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Read samples from Loop Year. --- Find out where John's Loop Year events will be. --- Contact John.
John Sheirer
Loop Year
Day 1 -- Tuesday, May 17, 2005 -- 11:45 a.m. to 12:21 p.m. -- Sunny, 60 degrees
I think I'll take a hike today.
I think I'll take the same hike every day for the next year.
Today is my forty-fourth birthday, and I'm going to hike the two-mile Shady Brook Trail (called the "Blue Trail" for its blue markers) at the McCann Family Farm in Somers, Connecticut, a property owned and maintained by the Northern Connecticut Land Trust, a volunteer conservation group. I've already hiked this little trail more than fifty times in the past three years--but that's less than one sixth of what I plan for the coming year.
For a year, I won't take any long trips or schedule my days so full that I can't make it here each day between 12:01 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. If I have the flu, I'll hike medicated. If I break my arm, I'll hike carefully. If I break my leg, I'll crutch. If I win the Nobel Prize for literature and am invited to the ceremony at whatever exotic location it's held, I'll skip it to be here. A broken leg is a few million times more likely than a Nobel Prize.
I'll pass through several life transitions this year--some big, some small, some ordinary, some once-in-a-lifetime. In a few days, I'll be moving from the house I shared for two years with my ex-girlfriend Ginny and her two sons to a one-bedroom cottage in another town. The spring semester at the community college where I work is ending, and I won't be teaching for the first summer in nearly a decade. I'm still recovering from major knee surgery. I'm playing basketball again, the sport of my youth, but I'm also hiking, the activity of my future. My new book just came out. I'm entering my last year before true middle age hits at 45.
As I walk the slightly uphill stretch from the parking lot to the first of my 365 hikes, I ask myself again, Can I hike this trail every day? I want to say yes, but I've made many other promises in my life that I haven't kept, other commitments that I haven't upheld.
I want to say yes, but a year is a long time.
Day 26 -- Saturday, June 11, 2005 -- 8:05 a.m. to 8:44 a.m. -- Sunny, 73 degrees
Not far along the trail, I see a baby bird perched on the edge of a bog bridge. I'm sure Jerry or Ginny could identify the species, but to me, it's just a tiny black-and-white-speckled baby bird. Its little breast is hammering, and it doesn't even look at me as I approach. I search the trees for any sign of a nest or parent birds, but there's nothing. The baby shivers and sways unsteadily on its fragile feet, and I'm tempted to pick it up and--and do what? Call the game warden? Drive it to the local vet? Build a nest for it? Take it home? Adopt it? Knit it a sweater, cap, and booties?
Ginny has worked in veterinary hospitals for years, and she has told me many stories about people who bring in abandoned baby birds. These birds always die. Nature is beautiful and wonderful, but the sad reality is that cute little creatures die. Not everything can survive, and not everything should survive. If every baby bird at McCann's lived, the birds would take over. They wouldn't attack like in the Hitchcock movie, but they'd eat too many insects that eat other insects that are harmful to the trees, and then the trees would suffer, making it harder to support the nesting needs of so many birds. In a very real sense, unchecked birds could eat themselves out of house and home.
Ginny says it's best to leave the abandoned birds where they are. Nature has a purpose.
But my big stupid human heart doesn't want to do that. It's so hard to think about nature's complex systems, chains of being and chains of eating. I just want to cradle this helpless creature in my hands until it feels better and flies off to join its parents and chirp a story to its siblings about the giant fleshy thing who saved it and sent it on its way.
I walk on. For two miles, I debate what I'll do with my little friend when I come back around to the bog bridges--pick it up or let it be. Even after two miles, I can't decide.
When I return, of course, it's gone.
Day 35 -- Monday, June 20, 2005 -- 11:52 a.m. to 12:32 p.m. -- Sunny, 73 degrees
Not far from the stonewall, there's a tree about ten inches thick with the unbroken iron rim of a wagon wheel around its base. The wheel is usually centered around the tree trunk, but today it's pushed off to the downhill side. I imagine a family hiking by here yesterday afternoon. One of the kids probably saw the wheel and grabbed it.
