Taking a Walk

As this photo is a decade old, this bridge may be long gone but my memories of it are not. East and west of this narrow crossing near the Ochlockonee River in the Apalachicola National Forest, the Florida Trail delves through some of the toughest-to-cross swamps along its 1,500 mile length. Few of those deeply wooded floodplains have bridges like this across slogs of cypress-gum swamps with sticky mud. Traversing this 70+ mile segment of the Florida Trail is not a walk in the woods.

I’ve been writing about trails for almost three decades. I’m in a transition back to my roots now while wrapping up one final hiking guidebook. Published between 1999 and 2001, my first nonfiction book series illuminated human impacts on earth science and vice-versa. I won a National Science Teachers Award back then for one of those titles. Receiving that award at their conference is a misty memory, but my joy in traipsing through geologic formations has never waned.

My hiking started with walks in the woods with my parents across boulder-strewn forests on the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, a place we called home during my formative years. Our forested backyard gave me a place to balance atop rocks, climb trees, and uproot ferns to find out what they were made of. I’m of the era where “go outside and play” was a daily directive. And I did. Communing with nature soaked deep into my soul.

I haven’t left nature behind while delving deeper into research for my historical fiction, but I do look forward to the day when I no longer need to document every trail I walk along. Walking in nature for the sake of walking helps blend the mix of what’s inside my brain. Solutions to problems resolve themselves. While writing fiction, the act of simply walking in the woods while mulling over my characters and their issues made a path for my story, created connections between ideas that led to a plot.