The late afternoon sunlight danced around us; an ever-changing movement of light and dark, warm and cold, as it filtered through the tunnel of trees we walked through at the edge of the lake. The water sparkled as a duck quietly drifted by. I took a deep breath and briefly thought how nice it was to be out hiking away from it all. Then I stopped and laughed because I was hardly “away from it all”.
Our world’s have all become very small this past month. Most of us are in our home now almost 24/7. The place you know better than any place in the world just feels different when you can’t leave it. For some it might be filled with loneliness as you spend each day alone in your home’s rooms and for others your residence might be becoming exceedingly crowded, filled to the brim with family members who are always around, day after day. I, every once in awhile, will feel claustrophobic, missing driving hundreds of miles each day for work.
What helps is getting outside. It’s spring which means the weather here is all over the place. Some days and warm and sunny, others cold and damp. The wind always blows, carrying with it pollen and, some days, the threat of tornadoes. Yet, we get outside daily. With most parks and trails closed and travel discouraged, outside is now what is directly around us. We walk, circling our neighborhood and those nearby. Houses with manicured yards, rows of townhomes with the end units still being framed, apartments with kids on scooters circling the parking lot; we walk past it all. Over and over…and over and over again.
Then one day my son and I decided to venue out of our daily circling on pavement to an area across from one of the developments we frequented. We stepped off of the sidewalk and onto a faint trail and followed it into the “wild” and into our own small adventure.
The trail started around a lake. We passed a number of people who were fishing. I asked a man who was watching his young son cast a line into the lake if they’d caught anything. “Oh yes, we’ve caught a lot,” he told me as he held his hands up to show the size of what they were catching. We continued on and soon reached an ancient man-made dam. Water flowed out of the lake here and disappeared underground as it descended to a river far below. We too turned and scrambled down to the river.
At the river we stood and watched the water that had disappeared underground at the lake’s edge, reappear creating a couple small waterfalls as it flowed into the river. It had rained a lot earlier in the week so the river was high and flowed past us splashing noisily over rocks and creating some nice rapids.
We hiked back up towards the lake, crossing over the dam, and continued on into a large field. As we walked we heard some chattering and saw a bird running along the ground beside us. She ran up to us and then flew in a large circle around us only to land and run beside us again, chattering the entire time. We quickly realized why as we passed a nest with four speckled eggs in it just a foot off the path we were walking along. “Don’t worry, your babies are safe,” we told her as we quickly moved along.
A little further along we came to a basketball hoop in the middle of the field. An old soccer ball lay next to it so we shot a few baskets. It’s all that remains of what was once someone’s home and was a good reminder that we were not on a trail in the wilderness somewhere, but rather we were walking along a bit of land at the edge of civilization. A bit of wild surrounded on every side by suburbia.
In fact, a major highway ran north to south next to us; its noise a constant reminder that we were not in the middle of nowhere.
I love that there are scraps of wild left in the middle of civilization. Places where the road ends and cities have not yet encroached upon. These little pockets of wilderness that are easy to get to and explore. They’re often places where people once were and have left, allowing nature to once again take over. And nature does take over; the trees and grasses and birds and deer not caring that they are near civilization as they create their own pocket of wild.
As we continued on we came upon more old homesites. Nothing was left but the flat area where a home once stood and a few trees that would have shaded the house from summer’s heat. Here, the homes would have overlooked the lake. We stood in the empty space and, with the birds chirping around us and a warm breeze lifting our hair, for a moment we could imagine how peaceful it would have been to have a home here. The only sound’s then being the wind in the trees and water lapping along the shore. The spell was broken as a semi drove by on the highway behind us and we moved on, exploring our bit of wilderness.
7feetnorth 