Nature Hike Part 3: Distant Hawks

As a child I often wandered in the forest behind our home in Maineville, Ohio. Willow Creek separates Maineville from Loveland Park and between Willow Creek Road and Lilly Drive provides a forested open space with hills, running water, standing pools, frogs, and box turtles that can endlessly occupy the eyes and imagination of a child who looks to the mud for entertainment and education. My near-daily walks in Willow Creek, unattended, losing more than one perfectly good shoe to deep mud, picking up salamanders, and walking through poison ivy were both encouraged by and the bane of my parents early thirties. Now older than they were then, even without my own children, I can imagine that it was a lot of work to take three-hundred-and-fourteen  splinters out of my arms and thighs one afternoon and two-dozen bee stingers from my neck and back another.

But what I found in Willow Creek was not simply mud and turtles and spider bites but also an intense love of nature. Even now, as an ostensibly mature adult, I will take a lost mayfly in my fingers and carry it from the office bathroom to the front door. Sure it may be eaten by a bird later that day, but it won't be smashed and flushed, its life and death having passed entirely for naught.

As I aged I began looking up from the muck and slime that ringed my childhood fingernails, stained my childhood clothes, and filled my shoes with permanent debris that would wear my toes and feet raw wile eroding socks like water on sugar. In college I began to look around at plants and other wildlife. In grad school and afterward at the sky. Now, as a mid-thirties adult, I am back looking at the muck, though not at the cost of looking into the blue. No single thing other than sky provides so much to see in something so featureless.


As a Teen I has less open space at my disposal. We had moved to Gurnee, Illinois, and the open space around us included a flat retention pond behind the house and a farmer's field across the road. Though I did not spend as much time outside, my activity in Boy Scouts provided time to explore semi-wild areas. At least until my parents' divorce and my father's and my subsequent and (somewhat) mutual disinterest in continuing Boy Scouts involvement.I forget if a photography merit badge existed or not. If so, I definitely did not earn it. If a video games merit badge existed, though, I would have earned that. I played a lot of F-zero. 



And animals continued to fascinate me. I had two pet ferrets, a cockatiel, and the dog I had grown up with in the creek behind the Maineville house. These and my brother's rabbit provided enough animal life for me to photograph and kept alive a tiny ember that sat, untended for years, until late last year. Photographing seagulls along The Embarcadero, I felt a stirring that recalled, brought fully into flame this ember, the love I had of photographing wildlife and natural scenes.


I'll never be a world-renowned wildlife photographer, but that's okay. With being good comes the responsibility of being better and continuing that for ever. And sometimes, instead of the pressure to go out and take ever-better photos, I just want to play Forza.