May
3, 2020
Today’s
reflections on yesterday – This weekend marked the soft reopening of Iowa in
most counties. I don’t think people
are flocking to restaurants to dine inside, nor are they rushing out for retail
therapy because most of our favorites are still closed. They cannot go to a
movie, a concert, a sporting event, or a neighborhood pub, but they can play
outside. And in droves, they did. In the state park that I visited with my new
cohort, the parking lots were brimming, and so were most of the trails. Walking
in the woods here felt more like walking down the midway at a fair, and the
mood matched the festive visual. I
imagined that many of the parents with hyper kids must have felt as if they had been released
from jail or the loony bin. They would follow their children down to the creek, then passively
observe them splashing around in the shallows and looking for snakes and
frogs to torment. Exceptionally few people adhered to the public health
measures of wearing a mask or of any social distancing. It has been a long stay at home period,
and their relief was palpable even if their civic vigilance appeared to be
taking a hike in another dimension.
We
moved together through the woods like livestock in a Temple Grandin handling system. Most of us wore smiles and grins as we peered into one another’s face, as if we had awoken
from a mutually shared lousy dream. And we encountered LOTS of new puppies! Maybe this was foreshadowing for a year-end
baby boom.
I
am a people watcher by nature, but I struggled so with this shoulder-to-shoulder
walk in the woods that after fifteen or twenty minutes of flowing with my fellow
humanity, I slipped off on a side trail up a little tributary draw. There, I found the space to notice new flowers in
bloom: Bell Worts, Jack in the Pulpits, Standing Phlox, Freckled Violets, Mayapples
and Toad Trillium. At the head of the draw was a cross-hatched sandstone
outcropping, heavy in iron patina. I followed a deer trail to the top bench and
bushwhacked my way back to the entrance road. Locals tell me that this is morel
mushroom season, but I was no good at finding them, being new to the geography. I hope one day I will hunt mushrooms here, but it was not today.
I
could find fault with many of my fellow woods-worshipers because of their lackadaisical
behavior with coronavirus safety. Still, I know that the chances we took, being
outside with the masses, was worth the risk. Like the risks pilgrims take to
bathe in the Ganges or that Mardi Gras revelers take to folic down Bourbon
Street; the spirit knows what it needs, and we attend to that as we can. And while the governor reported that there
were another twelve hundred and eighty-five new cases this weekend, I wager they
did not come from the likes of nature walkers like us. And as the dose makes the poison, I want to believe the breeze in the trees diluted our peril, while the
sunshine boosted our resilience. And our transient community provided respite
from the weeks of dutiful solitude so that nature could heal what doctors won't treat.
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