So I couldn’t make it to a scanner for this, but that shouldn’t be a big issue because I forgot to do a sketch anyway. Here goes:
9/7/2010, 4:00 pm
Weather: sunny, windy, approx. 70F
My entry into the Crum was greeted by what must have been 700 million birds gathered in the high branches above. The cacophony of flutters and chirps filled my ears as I looked at the path below and saw that it’d been spattered generously with bird droppings. I quickly set off down a random trail to avoid being painted white by my avian friends. I walked until I noticed an old beer bottle in a bush and began to wonder whether beer bottles are secretly living organisms that like to escape from recycling bins and flee into the woods while nobody is looking or if there really are people out there that feel the need to come to a very inconvenient part of the woods to drink one beer. I started my observation:
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I hear the wind run through branches. Every minute or so one of those branches cracks. I hear birds fly through the canopy and small mammals rummage through the floor.
I don’t see any of the creatures though, wherever they are, they’re well-hidden. Looking up I see a monochromatic bright green, the leaves all lit up by the sun. Down, I see dirt spattered with mica. I’m still blown away by how the stone around here sparkles, and even more blown away by how most people don’t seem to share my amazement at that. The only movement I see that isn’t caused by the wind is a bee, hovering in place for a few seconds, as if suspended by an invisible wire.
I feel the wind blow through my hair, cooling my entire body. I smell…well honestly I don’t smell anything. I thought my nose may be stuffed up, but then I smelled my notebook, which had a distinctive paper aroma to it, so something with either the wind or my location just wasn’t allowing a lot of odor to escape.
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I left my spot and proceeded to nearly trip over some unruly roots. I decided to take paths at random, half out a sense of adventure and half out of not knowing where I am anyway. Turns out going random directions isn’t a very efficient way to navigate, and after 15 minutes or so I’m spat out somewhere behind the science center.
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My earliest memory dealing with nature takes place around the time I’m two years old. I know I’m two because it takes place in Massachusetts, and we moved from there before I turned three.
In it, I’m with my dad, on the back of his bike in some sort of child seat. We’re going through a wooded trail, downhill. We come out of the woods next to a long bridge that, to me, seems to stretch on through infinity.
Yeah, that’s about as much detail as you’re going to get, I was two, after all.