Bleary eyed and slightly flustered, I stumble from my home, off-balanced by a large, overstuffed backpack precariously perched on one shoulder. I look like a three legged tortoise as I make my way to my bus stop. One icy block later I am at my stop, standing in the stomped-out place where I stood yesterday and the day before. This is the place where I spend my mornings, where I wake up and clear the rotting fuzzies from my thoughts. This is the place where my mind and the beauty of the new morning can take me to a primeval world of untamed glory and wild things.
This morning’s sun has just risen above the floating mist on the lake I can see from my station through the leafless trees. A frozen strand of hair rudely pokes me in the eye as the wind stirs through the trees across the black river road that lies in front of me. Watching over my shoulder a towering pine stands guard, its tall peak much higher than the other surrounding pines whose tops have been cut off due to the power lines that run down the street and provide perches for the same four black birds every morning. The black river road parts in front of me. It eddies and swirls smoothly into a silver stream that curves behind me towards a row of silent houses, and its other fork becomes rough gravel, dusty in the warm seasons. Just before the river roughens into gravel the row of stunted pines ends abruptly, making way for a hidden road that slopes down into what seems to be a grove. The occasional truck rumbles past, disturbing my peace with its growling and smog. The sun is alight on the mist now, creating the illusion of a bursting star upon the hidden water, a brilliant conflagration that captures, for a moment, the glory of morning. I inhale; a wave of peace overwhelms me. I am brought back to all the magnificent forests that I have seen in nature programs, read about in books, captured in my mind: places of untamed perfection.
The clumsy start to my day is always followed by a display of nature’s splendor and beauty. There, in my stomped-out hole, I am reminded. A bus stop is not the most obvious place to become connected with the wild places of the world, but in my little stomped-out perch, all it takes is one of those mistfire sunrises to be reminded of the grandeur of the long past and far-off greater wild.
