Nature, by Nature

Nurture. Nature. Words that, for me, sum up the shape of my life. Grounding, in a literal sense, a walk in the woods is the best prescription for my health.

Genetics threw me both gifts and burdens, one of which is Type 2 diabetes. Like my father. Grandmother. Great-grandmother. And so on. I’ve had four decades of doctors telling me “if only I could lose more weight.” And yet I have. Significantly. Dropping more than fifty pounds over a decade ago and keeping it off was no small feat. The lifestyle changes doctors say are a must were already a part of my life. Eating right: veggie-first, avoiding processed foods and sugary drinks. Exercising: I flabbergasted the doctor last time over the mileage I was putting in because I was working on a guidebook. Still, they hound me every time over the results of my blood work.

The demon I’ve struggled with forever, the one that makes my blood boil—literally—isn’t easy to dismiss. It’s stress.

How can I tell? Blood sugar readings. I do them daily. After a few weeks with out-of-spec readings, this morning a 101 comforted me. For those of you who don’t have to worry about such things, the “normal” non-diabetic range is 80-130. I take oral medications that generally keep me in that range. Being sick or injured or depressed can push those numbers up, and I’ve dealt with all of it these past few weeks.

Pile on the stress, and whammo. Brain fog. Little desire to do much of anything. No creativity. The best I can muster is to plug away at rote mechanical activities like cleaning or sorting or digital processing tasks. I’ve done a lot of that since Thanksgiving.

So, what shakes me out of that mode? I’ve tried meditation. Reading as escape. Time with friends and family. Sometimes these help.

What always works is a walk in the woods.

Yesterday, I did two. Revisits of places I’d been 25 years ago and not since. At the first stop, I was nearing the end of a boardwalk when I saw something swimming away from me quickly like I’d startled an alligator into the swamp.

Then it turned around and hissed. Guess who was the startled one? Grateful it was a tall boardwalk, and wondering if an otter could climb up the posts onto it.

The second walk had no such drama other than quite a few wrong turns, since the map at the trailhead wasn’t a map of the trails. It simply showed habitats. Good thing I was running a GPS track. I had to use to it determine the best route back out.

Both were work, in the literal sense, since I wanted to update them for the website. But more importantly, they were immersion.

That’s exactly what I experienced on our travels this summer and fall. Having no real agenda to document the hikes I did in Ohio and Michigan, I nonetheless took a lot of photos and video and ran a GPS track. It’s too ingrained in me, still. But the simple act of being in the woods, of walking in the woods, kept my blood sugar stable and me in good health, physically and mentally.

I grew up in the woods, you see. My parents had a house built on Birch Hill, a brand-new subdivision on a mountainside where only the footprint of the house was cleared.

Yes, we had birches and oaks and dogwoods and spruce and blueberry bushes, plus giant glacial boulders I loved to climb on. Climbing rocks led to climbing trees. Being shooed outdoors at daybreak and only summoned in at meals was a blessing.

Breathing in the scent of balsam fir takes me back to that wonderland of nature, where every little quartz pebble and mushroom and leaf had to be examined closely. Even when it snowed, I’d be bundled into a puffy snowsuit and sent outside, cheeks reddening from the cold, to build snowmen and snow castles and throw snowballs.

Many of the woods I wandered in Ohio and Michigan this summer were much like the woods of my childhood: open understory, lots of rocks, lots of gradients. Lots of old growth trees. Stands of birches. Wildflowers and mosses clinging to rock faces. A real counterpoint to the Florida habitats I’ve come to understand over the past couple decades, they surfaced a longing for the past.

My gold standard of where I’d most like to alight has always been “a cabin in the woods.” Even though I’ve never lived in one, there’s a reason.

I grew up in the mountains that the folks in New York City could see from the tippy-tops of their skyscrapers. They longed for those mountains, too. And so cabin communities sprung up, summer escapes for when their kids were out of school. The population of our little town swelled tremendously in summer from all those people in their little cabins on the lakes.

And my goodness, those were solid 1920s and 1930s construction of log and stone but so very tiny. Still, visiting those tiny cabins stuck with me. Sitting among the very logs and stones of my woods but now they’re a house. Wow! What an idea. My favorite place to be could also shelter me.

Another reason I loved My Side of the Mountain as a kid. The woods feel like home.

And so, no matter the stress of the moment, no matter the volcanic anger I can feel at times over the wanton destruction of nature everywhere we roam in Florida, the careless drivers who endanger lives, the elected officials who care for nothing but their personal agendas, the meanness and unkindness of so many towards one another, a walk in the woods can settle me.

Bring me to ground. Keep me in balance. Provide a balm, the calm I need to go on. Being nurtured in the woods as a child, becoming attuned to their melodies, they are intertwined with my very being.

Nature calls. It’s my safe place. My happy place. It’s in my blood.