APRIL 3, 2021 – For today’s post I’d prepared a commentary on the world’s woes; another feverish snarl, drooling with invective, and reverberating with righteous indignation. It was all set to go, ready to cut, paste, and publish.
But then a morning stroll disrupted my plans.
Before breakfast I slipped outside to inspect the morning—morning at the Red Cabin, our patch of solitude and refuge from the world’s woes . . . and a good many of our own. On the promise of warming spring conditions brightened by the sun, my wife and I had driven up late yesterday, arriving toward sunset.
Along our drive we noticed all lakes were now ice-free, a condition that used to come a month later. Almost reassuringly, however, a vast sheet of late-stage ice, 100 meters wide, had been driven against our northern shore by a stiff southerly wind. Thus technically, “our” lake, Grindstone Lake in northwest Wisconsin, wasn’t yet “ice-free.”
By the time we’d finished our take-out “fish fry” meal from a local joint (where everyone crowded around the bar chattered maskless), darkness had descended on the woods around us. With the fire lit and warming the cabin, my wife dozed off while I worked on this morning’s intended post . . .
. . . In the morning light, I saw the unexpected. Like a mass of Vikings who’d laid siege to our peaceful village the night before, the ice sheet now had floated mysteriously out to sea. Calm reigned in the place of yesterday’s angry breeze. Stacked up along our shore were the benign remains of the marauding force—small cakes of ice not long for this world. Once part of a mighty force of nature, they’d been reduced to embellishments inside a quiet photograph.
I walked along the old Indian path parallel to the shore running east toward the sun. The world was as calm as it gets—like a ship that has sailed through the storm’s fury, the rage of battle, the shoals, whirlpools, and monsters of uncharted waters . . . now tied securely to its pier in a safe harbor. Like a deckhand who’s sailed aboard the vessel through its trials and tribulations, I savored this time in port, where the only disturbance was the “jeeb-jeeb” of a blue jay sitting high on a harbor mast.
The sun floated free of the horizon—fast in real time, imperceptibly in my human view—and struck those harbor masts, the woodland pine. Details of nature lept into the spotlight and etched themselves upon my retinas and fleeting memory. Roiling seas, tumultuous weather, all manners of human strife disappear altogether from consciousness. In their place: nature beautiful, nature resilient.
In this time and place, along this path in a port of calm, I whistled to the birds, and they whistled back. “Have a nice day!” they sang. “You too,” I warbled in return.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
