In today’s fast-paced world, often rife with turmoil, now and again it’s good to take some time off and give your mind freedom to drift.
If nothing else during my 73 years I’ve learned how to do that — though some may say it’s senility creeping in.
A few days ago with nothing pressing, I drove to the southwest corner of Humboldt and moseyed into the woods.
A dirt road, rutted by bolder drivers, leads to the Neosho. I followed it a short distance and then took off through the timber. The sheer splendor of cottonwoods towering 60 or 70 feet tall left me awe-struck. So much, that I spent several minutes marveling at how straight and tall they were.
Being absent of leaves, it was easy to see just how well defined each was. They rise over a forest floor where few weeds grow.
While meandering toward the river, something stirred in a nearby thicket. Two does, ears perked up, loped out and took off at a quick gait, snow-white tails thrown up. They were gone in a flash, crossing a deep slough as easily as if it weren’t there.
Deer are amazing at how easily they can negotiate even the roughest terrain and most any obstacle. I’ve seen heavily antlered bucks scoot under a barbed-wire fence as quickly as a field rat.
When I came to the river, I found interesting how many tracks — as clearly defined as those in game books — had been left in shallow mud flats along the interior edge of a lengthy gravel bar. Most animals that seek nourishment along streams are nocturnal, but they leave their mark.
The gravel bar itself was a spectacle of what the river’s flow can do when it comes gushing down during high-water times. The leading end was scoured of small stones, with them piled in drifts on the down-stream end.
On the way back to my old Ford Ranger, I stopped to watch a squirrel gracefully leap from the limb of one tree to another, as well as a hawk that sat on an advantageous perch in one of the cottonwoods awaiting an unsuspecting rodent to provide a late-afternoon meal.
The best part of the leisurely walk was that not once did politics, the Kansas economy or even the rigor of raking leaves in my front yard — it took two afternoons — enter my mind.
Try it sometime, it’d be good for you. And we have the perfect place along the trails south of Iola.
