David Kralik Outdoors: Just Passing Through

They showed up early Friday morning.

I saw them when they arrived.

I was sitting in my camp chair drinking coffee and watching a lone Cormorant swimming around on the end of the pond where we were camped for the weekend with a group of friends that we often refer to as Tribe. It is called a pond. A thirty-acre pond, in my mind, is more akin to a small lake.

The morning warmed up quickly once the sun broke the horizon. Not the first hint of a breeze was stirring. The surface of the pond was smooth as glass.

They came from the North, circled once before lowering their landing gear, then touched down near the middle of the pond. That is where they stayed throughout the day. At times they would swim in tight circles. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. At times they would swim in a straight line in one direction for fifty yards or so before turning about and then, in single-file fashion, retrace the duck paddled distance.

The Cormorant stayed close to our camp until late in the morning. I don’t know if it was some kind of longing for company or if it was out of curiosity. Regardless of the cause, it took the Cormorant half an hour to paddle its way to the small plump of ducks in the middle of the pond. It stayed with the ducks during the middle of the day. Slightly outside their circle-swimming. Always a short distance from them in their single-file paddling forth and back.

Then, after mid-afternoon, the Cormorant returned to the end of the pond where we were camped.

Wallace Stegner, historian and novelist, makes a lot of sense in The Wilderness Letter (1960). He wrote, “we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human.” It is in the wild places that we “have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.” Without wild places we would be “committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life.” Stegner concluded, “We simply need wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Almost sixty years have passed since Stegner typed those words on what long ago became an obsolete typewriter. A lot has changed in sixty years. The termite-life has become tremendously more advanced and complicated over these near sixty years.

I pleasantly found myself both entertained and amused by the Cormorant and the ducks. I also found myself a little surprised by what seemed to be an irresistible attraction to watching them … something a little akin to a child’s interest in watching a fuzzy caterpillar for the first time crawling up their shirt sleeve. I felt that I belonged there in that day-long moment that would have bored most people to tears.

It was not only where I belonged. It was where I needed to be.