One
I am sitting at the check-in desk waiting for weekend arrivals. It is early in the fall season, and I’m still adjusting to the shift. Cabins in place of tents, refrigerators in place of bear canisters, paperwork and formalities in place of primal summer wildness. I am sad to see summer go. Even in this bright, wood-paneled room, I feel a little wilted.
Earlier in the day, I took day campers on a nature walk. We walked up the pipeline trail, reading blown-up placards displaying the pages of Owl Babies. I let the kids read. They were so young I wasn’t sure they could, but they surprised me as kids often do. At each sign we stopped and discussed the book. Why do you think all the letters in that word are capitalized? How does that change the way you read it, I asked them. When a word is tilted like that, what’s that called? The kids were proud that they knew the word “italics.” I was impressed with their literacy.
I’ve mostly forgotten about that walk, at least shoved it aside to a different pocket of my brain. It’s that way with busy lives. You move on. You forget. But sitting there at the check-in desk, the staff member that shadowed me approaches. I just wanted to thank you for leading that hike. I was really inspired by your teaching, she tells me. She thanks me again and part of me wants to cry.
She is 17 years old. Still in high school. I hadn’t met her before this morning. And that she came and told me what my hike meant to her, that she learned something, that she thought it was good, it is hard to describe what it feels to be recognized for something small. Recognized and acknowledged and thanked. Some days it feels like I’m doing the right thing.
Two
Today we are working with middle schoolers. Typical kids and a typical program. I’m embarrassed to say how much the schools all blend in, how the faces and activities and excitement become a colored, noisy blur in my head. I pick a random table to sit with for lunch and chat with the kids. One of them is particularly conversational. A boy with blonde hair that falls into his eyes. I purposely choose his group to be with in the afternoon. Because why not?
The kid trails me like a puppy as we hike. We talk about milkweed and deer and how he wants to travel to Africa. He is intensely curious. We swap nature documentary suggestions, and I tell him all I know about bears. When I tell him I lead backpacking trips in the summer, his eyes grow big and his curiosity soars. He asks me if I have Snapchat and I hedge, telling him camp has Instagram, which instantly disappoints him.
Before we switch activities and I lose track of him, I grab him a brochure for our summer adventure trips. He sticks it in his backpack and promises to ask his mom.
Other groups arrive and the courts get busy. The boy approaches me and starts talking, but I only half-listen as I scan the crowd to see where I’m needed. And then, in reference to the summer trips, he says he’s going to come and then mumbles, I could be your ride or die.
I could be your ride or die.
I could be your ride or die.
I could be your ride or die.
I hate that I can’t remember the boy’s name (Logan? I think it was Logan). I hate that already our conversations have become threadbare and all I could do is loosely summarize them without fragrance. But mostly I hate my splintered attention, how right before he said those words my mind was elsewhere, and I think that maybe this is part of growing up, the widening of attention, the growing list of demands, but how I wish I was a kid who could boil life down to a single moment, who could be swept up in the sight of a lone cat or the feeling of sidewalk chalk in my hand, and how being so small but so centered made you feel so big. In a personal essay, Virginia Woolf wrote, I cannot remember ever to have felt greatness since I was a child, and some days I think she was right.
Three
I am walking along the dark forest path to my house. I call it my house because it isn’t my home, but I don’t know what else to call it. Sometimes language fails me. Sometimes feelings are enough. My hands are full of fresh chicken eggs and I tread carefully across the arched bridge that is always slippery no matter what the weather. My headlamp is stowed in my pocket. I trust my eyes. I walk carefully. I carry those precious eggs in my hands.
As I walk, I notice a strange shadow in the darkness. I only notice it because I am walking slowly. I only notice it because I am walking without light. It is oblong and slightly rounded.
An owl.
All of its details are obscured by darkness, but the shape is distinct. An owl sitting on a branch directly eye-level with me. I like to think we are looking at one another.
A moment passes like this and then another and another, and it is just us, two gentle creatures of the woods, two dark shadows watching each other in the night.
And then I leave, chicken eggs in hand. I walk on.
(Part I of the Three Moments series can be read here.)
People in Parks 