A Week on the Lake

Here are my musings after camping along the shores of Lake Ontario

August 2023

It took me until Day Two to feel the release

He felt it on Day Three

The letting go of the mundane...

...day jobs really...

The mundane of our lives was never a problem,

we embrace it...the settling into the rhythm of life

....the good work of living...

it was always just the exhausting quest for coin...

The sound of waves crashing along rocky shore line

navigating through stones, pebbles, and gravel

Trying not to slip and break an ankle...

scouting for stones...one needs to watch...

they all look alike until heed is taken and watchful eye dilates...

...and the colors begin, and the patterns, and the fossils, and the glimmer...

Kayaking through rushes and swamp grasses, lily pads and globs of algae along still canal ways...blue herons with their primordial dinosauric squacks... delicate yellow finches, the disorienting feeling of being low in the brush...with no discerning point of reference... the assorted water turtle sunning on dead wood or head just popped above water level... and the occasional bull frogs...the glimpse of something large trundling just under my boat..I think it was a Bass...but it got bigger and bigger as the tale unfurled...

...the way the scent of pines hits different when growing next to the water...

Brilliant sunsets alone on the rocks

the clapping of the waves

watching those last seconds...and then its gone

the sun that is, just like that...

Watery, washed out sunrises (we faced west) with the French press a brew from mocha beans into tepid styrofoam cups... we carefully crawled down to the rocks

and enjoyed our bean brew with the waves and the boulders and the foam and the stones and the water...

Afternoons on the rocks, filling my brown canvas bag fuller and fuller with treasures until it cut into my neck whilst carrying my loot back to base

watching seagulls rest on an abandoned pier

watching them take turns at nibbling the dead bass that had washed up after the storm somewhere out there in the basin

the grey ones did not like the white ones

the white ones weren't intimidated by the larger greys ones

impulsive hour long walks among some of the largest trees I've ever seen...

we lived simply...burgers and corn grilled hot over an open fire

...showers cold...

watching the clouds and waves roll in and wondering about what kind of storm just happened out there in the miles of open water

...reading for hours and dozing off in the shade to the sound of kids giggling in the playground...

the primordial forests...trees so large I had never borne witness to during my only life on the eastern shores of the US...

I never knew such trees existed on the Eastern coast...I thought they'd all been cut down a century ago...

My soul was restored during this trip...my dreams again as well, as I want to live along those rocky shores one day...