Learning to Pay Attention

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Mary Oliver

 

Off Trail Winter Reflections about the Trans Canada Trail

 

Winter has given us something we had very little of during the past year - time to sit still. Since returning from the Trans Canada Trail in November, much of our attention has already turned toward getting back to it. Maps are being opened and studied again. Routes are being re-considered, equipment checked, plans adjusted, and distances calculated (and recalculated and recalculated). Somewhere beyond Rivière-du-Loup the trail is waiting beneath the snow, and when the weather allows we intend to return to Québec and continue west. There is still an enormous amount of Canada ahead of us, enough that looking too closely at the entire distance can be intimidating, so most of our planning strives to remain practical. Where can we resupply? Which sections will take us through towns? Where are the longer gaps in the off-road trail? How early can we realistically begin? How far might we get before another Canadian winter eventually brings the next season to an end? We have certainly learned a lot about the TCT during our first year, and both our itineraries and goals are shifting accordingly.

 

Yet now that we are temporarily away from the daily demands of walking, another thought keeps returning. During our first season we spent a great deal of time thinking about how far we were travelling. Looking back, however, some of what remains most vividly is not distance at all. It is detail.

 

I remember birds calling before we could see them. The changing sound beneath our boots when fine gravel became rough stone or switched to pavement. The smell of wet Boreal Forest in Newfoundland after rain. Spider webs covered in droplets during an early Nova Scotia morning. Great Blue Herons standing along the shores of Prince Edward Island. Canada Geese moving south over New Brunswick as autumn and later winter began catching up with us. Small towns that took hours to approach and rivers that remained beside us for much of a day. I remember conversations that began because someone saw two people with backpacks walking along a road and stopped to ask what we were doing. None of these things seemed particularly important to the larger task of getting across Canada. Most did not move us even one kilometre closer to wherever we were trying to reach. Yet they are increasingly what I think about when remembering the first year.  Not the challenges en route, not the tough days – the moments of wonder and kindness.

 

I have begun wondering how much walking changes the scale at which you experience a place.

We were reminded of this while travelling home. Sitting on the VIA rail train, we found ourselves passing through places we passing through places and pieces of landscape that we are soon to cross on foot.  Areas that will take us days to traverse disappeared through the window in minutes.  It brought back something Soren had once said when someone asked why we were walking across the country instead of cycling or driving. We had given some fairly ordinary answer, but Soren simply suggested that walking was the only way to really see things. At the time it sounded like one of those observations that makes intuitive sense without requiring much examination. Sitting on the train, however, watching places rush past, it seemed considerably more precise. Even on a bicycle, we realized, many of the smaller details of nature can disappear before you have time to notice them.

 

This does not mean that walking automatically makes us or any hiker observant. We proved that repeatedly during the year. There were days when we were too tired to notice much beyond our feet. There were afternoons when weather, hunger, kilometres or the search for somewhere to camp focused  our attention very narrowly until the landscape became little more than something we needed to move through. Near the end of New Brunswick, when winter seemed to be following us south, and our daily distances began increasing, it became particularly easy to judge a day according to the number of kilometres covered. Even earlier in Newfoundland we had caught ourselves wondering and debating both whether we were walking quickly enough and whether we were walking too quickly. Those two questions should probably have warned us that paying attention and travelling slowly are not necessarily the same thing.

 

Birding has always made this particularly obvious. You can walk directly through a forest filled with birds and see almost none of them if your attention is somewhere else. Finding them often requires stopping. You hear a sound, notice a movement or catch an unfamiliar shape at the edge of your vision. Then the forward motion of the day has to be interrupted. The backpack stays on or comes off, binoculars come out, perhaps the camera follows, and for a few minutes the destination matters less than whatever is happening in one tree, marsh or patch of shoreline. The irony of undertaking a journey called #Hike4Birds while worrying about covering enough kilometres was not entirely lost on us. If part of our purpose was to encourage people to reconnect with nature by noticing what was around them, we had to remember to do the same ourselves.

