Blue World

I love to swim. For just about as long as I can remember, water and I have been inseparable, and it seems as though the older I get the more I yearn for it. I was spoilt from a young age, of course. We grew up just on a hill above a creek, then moved to a hill between a creek and a river, and when I was older I spent ten glorious years at the ocean’s edge. As I said, spoilt.

We went camping recently to one of our favorite spots replete with rocky bluffs and clear water … and gorgeous swimming holes. All natural, these holes change depth and breadth and flow as quickly as the stream that feeds them. Last year, a freak flash flood scooped out the creekbed to solid rock, leaving the swimming holes an average of seven feet on the deep side. Lined with rocky outcrops perfect for cannonballs and shallow dives, it’s near paradise for a water-lover.

So while camping I spent as much time in the water as possible, skipping meals and cutting sleep short to lounge in the medium I feel I was made for. We even went for a few night dips when the heat and humidity drove us from our beds. Day by day my tan reddened to full-fledged burn but I stayed and splashed and swam and dove like a frog perfectly content in its pond. Until it came time to leave.

Leaving is always the hardest part. The last swim, the endmost dive, the irretrievable closing of blue-green water as you step out and begin that final climb up the gravel bar of the shallow side toward camp, and vehicle, and civilization. How I hate to leave.

There is a part of me always fearful that “this will be the last time,” that our next visit will find locked gates, barricaded roads, large warnings posted on trees and signposts that the area is closed henceforth. It’s happened before. As kids, the land trust surrounding our best swimming hole was purchased and access closed off without forewarning. We drove up one sweltering summer morning to find padlocked iron gates across the road and to this day it has not re-opened. Two years ago there was an E. coli scare on our now-favorite creek and accessible portions were closed to all water activities for most of the summer. It was an aberration, state employees said, a weird combination of low rainfall, limited water sources, and large watersheds. But they almost closed it again this year after a long dry spell.

Civilization creeps in. Wilderness recedes. But I am grateful for the times I am privileged to visit and enjoy, unrestrainedly, these watery wonders. I look forward to the next time I can brace my feet, aim my hands, and erupt into a liquid world full of silver bubbles and cold sunbeams, gravity-defying weightlessness and dusk-blue infinities.

For our earthen world today, good water is a miracle in itself.

Armchair Swimmers

I have returned from my trip, which took longer than I expected and was much harder to re-settle from than I’d anticipated.

My first full day back, I didn’t even bother to unpack. I grabbed a couple folding chairs, a good friend, and headed for the creek. The weatherman had called for clouds all day but they were gone by ten o’clock so we waded into the creek in full sunshine and set up our chairs where the water ran wide and shallow. I jostled a position upstream of a large rock I planned to use as a footrest for my feet and my friend dug a hole for his. We lounged, surrounded by gurgling brightness, and talked for hours about anything we could think of.

Sports, religion, politics, the economy, the future… I love good conversations with good friends. They keep me sane.

We finally retired in the afternoon, grabbed a bite of picnic lunch sitting under great pine trees, and discovered we were sunburned. Apparently neither of us were as tanned as we would have liked to believe. We spent the rest of the day in the shade, edging along gravel bars to follow the shadows. At times neither of us would talk for an hour or more.

Sometimes silence is perfect conversation, too. And it is wholly necessary for my well-being, the more the better.

There is no silence, of course. The air was full of sound from the creek and birdsong and wind in the trees and insects busily buzzing at their errands. But I consider that music, and also an essential.

As the day drew its shades we headed home, a good day gone all too quickly. But more lie ahead. That is the important thing.

Of Beauty and Butterflies

I went hiking the other day. It was breezy but warm and the nicest day we’d had for a stretch, and I wanted to get out and enjoy it. So I went to a bit of national woods not far away and walked a trail I’ve been through several times but had not visited in years. Much was the same, of course, and much was different.

An ice storm this winter hit the area hard. The trail often diverted from its original route to bypass tangles of downed trees and even where it did not divert there were colonies of stumps wearing skirts of sawdust. Some of the oldest trees in the area lay on the ground in cross-crossing lines with their roots in the air. It was almost painful to walk through. But there were protected areas, pristine little pockets behind hillsides and sweeping ridgelines, sheltered from the wind that accompanied the ice and caused most of the damage. In one of these pockets I stopped to rest.

