keely – Page 12 – State of Wilderness

Revival

This past year, my husband has been warning me that I was becoming one-dimensional. I pride myself on being somewhat of a complex person, and in fact that is one of the things he loves about me. Our conversations are usually so riveting, but it seemed like this past year I talked about little besides work, work, work. He kept encouraging me to find something that would calm me down, take the edge off. The kids were telling me I was way too uptight, and I could feel it like a hard cold line in my jaw and shoulders. It wasn’t helping that I had signed on to take this certification course this past year that resulted in my obsessively studying for the four exams when I was at home. Even when I wasn’t at work, I was focusing on work-related tasks.
I tried walking, I tried drinking, I might have tried yoga but not nearly enough (seems like I quit going to yoga regularly at the end of last year). I tried going out with my friends on occasion, making plans for outdoor outings, setting up camping reservations, reading NPR articles and trying to absorb and share new (not-work related) information. I was trying, but then it seemed like even my hobbies were stressing me out.
I realized a little late in the year that I had too many vacation hours left, and I needed to use them or lose them. This may also have been contributing to my obsession with work.
I started using these mental health days to go on bird walks with the Houston Audubon groups. I went with them to Fiorenza Park (which I wrote about earlier), to Hermann Park, and most recently to Kleb Woods.
I ended up having to bring the toddler with me to Kleb Woods, which meant I did not really get to hear the lecture on birding in the Katy Prairie and also missed out on some of the bird action and bird talk during our walk. I try to find the best in every situation, so we still had a good time. However, there was this moment out there, as I was leaving, where I decided to find some geocaches and then could not find them. I struck out on three out of three. It got me going down a rabbit hole, contemplating the idea that I might not be any good at the things that interest me. Over the years, various obsession have struck my fancy – horses, dogs, geocaching, birding – and the truth is, maybe I am not really good at any of those things. It was not for lack of trying, but despite some gains, there were also losses. Triumphs, and then great disappointments. Viewing myself from this lens was very demotivating. It didn’t help that this geocaching strike out followed a day of great disappointment at work. I was feeling kind of down about the whole thing, actually.
I took this week off work for a little staycation to use up some more of those hours. I contemplated the idea of finding out who I was separate from work. However, the first couple of days, I wasn’t really able to focus on that, because despite being on vacation, I was dealing with emails and text messages from work that started to cause me anxiety. I did go out on Monday morning to the Houston Arboretum with the Hike It Baby group, giving me and my little son some time to focus on nature. We did some holiday family outings together.
It really wasn’t until today, though, that I had a moment where I felt all of that tension slide away for a bit. I had gone out to Bear Creek Park for another Hike It Baby walk, and after the walk, I took my little guy in his stroller on another little trail off Patterson Road to find some geocaches and solitude in nature. The caches were easy to find, and we were having fun discovering little things in the forest, like mushrooms, lichen, butterflies and such. Then, there was this moment where I stopped on the trail to listen to some bird calls up high in the pines. I looked up and watched the pines swaying in the breeze. I took a few moments to spot the birds through my binoculars. Sebastian was awake when we stopped, but soon fell asleep listening to the melody of the birds and the wind. When I put my binoculars down, I felt so relaxed. It was as if I had just been given a massage. I remembered that this was my antidote, and this is what I needed to make sure I had more of. More than that, I also realized that I don’t have to be good at my hobbies necessarily. I can just enjoy doing them, with no pressure of performance. If I enjoy a thing, I can just do it for enjoyment’s sake.

This feeling in the forest is who I am without work, and who I need to focus on being – a woman who feels great joy in embracing the delights of nature, who is most at home in the woods, who loves discovering small little worlds in our great big one.

South Shore Park, Bastrop

I’ve realized that I have gotten to a certain age in my life where all my idols are Master Naturalists. This is why I felt lucky that we were in the presence of a couple of them on a nature hike last Saturday in South Shore Park. We were actually at the park for a geocaching camp-out, but we were enticed by the sign at the park headquarters advertising the hike starting at 10 am at the Swift Trailhead. We found another geocaching family there, as well as a girl scout leader who had a handful of girls with her.

