Secret Places

The beauty in discovering aloneness

It was before 6 a.m. in the woods. I carried a backpack containing my journal, a small portable coffee press, and a Jetboil for heating water. The day before I had discovered a “secret spot” that in all the walks I’d made in these woods I had never noticed. It was a small shelter, pagoda-like, tucked among a grove of old trees. A narrow beaten path led to it off the main trail. It was intriguing. And so, I wanted to return when the forest was quiet and empty.

The sun had risen only a few minutes before, and the light was muted along the path. The wide creek was to my left. I could hear it and caught glimpses of it through the trees along its banks. I was entering the woods from a new direction than before as I had to park my car in a different location due to the early arrival. Finding that “secret spot” wouldn’t be as easy. The meandering trails, although marked, could easily put the walker on the wrong path.

It was glorious in the woods. Soft songs from the birds. No wind. The sound of my boots on the dirt trail. But I was turned around. Finding that “spot” was proving to be difficult. And just as I was beginning to feel a sense of loss, the trail turned closer to the creek and to my left I saw how the brush had been flattened. Beyond this was a less-traveled path heading toward the water. I stood before it and smiled. It was a beautiful site. Early sun was glinting off the leaves and about twenty-five yards ahead of me I could see shimmering light bouncing on the creek’s current. I navigated my way around a fallen tree, light brush, and low-hanging branches to a larger fallen tree stretched out only steps from the creek’s bank. Could this be another “secret spot?” Truth was, neither spot was secret. The trampled paths suggested a share of visitors over time. Still, the newly discovered hideaway on this particular morning felt fresh and untouched.

I have always thrived on aloneness. I am not anti-social. People are good to be around. I’m far from a recluse. But solitude is my church. I write inside an 8x10 shed on my property. And being in this woods at that hour in this secluded place had enlivened my spirit.

One of my favorite books is The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. It is a beautiful memoir of loss, renewal, the natural world, aloneness, and energy of the western landscape. There is Thoreau and his cabin, Georgia O’Keefe and her Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and Salinger and his falling-down barn in New Hampshire. A few nights before my wife and I had watched an episode of a series on Netflix about a world-renowned chef who lived on a remote island in Patagonia, a small plot of land that required 100 miles of driving on dirt roads and a boat to arrive there. This was heaven to me. Many might not see it that way, and instead label this need for aloneness as strange at a time when the world has been so isolated by a pandemic, when we long to be together not apart. But my longing for seclusion was and is separate from quarantine. One is a choice. The other is not.

I leaned against the fallen tree and watched a fish come to the surface of the creek to feed on a bug, a midge. Once and then again and again. On the far bank, a deer. The doe eating low brush, its eyes never once looking up to observe what was around her before she disappeared behind the trees. This was a good spot. I had no need to keep searching for the other or any other spot at all. And so, I lit the Jetboil and placed the old percolator on the fire. With my journal and my pen in hand, I took a deep breath, and began to write—wild thoughts, nonsense, lines of poetry. It was nothing planned or calculated, simply an opening of the heart in a good place in the woods in the day’s most tender hour.

The painter Edward Hopper is the master of aloneness and isolation. Many say his work depicts urban alienation and desperate loneliness. Nighthawks and Automat are the most famous examples. There are many others. However, I care to see something different in Hopper’s work. I see introspection and what might be called “worthy melancholy.” “Worthy” because it elicits subconscious emotions for me that would otherwise be hidden from view, hidden away in my heart, hidden like those secret places in the woods hoping to be found. And finding those emotions and those places of solitude and isolation uncovers “worthy melancholy” and permits it to do some good.

I remained in those woods for nearly two hours that morning and returned to the world made different.