Just walking in the woods.

The sky is not what it was an hour ago. Heavy grey clouds with silver linings are

gliding with a deceptive slowness from the east. The breeze rings in the ears constantly

with a flat and solid drone.

Walking on the still wet grass from yesterday’s rain is refreshingly cold and wet.

It is nothing to worry about. The grass brushing against the feet shakes in the breeze of

late fall as the leaves fall into the breeze and then on to the grass. Walking on the grass is

good and refreshing after a night of partying. But waking up with a hang over is not nice.

Hopefully, the grass, the breeze and the approaching woods will clear the head up

eventually.

Back then I would not have gone on hikes just to look at leaves and listen to the

low din of the woods. And I certainly would not have gone alone. But I was always

amazed at those inji-gopsers, those yellow-haired westerners, who would go on a hike

just to go on a hike.

They traveled all over India with no seeming purpose. They traveled from one

place to another and another. And then another, just to see those places. So stupid, I used

to think. Why did they leave their countries with all the cars, skyscrapers, nice roads and

clothes? Just to travel on those crooked narrow jammed roads bustling with the noise

and people. Do they really want to travel in those trains where six people share three

seats? Where sometimes you have to sleep with a stranger on the same bunk? They

cannot even handle the food and water. Every time they shop, they get ripped off. Why do

they want to wear a kurta anyway? What’s the point? They said they wanted to find

themselves.

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 Those clouds are still there in the same place with the same shapes. Maybe it

looks less like a duck than it did before. Apart from the breeze, birds are making sounds

but it cannot actually be called singing. Birds in India sing. Cuckoos sing in India. These

birds are cackling. Yeah. That’s what it is called, cackling.

The foliage slightly veils the sounds of the breeze in the ear and of the unseen

birds in the woods. Now a new sound comes up from the ground and it is the gravelly

sound of soles rubbing against the trail. And the leaves also crunch under the feet.

We would hike five miles every time we had a function or a teaching to attend at

the temple. It was the Dalai Lama’s temple. We would wake up before dawn, put on the

uniforms and rush out for breakfast and then leave in lines. We would talk and joke all

the way up the hills in those cold misty mornings. The functions were all ceremony. The

officials would give speeches in high Tibetan that was hard to understand. And every

time they would tell us, “You are the future seeds of Tibet and study hard so that we can

go back to our country.”

Most of us did not understand the Buddhist teachings that we used to attend. But

we sat through these teachings for hours in silence, playing with the frayed ends of the

tattered carpets and poking each other while the monks chanted on, and we hoped that

the teachings will rub-off on us. And due to the good karma generated we would have a

better next life. At least, that’s what our teachers told us.

Some of the fallen leaves are still brightly red and orange. These leaves are from

different trees and they have all fallen off the branches. A lot of the leaves are still

hanging on to the trees in spots of fiery orange and red in a rustling sea of green. But they

will fall eventually. Dry up, fade, shrivel, and get crushed by the passing feet before the

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rain and snow melt them into the ground. These trees are mostly tall making a canopy of

leaves that shades the trail. And patches of sunlight fall on the ground like missing pieces

of an ever changing jigsaw puzzle. One moment they fit the next they don’t.

Fall because of falling leaves. And autumn means the same thing but fall sounds

more natural. Fall sounds like the rustling leaves with changing colors. Fall because of

the fresh breeze. Now here are the two roads that diverged in the woods. More leaves

cushion the path on the right as it dips down. The road less traveled goes down, curves

and goes up. It is a bit bumpy. Shit. Is that a snake? It is striped white and black. Vermont

has snakes but they are not poisonous. Wearing shoes is better but walking in sandals and

feeling leaves rustling is different. This path less traveled leads back to the main path

without apologies. Maybe that’s how it is.

Every one had big dreams for me. It was a game that they used to play. Maybe it

was amusing to the adults to ask kids what they wanted to become in life. I never really

knew what I was going to become in life but I knew that I never wanted to become a

doctor. Listening to my aunt recounting stories of cutting up cadavers and watching

nurses squeeze pus and clean up wounds at the school dispensary had a profound effect

on my career plans. Back in India, if you were a good student, you chose the science

stream, studied only science after tenth grade and you either became a doctor or an

engineer. So I guess I was supposed to become an engineer. Secretly I wanted to become

a great soccer player but was never really good at that. But I remember reading a lot of

everything. I even read that poem by Robert Frost a long time ago and I remember it

even now. It is funny to realize that I am in Vermont now and may tread along the same

paths that he walked on.

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 Those flowers might be purple or violet. No idea what they are called. Nice

circles of around twenty petals attached to a tiny yellow pin cushion center. Most of these

flowers have withered and are now surrounded by tall grass, spreading their seeds in the

wind before the snow comes. After the long wait of winter there will be new flowers

again, just as the trees will have new leaves when the snow melts away.

That tree is weird. It is as tall as the others but there is a big knot in the trunk three

quarters of the way up. A birch? Definitely not oak or maple. The leaves are long and

they turn light yellow before they fall. There are lots of young trees in jagged rows.

Someone must have planted them, intentionally trying to create an effect so they look like

they have grown naturally. Some thick, some thin, some with more branches and some

less. Their leaves are all green and they make a flat green horizon where all the leaves

melt into each other.

Finally, here is the bridge across Otter Creek, just like the map said; a suspension

bridge that bounces with each step. It is made of steel cables and wood planks. The water

moves lazily below, carrying with it a procession of fallen leaves. Leaves of different

colors and shapes. And there is a perfect reflection of the cloudy sky with trees where this

silent creek bends to the left upstream. Dipping branches make swirls which break the

film of water and become bigger and then finally fade into the current. According to the

map, there is no fish to be caught on this part of the creek. Maybe because it’s too

shallow.

