45 minutes
neighborhood / old stone steps / longfellow flats
68 degrees / misty fog
humidity 88%
A wonderful late morning fall walk. Wow! A few people outside, but mostly empty, quiet. A white sky mixed with deep green and slashes of yellow, red, orange.
1
Walking through the neighborhood, 2 male voices behind me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear them, there, for several blocks. It put me on edge, unsettled. note: could/should I use this version of edge in my Haunt collection?
2
I took the slick steps down to the river. As usual, I was holding onto the handrail the whole time. With my bad vision, I always have my hand on or right above the handrail just in case. On the last steps, I realized that these bottom ones had been replaced. Where there used to be uneven fragments, now there were smooth rectangles.
3
At the bottom of the steps, everything above was dark green and thick. Everything below was a deep brown — some dirt, some mud.
4
I followed the dirt path* for a minute or two until the trees opened into a bright and hazy sky and soft gray river. I could see the subtle shift in colors on the other side of the river: hints of reds and yellows. I wonder what colors other people could see?
*this is not a wide path, but it’s wide enough for me to tell that work was done to clear out branches and brush to make this trail as wide and open as it is; this was not done by striking feet along.
5
The echo of a bird calling out somewhere within the thick canopy. That classic sound of birdsong in a forest.
6
The sense of someone else there — did I feel something? Hear something? I turned to look behind me: another hiker, passing by.
7
Carefully descending a small rise to the abandoned spur of the Winchell Trail that I walked on a few days ago and am writing about. I noticed how more of the fence continue north, but it was buried in leaves and blocked off by small trees — buckthorn? I was surprised at how much more of the fence there was; I wondered if I ever followed it in past years, or if it had already been buried in the loam.
8
As I neared the steps up to the overlook, I heard a radio then I saw a guy sitting on a bench watching a video on his phone
9
A man running by with a steady, graceful gait, shirtless.
10
Stopping above the ravine, looking over the fence, studying a tree that has been leaning against/over this fence for long enough that it has separated a slat from the frame and grown a small shelf of bark over that slat
While I was walking through the abandoned part of the trail, I started thinking about how there’s one section that seems to be truly abandoned, where it’s not maintained at all and is impassable, but most of the trail seems less abandoned and more, either neglected or composed to create the effect of abandonment and the feeling that you’ve been able to step away from civilization and into the wild.
a few minutes later: Noticing how there are varying degrees of abandonment on this trail spur — a part buried in leaves and impassable / posts that are still there but missing their chainlink panels / an intact fence, still standing. A question: what does it mean to maintain a trail? what sort of maintenance does Minneapolis Parks do here?
At the end of the gorge part of my walk, as I studied the leaning tree, I imagined this leaning as a form of looking over — an overlook? could I put this in my overlook poem?!