by Kent L. Johnson
The bird swooped and parried. The patches of red on its wings as bright as the anger it displayed to unsuspecting kids walking to Green End Pond. Before you saw it, it's shrill calls forced a kid to look around and find the source. I was twelve when I discovered the old dirt road that inched to the pond's edge; the home of a springtime manic bird that wanted no part of civilization or twelve year old boys out for a walk.
I lived in one of the earliest colonies ever settled in the United States, Newport, Rhode Island. My time was 1971. My friend, Kevin and I walked down the path and skipped stones on the water. We'd talk about mini-bikes, go karts, our bicycles, the teachers and other kids in school and wondered what the girls in our class looked like naked. Should we try out for Little League? Hockey? Each subject flowed through our heads and bounced around like the flat stones being skipped off the surface of the pond, leaving ripples like the waves of our imagination.
The wonders of water and nature. There's something about being next to a lake, stream or ocean, surrounded by trees. The smell of damp earth, pollen and algae are aromas that stay; forever reminded that there is a world outside so unlike the inside. The touch of a spider web across your skin, or the sting of a nettle, creepy and painful but a reminder that you are outside, in nature, and you just experienced it first hand. The bird that swooped and barely missed you as you ran across a clearing to get to the safety of thick trees was a reminder that this wilderness is home to others too.
I'm a long way from twelve. Adult life has taken me to many new nature spots: remote lakes in the High Sierra, rivers surrounded by trees, my little boat being pushed by the wind in turbulent waters of a vast Pacific Ocean. There is one thing that remains a constant: I can go with a friend to the side of a lake and we'll skip rocks and talk of cars, motorcycles, our bosses and what the girls at work would look like naked. I guess we're all kids at heart.