"Wow," the kid must have said. (Let's call him Johnny and say he's about eight years old.) "How did the wheel get around the tree?" he would have asked his parents.
"Well, Johnny," his mom would have replied with a wink to his dad, "how do you think it got there?"
Johnny would have pondered for a moment, looking up to the tree's full height and then kicking its trunk. "I'll bet someone climbed to the top and pulled it down branch by branch. It probably took all day."
"Really?" his dad would have marveled.
"Or," Johnny would have continued, "somebody dug through the roots and jammed it on from underneath. Or they sawed through the trunk, put the wheel on, and glued the tree back together. Or aliens in a spaceship lifted the tree with their beams and set it down on the wheel. Or a magician turned the wheel invisible and put it around the tree. Or …"
I imagine Johnny's parents would have had a good laugh before telling him the real story. The wheel has been lying in the same place for years while tree grew up inside its ring. It has been there longer than Johnny's own lifetime, maybe longer than his parents as well. Both Johnny and I can sense of how long time has been going on independent of our own lives. That's an important lesson--that this world will go on much longer than we do, so we should contribute to the life and health of this planet as much as we can while we're here.
That's definitely a good lesson for a young kid on a Sunday afternoon hike with his family, but it sounds kind of boring compared with Johnny's speculations. Maybe someday he'll grow up, call himself "John," and write about this tree.
Day 95 -- Friday, August 19, 2005 -- 6:18 p.m. to 6:58 p.m. -- Cloudy, 75 degrees
Jerry recently asked me if I was counting all the things I see on the trail. "That would be really interesting," he said. Jerry has a Ph.D. in etymology, so he likes counting bugs.
"Sort of," I replied.
Here's my count for Jerry.
Bugs: innumerable--small as tics, big as wolf spiders; most of them like the taste of my neck.
Weeds: innumerable--small as ladybugs, big as dining tables; most I can't identify, except ferns, enough ferns to feed a herd of dinosaurs.
Trees: innumerable--small as weeds and big as rockets; the only ones I can identify are maple, apple, birch, red and white pine--pretty pathetic for a farm boy.
Stones and rocks: innumerable--smaller than apple seeds and bigger than cars; smooth, jagged, dull, shiny; poking from the dirt and stacked for property markers and fences.
Streams: several--usually low or dry, sometimes roaring.
Bridges: several--some planks and beams, some logs I helped to build myself.
Evidence of civilization: all over if you look closely--cut and lopped trees and branches, trail blazes, signs, cultivated fields, rusted barbed wire fences, metal rims from abandoned wagon wheels, the trail itself.
Animals: chipmunks by the hundreds; squirrels by the score; birds--various and hundreds, small as bees and big as herons; cows--about ten in one field, five in another--but I haven't seen the herd of ten in a month or so; dogs--about a dozen, half on leashes, half not, most with people; raccoons--only one, seen it only once; deer--about a dozen sightings, probably the same group of three or four, but they never hang around, so all I see are their white tails bouncing away in the distance.
Humans: maybe forty--twenty or so in work parties, another twenty on the trail; mostly walking, but a few jog; mostly on weekends, but a few during the week; young as an infant in a papoose, old as grandparents with hiking poles; male, female, and some too far away to tell; and one guy in particular who's here all the time and tells everybody who will listen (and a few who don't) that he's going to hike this trail every day for a year.
He seems kind of loopy to me.
Day 111 -- Sunday, September 4, 2005 -- 7:36 a.m. to 8:50 a.m. -- Sunny, 59 degrees
I've come to McCann's early for a slow hike before this morning's work party. I'm snapping photos of the beautiful morning, and I've brought tools to fix a few trail markers that have come loose from the trees.
