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.

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.

Shine On

I love sleeping in the sunshine.  It doesn’t happen very often, but on the occasions when a day off happens to overlap good weather and a few hours of free time, I put those beams to good use.  During the winter it’s an indoor affair, searching out the slanting afternoon light through empty windowpanes, but throughout the spring, summer, and fall there are many places I can go and curl up in quiet, sunny places:  a rocky outcrop, a copse of pines, a fallow field.  For me, few things carry such simple pleasure.

It’s kind of like camping.  I love to tent, sleeping under the moon and stars, and sleeping in the sun is just a napping version of the same thing.  Being outdoors, no one around, the wonderful warmth of the sun…  It brings such peace.  I can’t explain why but I sleep better, it’s more restive, and I wake more refreshed than ever. 

And it makes me feel free.  When I sleep in the sun it feels like nothing else in the world can touch me, none of the worries or conerns or problems of everyday life.  So long as I’m dozing in those warm beams, all is right in the cosmos.  Maybe it’s a placebo, just a psychological construct, but I couldn’t care less.  Ten minutes in the grass and leaves and sun beats out ten hours of tossing and turning in a bed.

And until the snow comes, you’ll still find me grabbing naps in the sun.