Tag: summer
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no words, just pictures…that is all we need late in the summer sun. no expressions, just a moment that lingers. the icy gel of white-tipped waves in a basin planned by engineers…i turn away from the dam, the unnatural spillway, and watch the waves. for mystery and happiness is so much better than numbers and drawings…
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He asked me if i was taking pictures of the backpack trail…
“Yes,” i said, scanning the map.
He studied something inside the posting board…where maps, rules and regulations, and various other government printed fodder suffocated, unable to breathe the moderate breeze skipping across the dock parking lot.
“I was looking for a trail map,” I admitted, though not in chronological, nor priority, order.
“Nice day.”
“You could say that.”
Quickly in the car, quickly down the drive, and out again to a table- picnic table- sitting at the edge of the lake. No trail here. No signs here. Only the feel of something greater…pulling at the tides of my heart. I sat. Alone with the sound of the waves, the wind, and a pounding in my head..
As when spring arrives suddenly, so the hardwoods faded across the water. The chill would come, and fires at this side would light the night with warmth. But none would ever be this warm again.
Looking behind me, my inquisitor saddled up like a pack animal, herding with four or five others, as they made their way for the far parking lot edge where the backpack trail resumed northward toward the lake’s end. They filed into the thicket, but like a run on sentence.
They vanished, just as a boat outfitted with senior citizens veered south, entering my camera view…
and like college students out for a weekend party, they squealed and exclaimed in the unintelligible language only a suddenly-going-senile crowd might understand.
timelessness washed over the shore, and over me, and I bathed in it, washed in it, and dried off in the wind. memory etched in my soul, it was time to move on. time to get back to work. more time to pursue the sweat of your brow, longing for another moment of timelessness, on the edge of something greater.
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a tranquil slice of the natural…on a day hot enough to boil an egg on your automobile…
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shades of green and blue…and white…summer’s palette…simmering…framed by sunlight. impossible to paint, to capture the material…and the spiritual…i am astounded by the beauty You create…
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where coal trucks once rumbled, the land resembles more jungle than park…and the trail underfoot dusty- the gravel gone and only stripped, bare earth remaining beneath your feet. but it is not a lone trail…birds hiding in the bush sing to you. and as you walk, a distinct croaking sound…off at an angle…reveals a hidden pond or wetland, behind a wall of dark-faded green. this trail is like a run-on sentence; the end-sight from here will become just another tail added to another tail…yet more of the same.
it is not a trail for the weak willed. it is like a life commitment, a covenant made; for once you have traveled far enough in, there is no turning back. no turning back of any kind.
but…you will reach a destination, something worth walking for. and that will make all the difference…just as it does in the walk of life…
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the joys of summer…wildflowers, forests, and a view
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open. sky, grassland, a pond, the dusty trail beneath your feet. nobody’s land; at least, it feels like nobody’s land. maybe the birds. they fly around, their flittering like visiting neighbors. but maybe not. all you see is opened before you like a living picture-book, 360 degrees.
but this is the outback…out back of. it is not out back of your back yard, nor out back of the next town over. no, it is out back of nowhere. a nowhere that time has let fallen into weedy growth, and even this path that you stare at beneath you, bares tracks unlike your own, as it dissolves into sandy soil in the wind…and loses width to the inching ground cover.
and then, as suddenly as it began, you stand at the end of divided tracks, atop of rise, where tree, bush, and grassland have mingled to eat away the remnants of a once busy road. it is summertime, and you are faced with a plethora of greens, a wall in the picture-book fabric.
there is nothing to do but turn around. to follow your old prints back to the car, to submit to the season.
you shall return. if you can. when the snow flies and the trail opens to a sky and field more brown and beige than green, when even a wall of wildflowers cannot stop you from entering an undiscovered remnant of what once was a way…
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this picture was taken just two weeks ago, when the grass wasn’t so high it looked like African grasslands or the Everglades.
this morning i took a walk and found myself staring at knee-high grassland. that is when i headed for the cooler woodlands.
it was Memorial Day in America today, a time to remember. I heard Frankie boy- Frank Sinatra- singing over the speakers in the grocery store. Begin The Beguine- or however you spell it- in WalMart. And across the country, it felt like a 1940’s nostalgia day.
But out and about, in parks and public recreation areas, people converged like gnats on a bad night…they were everywhere. I saw Pennsylvania people taking over a whole section of an urban park with tents, fishing poles, and louder-than-local noise. I saw family gatherings with portable bandstands hauled in from who-knows-where. I saw potato salad, bottled water, fried chicken, and more disappear from store shelves and restaurants. And I saw the summer sun beat down relentlessly…
surely my irish blood will boil…if it keeps it up.
in the words of the locals- stay cool, y’all
The Lost Kerryman 