Thursday, November 19, 2009

Walk #323: Game Trails and Lust

After a day of tin, door knobs and breaking water lines--I figured I'd done enough damage for one day. I took a longish walk with my dog. I noticed this game trail...

And then another one...

And I was happy to find some scat on a rock...


And later, I sat with my dog and watched the sunset...


The photo has three layers. The trees are immediately in the foreground. The darker bottom layer is a mile away or so, across the Feather River canyon. The cool part is the bluish layer. That is the Coastal Range...some sixty miles away. In the winter they are snow capped.

Tie it all together, Allan.

Inside all of us resides that person who wants to roam. To investigate. To walk freely and enjoy vistas small and large. Follow a game trail, investigate what a critter is eating from their scat (lots of red berries), say good bye to the sun. Watch birds sometime. You will notice they watch sunsets. If a bird brain does that, why don't we do it more often?

Pity the person at the gym (as I type this). Running on their treadmill--listening to their Ipod while a television set looms above them displaying Kouric, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow. About the only wild thing you can do there (at the gym) is to lust after that pretty twentysomething on the treadmill beside you. That instinct to roam has only one place to go: Infidelity.

Within our domesticated, computerized, cubicled, 9 to 5 at the office, panic stricken that we might lose our mind numbing meaningless jobs, non-lives--lust is the last wild human behavior. The last wild frontier.

Save your marriage; take a walk in the woods!

1 comment:

Ian Woofenden said...

There you go, Allan, lusting after game trails and scat! ;-)

Reminds me of riding the Burke-Gilman Trail in Seattle last month and biking on this gorgeous trail past a building full of 60+ exercise machines. I preferred the trail...

Today I did the block with a few side excursions. One was to replace some incandescent lightbulbs on a solar home with compact fluorescent, reducing load from 225 watts to 45 watts. The other was some hydro skulking -- following water downhill to see if there is energy potential...

8.01 miles
51:30
9.34 mph average
35.14 mph maxi