A Day in the Park
I had a wonderful ride on my new horse Burton yesterday.
It was a very beautiful day to begin with and Burton and I set out across Jennings Chapel Road into the Patuxent State Park all by our lonesomes. It was around 4 pm. Burton had a couple weeks off because he got a little skinny and was pooped after hunting all season. So yesterday he was feeling good.
The park was unbelievably beautiful. For those of you who do not know it, it is a very large park that follows the whole length of the border of Howard and Montgomery counties and then continues on through Prince George's and Calvert counties to the Chesapeake. It is huge. Up near us the Patuxent River itself is not more than 50 feet wide. When it empties into the Chesapeake it is huge like the Potomac. The Patuxent has grown on me. A lot of our hunting territory is around it and we spend quite a lot of time leaping in and out of it after the fox. Some of you may recall the alleged four foot drop Burton and I jumped in a yee-haw fashion after Robbie the day he whipped -- that was into the Patuxent.
The Patuxent travels along between banks that are very well defined and rather overgrown. Sometimes it reminds me of an English river, the Cam or perhaps the Avon when it runs past Salisbury. Sometimes it reminds me of Plum Creek in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book On the Banks of Plum Creek.
The water is clear and about 3 feet deep at its deepest and moves quickly along over pebbles and large flat rocks and fallen logs. Above the banks is a lovely grassy flat area that runs about 50 yards back on each side and then the land starts to rise up steeply. We sometimes run up and down the hills -- at the top of the hills are the huge farms that make up a lot of our hunting territory -- Harwood (where opening day is), Sunnyside (Rob Long's place), Tranquility, and Pleasant Prospect.
Roger, our master, sometimes refers to the land down by the river banks as "the deep bottom." One major access point into the park is Annapolis Rock (my favorite fixture!) -- if you keep going all the way to Damascus you end up below our kennels.
Yesterday the flat area down in the deep bottom was beautiful -- the grass is starting to grow up, the skunk cabbages are in, the fiddlehead ferns are unrolling, and wild wood daisies and violets and buttercups are everywhere. The swamp roses are leaning out over the muddy trails and the willows and oaks and sycamores have leaves -- although the leaves have not turned dark green yet. The park is strewn with evergreens as well -- cedars, fir trees, pine trees. It is so varied -- one will go through a pine forest and then a meadow with scrub and then a flood plain of birch trees and then an old oak grove. This is the park I have sometimes said resembles Narnia. Yesterday it also resembled the Elf forest in Middle Earth -- accessed from the Shire.
Burton and I cruised along one of the trails that skirts the edge of the deep bottom near the hill that runs up to Tranquility. The trail runs over some lovely jumping logs, up and down the lower part of the hillside over flat rocks and through cedar trees and willows and lots of daisies and buttercups. It was perfectly quiet down there protected from the wind. We were alone -- just him and me deciding together where to go and at what pace. At one point we crossed the deep bottom to go into the beautiful river so that Burton could have a drink of water and blow bubbles (he likes to blow bubbles). We stood in the water with the sun bright on the ripples and the beautiful pebbles and the green grass and looked around. We heard birds. We saw dogwoods and wild spirea and lots of other white woodland flowers that I will have to look up in my Maryland plant book. Everything was green and white except for the wild violets on the deep bottom, which were beautiful.
After cooling in the creek, we tried to find a way out on the other side but failed -- we lept up the bank but 20 yards later were met with an impenetrable wall of evergreens and scrub, so we went back the way we came.
We moved along up towards Sunnyside and went through an area with logs set close enough together to make a sort of five jump combination element with a slight turn in the middle. Soft muddy footing -- dappled light from the trees. SO FUN! We went through ditches -- Burton's forte -- and practiced turning on a dime for no reason other than it was way fun. I was riding Burton in a bit much lighter than the one I usually hunt him in and oddly, he was a lot more responsive (although that might have been because we were alone).
We ended up behind Harwood in a beautiful overgrown narrow lane running up a hill with cedar trees on either side and I was arrested by an amazing smell. I slowed Burton up and we looked around for the source of the amazing smell.
I realized we were in a lane on a softly inclining hill that was covered with honeysuckle that was blooming. I don't think I've ever been in the middle of so much honeysuckle. We stood in the lane about half way up the incline and looked at all the white honeysuckle, which was growing under shorter cedar trees so the blue sky was right above us. I could not see the top of the hill - it went on and on. The footing was cedar tree needles (or whatever you call them). We stood there for a while. Burton ate some grass and skunk cabbage and honeysuckle. I thought to myself that next time I should bring a halter and a sandwich and a book and Burton and I could spend a goodly amount of the afternoon on Honeysuckle Hill. I looked around and saw numerous trails shooting off the lane into the cedars and honeysuckles. It was like a secret garden within the park. I assume we must have hunted very near here before but without the honeysuckle -- it was a place transformed.
I had the feeling of being very far away from everything normal -- almost a time warp. I don't think I had ever been right where I was before yet I knew pretty much exactly where we were. I was alone yet with a living companion (Burton) who could not really speak per se but with whom I was communicating. I knew I was in the 21st century -- I had my blackberry and cell phone in my pocket, Burton was wearing high tech stud shoes on his feet, and I was sitting in a state-of-the-art German saddle -- yet we hadn't seen anything for hours that was inconsistent with a 14th Century ride in Sherwood Forest. I would not have been shocked if Robin Wood walked out from the honeysuckle. Or even if Braveheart had bashed through with a band of Scottish warriors. Perhaps even the stupid bard in Monty Python singing "Bravely brave Sir Robin, brave Sir Robin ran away!".
Burton and I thought about this for a while. Burton sighed. I sneezed. He was fairly tight-lipped about everything, frankly. I started to whistle Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, no-one could hear me after all. Burton cocked a hind leg and flicked an ear. He ate a branch of something. I looked at the sun between the cedar trees. I saw an airplane way up high on the Eastern jetway. Burton made a funny noise with his nose and tried to avoid a bee. It was lovely.
Then we pretty much ran all the way home -- down honeysuckle hill and through and along the deep bottom and up the five log combo and over the river and up the steep hill and out of the park onto the cornfields at Tranquility and back across the road into the long driveway at Pleasant Prospect. I ducked under branches and generally tried to keep sticks out of my face. Burton jumped oer the swamp roses hanging over the trail to avoid the sticker-bush-in-horse-knee syndrome. We went so fast and so effortlessly through all the Narnia territory that I started to laugh and whoop out loud -- sounds instantly taken away by the breeze. Anyone who saw us would have concluded we were nuts -- horse and rider blasting through the spring woods at top speed amidst gales of laughter.
And then we did see someone. Just before we turned up out of the deep bottom we ran across an angler on the path dressed in true angler gear, complete with things dangling from his hat an everything. Burton stopped short -- we had seen no people or animals for hours. The angler stopped short too. He clearly did not expect to see a sweaty, muddy horse and a mildly hysterical woman. In fact, everyone was quite surprised to see everyone else. Burton questioned the fishing rod. The angler appeared to realize this and backed slowly into the swamp roses and dogwood trees. We nodded hello and went on our way.
Once we were home Burton had a bubble bath and some dinner and then went back out in his field where he told his roommate Stonewall all about his beautiful day in the park.
