The sun has finally come out! The spring time is among us and it has already had a significant change on me and my surroundings. I tried to work on this blog entry around the beginning of March but it was cold and wet outside and I had a terrible flu. After spending all of spring break in bed, I was starting to feel a little bit better and I decided it was time to start jogging around Town Lake again. I was shocked to observe all of my surrounds. Finally, the change I was looking for! Everything that was dark and dead had come back to life with vibrant greens and even some purples.
It no longer looked like it was the backdrop of a horror film, but rather a Disney fantasy. Being around all of the lively plants and excited pedestrians made me totally forget about ever being sick. I decided then that I was going to start coming a lot more often so that I could interact with different things along the trail that I hadn’t done before. The next day I brought a slice of bread so that I could finally feed some of the birds. They had been begging since the first time I met them, so I figured it was about time. I had planned on feeding them in my last blog, but it was so cold the last time that they were all in hiding. This time was completely different. There were more birds than I had ever seen. I broke up the piece of bread as evenly as possible, but these creatures could have gone through an entire loaf. Now that I had checked “feed birds” off of my list, I wandered around, looking for more activities along the trail. I passed a kayaking station and decided to learn more about it. The price was actually really decent: only $10 for a whole hour. This was something that I would normally never do, but I was feeling spontaneous so I decided to rent the kayak. The actual “getting into the kayak and getting into the water” phase was a little bit more nerve wracking than I expected. I didn’t want to fall in the water because unfortunately it is not very clean. But once I got out into the middle of the lake it was totally relaxing. That experience helped me understand this quote by Aldo Leopold from A Sand County Almanac.
“Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.”-Aldo Leopold
Being in the kayak was a wonderful experience where I got to observe nature without harming it. I wish I would have taken some pictures from the kayak, but I was too afraid of dropping my phone into the lake…