A large shelf of rock spotted with mosses and lichens ran exposed through a narrow meadow-like opening on the steep hillside. It made an excellent seat. Surrounded by oak and pine, cedar and hickory, it was perfectly calm and flooded with warm mid-day sunshine. A small bronze-colored lizard with long dark stripes peeked out from under a tiny overhang in the rock that I hadn’t even noticed beforehand but vanished when I finally had to shift on my stone seat. A large patch of wildflowers swarmed the lower end of the clearing where the shelf of rock melted back into dark earth, violets and sheep shire, buttercups and phlox, false garlic and bluets scattered on the ground like confetti. Among their bright blooms, which drifted into the woods amid lazy sunbeams like something straight out of a Thomas Kincade painting, a few little butterflies hovered and flitted. Some were solid yellow, others colorfully spotted, and the smallest of them were white with orange piping at the edges of their wings. They tasted this blossom, then that one, seemingly unable to choose a favorite, dancing from one spring buffet to the next.

“They get to live their whole lives here,” I mused. “All they will ever know is this tiny paradise.”

I envied them. Beautiful and perfect, they danced on air. Their lives were short but enchanted, if only for one untainted afternoon. But, then, so was mine. I sighed and moved on, climbing farther and farther up the hilll until the trail broke out of the woods and wound the narrow edge of a bluff high above the crystal clear creek I had left just below the parking area. It was a lovely vista, a wide panorama of the creek valley and hills beyond, all broken ranges and steep hollows just beginning to don the golden-green cloak of spring. Redbuds flamed in purple brilliance and dogwoods floated like drifts of snow in the trees. I tried to soak it in, memorize every wrinkle of the hills, every sharp edge of rimrock, every curve of the creek so I could pull the memory out for later use and relive the simple glory of stillness and spring on a rocky bluff outcrop. I think I managed pretty well.

So now, even on long dark days when the sun does not shine for me, I can recall these memories and cling to the knowledge that it is not only butterflies who dance in the air and lead lives full of beauty.

Boykin Creek

I recently had the opportunity to visit the East Texas Piney Woods region and found a lovely little spot on Boykin Creek. It was a short visit, unfortunately, but so very pleasant while it lasted.

Boykin Creek was dammed back in the 1930′s by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the many Depression-era work programs created by then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt). The result was a small lake with dark water and a fascinating secret: here there be springs. According to locals, several small springs feed into the lake bottom and others dot the parkland, preserved as part of the National Forest complex. Three can be found within easy walking distance of the main parking area and the largest is quite an attraction.

Filling the immediate area with a sulphurous hint, the spring bubbles out of sandstone rocks and tumbles into a small stream, doubling its output just before it runs into Boykin Creek a few hundred yards below the dam. And there, at their convergence, I found a lovely little slice of life.

Two long, white sandbars lined the clear water’s edge, under pines and oaks and magnolias that towered overhead and rocked back and forth in the insistent breeze. At stream level it was nearly quiet, just a light puff of air now and then invading the streambed, cupped between rocky, sandy banks some eight feet tall. The banks and meandering path of streambed cornered the sandbars in an almost invisible location, one I stumbled on merely by chance. And immediately fell in love with.

At the first opportunity I retreated to these sandbars, shed my footwear in the warm afternoon sunshine, and rolled my pantlegs in preparation of exploration. I waded back and forth across the cold creek, reveling in the soft sand under my feet, between my toes. It’s been years since I was barefoot on the sand. Oh how I missed it.

After wading to my heart’s content (it took a while), I padded across a wide sandbar and sat on the downed trunk of a large pine. The air was fragrant and light, the sand warm and dappled with sunshine, and I was unspeakably happy to just sit there and stare at the treetops nodding high above.

No computers or televisions coerced me into an electronic stupor, no radios blared music at earth-shaking volumes, there was just water and earth and trees, sun and clouds and wind. And me.

The perfect afternoon inevitably ended – and much, much too soon – but not before I had reclaimed some part of me I had unknowingly misplaced these last several months.

It was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. Thank you Boykin Creek.