Learning from the White Rabbit Trail
TWO BLOCKS FROM OUR HOUSE, there is a trail called the White Rabbit that leads into the forest, along a creek, and seriously uphill with views of the valley below. It’s a magical world of thick pines and madrones with bark as crimson as blood. The trail winds through the rugged, sprawling Oredson-Todd Woods for two and a half miles and then meets up with the Alice in Wonderland Trail above downtown Ashland. These are public lands.
Locals say there is no need for a trail map. But it’s a down-the-rabbit-hole affair, with a warren of other trails crossing the White Rabbit: Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, Looking Glass, Caterpillar, and more. The Pacific Crest Trail appears and disappears, too. Although it may be hard to get lost, it’s easy to feel lost. Lewis Carroll would approve.
For weeks now, Tony and I have made a 45-minute hike in and out of the woods a morning constitutional. We never follow the same route.
This morning, we were up at dawn and decided to walk the full length of the White Rabbit Trail, getting an early start before the dry heat took over.
The night before, I’d buried myself in the day’s news: 800 marches across the U.S. protesting Trump’s immigration policies (why weren’t these protests front page headlines?), the ongoing stories of separated parents and children crying in the night, of detention centers that are defactojails.
If I still lived in Brooklyn, I would have joined the marchers spilling across Brooklyn Bridge with their signs: “Families Belong Together,” “ICE Shames Us,” “Make America Humane Again.” My Ethiopian daughter-in-law, Kidist, and my almost four-year-old grandson, Lucas, might have joined me. When Trump took the throne, he favorited a story about an Ethiopian parent and child who had been deported to Ethiopia. Lucas overheard his parents talking about it and wondered whether this would be his fate, too.
Our decision to move to the Rogue Valley, far from the madding world, was unquestionably a retreat: from the chaos of daily life in Brooklyn, but more, from the daily heartache of Trump’s presidency. The Rogue Valley, I believed, would provide an antidote, actually several.
The White Rabbit Trail is one of those antidotes. It has much to teach, if you pay attention.
Look around. Every forest has its understory, the shrubs and plants growing between the forest canopy and the forest floor. Here, in these Southern Oregon woods, you will find bushes with delicate white blossoms, a rotating cast of wild flowers, fallen leaves, old tree limbs, lichen covered rocks. Interdependent, they form their own community, more vital than the tree tops that shadow them.
Pace yourself. When the White Rabbit Trail turned a corner and I found myself facing a long, unforgiving incline, I reminded myself to look down and take it step by step, or as Annie Lamott would say, “bird by bird.”
Feel your body. The 20-minute “Body Scan” that is part of mindfulness training has one goal: to simply notice your body, in its comfort and discomfort. Hiking forces its own body scan. We notice our breathing, most when we’re out of breath. We check our footing against rocks and tree limbs. We wear the signs of ascent and descent, in our quadriceps and thighs, in our calves and glutes. Our thoughts release their grip.
Listen to the place. The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton warns that silence on our planet is so endangered by noise pollution that we need another word for it. He defines silence not as an absence but a quiet presence, and he advises us to listen to the place, not the sound. On the White Rabbit, chirping birds and calling doves punctuate the presence, along with wind in the trees and small animals scurrying in the undergrowth. Places like these, Hempton says, are “the think tank of the soul.”
“Who are YOU?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I-I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
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