Just as I'm tapping an aluminum nail to hold a blue plastic blaze in place, I see a woman coming toward me on the trail. She calls out a hearty good morning. "I didn't want to startle you," she says, looking slightly startled herself to see me hammering away this early on a Sunday morning.
She's in her late fifties or early sixties, walking slowly with a hiking pole, wearing new, creased khaki hiking shorts. A red bandanna is tied around her neck, her hair done perfectly. I can even smell a hint of perfume. She could be a high school principal or bank president, carrying herself with authority. Her gate is slightly hesitant, her legs a bit heavy--but she has the strong shoulders of a former athlete, probably a swimmer, maybe a plaid-skirted field hockey player at a prestigious women's college in the sixties.
"Are you with the organization?" she asks me. I assume from the context that she means the Land Trust and not the CIA or NAACP or any other more famous "organization."
"I just discovered this place last month," she continues. "I walked to the stream a couple of times, but this morning I felt like exploring."
I tell her about the Blue Trail and the longer, winding Yellow Trail.
"Oh, I'll stick to the short one today," she chuckles. "I don't get around like I used to."
As she passes, she touches my arm. "It's so lovely here, and I really admire all the work you've done on the trails," she says as if I've done it all myself. I know how the tellers at her mythical bank must feel at day's end when she pats them on the back for a job well done. Even the cynical teenagers at the high school I imagine she presides over must secretly long for her praise.
"You should be very proud of yourself," she says as she moves off down the trail.
I am.
Day 145 -- Saturday, October 8, 2005 -- 9:34 a.m. to 10:12 a.m. -- Heavy Rain, 72 degrees
Wet. Today is wet. More rain today than the previous 144 days combined wet. Wet like jungle expedition wet. Wet like soaked through the epidermis wet, like just stepped out of the shower wet, like sitting for hours in a steaming outdoor sauna during winter's worst blizzard wet. Wet like that Ray Bradbury short story about astronauts marooned on Venus with rain falling on them so hard they are going insane wet. Wet like a long-haired cat in a kiddy-pool being shampooed by careless toddlers wet.
Wet like not wearing my raincoat today because I wanted to feel the rain on my bare skin wet. My arm hairs flattened against my skin wet. Wet with my skin beading water like a newly washed and waxed car wet. Wet with Niagara Falls flowing from the brim of my cap wet. Wet like an entire double-header at Fenway getting canceled a day in advance wet. Wet like an unbalanced load of towels and jeans in the washing machine wet. Wet like when guys named Noah start to get funny looks from the animals wet.
Wet like I'd be annoyed if I had to go to work and be dry and neat and presentable. Today I love it wet, love it like I loved splashing through puddles when I was carefree and six years old. Wet like the water balloon that landed square on my noggin lobbed from the third floor of my college dorm one night on the way home from the library wet. Wet like body surfing wet. Wet like a Weather Channel remote location reporter shouting above the pounding surf strategically caught on camera in the background wet. Wet like the time a pipe froze and burst at work and I had to sprint through the spray to get out the front door and I slipped and fell on my ass wet.
Wet like a St. Barnard's jowls in my hands wet. Can't see through my glasses wet. Wet like hopelessly trying to dry myself with paper towels in the men's room five minutes before my first important job interview with my only good suit plastered to my body by rainwater wet.
Tomorrow's forecast? Rain.
Day 181 -- Sunday, November 13, 2005 -- 3:21 p.m. to 3:58 p.m. -- Sunny, 64 degrees
I don't recognize any of the five cars in the lot today, but I'm not surprised that so many people are here to take advantage of the nice weather. As I cross the bog bridges, I meet a young, attractive couple with two beautiful toddlers happily making their way back toward the parking lot. We share a smiling "hello," and it occurs to me that they could be Betsy and me in a different life. For just a moment, I feel a pang of regret for being nearly middle-aged, childless, and having met someone so wonderful this far into my life.
About halfway around the trail, I hear and then see a big group of people coming toward me about fifty yards away. As they get closer, I realize they're teenagers, three guys and three girls, chatting loudly. The biggest guy steps off the trail and starts shaking a dead tree as hard as he can, his head bobbing back and forth with the effort. The treetop flails and twists, but it won't break.
