As the crickets’ soft autumn hum

is to us

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills.

~ Gary Snyder

Relaxing on my porch in Wellsboro, a memory of my kids and me hiking the gorge at Robert H. Treman State Park surprised me in the way that the hummingbirds do when they suddenly grace my hanging pots with their buzz and blur. I was feeling nostalgic. My oldest had gotten married in our backyard the previous weekend. My youngest has one more year in high school. I pulled up images, trying to connect them. How old were they when Jimmy and I took them hiking? We went more than once, right? And swam beside the waterfall—Gabe even jumped off the high dive. Bruce and Judith came that time, too. So that must’ve been before…oh, Bruce.

I couldn’t sort my mental images into specific days, and started doubting if all of them were from hikes in that gorge. So, I headed to the source to see what memories crystalized. After all, I’m hiking memory trails, exploring the folds of my brain as much as the narrow canyon, Enfield Glen, comprises the glacier-carved geology there.

While I’m not sure which trail we’d taken, I clearly remember two entrances to separate parts of the park. The lower park comes quickly after I turn from NYS Route 13 onto NYS Route 327. It’s three miles to the upper entrance, where I pay my nine-dollar day use fee and park near the old mill.

I know we started and ended our hike here. The map shows a few ways to connect the Gorge, Rim, and Red Pine trails to make a loop possible. After reading the signs—one warns of the “many ups and downs” and that “use of strollers is practically impossible”—I start on the Rim Trail. Surely, I’d have begun by going up while the kids were fresher. Today, the day after the Fourth of July, it isn’t very crowded.

Soon I come to the corner at the top of some stone stairs and meet a younger me. She is facing her four-year-old daughter below (Jimmy behind), holding out a hand with red gummy Swedish Fish, saying “Almost there!” So, apparently we’d hiked counterclockwise starting with the Gorge Trail. As I recall this, a woman around my age also stops at the top with her young golden retriever on leash and beckons me to go first. I tell her I hiked these steps with my kids when they were little, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been here. She looks at the steps and says with a sigh, “They haven’t changed.”

But everything changes. My knees, for instance.

Soon I get a good view of the Gorge Trail, carved in stone on the other side of the creek. After a half mile and more steps, I’m at the bridge. I cross, anticipating better views of Lucifer Falls. The trail is hardpan dry in some places, in others as slippery as memory. Instead of heading back to the mill lot, something pulls me right till I follow others in finding a rock to sit on below another of the park’s twelve falls.

In water clear enough to see the rock patterns beneath, the dark commas of tadpoles shimmy. Something tickles my memory. We had brought the kids a second time. When we hiked with Bruce and Judith, we’d had two cars. My five-year-old was easily convinced to do the hike again. Glo adored these friends, there’d be swimming, and I promised we’d only go down. At not quite three miles, it wasn’t a huge distance, but it took a while. After we’d passed the 115 feet of Lucifer Falls and the terrain got more predictable (trees!), Glo’s pace began to drag. Judith explained how fairies made their houses at the base of some trees and got our daughter to look for places which might be fairy houses. This worked for a while, but then Glo, tired of Swedish Fish, turned to Jimmy and cried, “Daddy, Daddy, pick me up. I’m dying!”

Glo was more than capable of walking this distance, and we were no longer carrying perfectly able children. Bruce, who’d been behind talking with Gabe (at eight he suddenly preferred to hike with the adults), moved up, took Glo’s hand, and led off down the trail. I’m not sure if it was the novelty or if he had some brilliant means of convincing Glo to continue on, but there was no more whining. The image of my daughter and my good friend, who’d been recently diagnosed with bladder cancer and was starting chemo, holding hands all the way to the lower parking lot is precious. And the smell of the negative ions released by moving water is the same today as then, when Judith and I commented on their healing properties.

Heading back to my car via the Gorge Trail, I’m appreciating Lucifer Falls from a new perspective. So many steps. I climb from the wide, deep base of it to the limestone lip that resists the erosion and creates a dramatic plunge. Then to the bridge over the slot that the water squeezes through before pouring over, and then to the creek, calm as a sleeping child.

I stop at the lower park before going home. There on my left is the playground where we ate and played while Jimmy and Bruce took the car up to get our van. Then we’d gone swimming. On this hot and muggy day, the lot is full, and I’m sorry I didn’t bring my swimsuit. The shallow area is great for kids and those who only want to wade. Glo had liked that it was stone underfoot, not lake muck.

Here, all the folks I don’t know are enjoying themselves in and out of the water, joined by the young versions of my kids, as well as Jimmy and me when we had the energy of young parents who never dreamed it could go by in such a rush. There’s Gabe, climbing the ladder to the high dive. There’s Judith splashing with Glo. Though that was our last hike with Bruce, here he is, still, grinning, convincing the rest of us to enjoy every step.