A FREAK OF NATURE
and other motivational factoids
I started out as a wildlife photographer and somehow weaseled my way into the Easton Waterfowl Festival in November of 1989 in Easton, Md. Back then it was pretty prestigious to be asked to exhibit. In fact somebody had to die to just get moved up the waiting list. I guess they thought I had some pretty good local waterfowl images or the plague had hit and half of them died off.
My love of wildlife and nature can be traced back to age six or seven when living on a portion of my grandparents farm of 100 acres or so in southeastern Pennsylvania. I thought the place was my personal Seringetti, and wandered all day every day. Fields held rabbits and ground hogs, both rabid processors of vegetable matter into protein. We had a couple of streams which held an occasional trout. But it was what everybody called "The Big Woods" out back and on the edge of the property that held the dreams and day dreams of a six year old. At six, property lines didn't mean much and in fact in the mid 1940's not too many people even posted their properties agains hunting, fishing or just plain trespass. For a kid it was shangra la!
The play of light and how it changes minute to minute conjures up all the scenes that my parents and grand parents imparted to me though all the books they thought proper at the time. I applied those stories such as (God forbid today) "Uncle Remus" and brer fox, brer rabbit, et. al. Today, young readers are more likely to conjure up a white owl in silent flight through the shadows. Or even Harry Poter himself racing through the stands of hardwood. It doesn't make any difference if it is Brer Rabbit or Harry Potter. It's the process!
These are places where young men and women with skulls full of mush can create the plans for a lifetime. Leave them go, leave them dream, and our future leaders will be all the better for the experience.
Reading (or being read to), learning, then trundling off to apply that word to what in whatever section of the universe the young person has handy, simply moves the fantasy closer to reality.
I guess that is a long way around to simply say that I love to sit in a quiet woods, pretend I am a bushel of apples, watch the light change, and the animals go about their daily duty. Seems the only place anymore to just sit and sort.
I did that once on the opening day of deer hunting season in Central Pennsylvania. It was a season that led me to put down the gun and stop hunting. Because it was opening day and the woods would be crawling with hunters (maybe more than deer), I wisely climbed in total darkness to the top of the mountain. The deer were down in the valleys still foraging as they do during the night hours. They then look for cover during the day to safely chew their cud, ruminate, or whatever they do with their food. As daylight finally broke I heard the scramble of a dozen or so deer climbing the mountain off to the left in a controlled panic created by the hunters below . I had chosen a very large elm tree (wider than my own body) to sit below with my back against the trunk. Virtually inisible when I sat still. The deer, about a hundred yards away, started to work accross the ridge towards me. Only one small fork horn buck in the bunch. As luck would have it one of the does was coming directly to my tree. Now I am sitting on the ground and she is nose to ground looking for acorns. As her nose came around the corner of the tree, we were virtually eye to eye. Could not have been more than six inches to a foot. "Good morning lady" I said in a soft voice. Deer's eyes like human's can widen to saucer size or so it seemed. She immediately snorted and jumped backwards about three feet. She was absolutely stunned that something else that smelled as bad as me was sitting on her ridge. She didn't run too far and those deer milled around for a couple of hours.
Good stuff!
No comments:
Post a Comment