Hiking on Sundays: A May Day Beginning

Sunday, May 1, 2011

A May Day Beginning

OK, the title sounds a little hokey. But today is May Day, and we started this project? challenge? idea? well, whatever it is, we started today. Unfortunately Eric is out of the country on a work trip, so it was a me-and-the-kids hike, but we had a wonderful time.

I decided to start us out close to home, in Reed College Canyon, in SE Portland. The canyon is part of the Reed College campus, and there are several entries to the hiking trails from campus, but we found a trail on Reedway Ave, off of 39^th Ave. There was parking along the quiet street there, and the trail started at a steep decline, which was fun for the kids. They got out of the car and happily ran down straight downhill.

It didn’t hurt that it was a beautiful day, a warm and sunny start to May. The sun filtered through the early leaves onto the trail, which was well-maintained--mostly dirt, bark dust, some mud, and slatted walkways. There are lots of different areas to explore, as the area is on 28 acres, the trail circles Reed Lake and the walkways span and cross much of the marshy area. Jaeden and Stella, like many kids, love frogs, salamanders, lizards, fish, birds and wildlife of all sorts, and I use this to encourage enthusiasm for hiking, which is somewhat less attractive to them. The walkways allowed us to get right up close to the water, and we spent several minutes just standing still and watching for signs of life in the thick mud. We didn’t see much in the way of amphibians, but we saw lots of Canada geese and ducks as well as probable nests, which means we’ll look forward to going back in a few weeks and hopefully seeing goslings and ducklings. It was overall a lovely hike, and I felt so happy and relaxed being outside off of pavement. The air had a freshness to it that I’d expect to find only further from the city, and the kids were having so much fun exploring that there was very little complaining, and none from Jaeden, who is usually the one who peters out first. Stella tried for a piggy-back towards the end, but I was able to encourage her to stick it out.

The Reed College website has a section about the canyon, with a lot of great information: a map, lists of animals and plants found in the canyon, a history, and more. Next time I think I’ll make up a checklist for the kids and me (or us, if Eric can hopefully join us) of plants and animals to try to find. I think they’d love that.

For more info, check out http://www.reed.edu/canyon/natu/index.html

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About this blog

For a while two things have been brewing in me: the need for an impetus to write more (yes, motivation is often lacking in me), and the desire to spend Sunday mornings outside exploring with my kids. I’ve started this blog to fulfill both.

I majored in creative writing in college, which made for an extremely enjoyable three and a half years and a somewhat less enjoyable final semester, where in Senior Seminar I was suddenly faced with the cold reality of what being a “writer” in the real world really meant. It meant something I really didn’t want: being prepared to work on one thing (short story, poem, novel) really hard, and then sending it in to thirty to fifty publishers and probably receiving rejections from them all. Until finally I would freak out to find out my poem has been accepted by a tiny literary magazine in Alabama, with a readership of seventy-five. It didn’t interest me. I’d wanted to be a “writer” since I was young…I remember sitting in our living room on our brown tweed sofa, sunlight filtering in through the big window, and my dad saying to me, “Rebekah, when you grow up, be a writer. You can choose your own hours, no one is breathing down your neck telling you what to do, you can just do whatever you want.” It stuck with me. Unfortunately my dad didn’t actually know any writers, so of course his version of the profession was a bit…unrealistic. For my parents, having their children go to college was the dream. Just getting there was enough. I will recommend my children enjoy college but choose a career instead of just a major…hopefully this will help with the job search after graduation. Hopefully.

My children are still pretty young. We don’t go to church, but I like the idea of doing something special together as a family during that time. If I plan it, my husband, Eric will come along. It’s good for us to do things the four of us, because for a long time it’s kind of been me-and-the-kids. I’m a stay-at-home mom now and Eric likes his job and spends a lot of time with it. It works for us, mostly. But we need to be a family of four, not three. I’ve long thought it would be a good thing to hike outside on Sunday mornings, treating a commune with nature as our own version of church.

My goal is not too lofty, I hope: every Sunday (preferably in the morning), we will hike in a different place. And then I will write about it afterwards. We live in Oregon, which means for several months of the year this will be pretty easy to manage. The rainy winter and spring months will make for more of a challenge, but one I know will be worth braving.