"Shit!" he calls out, and his friends laugh at him. Then he looks up and sees me coming. For a moment, I can tell he's embarrassed for not being able to knock the tree down. He dips his eyes, but then he remembers that his role is to look tough for his buddies, so he stares at me.
"Hi," I say. "Beautiful day."
The girls greet me politely, and two of the guys nod with half smiles as they pass. The big guy hangs back, still staring me down. As we come close, I'm surprised to see that I'm half a head taller than he is and probably thirty pounds heavier.
"I can't knock it down either," I say, nodding toward the dead tree. "I've tried a dozen times. It's a tough old guy."
He grins sheepishly. "I'll get it next time," he says in passing.
"It'll be dark in about half an hour," I call out to the group. "Stay on the Blue Trail. It's shorter."
"Thanks, mister," one of the girls says as she waves and leads her friends along.
"Yeah, thanks, tough old guy," the big kid says.
Day 226 -- Wednesday, December 28, 2005 -- 10:32 a.m. to 11:13 a.m. -- Sunny, 36 degrees
Daisy and I arrive at the trail today to find an unfamiliar SUV parked in the icy lot at an odd angle. As we climb out of my truck, I notice two men walking slowly along the final few yards of the tail. One wears large, worn work boots, jeans, a plaid jacket, and a tired smile on his broad, rosy face. His companion wears brand new running shoes, sweatpants, and several heavy cotton sweatshirts. He's also smiling.
They burst out laughing when they see the trail sign. I approach and say hello, and the one in sweatpants speaks through laughter. "We took the wrong trail!"
"Oh, no!" the other chuckles. "We were on the three-mile trail, not the two-mile trail. No wonder it took us three hours!"
I join their laughter as I pass. Three miles in three hours? I ask myself. Yesterday I covered two miles in about half an hour.
"Hey, Bob," Sweatpants calls to a third hiker, a strained-faced, heavy man with tiny sneakered feet coming down the trail. "You won't believe this!"
As we pass, he pants, "Careful … icy."
"Thanks," I reply, as my Yaktrax dig in.
While Daisy and I enjoy our contented stroll, I notice the three sets of footprints in the remaining snow and ponder their hike this morning. Three hours ago, the temperature was barely into the twenties, the wind harsh enough to numb bare faces. Work boots and sneakers would skid on the abundant ice. Uphill climbs that I've grown accustomed to must have sucked the air from their lungs and burned their thighs and calves. Trail markers obvious to me sent them meandering along the Yellow Trail. How often did they wonder if their car was just ahead only to emerge into more unfamiliar woods? How would they describe their day-off adventure to friends at work tomorrow? How often did they wish they had stayed in bed?
By contrast, the only surprise Daisy and I find is that the normally distant cows in the western pasture have ventured close to the trail.
"Cows!" I say to Daisy. She yips, adding another word to her extensive vocabulary alongside "squirrel," "chipmunk," "trail," and "good dog."
Day 259 -- Monday, January 30, 2006 -- 7:48 a.m. to 8:27 a.m. -- Light Rain, 38 degrees
As I enter the McCann's lot this morning, a bear attacks my truck, so I jump out and punch it in the snout. I punch and punch and punch. The fury builds in me and I punch and punch and punch. I punch until the bear runs howling back into the m*th*erf*ck*ng woods.
That didn't happen, but if you've read James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces, you might get a chuckle. Frey's "memoir" about battling drug addiction was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club and became a bestseller--but was then debunked as a boatload of exaggerations and lies. Frey reappeared recently on Oprah's show for her to chastise him about the whole mess. Basically, Frey admitted to making himself look tougher and cooler so that the book would more interesting and marketable.
A friend of mine asked me yesterday if I was planning to "Frey" this book--I knew immediately what he meant. He wondered if I would skip days whenever I wanted to and then just make up hikes around the loop so that the book would be more interesting. I told him no.
