Tattooing talus slopes of busted rock, ledges and boulders, tiny lichen’s marriage of algae and fungi survive extremes nothing else dares. Ashen green and ancient, they appear in flattened splotches and bearded mounds of branching threads. A tapestry of patterns, textures and subtle color, they grow with the detailed delicacy of a pen-and-ink drawing. Noticing their crinkly edges and foamy tufts quickens my eye for all else.
A topography of lichens shaped by patient centuries of growth colonizes and encrusts unyielding stone, slowly gnawing away at these very bones of the planet, leaving soil in their wake. Brightening at a hint of moist fog, snow or rain, shriveling in wind, they whisper stories about the world around them.
The trail moves through gardens of lichen camouflaged by their ubiquity. It takes as much effort to see them as it does to scale the heights. Crunchy underfoot, one step can erase hundreds of years and leave bare spots lasting decades.
slowly eating rocks
thriving in hostile terrain
boots scrape off eons
(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/