Summer Rambles

Long summer rambles through miles of farmland in Florida's Marion and Alachua counties are a gift and a blessing. Soon on the road, one feels like a familiar old machine that is well-oiled and running perfectly and realizes that we humans were built for walking long distances with each other. You become acutely aware of every sight and sound.

The walkers' pace permits you to see things seldom noticed, especially at the scale of, say, a leaf hopper. You encounter things along the way in a manner that you could never experience in a car. Things like bits of wire, colored glass, pieces of bleached armadillo husk, turkey vultures hunched over a raccoon carcass, or a baby goat straining at the fence for a scratch behind his little spikes and a taste of your sweaty fingers. You hear unseen cows bellowing from hidden pastures a mile away. Frogs of all stripes burp and croak and squeak from culverts and roadside swales, cautious of one's tread or the big banded water snake lurking in the sedges. Crickets and grasshoppers and katydids and cicadas buzz and clack all around, orchestrating a plangent communal jangle that abruptly trails off into silence without explanation. The sounds of nature, at first foreign, become familiar and full of meaning and messages.

Above and all around, the fierce and omnipresent sun presses like a hot iron. Yet walking over open ground under the sun brightens your mood, as if the sunlight were pooling in your heart and viscera, driving ill-will and the day's cares out of your pores with your sweat.

Traversing these long and unhurried distances reconnects us to the physical world. Conversation shared with one's walking companion is as expansive as the sky and can be by turns lofty, philosophical, or jocose. There is no complaining, no guile. You instinctively assume Nature's mien. There is no rancor or jejuneness in Nature. Only beautiful richness and complexity adorning simple honest purpose. The way one's life should be.

These are some of the lovely lessons I've learned as my sweet wife and I have gone a-walking this summer.

hiking, summer rambles, walking, Florida