On the old railway this morning, I saw a yearling fawn. It was surprised to see me, and it stood for a brief moment as I came to a thudding stop, spraying gravel and dripping with dew and sweat. As soon as I stopped, though, it lept away into the brush at the side of the pathway, never to be seen again. No respect.
At the old dam this morning, I saw a family of ducks. The mom and dad were out and about and suddenly there appeared from behind a tuft of grass in the stream seven or eight nearly full-grown ducklings. They scooted through the water, just excited to be there. A great blue heron stood and calmly watched them. When I turned around for a moment, they all disappeared.
At the old mill pond this morning, I saw the fog lift off the water's surface in gyres, powerful tiny vortices that spun upward into infinity: tight tubes of vapor taking the surface with them. Sometimes, there would be a vortex so powerful the entire surface of fog would drift towards that one updraft, a lake-wide effect.
I love watching fog off a lake in the sunlight. It's so. . . calming somehow.
ReplyDelete(I assume Blairsville is in PA? The others I could google were in South Dakota and Georgia, and you've definitely not been traveling *that* long yet.)
Ya Pennsylvania. Today I will stop in Harrisburg. That'll be something like 130 miles in two days.
DeleteWow! That's a very long distance for two days! I do hope you're getting enough sleep and food and what not.
DeleteI LOVE that you used the word vortices.
ReplyDeleteThanks!I also like the poem Second Coming by Yeats.
Delete"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. . . " Speaking of gyres.