Findings | Here and there
Tag Archives: nature
Sunday walks and spiderwebs
Sundays always go too quickly–The fellowship, the family time, the blessed enjoyment of the outdoors. We live in such a fast-paced culture, but I’ve been discovering a peace that comes with a quieter life. Sometimes life gets busy and schedules get hectic, but coming home to a quiet life at the end of the day is unbelievably restful and calming. Regrettably, the last week sped by with hardly enough time to breathe deep of the clear, piney air or to ponder flowers in shady corners of the Hills. I tried to make up for it today.
A quiet, solitary walk to scout some good photography locations was restorative, even with temperatures in the 90s. I explored a beautiful little ravine branching off our jeep trail to Hole-in-the-Wall, and enjoyed the sight of birch trees glinting in the 5:00 sunlight. Deadfall and rocks, mossy soil and sandy creekbed–The ravine was like something straight out of a western novel. I love not being able to see what is around the corner–Where might it go? What is just out of sight, waiting to be discovered?
Another ravine, the grass bent from flooding, was scattered with ancient, sun-bleached bones. Some of them were mossy and green, all of them porous with time. Life is so short, so transient. Like the “flower of the grass”, the Bible says, life comes and life fades, just like that. Human life, animal life, plant life. But unlike the flower of the grass, we have a soul that will not die! And God is good to His children. So good.
On the way back through the corrals to get home, which are built with the bare rock as the fourth wall, I nearly walked right through this beauty’s web. I watched as she snagged herself a grasshopper, then scurried back to the center to watch and wait. Ants are examples of industry. Spiders are examples of vigilance.
We were graced with a little thundershower this afternoon, just enough to wet the deck and scare the Dog. She’s a bit of a coward. The clouds rolled up so gradually, they looked like smoke and haze, but soon took command of the whole horizon and the sky above. A little thunder, a little rain, a little wind in the whispering pines. The moisture was pleasant.
Tomorrow is the start of a new day, a new week, and a new job! Off to new adventures.
Raspberries
The raspberries are out in full force at this time of the year. After a long three days in Hill City, navigating Sturgis Rally traffic and listening to the roaring engines and blaring music, the silence of the woods was a welcome relief. It always is a pleasure, but this time it was a relief.
We picked and ate for an hour and a half or two hours, and barely made it through any of the berry brambles! We walked in probably a quarter of a mile, along a rocky, rutted logging trail, and on either side – down the slope on one side, and up the slope on the other – the brambles were plentiful and thick. We could have picked for hours longer and still not canvassed the whole berry patch! I’d never seen anything like it.
We enjoyed the antics of a little red squirrel, the occasional glimpses of moles in the tall grass, and the gentle song of the wind in the pine trees. The berries were smaller than garden-grown ones, but so much sweeter. Even the not-yet-ripe ones were sweet, and I never once tasted a bug inside. So either the bugs out here taste better than the ones back in Illinois, or there were truly fewer insects!
In a week or two, the rosehips will be ripe–I’d love to get back out there to pick rosehips, so we’ll see if that makes it into the schedule.
Taking time to enjoy life, to spend time with friends and family and to revel in God’s beautiful creation…These make for a fruitful, bountiful life. The more I spend time in fellowship with my brothers and sister in Christ, and the more time I spend in fresh, clean air without the noise of traffic in the background, or the smell of asphalt and fastfood, the more time I spend without worrying about the clock, without the hurry and race of town life, the more I love these beautiful blessings from God.
Blooming June
The Black Hills are dressed in their best and most glorious finery. Wildflowers are sprinkled, sometimes lavishly, on hillsides and in valleys, the creeks are full to overflowing, and everything is green and lush and fragrant. It is always fun to see the Black Hills through the eyes of a visitor. Even though I’ve only lived here for four months, this has always been our home away from home, and consequently seeing it sometimes becomes, well, daily life. There is nothing like a new pair of eyes to renew my own love of this region.
Mom’s cousin Russel, his wife, and their three daughters have been staying with us since Sunday. I’d never met any of them, so it was fun to get to know my second-cousins from Texas! We all went down to the Mountain Lion Cave last night (or as close as we could get without crossing Battle Creek), and this morning my second cousin Julie and I headed out on an excursion. The rest of her family and Anna were going to Reptile Gardens and, as fascinating as I am sure it is, neither of us was particularly interested in spending hours there.
So out we went to Spokane and haunted the ghost town for a few hours, drove Iron Mountain Road, and visited Little Falls. The flowers were beautiful, and any little hollows or depressions were full of water, frogs, and mosquitoes. The thistles were becoming the prize-winning sort, and mushrooms were in abundance.
Violet and creeping wood sorrels flashed little glints of color in the shorter grass, their heart-shaped leaves green and moist and plentiful. Wild roses and geranium, blue-eyed grass and purple clover, asters and dandelions, all were tucked under trees and nestled into hillsides, along paths, thriving. The flowers and berries were peeking daintily from the Solomon’s Seal, and the lichen was thick on fallen branches and damp wood.
While on first glance not much had changed (it is a ghost town, after all…), when I looked closer there were dozens of new forms of botanical life, flowers that hadn’t been in bloom on our first visit, overgrown and flooded paths, and new clusters of mushrooms growing in the rich layer of decaying leaves and pine needles.