The dozen or so of us adventurers set down the path with Louise (I think?) and another Naturalist, perhaps one in training. We stopped every few feet for our guide to point out plants, to investigate scat, to identify butterflies and so on over the course of a couple of hours and a couple of miles. I learned so much during the walk, but mostly I learned, or was reminded of, what it felt to be completely absorbed in a place and moment. During this hike, I felt so entirely happy, so sure that this was EXACTLY what I wanted to be doing at this time.

One of the aspects of the hike that made me the happiest was seeing my middle son get so excited by nature. He usually whines about having to go on hikes with us, and acts bored or disinterested in learning about what I can point out around him. I am not sure if it was because there was a boy his age in the group, a pack of girls, or if it was something in the way our guide was speaking to the group, but he got hooked. He was particularly excited about identifying mushrooms. Louise handed each of the kids a different pocket guide. He had the mushroom one, the girls had birds, butterflies and flowers, and they were all using the pictures to identify their particular specialty.

I really enjoy these kind of guided hikes because they combine education, outdoors, and relationships with other people. I love mental stimulation, and I love the feel of the forest around me. I love seeing not just my kids but other kids get excited about nature. Also, we were geocaching. We found a couple along the trail, and some of the cute little critter waypoints for a night hike that was set up for the geocaching event. We also saw some cool nature scenes, like this lichen on a log:

Along the walk, I learned more about the Master Naturalist program, because I think if those kind of people appeal to me, perhaps I could join their ranks one day. What I learned about it is that it requires 40 hours of classroom instruction on your specific geographic area, where you will learn all about the flora, fauna, natural history, geology etc. After that, you have to commit to 8 hours of additional training in the field and then 40 hours a year of volunteer hours educating the public in various capacities and programs of your choice.

I think I will do that someday, but I will have to wait until my children are older or grown. That probably explains why most Master Naturalists that I have met are either retired, or close to it. They are probably more likely to be grandparents than parents. I do worry that time is short, and it is not a guarantee that I will make it to retirement age or even to an age where I might have leisure time that does not involve children. That is what I get for stretching my reproductive years over such a long span. I have one getting close to leaving the nest and one who is just settling into it.

At one point, Jason went ahead of us on the trail, because Sebastian was being very antsy in the backpack with all the starting and stopping. He was looking at his phone and not at the trail, and just barely caught this particular little elusive devil of a snake out of the corner of his eye. He barely had time to get a picture of it before it disappeared into the brush:

I really enjoyed the other mothers who were on the trail. The girl scout leader was extremely knowledgeable, and the geocaching mom had some interesting life experiences to tell. Eventually I started talking to this geocaching mom, who was from Round Rock, and she and I made a plan for me to come speak to her homeschool core class on career explorations about the kind of work that I do. I have been wanting to do outreach talks, and this might be the start, or perhaps one of a few I do next year. It happened to be that she and her son were staying in the cabin right next to us.

I did enjoy the camp-out as well. It seems like this is the first year that my middle son has actually had fun and made new friends at one of these geocaching event weekends, and maybe it is because the vision of the Lone Star Roundup has finally become manifest. We have been attending this event each year since it started in 2011 as a fall alternative to the Texas Challenge that is held in the spring, to offer a chance for Texas cachers to get together just for fellowship and perhaps without some of the regional animosity that has developed over the years due to the intensity of the Challenge. It was a fun park to host it at, too. The butterfly garden in front of Osprey Hall is just amazing. We just love Bastrop, and I do like this little park. All in all, it was a good experience.

