Dead of Winter
Monday, January 1st, 2024: Hikes, Southern Indiana.
The Eastern Deciduous Forest is where I grew up. I formed a whole mythology out of it in early childhood. The radical swing of its seasons seemed to amplify the emotional rollercoaster of my adolescence, from the tantalizing fertility of summer to the Calvinist repression of winter.
On every visit to Indiana I hike this forest. Coming from a land of towering mountains with forever views in a roadless wilderness as big as some states, this tiny patch of second-and-third-growth habitat covering modest ridges and hollows only frustrates me and makes me long for the West. And that’s even worse in the monotony of winter, when the entire ecosystem is resting or decomposing to the base nutrients that will fuel spring’s renewal.
It was a dark day, the temperature hovering just above freezing. I was the first on this popular trail in the morning, but after a couple hours I was passed by a male trail runner. We’d had several rains in the past week, so the carpet of leaves covering the trail was especially slippery and hid the roots that crisscross the ground. It was hard enough for me to keep from slipping or tripping – I couldn’t imagine running in these conditions.
I passed a handfull of other hikers throughout the day, and on the highest ridge – only 300 vertical feet above the deepest hollow – I passed a young guy setting up camp under a lean-to, only a few yards off the trail, then noticed another farther off in the forest. It had started to snow lightly. The guy under the lean-to conjured romantic images of mountain men on the frontier, but he’d only walked a mile from his vehicle and climbed less than 300 vertical feet, you could still hear cars passing occasionally on the road he’d driven, and there were farms and more paved roads within the next mile.