I have mixed feelings about the Frey controversy. As a memoir writer, I recognize the importance of truth, but I don't think "truth" is only found in the exact retelling of events--something that isn't even possible considering the nature of memory. Memoir is a creative literary form, not a catalogue of events. Often a greater "truth" is contained in a book that recreates experience dramatically than in one that simply reports or records. Of course, there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction. If a book draws primarily on the imagination rather than on experience, it's a novel, not a memoir. Frey seems to have strayed too far into the imagination for A Million Little Pieces to be a memoir. Many memoir writers exaggerate, but Frey wrote an experienced-based novel and called it a memoir to sell more copies.
As an English teacher, however, my biggest problem with Frey's book is that there's not a single quotation mark or paragraph indentation in all 432 pages. Oprah should have taken him to the woodshed for that.
Day 272 -- Sunday, February 12, 2006 -- 1:36 p.m. to 3:08 p.m. -- Heavy Snow, 19 degrees
On the other hand, sometimes expectations match reality, and eight to ten inches actually turns out to be two feet. That's what happened today.
I went to bed last night with bare ground and starry skies, and I woke this morning to drifting snow piled halfway up my front door. Yesterday, after watching the twenty-seventh weather report that guaranteed a ridiculous snowfall, I decided to drive home from Betsy's house while the roads were dry and safe rather than risking being stuck at her house thirty miles from the trail.
It takes me almost as long to drive the five miles from my house to McCann's today as it usually does to drive here from Northampton. I park on a plowed side street a few hundred feet away because the parking lot is buried. As soon as I step from the plowed road into the unplowed McCann's lot, I sink into snow up to my knees. I'm just wearing boots because the snowshoes are too much work for negotiating the narrow, winding trail, so I plow my way through the deep snow like I'm sloshing through knee-high water.
Some adventurous soul has cross-country skied the first few hundred yards of the trail before giving up and going home. Their tracks make my steps easier for a while. After that, I plod though the undisturbed powder, laughing out loud at the absurdity of hiking in this weather. The first mile is fun. But somewhere around the stonewall, I get slammed by fatigue from dragging a bad knee through two feet of snow while recovering after almost three weeks of every-other-day flu.
The last half mile of the trail is as difficult as any steps I've ever taken, and by the time I slip on Jerry's Ridge and fall flat on my back into a soft, deep bed of snow, I consider not getting back up. Lying here is so pleasant and restful that I could nap until I freeze to death, just like a character in a Jack London story.
After a moment, I struggle to my feet and stumble through the rest of today's hike. If I didn't keep going, who would write this book?
Day 297 -- Thursday, March 9, 2006 -- 7:52 a.m. to 8:53 a.m. -- Cloudy, 41 degrees
As I set off along the trail this morning, I start touching trees and counting how many I can reach. Within a few dozen steps, I've decided to touch every tree my height or taller that I can reach while still keeping at least one foot on the trail.
Hiking the same trail every day is an obsessive-compulsive experience, of course, but it barely compares to touching each tree along the trail. My mind and body are so immersed in counting trees that I literally can't think of anything else--except how strange I must appear to anyone who might be watching. I veer from one side of the trail to the other, stretching to touch one tree and then staggering over to tap another directly across from the first. I probably look drunk or crazy--maybe both.
The trees here show amazing variety, something I already knew but hadn't experienced so directly. Some are barely as thick as my pinky finger while others are wider than my truck. Some are smooth, some rough, some alive, some dead. Some barely register. Some tear my skin with a well-placed thorn. Occasionally, I settle for tapping an overhanging branch, but mostly I prefer the satisfying thump of my fingertips on the trunks.
When I started, I thought there might be a few hundred trees within reach, but I'm well above that number a third of the way along the trail. As I did back in early June when I used a step counter to discover that the whole loop takes 4,178 steps, I start to speculate about how many trees I'll touch by the time I finish the loop. Before I'm halfway around, I realize that the number is going to be in the thousands. When I reach a moderately open area and take a few dozen steps with no trees, I lower my estimate. But then I come to a dense section and rack up fifty trees in barely fifty steps.
