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'All things counter, original, spare, strange'
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Location: Blogs Now We're Talking |
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| Posted by: Joe Byrnes |
3/28/2007 2:24 PM |
The young eagle coasted gracefully just 40 feet above Lake Wauberg. From my boat shortly after dawn, it seemed to me as if I held it by a kite string.
On dark, gray-flecked wings, it glided down, oh so slowly, to the rippling surface of the lake and, swinging its talons with an easy indifference, scooped up a squirming fish.
Then, with a few strokes of its wings, it rose and flew beyond the tree-lined banks.
The lake is just north of Marion County in Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, but I hope this scene from my trip there a couple of weeks ago will help make a point about the experience of nature in this county and this part of Florida.
It can surprise you any day. Like the eagle, it will slip through the keyhole of your heart and unlock a sense of wonder.
Hiking last Saturday, I saw eagles again at the beginning of The Yearling Trail off State Road 19 in the Ocala National Forest. From nests along Lake George, they sailed high above the sandy scrub.
It was a place of fire, with charred sand pines and scrub oaks and the tall, black, limbless trunks of great trees tilting and twisting in a blue sky. I walked with my wife, Lauri, and younger stepson, Scott, on a miles-long trek through the alien landscape out to Pats Island and back again.
Its 1,400 acres of longleaf pines, oaks and richer soil, surrounded by the scrub, was the real-life setting for “The Yearling,” a famous novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
In the 1940s, a movie version of the book, starring Gregory Peck, was filmed here.
The pioneers about whom Rawlings wrote left in the 1930s.
On Saturday, Pats Island was a peculiar mix of black and green, fire and rebirth, ashes and spring leaves. Palmettos rustled among the twigs of burned bushes, and small leafless trees twisted crazily against the columns of singed pines.
Every plant in the woods seemed to have its own story. Out of the blackened bark of a sweet gum tree – riddled over the years by so many hungry woodpeckers – a bright sprig of five-cornered leaves had sprung.
Across the county the day before, I saw things no less strange and wonderful. On the Rainbow River, a copper snake, perhaps four feet long, slithered across the top of the stream.
Like a timid sun-bather who tests the cold water with his foot and yanks it back, the snake kept drawing the writhing ribbon of its body back into the sunshine. If this serpent had legs, I thought, it would be walking on water.
Then I saw a great blue heron making a total fool of itself. You have probably noticed its kind — a tall prince among the wading birds — standing with quiet poise in the shallows.
Last Friday, this particular one was sunning itself on a branch with its wings oddly clamped to its sides and then splayed out around the hips. It resembled a short-handled shovel and was turned, like a satellite dish, toward the warming sun.
This strangeness in nature is hard to avoid. It comes knocking, like the cardinal that likes to quarrel with her reflection in the side mirror of my car.
I’m reminded of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins in praise of the maker of “All things counter, original, spare, strange;/Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)”
Spring is a good time to get out of our cubicles and truck cabs and paneled offices, to leave our TVs and PlayStations, and be surprised by the million shades of green.
Joe Byrnes may be reached at joe.byrnes@starbanner.com or (352) 867-4112. |
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