The Ridge
A thin band of swamp meanders for miles just west of the Lake Huron shoreline, hemmed in by limestone, pushed by the waters of the lake and the upswelling called Maple Ridge or simply “The Ridge”. The shift in landscape is dramatic, flowing up from the dark of packed cedars, ancient despite their thin waists. On the Ridge, the forest breathes into sugar maples, white pine, apple trees, beach, oak, spruce and more. Great moss-covered rocks invite a Zen gardener to hunker a bit, contemplating each. In the fall, the trees blaze golden, a brilliant counterpoint to the ever-dark lowlands.
Even on the Ridge, the land rolls and pools, the bodies of long-dead trees creating wandering, humped graves of soil. Homes set along the country byways of this area are modest, hidden, practical. In the fall I can smell smoke from the outdoor wood burners, and the whine of chainsaws as folks get ready for winter. It’s a familiar song, growing up as I did in the State Forest about twenty miles away.
Highs and lows are built into the land, light and shadow complementary friends. Like a massive Yin/Yang symbol, the Ridge holds opposites with an easy grace, allowing the wetlands of spring to rise upward to dry fields of thin soil and bobbing Queen Anne’s Lace. When I walk the trails my husband and I cut out by hand, I breathe in the circular nature of the land, my feet searching for the center, the balance point. Each step requires thought, and my steadying walking stick is no longer a prop but a necessity.
Being off-balance, treading slippery rocks and small stumps, humps of the land, and fall leaves sliding over each other never feels like a hardship, though. The forest also holds me, its scents pulling me out of the mundane waves of thought, its barrage of form and light and sound sweeping out the repetitive, the jaded, the anxious circling of thought. Each walk is different, from the spring mosquito trot to the exhausting slog through snow. Sometimes fog hangs and diffuses the light; other times, the forest holds its breath and humidity settles on each leaf, indolent. Living being that it is, I greet the Ridge each day as if never having known it at all but eager to chat.
And yet, beneath all the change and flow, a Presence abides, transcending the seasons and weather as well as my moods and physical changes. If I sit, my back against a hundred-year-old Maple, I can hear it breathing within my spine. It rushes in the bark, dances up into bracken and fungus and clover, bursts skyward on birdwing and pollen, crashes through the underbrush on deer legs, gently folds up and around my legs in the soil and thin grass. It slumbers, patient, in the limestone fossils and in the apple seed snuggling into the ground beneath its mother-tree.
In my fifty-sixth year, I find that some days, all I want is to sit with this Presence, trying to catch the complex rhythm of wild abandon and patient abiding. I have tried for years to express it, to mold it, to show it—an impossible task unless I can bow my head, get out of the way, and acknowledge that it also glows within my gently aging bones, in my struggling lungs, and yes, in my undulating, hilly brain tissue. I stand up against gravity, give in like rain, and know that someday, I will lump the ground, simple soil, until drawn flat and thin over Earth’s blazing core.
Writing, art, gardening, holding my husband in the night, taking my mother’s hand is Presence, as natural an outpouring of life as the way a fern uncurls in spotty sunlight or an aged goat lays down to rest among searching roots and dark dirt. I rise and pick up my walking stick, picking my way forward, Presence moving over the land on grumpy human feet.