Jerusalem Trail Songs

Tracks.

There are these archaeo-acoustic rumors that clay pots thrown thousands of years ago bear on their surfaces tiny tracks that recorded the sounds and voices of the potters and the rooms they were spun in. You just have to find the right stylus to slip into the grooves and the dead will rise. It could just be a bullshit joke or kooky Internet theory, but I’m gonna choose to believe it. Organic and unplanned transcriptions all around us. Like the phonograph, a natural etching of transient sounds reliably into solid matter for future aural reproduction.

The point is tracks. Trails. Invisible ghost records that leave tethers deep with in us, the bumbling human needle. We walk the old roads, streets and hallways and can hear those records. The smells, songs and artifacts that naturally hold an impactful experience (for better or for worse) and sing within you once they are unlocked.

I’ve been homesick for those sounds for a long time. Sometimes I think it’s become like a disability, these waves of nostalgia that make everything you’re doing seem unsatisfactory compared to that vibrancy. Of course the real trick is that so much of what seems "unsatisfactory in the moment is then integrated into the spaciousness of what was, and soon you’re nostalgic for that. I think a lot about the poet Li-Young Lee’s poem “Braiding” in relation to that. Specifically the 2nd part:

2.

Last night the room was so cold
I dreamed we were in Pittsburgh again, where winter
persisted and we fell asleep in the last seat
of the 71 Negley, dark mornings going to work.
How I wish we didn't hate those years
while we lived them.
Those were days of books,
days of silences stacked high
as the ceiling of that great, dim hall
where we studied. I remember
the thick, oak tabletops, how cool
they felt against my face
when I lay my head down and slept.

“How I wish we didn’t hate those years while we lived them.”

That’s a fucking line man. Not that I hated all my years while I lived them, it was more varied than that. I remember being keenly aware of the experiences and moments that were overflowing with joy and adventure and friends; knowing: “this is gonna haunt ya.” I like the clarity he creates in that line, that so often we look back and only then see the intricacies and the importance of what was mundane or ordinary.

How in the wake of living we leave these webs that connect to the tracks that are etched within our experience. The places that mattered for whatever reason and that we carry. The woods was a place that made sense in its spaciousness, its patience and its potential for adventure and escape. It allowed for me, that current in vogue, therapeutic catchphrase of “making space” or “holding space”. A place to be quiet/reflective or loud/reckless outside of social caste and calamity.

So in late May of this year of the global pandemic and America’s Pluto return and the resurrection of all of the hastily buried and unmourned, un-reckoned with injustices of our society, I parked my car on the side of Jim Dwire Road in South Starksboro Vermont and entered the Jerusalem Trial.

I grew up about a mile from the trailhead. We roamed all of these woods, my friends and I, together and on our own. “Private Property” and “No Trespassing” signs just dead languages that meant “be sneakier and don’t get caught.” No one could tell us there was forest we weren’t allowed in. We climbed the Jerusalem Trail multiple times, from when I was 6 or 7 into my twenties. If we weren’t just doing a basic trek up the trail, we were using it as an axis, a steady point from which to bush wack or depart. Always aware of where it was and that if we headed in that direction we’d be able to find our way down to the road.

It’s only 3.8 miles up to Stark Mountain but the final bit is a tad vertical, you can find yourself using feet and hands to scramble over exposed rocks and roots. We climbed it in all seasons, from the settled heat of a midsummer afternoon to the waist deep low visibility of a blizzard. Spooking deer or quail and once hiding in a grove of saplings from a passing male moose, refugee of an ice age. It was something to do that helped you find a place in the day on the earth. Any test you thought the ancestors might approve of.

When I came back this May my head was a mess but I was climbing my way out of it and this hike seemed a part of that process. To get there early and go alone because the ones I used to hike with are scattered across the country. I’d been meditating again and returning to the practices that helped me feel most at home in this life (but that’s a different post) and revisiting the works of my heroes who saw the importance of rambling in the wild (also a different post).

All of these things came to mind as I walked in and observed that the trail hadn’t changed much since years ago. The same small waves of dirt, the tiny creek you had to hop, and then the curves and ascension into a deeper forest. Electric groves of bright green ferns uncurled and in devout openness before the sun light that passed between translucent maple leaves. Clusters of white birches spilling over each other skeletal and otherworldly. Deeper in, the space condensed and the darkness of the moss beds and lichen patches slipped over the rotting debris of winter in chambers of shadowy evergreen herds.

I rested on a large boulder and remember thinking “The Jerusalem Trail smells just like the Jerusalem Trail.” It made me happy to feel that connected with those kids and that feeling of freedom and certainty. For the way you could wander and laugh and bullshit with those who know you completely and walk in the unquestioning belief that nothing in life is more important than that. I thought about my dad forcing and bribing us to hike as little kids until eventually we outpaced each other. I thought of the dogs I’d had who would weave in and out of the bushes as we went with purposeless purpose. I thought of the world in pain and on fire, a world where so many are denied the dignity of joy and whimsical exploration, of a sacred uncomplicated justice. Like I couldn’t find a footing until I stepped away but also into it.

Whatever it is in us, we hold the capacity to touch the etchings of a life and bring the sounds to surface. It’s important sometimes, when the pace and the urgency of our society are disorienting, to sit and listen to the classics, to reorient yourself before you respond. It’s important to miss your friends and love the moments when nothing could touch you and the land celebrated in your adventures. It’s important to return to that trail when you feel completely lost and then embark again, back into the bush.

At the summit the wind froze the sweat to me, I sat on an empty ski-lift beside a hiker’s lodge and rocked slowly back and forth on the metal cable. Swinging out over the valley and then back to the wooden deck. Content with the limits and impermanence of a life at least for that morning. Held in the space between the songs.

Alex And I (Jas there behind the camera) years ago, severely under dressed and climbing it anyway.

Notes. May 2020