A snapshot of my life
I was making a campfire after dark on Saturday night when a large animal broke many twigs as it carefully walked through the woods toward me. I was in the woods on my parents’ property. I sat listening to it for a few minutes as it walked as close as its path would take it and then continued on, passing out of hearing range.
The next morning I spent forty minutes searching for the animal’s tracks as two angry jays squawked and darted from tree to tree in the canopy high overhead. Somewhere off in the distance I could barely hear an indigo bunting’s odd little song despite the jays’ chattering above. Finally I found a fresh deer trail in about the right spot, confirming my suspicions of the previous night.
That out of the way I made my way out of the forest, pausing for a moment at the edge. The field of wheat swaying before me was a great beige ocean beneath a blue sky that was impossibly huge. Funny how such a simple and expected sight could stun me with such unexpected beauty.
I followed the path made by dad’s four-wheeler to the ‘back’, the far western edge of the property. All through my childhood there had been a wide strip of uncultivated field between the fence and the crops. The strip was marked by three hills, the largest of which being the favourite. It was a gentle slope that peaked higher than any other point on the property. As a boy I had often hurled myself down it on a toboggan. When older I had regularly driven a four-wheeler so quickly up one side that I’d become airborne for a moment before touching down on the other. I’d sat there one evening as a teenager, watching the sun set with the girl I was dating at the time.
It was there I was heading. I had Walden in my hand and I planned to sit there in the long grass and read.
I hadn’t been back this way in years and I was surprised how dense the bush had become and how closely it now strained against the edge of the field. Topping the last rise before the strip, I found that the bush wasn’t the only thing to claim new ground. The strip was gone, plowed under and covered with wheat.
Frowning, I made my way down toward the fence. No use getting upset over a stupid strip of Earth, was there?
Dad later told me that they’d had to plow it under when the potatoes yields went down and the farmer we rent the land to had to switch to wheat.
Before I got to the fence, I noticed a brown furry ball on the top of a fence post at least fifty meters south of me. Puzzled, I squinted at it. Then I moved to see if it would. It did. It was a groundhog and when it saw me it turned and ran down the post, disappearing into the long grass. On closer inspection I found that the post, which was about chest-high, was all scratched up on one side. A groundhog hole was a few feet from the post and a well-trod dirt path stretched between them.
I’d never seen a groundhog do such a thing before and was thrilled.
A few moments later I was on my way up the hill I’d been heading to before. On the edge of the field was the trail of a deer that had passed the same way sometime in the last few days. On a distant hill on the other side of the fence a herd of light brown cattle stood like statues. On the wind I heard the triple note of a goldfinch.
Looking up I found it just as it seemed to drop from the sky. It sang and flapped and rose a few feet again, each of the three chirps coming with the beat of a wing. Then it pulled its wings in tight and dropped a few feet, before repeating the entire process again. It was as if it couldn’t bear to fly without singing, but couldn’t keep up both for long.
I got to the top and leaned back against an unscathed fence post. There was nowhere to sit.
Walden was open in my hands, but I couldn’t focus on it. I smiled because I knew that Thoreau would understand.
A sparrow landed on the top wire of the fence a few feet away from me and proceeded to hop toward me, its little eyes on me the entire time. With each hop the wings moved almost too quickly to see as the sparrow turned one hundred eighty degrees and moved barely an inch. I had to laugh.
What an excellent way to spend a morning.
The next morning I spent forty minutes searching for the animal’s tracks as two angry jays squawked and darted from tree to tree in the canopy high overhead. Somewhere off in the distance I could barely hear an indigo bunting’s odd little song despite the jays’ chattering above. Finally I found a fresh deer trail in about the right spot, confirming my suspicions of the previous night.
That out of the way I made my way out of the forest, pausing for a moment at the edge. The field of wheat swaying before me was a great beige ocean beneath a blue sky that was impossibly huge. Funny how such a simple and expected sight could stun me with such unexpected beauty.
I followed the path made by dad’s four-wheeler to the ‘back’, the far western edge of the property. All through my childhood there had been a wide strip of uncultivated field between the fence and the crops. The strip was marked by three hills, the largest of which being the favourite. It was a gentle slope that peaked higher than any other point on the property. As a boy I had often hurled myself down it on a toboggan. When older I had regularly driven a four-wheeler so quickly up one side that I’d become airborne for a moment before touching down on the other. I’d sat there one evening as a teenager, watching the sun set with the girl I was dating at the time.
It was there I was heading. I had Walden in my hand and I planned to sit there in the long grass and read.
I hadn’t been back this way in years and I was surprised how dense the bush had become and how closely it now strained against the edge of the field. Topping the last rise before the strip, I found that the bush wasn’t the only thing to claim new ground. The strip was gone, plowed under and covered with wheat.
Frowning, I made my way down toward the fence. No use getting upset over a stupid strip of Earth, was there?
Dad later told me that they’d had to plow it under when the potatoes yields went down and the farmer we rent the land to had to switch to wheat.
Before I got to the fence, I noticed a brown furry ball on the top of a fence post at least fifty meters south of me. Puzzled, I squinted at it. Then I moved to see if it would. It did. It was a groundhog and when it saw me it turned and ran down the post, disappearing into the long grass. On closer inspection I found that the post, which was about chest-high, was all scratched up on one side. A groundhog hole was a few feet from the post and a well-trod dirt path stretched between them.
I’d never seen a groundhog do such a thing before and was thrilled.
A few moments later I was on my way up the hill I’d been heading to before. On the edge of the field was the trail of a deer that had passed the same way sometime in the last few days. On a distant hill on the other side of the fence a herd of light brown cattle stood like statues. On the wind I heard the triple note of a goldfinch.
Looking up I found it just as it seemed to drop from the sky. It sang and flapped and rose a few feet again, each of the three chirps coming with the beat of a wing. Then it pulled its wings in tight and dropped a few feet, before repeating the entire process again. It was as if it couldn’t bear to fly without singing, but couldn’t keep up both for long.
I got to the top and leaned back against an unscathed fence post. There was nowhere to sit.
Walden was open in my hands, but I couldn’t focus on it. I smiled because I knew that Thoreau would understand.
A sparrow landed on the top wire of the fence a few feet away from me and proceeded to hop toward me, its little eyes on me the entire time. With each hop the wings moved almost too quickly to see as the sparrow turned one hundred eighty degrees and moved barely an inch. I had to laugh.
What an excellent way to spend a morning.
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