Everyone wants to be in charge, but there are so many distractions

The Ashokan Reservoir is an important component of the New York City water supply.  Lying at the base of the Catskill Mountains, the reservoir is 12 miles long, covers 8,300 acres, and has a maximum capacity of 123 billion gallons of water.  Reservoir Year: A Walk of Days is Nina Shengold’s account of a unique project during which she visited the Ashokan Reservoir for a daily walk along the shore, with a special commitment to complete a full year’s worth of walks without skipping a single day.  In her daily notes, which range from a single sentence to a few pages, she brings the reservoir to life.  She recounts the drama of sky and water.  Shares the antics of crows, deer, squirrels, bears, herons, and bald eagles.  Relates the interactions with strangers she encountered and with friends and family members who sometimes walked with her during this improbable quest.  Improbable, for a 60-year-old single mother with bills to pay and aging parents who need her help and many other obligations.

Nina is a talented writer and in particular a master of metaphor, which makes the book a stimulating read.  On a spring-time visit, the cloud-striped sky evokes a blue-and-white lava lamp.  The atmosphere beneath a brewing thunderhead feels “dead-air, locker room humid.”  A sunset morphs from pastel “to flamingo, persimmon, tandoori salmon, hot lava.”  It’s clear in writing up this account she had fun.

But beneath the engaging prose, a serious question lurks.  Why?  Why, if you didn’t have to walk a dog, would you visit the same place on every single day for a full year?

Keep Going

Early in her account, Nina relates the “familiar shiver of doom” that comes from committing to a project.  These are shivers of self-doubt.  Nina describes herself as someone who has little endurance or patience.  Someone who tends to get easily distracted and often quits.  But this time, there is an emotional current driving her.  After kicking off the project, she gets “obsessed.”

Only to find, not surprisingly, that some days are difficult.  She heads out in the rain — “Dark, dank, damp.  Damn.”   She heads out in the fog — “white on white on white.”  On a frigid winter day, as the knife blade wind needles her skin, she asks rhetorically, who would care if she quit this crazy project?  The answer – “I would.  Keep going.”  One day she heads out with a fever and stuffed head, attributing this outing simply to a sense of duty.  “I guess I’m determined” she admits, tentatively.  Keep going is a quiet theme running throughout the book, and an important one.

Notwithstanding winter gloom, Nina reaches day 100 of sequential visits, reports herself feeling surprised — “I’m astonished I haven’t missed a day yet.  I’m not a person who sticks to things, but somehow I have.”  What’s the glue that’s kept her stuck?  A simple answer comes to mind – “The more I go back, the more I see.”

This comment caught my attention.  It reminded me of Samuel Steen, one of the first people to undertake the “Grid,” which he completed in 1980.  The Grid is a hiking challenge which requires summiting each of the thirty-five Catskill high peaks during every month of the year.  It’s a big project, requiring a total of 420 climbs.  In discussing his motivation, Steen made a simple observation — “The more you get out and into the woods, the more chance you have to see things.”

Learning to Observe

During her daily walks, Nina sees, hears, smells, and feels.  On one walk, she looks out at “mattress clouds, mirror water.” On another, the winter sunset presents as “apricot afterglow on pewter ice.”  The sky is “pearlescent” or “postcard blue” or the color of skim milk or an “extravagant tie-dye.”  The mountains are emerald green with dark cloud shadows carved upon them, and next time they’re eggplant purple.  She witnesses “towering clouds, dark and steely” casting an “unearthly light,” and the reader feels her awe and wants to be there.

Her text contains echoes of past voices, like that of John Burroughs, a Catskills native who was the most popular and influential American nature writer of the early 20^th century.  On one visit to the reservoir, Nina looks up at clouds which “curl and part like living things,” and suddenly “a shaft of blue sky emerges from turbulent gray and closes back up in an instant.”  This passage calls to mind Burroughs’ observation that “the sun and blue sky are still there behind the clouds, unmindful of them” — his point being that we should not lose hope when the clouds obscure the light, because life must contain both happiness and sorrow, health and sickness, youth and age, life and death.

Similarly, Nina channels Burroughs when she notices the “calligraphy” of clouds at twilight, and on a subsequent visit, when she sees “a swirl of white clouds like a galaxy, streaked with dark charcoal lines.  God’s calligraphy. “  The words bring to mind one of Burroughs’ favorite memes:

“The book of nature is like a page written over or printed upon with different-sized characters and in many different languages, interlined and cross-lined, and with a great variety of marginal notes and references. There is coarse print and fine print; there are obscure signs and hieroglyphics.  We all read the large type more or less appreciatively, but only the students and lovers of nature read the fine lines and the footnotes. It is a book which he reads best who goes most slowly or even tarries long by the way.”

— John Burrougshs, “The Art of Seeing Things”

Learning as Path to Personal Sovereignty

Yet Nina’s self-appointed challenge is not merely an exercise in close reading of natural phenomenon and appreciation thereof — she considers the project an “all or nothing” enterprise.  Meaning that during this special year, she is not allowed to skip a single a day.  She’s supposed to be out there “every goddamn day,” this clarification revealing the fiery and determined spirit that she otherwise keeps hidden.

The reader follows along in fascination as the year goes by, taking note of subtle changes in her self-identity and sense of agency.  For example, on a winter day that was particularly dismal and unappealing, she tells us — “I hear the hoofbeats of failure.  Pack it up kid, you’re through.”  But she doesn’t.  As a professional writer, she’s always understood that victory comes from persistence.  Now these daily walks are helping her “push through the everyday sameness and find something new.”

At first Nina felt guilty about making a pact with herself.  But as she makes progress on her project, the sense of guilt begins to shift until her inner voice commands, “you can’t stop now.”  She says out loud something she always knew – that stubbornness is a strength.  Maybe the change in attitude comes from watching her parents, who show up once or twice on her daily reservoir walks – they lean forward, struggle for a few steps, brace themselves against the relentless wind with cane or walker.

Nina’s story reminded me of Martin Armitage’ book Switching Gears, which recounts his own mid-life project, which was to hike Vermont’s Long Trail end-to-end.  As Martin explains, his motivation was to confront the “fear of failure, my fear of starting and not finishing” — and to “slay” the fear.  In other words, to prove to himself that he could still take on personal goals and achieve them.  Especially in the face of mid-life, during which the realities of the aging process become apparent, including the dawning realization that old age is around the corner.

Peak-bagging, hiking, and daily walking are different modalities, but all these structured outdoors projects have the potential to drive personal development and agency.  On her way home from a visit to the reservoir, Nina realizes suddenly — “I’m fully alive.”

Her final walk, which is number 366 (it’s a leap year), consists of a full-day ramble along the shore, at the end of which she stares out at mountains and water, “basking in weary triumph” and thinking to herself “I did it.”

The experience has changed her.  She can finally say — “I’m in love with the world.”  Indeed, she’s learned Burroughs’s most important lesson, the one he wrote about during his later years — that “love is the measure of life.”

A friend looks at her and is so surprised — “I think your reservoir year made you magic.”

Make some time to read Reservoir Year, and maybe you will learn some magic.