The power of walking a place

I wanted to go to the beach.

And I dreaded it.

I went, because I knew I needed to. It was a grey day, which felt right.

Walking up the wooden walkway alone…it hurt. I had a crystal clear memory of the last time I did this, on a morning after a thunderstorm, the light just so, with my dog trotting slowly on her creaky senior legs ahead of me.

That was summer, many months ago, on Sadie’s last visit to our beloved beach. I cried seriously ugly tears when we drove off because I knew she wouldn’t be back.

I cried some more now as I walked, alone, in the sand, heading north. It felt like being assailed by memories, and it was almost too much. I kept thinking how we used to walk, with Nicole and little Piper, all the way up to the fence at the border with the Naval base. How we hadn’t been able to do that for the last few years. I thought about how Sadie would trot along at the top of the sand, just before it sloped down to the water; she didn’t love the water but would come down occasionally when I called.

Dog prints in the sand…you’d think those would have done me in but I actually found them comforting…trying to figure out the size, type and path of the prints was something else to think about.

I have learned, over these last months since Sadie passed, that I have to let these bouts of tears and sadness run their course. Trying too hard to stop them makes them infinitely worse, and I continue to be grateful that my brain has the capacity to go to such depths and then bounce back relatively quickly.

As the ugly tears subsided I headed off the beach, up to the feeder road. I started to think about normal, everyday things, and felt better.

And then, down the road, a yellow lab and its human approached. I smiled, hoping we might be able to say hello. As I got closer, the dog decided that we would indeed be saying hello, almost taking it’s human off her feet. I made sure to ask if it was ok to say hi, but it was a moot point as the lab was giving me all the tail wags and nose nuzzles. Her human (the dog’s name was Lady, I learned) was giving me a puzzled look. “She never acts like this,” she mused. “I thought she knew you. She never gets this excited to meet a stranger.”

Sadie does it again, I thought silently. Aloud, I said “I think she knew I needed to pet a dog just now.”

Two days later, something similar happened while I was hiking on a favorite trail, feeling the ache of missing my girl as I marveled at the remains of the fall leaves…Sadie used to blend in perfectly with fall leaves. The tears came again, and so did the golden dog, this time in the form of a retriever named Daisy who leaned heavily on my legs as her humans graciously stopped to let me pet her.

Recently (and unrelated to dogs in any way), I found myself in Reykjavik, Iceland, a city I had visited before, very briefly. As we wandered the city, I probably drove my companion nuts with “oh, I remember this…blah blah…” I had an unexpectedly powerful memory and delight in the place, even though I’d only been there for a few hours.

A similar thing happened when we visited Zion National Park recently, again for my second time. A walk along the river brought back visceral, glorious memories of the first time I saw those high, red canyon walls and the beautiful Virgin River winding through them.

I’m struck, through all of these musings, at how powerful my sense memory of these places are. And I think it has to do with walking them. With having my actual feet on the ground, with mapping the terrain in my body, one step at a time. With feeling that connection to the land…I never thought about it this way before, but every step puts my body in touch with everything that has shaped that land until that moment. All the people, the wind, the tides, the shifting plates of the world, all the dogs…and me. That’s pretty cool.

I feel lucky to have walked so many miles, with my dog, with my friends, by myself…and I hope I never lose that connection, even if it does make me cry once in a while.