Rivers and streams have always been there wherever I went. I was born on a farm

in Ladakh by the mighty Indus River. The village was called Spituk. Before we had a

hand-pump my aunts and uncles went to the river to fetch drinking water from the Indus.

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My mother used to tell me how she used to cross it with her friends when she was young.

It was a big river and it became bigger and brown like coffee in the spring when all the

snow melted somewhere up there in the Himalayas in Tibet. But I used to swim and fish

in the stream that flowed through our farm. It was shaded by apple trees and tall grass

grew on its banks. I used to sit there with my own fishing rod that I made with a stick and

a bent nail tied at the end of a string. I did not know about baits. My grandma would try

to call me back for lunch on those Saturdays but I shushed her because she disturbed the

fish. Of course, I never really caught anything.

There was the Ganges in Banaras where my father taught at the Tibetan

University. We Banarasis call it Ganga Ma – Mother Ganges. The water of Ganga has

great healing powers and it never goes bad. It is used in Hindu and Buddhist rituals and

there are hawkers selling it in small brass jars called lotas. Hindus from all over India

come to Banaras to wash off their sins in the polluted waters of the Ganga. The shore of

the Ganga is also the place for the final rites of the Hindus of the world. There is the

cremation ground where they say the fires of the funeral pyres have never died. My

father took me there to see burning dead bodies after we had gone for a nice boat ride in

a rowing boat. I do not remember how it smelled but I saw sickly yellow feet sticking out

of the pyres bloating and steaming. There were people dressed in white mourning their

loss and priests chanting mantras. Some people were collecting the ashes in a clay pot to

release them into the Ganga. The waters of the Ganga will wash off the sins and those

that have passed away will be reborn in a better place.

The path upstream along the creek is narrow and covered with ferns on both sides

that brush against the legs. It runs counter-clockwise around the sports fields of

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Middlebury Union High School in a giant arc that can be part of a bigger circle. Rusty

white goal posts are lying around with the empty benches on a wind blown soccer pitch.

Near my Tibetan boarding school in Dharamsala there was a big stream in a

vale. You could hear it gushing all the time and it was much louder at night. The water

always made its way around those boulders and rocks as you watched it from the rooftop

terraces of the dorms. We used to go for swims in it even though it was not allowed by

the school. I mostly swam downstream with the current because I was not a good

swimmer. And it was easier. Every monsoon that stream would rise with the rains and it

would turn into a brown torrent and it did not matter whether it was night or day, the

gushing was loud all the same. Then, the stream did not care about going around those

boulders and rocks. When these periodic storms of monsoon stopped, we had to find new

swimming holes because the stream had changed its course again.

One of the many branches of a big tree has fallen high over the path. The tree has

leaves growing and changing colors on it. Although it is covered thick with green moss,

the fallen branch still has some leaves growing on it. It is thick enough to be a tree itself.

Eventually this branch will give in to the moss, the rains and the bugs. Much of it will go

back into the soil and the creek from which it came. And then new trees will grow again

on the same ground. There is no death in the woods and life gives in to life.

Now the creek bends away to the right but the path stays straight. It leads out to

an open field where the grass is shaped by the wind like the waves in a stormy sea. A big

puddle of rain water from yesterday pours into a gully that is going nowhere and random

dandelion seeds are floating in the wind.

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 The path leads to a road where a few cars are passing by. Up ahead on the right

are empty houses of a gated community. It might be the foreclosures. There are no gates

yet. One of the empty houses is a model house open for clients to visit. A white picket

fence runs around the periphery. The model house has a kitchen with bright yellow

flowers on the window sill and cream colored walls with a grey roof. There is no

construction going on, but there is a sign in the yard of the model house that says:

Danger, Hard-Hatted Area. A couple on their morning walk stopped and looked at the

model house and then went on their way. It is all part of the economic cycle. There are

booms and busts. They just caught the wrong one this time.

Across the road is a middle school building. It is big and brown. There are no

children playing in the fields because it is Saturday.

The concept of the weekend with free Saturdays and Sundays was strange. We

used to have just Sunday free and Saturday was a half day. On Saturdays we could wear

our casual clothes instead of the uniforms. When I went for the last two years of my high

school at the United World College of India, I did not know what to do with all that free

time. I was quite hard at first. It was a strange feeling to be alone because it forced me to

think about life, identity and all that stuff. I had never really thought about such things.

Thinking about life seemed stupid to me. You go to university, get a degree, get a job, fall

in love, marry a girl, have kids, make some money, maybe become famous and then die

before you get too old. Again it was mostly those kids from other countries who were

philosophical and could talk about life and politics. They were already exposed to so

many different ideas about everything. Some of that rubbed off on me during those years.

They went on hikes just to go on hikes as well. But I did not go along.

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 The path behind the empty school again leads into the woods. Back into the

woods but there are not many maple trees. Just pine trees with pine needles that fall and

cover the path underneath them like a carpet. Following the orange TAM signs into the

woods there were two diverging trails again. One is longer and the other shorter but they

both lead out to Vermont Route 7.

These woods are lovely and dark and deep. Battell Woods they are called. The

grassy knoll that skirts around it looks almost like a part of the shire from the Lord of the

Rings. The clouds are bluish gray in the distant horizon. There are no orange tags giving

direction so let’s just tread on worn down paths. It is safer. It will be hard to get lost in

these woods. Which way is the north? Looking at the sun does not mean anything

because there are no well worn paths to take. Just choose a direction and keep walking.

That map is useless.