Last Sunday, the Sunday of Thanksgiving week, I took a walk in the woods. After my retirement a few years ago, I have returned to a form of exercise that I had enjoyed during my adolescence: hiking and exploring on foot. With a daypack filled with the essentials, once or twice a week I spend an afternoon in the woods either bushwacking or following trails just to see where they might go. The exploration and discovery (sometimes challenge) and the navigation keeps it interesting. It's a walk and a search; the hills make it a real exercise; the thousands of acres that I can enter hold many surprises, and the exit is an accomplishment. I am seldom more than three miles from a road of some kind.
Sunday was a day of bright sun and a cloudless sky of deep blue. I had been in the woods for only a few hours, threading my way through a network of faint trails that were new to me (although they were the traces of a couple of centuries of varied activities by humans and animals). The terrain was heavily wooded and hilly and rough, and I always chose the more easterly of the paths in order to maintain a general direction.
Unexpectedly, I saw the glint of water through a tapestry of leafless trees ahead of and below me. I carefully twisted down along a narrow path that eventually opened into one of those sudden scenes of nature that can remind our jaded souls of how beautiful and precious this earth really is, a thought easily concealed by the rush and distraction of the human-made world in which we must live most of our lives.
Deep in a hollow among steep forested hills lay a beautifully still lake. The brilliant sun, now low in the sky, showed a body of water about 3/4 mile across and a mile long to where, at my right and toward the sun, it seemed to join another lobe or bay hidden in the glare. I walked to a small open area softly paved with needles of pine and free from brush. I lay my stick aside and sat in the shade on an old log next to a huge leafless beech tree at the edge of the patch. Not a human sound penetrated to this scene, and the only indication of any human presence was the faint trail upon which I had walked and a rope that hung down before me over the water from the branch of an ancient pine that somehow lived right at the shoreline. A chickadee or two talked to me or to each other in the woods farther behind me.
I sat for a long time. I noticed the regular rows of a sapsucker's holes on a tree, maybe a maple. A circular ripple showed on the surface of the water. Too late in the year for bugs; it must be a fish. Somewhat to my left and near the opposite shore , also completely forested but with fewer scattered clumps of evergreen among the leafless trees, I could see a handful of geese and a small flock of ducks (too far away to be identifiable) resting contentedly and undisturbed in the water. I sat in awe, as though in a chapel, absorbed by the beauty, the quiet, the immensity of this small spot upon which I had stumbled, by the richness and pattern of life here, plant and animal, living in a kind of resonance with earth and hills and water and sun. Of course other humans had been here before me, but, this day, I was clearly the first ---clearly alone and highly privileged to be the only human being in this small, perfect world.
The air was completely still. The sun was almost warm. Three soft quacks drifted across the distance to me. One muffled honk from a goose followed them a while later. I looked at the water, at the hills around me, at the big tree in front of me, at the eye-painful brilliance of the sun on the water down the lake to my right. No more sounds.
Then I saw what had been hidden from my view by the tree trunk in front of me -- a large bird swimming steadily along the lake from the direction of the ducks, angling slightly toward my shore in the direction of the sun. "Goose," I thought. But the figure continued swimming---steadily and strongly eating up the distance. It did not stop, nor rest, nor take flight. It left a large wake which I could see even at a distance. As it drew closer to my side of the lake, I moved softly to put my head and body into the shadow of the large pine tree so that the sun wouldn't blind me. What an odd profile for a bird! It looked like the tail feathers were in front. Suddenly a glint of white just above the profile and a dark line behind it jolted my mind into a clear recognition. It was a deer, a young buck swimming powerfully along the lake. I hid behind the tree, fearful of intruding upon this operation of nature, of damaging somehow the perfection of the place and of the moment. As the buck drew more near, passing to my right, I could see and hear twin puffs of steam regularly blowing ahead of him out of his nostrils as his lungs kept up with the exertion. From the motions of the waves and the pulsating reappearances of the line of his back, I could feel and almost see the determined and ceaseless pumping of powerful legs below the water. His course was straight and strikingly steady. I was silent witness not only to beauty, diversity, reality, ---but to determination, will, and courage as well.
He drew closer to the blinding glare of the sun upon the water toward the southern end of the lake. I nearly held my breath so that he would not become aware of my presence and perhaps turn back toward the center of the lake. His self-appointed task (whatever it was) had to be respected. He disappeared into that shining silver, and I never saw him again despite my efforts to pierce the amazingly broad and intense band of brilliance which shielded the entire southern shore.
I stayed still for long minutes until I was sure that his trajectory and speed had brought him safely to land. Then I moved quietly away, treading carefully back up the darkening path that had brought me to this place. It was a special place, a place of virtue. For beauty is a virtue, and this place had a simple and pure beauty that was stunning. For knowledge is a virtue, and this place was a teaching display of the diversity of life surrounding me and living in delicate balance. For will and determination are virtues, and the strength and purpose of the deer was a clear and simple image of that force. For it is a virtue that the goals of one living being sometimes are a mystery to other living beings, and the deer's goal, hidden from me in that brilliant glare, was perhaps a vital need for him. For simplicity and clarity are I had entered a small library of nature, the kind of library experienced by humans long before the dawn of literacy or of what we arrogantly call civilization., and that bright little area was a gem, a small place telling much about the complexities of our existence. For good is a virtue, and the deer's course in such a sacred-feeling place brought out in me (a former deer hunter) a concern to cause him no interruption or harm, to help him if I could have.
I had entered a small library of nature, the kind of library experienced by humans long before the dawn of literacy or of what we arrogantly call civilization. There I had recognized in myself perhaps the true origins of the respect and awe that we often feel in a human library which also is filled with truth, with beauty, with diversity of experience, with options to learn of the lessons of life. To learn those lessons takes effort by the individual, but --first-- the places must exist where such efforts can be fruitful. Libraries, big and small, human and natural, must exist for all of us. As the library of nature gave the deer freedom to explore and to dare the future, the human library also gives freedom to explore and to dare the future even though the individual's immediate goal may be hidden from others in a glare of uncertainty or privacy.
That small library of nature is not one of the BIG libraries of nature (such as the rain forest or the oceans), but, when I left it last Sunday, I was definitely more wealthy than when I had entered it, despite only a limited bit of browsing that day. Likewise, the small human library is almost as beautiful, almost as rich in experience and roads to diverse knowledge, and -- to humans -- equally as vital and necessary. It also must invoke awe and respect and curiosity. Nature (perhaps God) and humankind share responsibility for the continued health of the libraries of nature. But you and I are solely responsible for the health of the small libraries of humanity.