Just Me and My Walking Stick

I love packing my bag and grabbing my walking stick on the way out the door to my special place a short three minute drive away (I need a bike) to the lake. As I pull in I pray that there are no other cars, and often there are not. The other day there were three cars park in the boat launching part. But the park is large so I set off down the trail with high hopes that I wouldn’t run into anyone. After I walked through a few spider webs, I took it as a good sign that the other visitors were not fellow hikers, but canoers who could be anywhere on this great lake (and not likely to be at “my spot”).

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

On the way to my spot I had the good fortune of seeing two bald eagles leave their roost as I rounded the corner. I watched them fly majestically in circles before moving on. Of course I had forgotten my binoculars and camera. On the way to my spot I did see some blue canoes pulled up on another shore far off in the distance, but when I finally got to my spot, they remained hidden.  Perfect. I come by myself because others get bored or need to talk. Although I sometimes wish I had a wise old dog at my side.

There I remained, swam for a bit, but lay mostly idle, just taking it all in. I like to close my eyes, withdrawing the senses, for a few moments of time, and then when I open my eyes again everything seems richer, more saturated—brand-spanking new.

Consider what the perpetual admonition of Nature to us is, the world is new, untried. Do not believe in the past. I give you the universe new and unhandled every hour. You think in your idle hours that there is literature, history, science behind you so accumulated as to exhaust thought and prescribe your own future. In your sane hour you shall see that not a line has yet been written; that for all the poetry that is in the world your first sensation on entering a wood or standing on the shore of a lake has not been chauted yet. It remains for you, so does all thought, all object, all life remain unwritten still.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I come out to these truly quiet places (no traffic sounds) I find stillness happens quite naturally and effortlessly. I don’t even realize it is happening. Too bad I can’t say the same for when I intentionally sit on my cushion at home.

To get back I walked the loop and looked at a variety of bright and interesting fungi, from neon yellow and red, to black and white. They looked like colourful worms standing up in choirs. I’ve also committed to memory images of a few berry producing plants and shrubs that I will someday find out what they are. By not having my camera with me, I also missed out on an opportunity to catch Indian Pipe still in bloom. There are so many wonders, and you don’t have to travel far to see them.

When I got back to the car, two men were pulling out a row boat, but the original three cars were gone! Well then, who did those canoes belong, too? Tis is a mystery!