To the Meadow

working it out

In the car in the tiny parking lot at the head of the walking trail, a husband and wife are disagreeing amiably about whether to get out of the car or go to a different spot. It is Friday, early evening, August, warm. Supper will be put off in favor of a long walk, but where? The wife is stuck on heading to the shore. She is craving the focus of the horizon, the blue on blue, sky on sea. The smell of sun-baked seaweed and the familiar cry of indignant gulls. Water.

The husband is happy to head up the piney path a few feet from the car and get the whole thing started. He is a woods guy. But he is waiting for his wife to settle into herself, to work out whatever she needs to. He will back the car out and brave the summer traffic and the 20-minute drive to the beach if that’s what she wants.

She is worried about time, always about time. And decides that they are here; here is where they should walk.

The tall pines merge high above them and the root-strewn ground rises beneath them, almost as if they are walking through a porthole as they begin the gentle climb. Shortly they pass a side spur with a sign that warns of “steep and rugged” terrain, and they can’t help but laugh. This is Martha’s Vineyard and, with the exception of the cliffs in Aquinnah, steep generally means a high sand dune that kids could jump off of and not hurt themselves.

“Steep and rugged” becomes their mantra as the path now descends into a lush valley of ferns, an unusually vast and unfettered under-story in an oak forest where lanky highbush blueberries, fragrant sweet pepper bush, tatty grape vines and rotting trunks usually obliterate any view more than six feet away. This is nice, they both think, cool and calming and very quiet. There is no one here.

A short boardwalk crosses a dry stream bed and the path begins to ascend again.

They are heading from Middle Road to Waskosim’s Rock, traversing two Martha’s Vineyard Landbank properties to reach a sort of peak, marked by a giant erratic dumped by a glacier a few eons back.

They have come to the rock this way before – a back-door approach from the south that’s less popular than beginning the walk at the official entrance off North Road. They rarely see another soul.    

This evening there is no one.

And now there is a decision to make at a fork in the path. Will they go right and up to the rock or shall they go left and down into a meadow, a place the husband has been before but the wife has never? Again there is discussion, but it lasts no longer than the time it takes the husband to bend down and tie his boot. The wife would like to see the meadow. She can tell there is bright sunlight there and she is drawn to it.

They take the fork, skirt a gully carved by a recent storm, and hop down to a break in the trees where a wide swath of mown grass beckons them into the meadow, irridescent in the low evening light. The path parts the sea of grasses and goldenrod, Moses-style. It’s easy to imagine this as a place once filled with water, the wife thinks.

At first they don’t see them; the glare from the western sunlight is blinding and they are walking into it. But the path curves north and as they turn, speaking to each other, each with a hand over their eyes, they notice something. Some things. Whizzing by.

It’s those prehistoric wings that catch the light. Millions of years ago, the gossamer airfoils spanned two feet; now they measure only a couple of inches across. The dragonflies, dozens of them, are soaring back and forth across the meadow, riding the wind, dipping and flipping like the showy aerial acrobats that they are, catching the sun’s rays and reflecting them out, a golden Morse code of dots and dashes unseen by all but those who are looking.

The wife remembers that dragonflies are both symbols of change and messengers from souls past. As the path turns uphill again, leaving meadow for scrub oak and landing at an overlook facing west over the valley, they silently agree to sit and watch the show, to listen to the wind rustle the dry oak leaves, to feel the warmth of the sun on their faces, and to marvel at being drawn into a place of peace and wonder at the center of the Island, while the edges foam and buzz with busy people unaware of the ancient beauty hidden in plain sight only a few miles away.

The wife has stopped worrying about time. The husband has stopped timing the walk.

They wonder aloud about what the message might be that the dragonflies bring and from whom it comes. They don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. They know who the message is for.

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