Luckily, I got Vaughn interested in going back up to Bangor to photograph the unexpected nature at the mall with her good equipment (she being a photographer and all). True, by the time we were almost there we started feeling guilty about all that optional driving with its attendant CO2 emissions, but it would have been pointless to turn around.
At about 7:00 on Sunday morning we had the place to ourselves.
This time I crossed the fence and waded into the tall weeds, down to the water’s edge.
As I said elsewhere, beauty lurks on the boundary line. It turns out I wasn’t kidding myself. There is a great deal that is beautiful in this little valley surrounded by pavement and stores. It is hidden in plain sight. There’s no secret to finding it: just walk. Here is what strikes me more and more: it is a short walk to something beautiful, but this is a walk we usually don’t take.
These are some of my efforts from early Sunday morning.
signed,
P.S. The stream has a name, and it isn’t Best Buy Creek. According to the USGS map, it’s really called Penjajawoc Stream.
(More in Pro. Pei #11)
Okay, so yesterday I took “a walk we don’t usually take” on my campus, where there are two bodies of water (maybe there are even more…): a pond, and a little pond. I realized that I hardly ever investigate or enjoy them, because there’s no sign or walkway that signals “Here I am” or “Come to me,” which is perhaps what I’m used to in parks large and small. As I stood and looked more closely at the little pond, which seems man-made, caught in a triangle between the main college road, the administration building, and a dorm, I also noticed a co-worker walking by at a distance who stopped and looked at me curiously, as if to say, “Jane, what are you doing over there?” Although I didn’t talk to him, I did realize that my purpose was this: to observe, to see, a feature that before yesterday was only a blur to me, something “over there.”
This is making me think about my own plans for the future. I have always assumed at some point the concrete and grittiness would become too much and I would need to move back to a more green, less grey, place. BUT, maybe I am really at fault here for not bothering to investigate the green I have available to me right now.
On another note. Do you know Lost Pond? It’s in the Chestnut Hill area. Home to deer and coyotes it shares it’s land with a housing development and an incinerator tower that must have disposed of trash at one point. It has an oasis like quality, being on a piece of land that shouldn’t logically exist. Driving around the perimeter it seems like there can’t be enough space on the inside to contain pond and animals, but they are they. I was once attacked by a goose at the edge of Lost Pond. I was sitting quietly trying to write, actually, but she felt I was threatening her offspring, hissed, and tried to pull my backpack into the water. I have been more careful about who I disturb there ever since.