I think most of us have had a moment in our lives when it seemed all was right with the world. Must be true.
Because even I’ve had one.
During my early teens, I spent a big chunk of three years living with my grandmother in Southern Illinois.
Growing up in Chicago, I had only seen a few wild animals. Mostly pests. Rats. Pigeons. Seagulls sometimes, because I didn’t live too far from the city dump.
Maybe the occasional cardinal.
My grandmother and I lived in a single-wide trailer, miles outside of a town of less than 4,000 people. A two-lane strip of blacktop ran into our little community and out again. Other than that, we had gravel roads and well water. We burned our trash because there was no pickup service. My grandmother and I heated the trailer from a giant propane tank that would be refilled by a truck. One year, propane was too expensive and my grandmother bought a cast-iron potbelly stove and had a truckload of coal dumped at the house, instead.
I’d get up in the morning and feed the fire before taking the school bus into town.
There were maybe a dozen of us kids out there. We’d mostly been sent from Chicago or East St. Louis to live with retired grandparents in an attempt to keep us out of trouble. It took a little getting used to. For months I would wake up at night, my ears accustomed to the rumbling of heavy traffic on city streets.
But, in time, I learned to wave at everyone that drove by on the road. I got used to needing to dress to get the mail. I even got so that I could recognize cars at night by the cant of their headlights.
There was a big sycamore tree in front of our place that I would climb, hiding from my grandmother in its broad leaves.
And it was fascinating to see all of the different animals. There were the basic farm animals, of course, with one family near the highway even raising peacocks.
But the woods were full of deer and raccoons and hawks — even skunks. Some days we kids would find huge snakes sunbathing on the road. There were creeks and ditches full of crawdads and frogs.
We once found a big catfish that had become trapped in a mudhole of a dried-up streambed.
One warm summer day I ventured off the gravel road and went on a walk in the woods, by myself. My wandering took me to the Kaskaskia — a wide, muddy river slowly winding though a few hundred miles of the state.
I don’t think I’d ever gone down to the river before. It had been a dry year and the river was very low. In truth, there wasn’t much to see, just the occasional splash of a fish or a small whirlpool spinning some mysterious piece of trash in the chocolate-brown water.
I stood on the edge of the high bank, tossing small stick and rocks into the water ten feet below, watching them drift downstream or turn in eddies or plop to the bottom. The bank was steep, and every now and then I would back up just a bit as the edge crumbled under my feet.
Back then, I was still thirty years away from learning how to swim, and if I had fallen in on that lonely stretch of riverbed, I’m certain I couldn’t have climbed out.
I would have sunk to the bottom as surely as those stones.
Nope. It really wasn’t much to look at. But I did wonder about where it went. I leaned out a little under the canopy of trees that lined the river and looked upstream, thinking about the towns it had passed. The people. The places it was going. I didn’t know then that it eventually flowed into the Mississippi, on its way to New Orleans and to the Gulf of Mexico.
I wish I had known.
As I turned to leave, a blue heron flapped slowly down the river, almost level with my line of sight. It was the color of a cloud. Its wings seemed to span from bank to bank, its long legs pulled up beneath it so that they didn’t skim the water. I held my breath as it few noiselessly by, until it was gone, obscured by the trees.
I was astonished. I had no idea that such a bird existed where I lived. That it could exist. It may as well have been a pterodactyl.
I walked home feeling that nature had shown me a glimpse of some great secret. That it was telling me that there was more to life than I knew, possibilities that I hadn’t imagined.
It is a moment that I cherish.
What’s yours?
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Previously Published on Medium
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