FEBRUARY

Just a couple of miles from my house sits the Great Baehre Swamp, just where Hopkins was once a corduroy road. Inside the swamp, a boardwalk wide enough for a kid on a bike to pass walkers parallels the sidewalk. One sign as you enter says walk your bikes and another one says be safe—walk with a friend, but almost everyone ignores these. When illicit bikes threaten solitary walkers, most of us just lean quietly against the rail fence until they go by.

One day last week, I drove up Hopkins Road toward the lot on the far side of the swamp. A woman I guessed to be in her seventies, a short woman with black hair, was walking along the sidewalk toward the entry to the boardwalk on the near side of the swamp. The woman was wearing a maxi-length skirt made of grey-blue cotton, a white short-sleeved shirt, and black flat rubber-soled shoes with a cross strap. Entering from the parking lot at the other end of the boardwalk, I knew that we would meet somewhere in the middle of the boardwalk, just as on other days, I had on other days come across an entire plein air art group, solo introspective joggers, moms in companionable pairs pushing strollers, and a bilingual dad whose little sons admired the wildlife in Chinese punctuated by English.

From much of the boardwalk, the road remains within view. The boardwalk isn’t perfectly straight, though. Not only can’t you see the forest for the trees, but you can’t see the path much farther ahead. But civilization is never more than a hundred feet from what are the remains of a glacial lake some 11,000 years ago. Even so, when you look away from the road into the almost 300 acres of ash and silver maple, eons disappear.

Redwing blackbirds flit from tree to tree, frogs croak unseen, three or four ducks sun themselves camouflaged on a fallen log, and very occasionally a kid with a fishing pole playing Tom Sawyer sits on the rail fence. The quiet is intense.

Walkers here who don’t know each other point out interesting tidbits, as if we were booked on the same trip to somewhere exotic or had weathered a rocky cruise and were just sighting land--either a polite convention or a group-protective impulse trickling up from the collective unconscious. But it is why I heard that the goose eggs near the fence had hatched on the same day it happened. Someone from the plein air art group was painting a portrait of the mom posing with her chicks. Painting is good for grief, she said, choosing her words and colors carefully. I nodded.

Maybe that’s why last week I pointed out a horse of a different color to the black-haired woman who, sure enough, I met in the middle of the boardwalk. I had stopped to admire a tall bird proportioned oddly, a long blue section of feathers reaching down the back of his skinny legs, a disproportionately white neck with its black topknot of hair curving upward. He stood motionless, several feet from three ducks snoozing with their heads swiveled onto their backs. Blue herons mate and nest in treetops, I found out later, when I matched what I saw to its Audubon picture. They are found in swampy areas in quite literally this neck of the woods. But I had never seen one there before.

I spotted the woman as she rounded the bend. I pointed him out, having learned from the plein art painter something I couldn’t quite put into words. “Yes,” she said, in accented English, some undefined lilt to her words, “I see that blue heron here often.”

I was standing several feet from her. Her blue skirt was longer than those that most women wear, and the short-sleeved white shirt was small in proportion to it. The wide flat black rubber-soled shoes assured her safe walking. Although she was some years older than I am, there was no gray in her short black hair. She leaned against the rail, silent in the sun, her back curved just so. She was quite short; he was quite tall.

If we had been looking in toward the road, we would have been acutely aware of the hum of cars and the houses across the street peeping through the treetops. But we were looking in the other direction, into the forest primeval, where anything is possible.

Linda Chalmer Zemel is the Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner for Examiner.com, where she also writes the Buffalo Books column. Her op-ed pieces on social issues have been published on Truthout.org. She teaches at Medaille College.

Contact information:

Linda Chalmer Zemel

1370 Maple Road

Williamsville, NY 14221

716-604-4644

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it