By the time I arrive at the end of the trail, my left shoulder's bone spur is killing me and my palms are raw. I guess it's no wonder I'm hurting considering I've just touched 1,705 trees.
Day 336 -- Monday, April 17, 2006 -- 8:18 a.m. to 9 a.m. -- Sunny, 47 degrees
I couldn't get my chainsaw this morning because the garage where I keep it was locked. There has been a loose padlock on the garage door since I moved in a year ago, but it was never locked before this morning. The landlord happened to be out this morning, and he went through every key on his ring without being able to open the lock. So I'll do my chainsawing on Wednesday instead of today.
I was a little annoyed when I first discovered the locked garage, but as soon as I arrive at McCann's, I realize that I'm glad just to have a relaxing stroll around the trail before starting my day of paper grading and meetings at work.
As I step out of my truck in the parking lot, I pause and notice the cars whizzing by on Route 190. I'm usually so focused on my own thoughts about hiking the trail that I don't think much about the traffic. But a question pops into my mind this morning: What do people driving by on their way to work think when they see me getting out of my truck? If I were carrying a chainsaw, they would probably think I was setting out for a day of labor in the woods. But today, like hundreds of previous days here, I have no tools. Do the passing drivers wonder what I'm doing? Do they assume I'm some privileged person with no need for a job who simply walks around in the idyllic woods every day? Or do they think I'm too shiftless to hold a job and probably live out of my truck?
I have a full day of work planned for today after I finish the trail, and this project is sort of a part-time job--but the passing drivers don't know that. What would I think if I saw someone setting out on a hike while I was driving to an office or worksite for a day of selling or building or cleaning or whatever work I might be doing? I imagine the traditional work ethic part of me might think, lazy jerk should get a job and stop wasting his life.
Day 355 -- Saturday, May 6, 2006 -- 10:46 a.m. to 11:41 a.m. -- Cloudy, 62 degrees
Betsy, Daisy, and I are here for a leisurely stroll to savor one of the final weekend hikes of this year-long project. The weather seems cool and warm at the same time, comfortable and relaxing, almost dreamlike. In fact, I'm feeling slightly drowsy as we make our way around the trail.
Then something strange happens as we hike along the last hundred feet of Jerry's Ridge. Ahead, in the eastern cow pasture, I see a dark shape moving among the trees about seventy yards away. It's charcoal gray, possibly a silhouette, bobbing slightly just beyond the rise where the land rolls away on the other side of a small hill. At first sight, I think it might be a cow, but there haven't been cows in that pasture since last summer. And it doesn't look like a cow. It looks more like the head and shoulders of a person, but it's way too big. And it actually looks hairy, not just the head, but the shoulders as well. I watch it for about five seconds until it moves out of sight behind the hill, bobbing like someone walking with heavy steps.
"Did you see that?" I ask Betsy.
"See what?" she replies.
"Over there," I point toward the pasture. "It looked like … this is silly, but it looked like Bigfoot."
Betsy laughs. We've had Bigfoot-UFO-Loch Ness Monster discussions before. I tend to believe more than she does. I look at Daisy trotting along in front of us, but she is oblivious, paying more attention to some long-faded pee scent in the dirt.
"I'll be right back," I say, and run ahead up the hill until I can see where the shape disappeared. There's nothing there.
When I return, Betsy asks, "Was it a cow?"
"I don't think so," I reply.
"A bear?" she asks.
"It seemed too upright." I think for a moment, frozen in place. "It wasn't Bigfoot, I know, but, wow, it really looked like Bigfoot."
Betsy takes my hand. "You look a little pale. Let's get you home for a nice lunch." I take a final glance toward the empty pasture as she leads me back to the parking lot.
Copyright . John Sheirer. All rights reserved.
