We camp. Our state parks are numerous and well maintained. We are lucky.
I mention it because we are camping this holiday weekend. The current, exorbitant price of travel is one we are willing to incur when these parks are our destination.
The notion of nature as a green tree against a blue sky may be simple, but is, for me, not simplistic. There is nothing more beautiful. The further away i am from concrete or artificial light, the happier i am. I am too sentimental in my appreciation of natural beauty. But when i am some place that fills my heart with joy
, you are more than welcome to call me anything you like.
In that place, i won’t mind.
Took a recent trip to a marshy ecology with more heron-type bird species than i had ever seen. And alligators. Bona fide gators. Actually, i believe the wetlands in this park were not technically marshes because vegetation didn’t cover the entire surface area. They called them lakes. But they looked marshy to me.
We camp.
Sometimes our accomodations are more rustic than a campsite with water and electric. Though too late in our area now to do any more tent camping until Fall, earlier this year, we loaded the kayaks with as much gear as we could manage and paddled across a lake to stay over night in a national forest near to our home. We found the most perfect spot, on a point that caught the cross breezes, keeping us cool and bugs away.
We were woken in the middle of that beautiful night by the squawking agony of a heron, the sort that we would, the following weekend, see aplenty in the marsh, mutilated by what we would come to assume was an alligator. We found it stunned and floating nearby in the morning, its legs almost completely bitten from its body. Such is nature, i suppose. The nature i love.
We ended the bird’s misery.
Sometimes . . . often, my role is so small, there is nothing i can do.
