Blow off your worries with a walk in the woods

We’re getting a touch of Indian Summer in November in these parts. Doesn’t happen every year.

Between Trump, Biden, covid, and a collapsed economy, most everyone has plenty to worry about. So it was that I decided to get away from it all with a hike in the woods yesterday.

They’ve re-jigged the Bruce Trail a bit lately, and one of their official side-trails now cuts through the farm next door. I picked up the trail there and headed up towards what is variously known around here as Kemble Mountain, Kemble Rock, or, among the jaded, the Kemble Bump.

Four hours hiking through fresh air and warm temperatures and composting leaves. I had a drink from a stream cascading from higher up. At one point, a sign; “Caution: bear in Area.” We’re a few days into deer season but not a hunter seen or heard. Just leaves rustling in a middling breeze, bird-song, the scolding of squirrels. I ventured off the Bruce Trail in favour of over-grown logging roads and ATV trails, and for a few kilometres went off-piste altogether. 

Rotting stumps of oaks felled 150 years ago when the first settlers cleared the land. Old stone fence-lines that once marked cleared fields long overgrown again. Every stone of tens and hundreds of thousands in these fence-lines placed there by human hands. Much of this geography was only briefly conquered. Nature is taking the pastures back. Forests felled long ago are growing in again.

Four hours later, all the shit is still shit, and it’s still there… but you’ve gained a whole new perspective on it.

Give it a try.