The event poster reads like that for a rock extravaganza a la Lalapalooza or Coachella:
Get Here Early!
Gates open at 5 a.m.!
Stay All Day!
Food trucks! Vendors! Live streaming!
Don’t you dare miss it … !
In fact, it’s the poster promoting Total Solar Eclipse 2017 at Gorges State Park, part of the normally staid North Carolina State Park system.
Is this the weekend you take your first dip of 2017 in the Atlantic? Perhaps you’re more interested in a hike into history. Or maybe it’s when you take a class and learn not to bark up the wrong tree (so to speak).
Coast
Did you miss the chance to jump into an icy pool — the classic polar plunge — on New Year’s Day? Do you feel your year isn’t off until an official start until you’ve had the wake-up call that only baptism in 55-degree water can confer?
It’s about this time of year that I begin getting distracted on the trail. I stumble over tree roots and rocks more, my attention diverted from the trail itself to three, five, 10 feet into the neighboring terrain. Scanning, constantly. I grow quieter on group hikes; my responses to fellow hikers limited to a delayed “right” or “sure,” wondering later if I offered to bring a main course to a pot luck.
A dull, distant whirring, an intrusion of industrial origin that should have been distracting at the least. Instead, it was curiously reassuring.
I was walking a stretch of the Eno River upstream from Durham, downstream from my home in Hillsborough. More rural than urban, but not entirely detached. I’d been faintly aware of the thrum of tires rolling down I-85 a half mile distant, fading in and out, of the occasional chirp of a truck backing up closer by. Then, the low, constant buzz of a plant of some kind powering along, the heartbeat of the world I was trying to shake. I should have been annoyed. And yet … .
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