 

Photography creates another version of the same problem. A camera can encourage attention because it makes you look for light, colour, patterns, wildlife and small changes in a landscape. With that said, it can also easily become simply another reason to move quickly from one image to the next. During our train ride from Rivière-du-Loup to Montréal at the end of the season, I found myself watching someone scroll through an extraordinary number of photographs and posts, each appearing for only a second or two before being replaced by another. There was nothing unusual or wrong about what she was doing, but after months of moving through the world slowly, it felt strangely disorienting. We knew how much time could exist behind a photograph. Sometimes hours of walking had led to the place where a picture was taken. Sometimes there had been waiting, watching, identifying, talking or simply standing still long enough for something to happen – and then we were fortunate enough to get the picture. Watching so many moments pass almost instantly made me wonder whether attention itself had somehow become one of the things we had been carrying and exercising on the trail without realizing it.

 

Perhaps that is what has been changing.

 

Before leaving Cape Spear, we thought a great deal about long-distance hiking. We thought about physical endurance, navigation, weather, food, equipment, and the intimidating distance separating one coast from another. We also knew why we were walking. Birds and Citizen Science were central to the project from the beginning, as was our hope that sharing what we encountered might encourage other people, particularly young people, to explore the natural world around their own communities. What I am less certain we understood was how much the act of walking itself might affect our own ability to notice.

 

Moving slowly gives things time to enter your awareness.   A forest is no longer simply forest when it takes several days to cross. There are wet sections and dry sections, spruce and birch, old cuts and young growth, places filled with warblers and stretches that seem almost silent. A town is no longer a name on a road sign when you approach it gradually enough to watch farms become houses, houses become streets and streets become a downtown centre. Weather is not something checked before leaving home but something watched across the horizon and experienced on the trail. Rivers have their own sounds. Even distances and the terrain acquire texture. Twenty kilometres through a shaded rail trail beside a river is not the same experience as twenty kilometres along pavement in wind and rain, although the GPS may record exactly the same number.

 

None of this is particularly profound. People have been travelling on foot for as long as people have existed and set out exploring.  Generations of naturalists have understood that seeing more often requires moving less. Perhaps what surprises me is how easily that knowledge can be forgotten. Modern travel is extraordinarily good at getting us somewhere. Cars, buses, trains and airplanes allow us to cross distances that once required weeks or months, and we are enormously fortunate to have them. But efficiency changes what is visible. The farther and faster we move, the more the world necessarily becomes background.

 

Walking reverses that relationship - the background becomes the journey.  An old railway bridge, a hand-painted trail sign, a conversation outside a general store, a patch of autumn colour reflected in a river, a trail volunteer explaining how a section of pathway came to exist - these are not necessarily the things we imagined when planning a walk across Canada. Yet after our first season they are increasingly what gives shape and meaning to the kilometres we covered. Without them – I think - the journey would simply be a line traced across a map. Perhaps this winter has made that easier to see precisely because we are no longer moving. Our packs are not beside the tent tonight. We aren’t soaked or cold at the moment.  And there is no need to calculate tomorrow's water supply or figure out somewhere to camp. Instead, we can look back over photographs and journals and discover how often the moments that mattered required us to stop, look, listen or allow ourselves to be distracted by the moment and pay attention once more.

 

When we return to the trail in the next year, we will still have a destination. We will still count kilometres, worry about schedules and probably walk farther on some days than is entirely comfortable or sensible. There will be places we hurry through because weather or logistics leave us little choice, and there will almost certainly be evenings when all we care about is getting our boots off and eating.

 

But perhaps we can carry one thought back with us from this winter. There is a difference between travelling through a place and paying attention to it. We began walking across Canada because walking seemed like a good way to explore the country. After our first season, I am beginning to suspect that its greater gift may be simpler than that.  Walking gives us time to notice where we already are.

 

See you on the trail.