January 23, 2024

The buzzing of my watch alarm woke me up about 4:30 AM. I felt groggy after what seemed like hours of a meaningless, repetitive dream about having to pick up my car from a park before it closed. After a cup of coffee, my brain fog cleared, and I felt ready to take on the day.

This morning, I went for a walk in the woods. Koda and Axel, two of my dogs, were outside in the backyard, and they became excited, thinking I was taking them with me. I wasn’t. I heard them bark and howl as I walked away from the house, then, as if on queue, all four dogs started howling like primitive wolves. They do this every time I leave the house, and I often wonder whether the deer have learned that the howling means I am entering the woods. Most mammals learn, with relative ease, to predict something will occur based on classical conditioning.

The dogs’ cries grew faint as I traveled deeper into the forest. At some point, I no longer heard them. “Good”, I thought to myself, “They must have finally settled down.” About three minutes later, I heard rustling leaves. It was loud; something was approaching me at high speed. Last year, when I was taking a rest near a large rock in the forest, a herd of deer, apparently spooked by something, ran past me, never even noticing I was there. Were the deer coming again? I peered though the trees and that’s when I saw him. Axel, my youngest dog, was heading toward me at full speed. A couple of lengths behind him, Koda was trailing along, stopping to sniff the ground in several locations. They learned to get out of the backyard fence.

Luckily, the dogs are relatively well-trained, so we all romped through the woods, right back to the house. On the way, I noticed there was still plenty of corn out. After securing the dogs, I retrieved a bundle of rope from the SUV and used it to temporarily tie off a section of the broken fence. Now, I had a weekend project to take care of.

At last light, I walked alone to the creek and sat on a large boulder that oversees a small ravine that catches floodwater when the creek overflows. When I walk through the woods, I usually stop from time to time, but I never really take time to sit down. This evening, I sat alone, just immersing myself in nature. When you walk through the forest, there is a strong sense that a human is in the area. The leaves crackle loudly with every step and there’s an occasional snapping of a dried twig breaking underfoot. The forest seems to stop when I move about, but when you take time to sit down and be still, whether in a blind, tree stand, or on a large rock, then the forest slowly comes back to life.

From my location, I could hear the gurgling of the creek, its high-pitched trickles cutting through the open area. In the distance, I heard the faint echoes of a neighbor’s dog barking, usually a sign the scent of deer is in the air. Birds chirped in the distance, even though I could not see them in the trees. At one point, however, a small bird flying low, probably on its evening commute, rounded the corner and almost hit me. We were both surprised.

The evening temperatures were dropping, and the air smelled damp and felt chilled, like when you walk by an open door on a hot summer day and feel the air-conditioned air escape and brush lightly across your face. The entire area smelled of petrichor.

The sky was very gray, not smooth, but with large cumulonimbus clouds bellowing up in every direction. The cloud cover was thick, and although I knew the sun was setting, nothing within the sky betrayed this. There were no planes or sounds of plane engines, probably because of the visibility was so low. In this part of the county, most of the airplanes are small single engine contraptions that fly by visual flight rules, and not instrumentation.

The stillness was quiet, and I heard raindrops falling lightly, hitting the branches of bare trees. In the dead of winter, the entire scene looked monotone, and even the evergreens looked dull and gray. It was not a melancholy sight, but the woodland looked tired; desolate.

The woods have a way of slowing me down, pulling me out of my head and back into my body. While the area looked stark and unenchanted, it was all still somehow beautiful to me. That’s the thing about nature. It does not follow human constructs. It is not happy, sad, positive, or negative, just like the moon is always full, round, and complete. We are the ones who created the ideas of a quarter, half, or full moons. We invented up and down; the four directions. Nature just is. And when you sit with her, you learn to be with that. You get to experience what it means to be present without all the fluff or interpretations we like to pin on life.

In the wild, it’s okay not to have purpose or meaning. But make no mistake, life is real, and in the wild, man once again becomes an animal, not devolving, but returning to his natural self.