Descending Beseck ridge on a cold March day, I come to the intersection of a woods road and small stream with muddy margins thick with skunk cabbage. There are low spots in high places. Leathery hood-like spathes, cupped like a pair of hands, protect fragile flowerbuds generating heat as they expand. They’ve pushed their way through the half frozen muck, rising among snow patches and last year’s leaf litter. Mottled and patterned in unpredictable swirls and stripes of purple and green, their irregular coloring can induce hypnosis in this gray and brown season.
Growing in soil the consistency of gumbo with large, offensive smelling leaves emerging in a few weeks, this brave plant is neither skunk nor cabbage, but its color and scent invites flies and other pollinators. Long before the equinox, it’s testing the soil’s warmth, the sun’s strength. I glimpse not just fleeting beauty, but a medicine that this earliest and surest sign of spring has for a winter weary soul.
off-putting skunk smell
fleshy spathes a welcome sight
springtime in winter
(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku. It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre. Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination. To travel the entire New England Trail with 90 haibun go to https://www.ctwoodlands.org/blue-blazed-hiking-trails/half-million-footsteps-journey-through-poetry-the-new-england-trail)
The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border. The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts. For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/
