Very Busy Day. No work on house--but many adventures.
Woke up early to drive to High Point State Park--the highest point in New Jersey-where I'd signed up for yoga class to salute the equinox. I had a vague memory of going there once many years ago--perhaps when I was learning to drive--it's little over a half hour north, almost at Port Jervis--but much higher elevation, with spectacular views across the Delaware into Pennsylvania. The class was fine--on the glassed in veranda of an old stone lodge--now the park's interpretive center--the teacher was euphoric about the views, the proximity to real trees as we took tree pose, etc.
The class was followed a walk (with many fewer participants) through the forest and to the site of the old hotel that once sat atop the mountain (demolished, according to a placard, after much controversy in 1995). I was excited to discover that the park was designed by Olmsted--though later learned it was the firm of the Olmsted sons that actually did the work--still a surprise--and quite lovely--with its mix of man-made lakes, rocky cliffs, grand vistas and leaves drifting from the rusty yellowish, reddish trees.
Marveling continued over that splendid lunch in the backyard, and then, as David settled in with a fat volume of Solzhenitsyn's memoirs, Debby and I headed out for a hyper humus hike.
The old hyper humus property (where they dug out black earth through my childhood) now belongs to the state--the eighty acres we sold to Green Acres are officially connected to it. There are more walking paths than there were in days gone by--but, despite its designation as a wildlife management area, we never see more than two or three other people. It remains pretty wild. We walked across the dam and onto the Sussex Branch Trail and were about to turn back at my usual turning point (a rusting bridge across a canal that I'd always assumed led to nowhere) when we decided to see if we could find another route back. I knew a path that once existed had been long overgrown, but in recent weeks, new trails had been cut by hunters, and it was slightly possible that the exact route we wanted might have been opened. The worst that could happen, I told Debby, was that there we would find ourselves blocked by swamp and would have to turn around. So--in we plunged. We bravely bushwhacked our way through the reeds--much easier than brambles, balanced on logs to cross little canals and were doing quite well even as we longed for easier going.
And then it looked like we'd found it. Look, here's a path, Debbie exclaimed, stepping happily onto what looked like a gray gravel trail. But the trail was not a trail at all, it was most likely, a semi-dried canal, and in a nanno-second Debbie was up to her waist in muck and sinking fast.
Luckily, my stronger-than-expected yoga arms and my desires to be a good hostess (first hostess rule, i imagine, is to not lose any visitors in quicksand), I managed to pull Debbie out, and she then of course, had to work with me to extricate my left leg which was on its own journey to the center of the earth. But we made it. We were well muddied, but managed to find our way back to the rusting bridge that we'd crossed not that long before, and made it back to the house well before dark.
We cleaned up a bit, had a quick snack of smoked oysters and tea before Debby and David headed off on their long drive back to Boston.
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