A Corner of My Neighborhood Park

The park has a busy playground, a paved walking trail around a lake stocked with fish and frequented by geese. But it's been a park for just a little while. The neighborhood the park was built for has only been around for 20 years or so. This ground had a different look before that, having been part of a plantation begun early in the 19th century, with much of it farmed until sometime in the mid- to late 20th century.

A weathered old gate stands where wagons and cattle passed in other times.

An old fence post stands near the gate. No one needs it, but it's not in the way. The three strands of rusted barbed wire have cut deeply into the post, still a live tree when the wire was fastened to it, a tree that lived a few years as it grew over the wire. Now it sits out of place in time, unnoticed by any but the few who might pass it on foot. But it says something about how people once used the land.

Beyond the gate and the post, a copse of trees remains in a low-lying area drained by a small intermittent creek. All my life I've wandered to spots like this, more curious about nature's arrangements than the useful but somewhat sterile human constructions nearby.

An Osage Orange tree growing by the stream holds its ground with large, powerful roots, though the roots are eroded, as some I pointed out recently on the bank of another stream.

Nearby, a still winter-bare honeylocust tree reveals its long thorns. In a few weeks, white flowers among the green leaves will obscure the thorns that grow up and down the tree-trunk.

In the distance, the playground's brightly painted equipment marks another, more prominent, and undoubtedly, more attractive place for young children.  

But for now, I'm keeping it in the distance.

Boy By the Water

The boy, three years old, is my grandson. He might be me, as well, sixty years ago. Or any child exploring some available nook of a world that abounds in wonder. In the long course of human history, play is ancient, as it is with other animals. Toys, by comparison, are a novelty.

   
Here, the boy just needs a stick. It could as easily be a tool as a toy.

The stick serves to stir the waters, propagating watery patterns as rippling waves overlap and interfere in each others' progress. The child watches what happens, knowing he's causing an effect in the world. The doing and the watching are inseparable, and absorb him completely.

A moment before the stirring of the waters, he dug in the sandy soil, and excitedly called my attention to his discovery of an earthworm. A moment later, he will use the stick to dig out a rock embedded too deeply in the sand for him to pull out without moving some of the sand with the stick, then levering out the chunk of gravel. Another moment, and he'll enjoy throwing the gravel in the water and watching the splash.

He sees water respond quickly to the thrown rock, picks up another rock, repeats. Watches the surface of the water as it quickly returns to stillness.

Like most boys his age, he moves around energetically, constantly seeking novelty and stimulation. Inside, among his toys, he's at or near a frenetic pace much of the time. Out here, he seems more absorbed by his surroundings, by his explorations, pushing against the objects around him to see what they feel like, how they act, how they respond to his interventions. The pace moves with a rhythm that's natural and pure. He breathes, his heart beats, his acute senses show him a little more of the world. And in the joy of his own vital body, he plays.

The Way of One Small Watercourse

But who can straighten out water?

Water follows gravity, and if trapped, rises to find a new outlet . . .

--Alan Watts, The Watercourse Way


Fallen leaves sometimes form barriers in small streams. In times of low water flow, the streams simply go around the barriers, since natural forces guide them in that way.

On the right side of the image above is a line of leaves that fell from trees months ago. But trees are ample on stream-banks, if they're allowed to stand where they grew naturally. So, a lot of leaves fall into streams in forested areas. They're one of many elements that guide the meandering course of creeks and rivers. The leaves seen above seem to be partly anchored in the gravel, and folded over slightly toward the flow of water, which, after passing the barrier of fallen foliage, widens a bit.

The leaf-dam above, just a few yards downstream from the earlier image, redirects the flow where the leaves happened to become lodged in the stream bed. The flowing water, forcefully squeezed into a narrower mini-channel on the left, drops a few inches and stirs up some foam on the pool below.

If the water were higher, it would surge over the top of the leaves, taking a few of them downstream with the weight and speed of the current. But now, the balance in forces allows the trees' leavings to guide the water around them.

Water doesn't fight that. As noted by Alan Watts in the epigraph, it simply finds a way around obstacles, going with nature's course. The straight lines in the minds of people are nonsense in nature.

When I was a small boy, my family lived in a house in a newly-developed post-WWII subdivision. The land was drained by a network of straight-line ditches, their banks reinforced with concrete to prevent any deviations. After all, the space was carefully planned, the lots sized with storm-water flow needs in mind. It never occurred to me then to wonder what was there before the concrete ditches. Now, I wonder what it might have looked like a few decades, or centuries, earlier.