The house looked pretty much the same as before–the broken windows, rusted hinges, rotted floorboards, and the swallow’s nest in the stovepipe–but when on the hunt for details, I suddenly noticed many things that had escaped my eye before, such as the remnants of wallpaper in the house, or the lichen-encrusted nails on the windowsill, or the broken blue Mason jar and the scrap of blue and white wallpaper. 
The nest had a swallow in it this time, and little plants were growing in the moist earth where floorboards were missing. I noticed “love notices”, where boys and girls had written their names together on the walls. What an old-fashioned and romantic little spot. 
Outside one of the windows, there was a layer of shattered glass. My camera is a bit finicky, and after taking one properly-focused picture, it suddenly stopped focusing on the glass. Instead, it was focusing on the reflections of the trees in the glass. The effect was enchanting! 
Beauty may be subtle and well-hidden, even when in plain sight. It is hard to see beauty in the mundane when one is only looking for the mundane, or when one is overburdened with the world. A certain optimism is required for seeing exquisite beauty in the drabness of rotting wood or broken glass. Optimism is not my natural state, but I find it exceedingly difficult to be pessimistic when I am surrounded by God’s beauty, and his little gifts. I passionately think we should nourish the vision to see those beautiful details. The world is a bleak place, but there are so many tiny joys and gifts given to us each day by a loving Creator, if we have the eyes to see them.
Beauty in the Badlands
The Badlands are rich with subtle life at this time of the year. The summer heat hasn’t scorched the region brown yet, and the moisture has coaxed flowers into bloom. Soon enough, the summer will arrive and the green with burn away, but for now there is a tenacious life that clings to the region.
This past Thursday, Sarah and I took an excursion to the Badlands with two church friends, Roy and Jessica, and made an afternoon of the Badlands loop, stopping at just about every scenic turnoff, and hiking when possible. Although my family has driven through the Badlands several times, never had we gone through at such a leisurely pace! A quick drive through really doesn’t do them justice.
Razor-sharp peaks and spires give way to rolling hills with impassible cliffs. Strata of bright orange and gold layer through one region, while tablelands dominate another. Viewpoints overlook cliffs, plummeting down hundreds of feet into the valley or canyon below.
And in such a hostile wasteland, a no-man’s land, there’s life–Creeping insects, scurrying chipmunks, burrowing prairie dogs. Prairie phlox and scarlet globemallow bloom in the rocky, dusty soil. There wasn’t any flowing water anymore, but the gumbo mud was still sticky in places, and little puddles of tepid water hadn’t yet sunk into the earth.
The rain in the Hills had opened into blue skies over the Badlands, but as the day wore on, we watched thunderstorms roll in. The sky grew bluer and bluer with storm, and the occasional rumble of thunder echoed quietly through the stony peaks and valleys. For hours, the storms seemed to crop up on the horizon and roll towards us, never reaching us.
We scrambled around in the gumbo, climbing to the tops of the tablelands. As we scrambled up over the edge of one, a pair of doves startled from their ground nest. Two eggs were tucked inside. I should have gotten a picture of the location of the nest–The tableland rose a good thirty feet up, and then there was a little washed out spot and a slightly higher table, roughly the size of a dinner table. The nest was nestled in the grass on this second table. The perfect vantage point to watch for predators.
The storm broke as we were eating dinner. Probably a good thing, or we might have stayed out exploring a lot longer than we did!
New Haunts
When we p
lanned on Sunday to have an excursion Wednesday, we just assumed the weather would cooperate. When it started snowing yesterday, and then snowed and rained all afternoon, I started having my doubts. But today, the sunshine broke through the clouds, turned the snow into puddles, and the air warmed with springtime. A perfect day for an exploration!
My sisters and I and some friends from church ventured forth to enjoy a day off in the beauty of God’s creation. We visited their building site (they’ll be our close neighbors, it turns out!), had a picnic lunch, and then decided to haunt a local ghost town, Spokane.
It is hard to imagine people once living here, attending school, inhabiting what are now mere shells of homes, piles of wood and rubbish and old rusted nails. But once, people had lives here in this beautiful little meadow, and the big, two-story house wasn’t overgrown with birch, and it didn’t drip water through the roof. 
The chimney once gave smoke, and the upstairs bedroom was lived in by people, not a family of bluebirds. The apple tree was young and fruitful, the house was whole, and people had lives within its walls. How fast we fade and are forgotten! Who were they?
The little ghost town sprawls in an open meadow, and remnants of later days, forgotten later days, are scattered farther into the overgrowth of trees. An old crumbling stove. Ancient automobiles with rust-eaten bodies, rotted cushions, shattered glass, and polished chrome.
The recent rain and snow has turned parts of the Hills into thick woods reminiscent of rainforests. Trees were dark with wet, and the ground seeped with it.
Moss dripped from branches bejeweled with gleaming lichens. Old rotted stumps crumbled softly underfoot, and tiny mushrooms flourished in the fertile moist earth.
We haunted the town for more than an hour, enjoying the quiet, the creeping life of things living close to the soil, the smell of wet trees and fresh grass. I have a feeling we’ll be back.
Song Dog Journal 