Winter Begins on a Path

Ramapo College path (photo: Nick Sammartino)

By Nick Sammartino

I walked this path for three years, and now, in my fourth, I walk it again and again. Not because I have to—really, it’s inconvenient—but because I can trace the trajectory of my thoughts in the wood grain, the curl of the bark. I can follow the change in my ideas over time, just like I can see where the trail stops and turns back into campus.

There’s a smell out here not like decay, not like that rising stinking bloat of spring, when all the animals are shitting and eating and dying, and the plants are thawing and rotting beneath warm showers. It’s totally unlike that. The smell here is clean and concise, and when some bad aspect does come through, it’s faint and quickly swallowed by the wind.

That’s if you’re by the green bridge, though, which looks out over the pond and sits below Overlook. Meanwhile, if you’re at the end closest to the Birch Tree Inn, a clinging stink of grease wafts from the building and touches wilderness. Latches onto your clothes and hair.

The middle of the path is a nice compromise between man and nature. Orange-red leaves turn on the ground like the hands of children. A lamppost, fitted with a safety box, looms like some clockwork sentinel. Wind pirouettes between the trees, singing empty ballads—its voice a grim implication of the quiet blue days to come. Cold will compress the brain in my skull, just as these dark mornings do. Can you feel the change like I can? Soupy layers of gas have sheathed the world, blotting out the light, and a shadowy depression has already checked in.

Three years back, I was walking here with folks. We were freshmen. A new winter just like this one reigned over the forest. It was early and the world was blue and black. I stopped on the path as fog throbbed beyond the trees like a ghostly heart. I was so cold. Erin touched the tips of her fingers to my elbow and asked if I was okay. With numbness I responded, said something like “Yeah I’m fine,” though I was not. The three of us—Erin, her roommate, and I—walked back to the dorm. They spoke, I went in silence. They said “Goodbye” to me when we reached Mackin, we split apart. Then I went up to my room and coiled up under the covers. It was early, yes, but the world was blue and black.

Back to the present. The grey sky swirls overhead, over the pond and the woods. Cloudy depths conceal a sick, pale sun. Acorns plink down on the concrete path. Two years ago, as I was stepping off the green bridge and onto the path, one plinked against my skull. It’s strange to think that acorns hold oaks like skulls hold brains. It’s strange to think that seeds and heads both harbor huge potential—and that this potential often remains unrealized.

Oaks and maples and ash trees stare emaciated over the pond, some starting to hook and bend down at a common zenith, as if pondering the fate of the fish below. The fish swim below, unseen, unperturbed; as far as I know, they do not wonder about the fate of the trees above.

To my left, the green circle of marsh water reflects a flat canopy, surface untouched by the dancing wind. Where’s mister turtle? Where’s the bog-witch with her creeping ten-inch fingers of vine?

Likely here and likely not here. But mister turtle will be back, when the meltwater flows along the path on either side, and so will the bog-witch and her jittering goblin boys, bodies made of banana peels and apple cores and discarded cups.

Some friends in Sophomore year were thinking about organizing a Ramapo clean-up club, because the problem went beyond bananas and cups. In the puddles around the path, you can sometimes see floating wrappers. On a few occasions, I’ve spotted empty medicine boxes: the gradient blues of NyQuil or Sinex. Plans for their club fell through, but I still do my part when I can. If there’s trash on the path, I take a tissue from my pocket, grab the offending item, and walk it to the garbage cans that sit by the mouth of the forest.

In the time between pleasant seasons, this is a lonely place, and the only occupants until spring will be death, wind, and ice, who all three love to dance together on the false grave of wilderness.

Wilderness is lying in bed right now, not quite dead. The fever has passed, chill is setting in, and the pre-mourners, they know—flesh sloughs from the bone, hair falls from the scalp, color leaves the skin. They know. I grieve for the passing of fall; so, too, do the bears and squirrels. They’re hiding their faces right now, too sad to be seen about. Their grief is vast, but temporary.

It’s hard to say if I’m going to miss this place. I’ve walked here a fifth of my life, and that has to mean something, right? I admire the nostalgia, how I can follow the flow of my own creative choices as if a path of its own. Landmarks mark the inception of ideas; my stories share the soul of this forest. The fallen log, the swamp, the pond, the canopy, the green bridge. Each has its own incarnation in my fiction.

Maybe I am going to miss it.

Breath jumps from my lips in a fog. My lips are chapped and shedding skin.

What I’m not going to miss, though, is Ramapo winter. Or this place at night, when the terror comes not from the darkness, but from the light of the lampposts. How their haloes project deformed shadows—like the planet is asleep, and its nightmares are out walking upon its head.

Before day dies completely, before the blue and black turns to just black, I make like a leaf and walk away with the wind.