Crows and Geese

This morning I took an hour and walked over to Cherry Creek Reservoir, a good ten-minute walk from my house.

It’s a nice morning walk.  There’s a path that winds through the trees, meets up with the road and makes its way down to the lakeshore.  Instead of walking down the roadside, I went through the grass, brush and trees down the slight incline to the lake.

A fox sparrow greeted me from one patch of brush, and I stopped to watch him for a while.  On the road nearby, a jogger plonka-plonka’d past, his running shoes slapping on the hard pavement, and a couple of cyclists whirred past, crouching into the slipstream.  After a few minutes, I left the sparrow’s patch of brush and wandered down to the lakeshore.

I took a seat on one of the picnic tables right at the shore of the reservoir.  A flock of Canada geese was noisily feeding and splashing in the shallows near the picnic table.  One of their sentinels watched me closely as I sat down, pulled out my pipe and tobacco, and prepared to have a politically-incorrect smoke.

Pipes take a lot of assembly to get ready, and while I was loading and lighting the old briar, a flock of crows that had been squabbling across the lake sent a representative over to perch in a tree over my head.  He called back and forth across the water to his fellows for a while before flying back across the lake.

I sat enjoying the warm sunshine.  A youth spent in the bitter cold of a northeast Iowa creek-bottom home has led me to appreciate the balmy weather of January in the Denver area, and I sat there this morning in a T-shirt, jeans and the old safari vest that carries all my essentials.

All around me, people hurried around the lake, up and down the paths, exercising for the sake of exercise.  I wondered how many of them would notice the fox sparrow in the brush, or the ring-billed gull picking through lake-bottom litter just in front of me, or the pair of goldeneye ducks diving for their luncheon in the lake a hundred yards or so out.  Most of them, if you asked, would say they’d noticed the geese, and maybe the crows. 

But they miss so much more in their haste.

I watched the gull and the goldeneyes while I finished my pipe, and then I stowed the smoking gear and got up to walk back home.  As I meandered up the shore, looking at the footprints of geese marching here and there over the sand, a father and daughter pulled up on their bicycles and stopped to look at the lake. 

“Looking for arrowheads?” The father was smiling, friendly.

“Just looking,” I told him.  He wished me a nice day, and got back on his bicycle to speed on down the lake.

Maybe life would be a little less disordered if people would spend less time hurrying, and a little more time just looking.