Chronicles of the Dawn Walker
Introduction.
I’ve moved to the countryside, Covid’s falling dominoes pushed me out of pricey Clinton Hill and into the rural foothills of the Catskills Mountains. I’ve had the house for 14 years. Fate’s dark humor means I share the house with an actual supervillain, known as The Spoiler. We don’t get on. To keep out the way, I’ve converted an outbuilding into a tiny home, and here I reside. I think of it as my Sietch. Dune fans will get the reference; a place of sanctuary and safety.
I have all my music, games, books and creative tools here. It’s my work studio too so. I’ve served two quarantines and one lock down here. Sanity remains, broadly, intact.
Sitting on my ass absorbing culture through screens is part hobby and part work. I enjoy it but I need to get some daily exercise. As a dad and a small business owner, I’m not always able to carve time out for myself but I recently hit upon a simple idea: Just go for a walk during the only time I can guarantee is mine: dawn.
I love to walk but I’ve never thought of it as a daily mediation, or inspiration for a writing project, until this morning.
These days, I wake at sunrise. It’s hard not to.The sun streams into the shed, I’m conscious that the hens, two new additions to my life, will want to come out for breakfast plus I need to pee.
The Sietch is my new home but by god is it cold. One heater, which I don’t keep on over night, means the mornings are baltic. I dress fast. Make a strong, hot black coffee and sit on the wooden steps sipping it while I watch the antics of the hens, as they scratch around their coop, Bockingham Palace.
OK. Do it. I grab my walking staff (I catch my vanity here — ’walking stick’ makes me sound too old). It’s a piece of maple I’ve had for over a decade. It feels smooth and warm where my hand naturally settles. It’s the last remnant of an old sugar maple that stood in front of the house. Hit by lightning in the first year of being here, it had to come down before it fell and destroyed the roof. I shed tears when it was executed. A beautiful old grandaddy of the yard beyond saving. Us city folk tend to be more sentimental about such things. Rural people are more pragmatic. Trees felled before they fall, the wood is used for heat, furniture and mulch for public gardens or school playgrounds. Yet, I still felt a great loss. Its destruction timed with the death of my much-loved grandmother. The two occurrences felt magically aligned somehow.
After its removal I surveyed the large stump. Sticks, branches and bark lay everywhere, like a murder scene. I picked up one of the larger sticks, and it is this, ten years later, I pick up now.
I start walking. There are few options for walks (without driving to them first). They are along roads but surrounded by natural beauty on all sides. I decide on the Farm Walk.
Fall has slipped off her golden robes to reveal cold, bare shoulders. The loss of leaves is the gain of greater views. An outline of the mountain is revealed, the sky becomes bigger. The clouds breaking apart like warm bread by the sun’s weak but inexorable rays.
A new day and a new writing project begins. Welcome to the Chronicles of the Dawn Walker.