Fiorenza Park: Eagles, Reflections, Goals, and Pipe Dreams

Every morning during the week, I turn my car east on Westpark Tollway and join all the cars heading out of Katy. There is a time, usually coming over the hill past 1093, that I hit a slowdown of this congested spot of tollway and find myself sitting still in bumper to bumper gridlock that carries me all the way to the Beltway. Inevitably, I will look over to my left and see the sunflowers dancing on the grassy hill that marks the beginning of Archbishop Joseph A. Fiorenza Park. The flowers seem to be beckoning me to come play.

If you are watching close, like I usually am (because there is nothing else to do), you will see the hillside disappear and a lake appear. You might see the silvery flash of fish jumping in this lake and feel the delight of this in your heart. Your eyes might be drawn to the two small islands, and perhaps you will wonder what those birds are that are clustered in a small flock on the islands. You might contemplate what they are working on in the space between the highway and the lake (developing a new trail that will work itself around this side of the lake). Perhaps, if you are like me, you might find yourself wishing that instead of going to work, you were actually on your way to that park instead, to see those things up close, to stop this rat race and just slow down a bit and soak up every bit of nature that place has to offer.

When I found myself high on vacation days and needed to make a plan to use them or lose them, I decided that I was going to take a few days here and there to just give in to that feeling and go explore this park. After all, there was a regular monthly bird walk that was scheduled here that I have been wanting to attend since my maternity leave last year (when I first discovered this information). I felt very left out when I would get the email blasts with the list and pictures of the birds they saw. I was especially excited when I saw that the group (led by a Houston Audubon employee, Mary Ann) was spotting Bald Eagles out there. I wanted to see the Bald Eagle(s) for myself.

So today was one of those days. It was perfect weather to join a group of (primarily older) adults on a walk about the park, marveling at each species representative. I was the only one without a special fancy camera. Next time (next month), I am going to bring Jason’s camera with me. We did get to see the Bald Eagle. Sometimes there has been up to five seen, but this one seems to be a permanent resident. This is the only shot I got of her, with my cell phone:

After the group dispersed, I took a walk around the smaller section of this park a little further south to identify a vireo that I had seen while in the park a few weeks back with my kids playing Pokemon. I had not thought to bring my binoculars that day. I was delighted to note that it was a species of vireo I had not seen before (Blue-Headed), and after tallying up the species of the day, noted that my birding list for actually-seen birds this year is at a total of 130 species.

I was hoping to make this a year of birding trips, but then had to put that goal aside to cater to my middle son’s sports schedule in the spring, and then abandoned it completely in the heat of the summer. However, I am only 5 species away from observing the most birds per year that I have recorded (in the few years I have been counting). I am still 70 away from recording 200 for the year, which is one of my hobby goals, so I might have to plot a strategy for that in the next few months. I also had set a hobby goal of getting 4000 geocache finds before my 41st birthday, and I completed that. We have also been discovering a lot of parks in and around our area, which was one of my goals.

I recently reflected on the goals I had of planning a backpacking trip, in order to determine how serious I was about my dreams of hiking the AT or PCT one day. I had to really question if my ideas of backpacking were actual goals, or just pipe dreams. I am really not a fan of pipe dreams, to tell you the truth. My best friend Jen said something this year about how I was “extremely goal-oriented”, and I hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but when I tried that label on, I found that it fit. It irks me when people discuss their dreams as if they are things that will never really happen, because I feel like we create our own reality. If you want to do a thing, you should make a plan to do that thing. Work towards it in steps in you have to, but get it done.

I wanted to go spend some days at this park and see the eagle that lives there, so I made it happen. I wanted to be an animal behaviorist, and I made it happen. My job has given me the confidence to create plans and the persistence to see them through. However, I still haven’t shed that baby weight, or even looked to see what kind of supplies we have for backpacking and planned a trip. I suppose that today, doing a thing I wanted to do, made me consider more carefully how I was going to do the other things I say I want to do. We will see how that plays out in the coming months.

Bear Tooth, Bear Claw, Buffalo Burger: A Love Story

This week, I was asking my family to tell me about the happiest times of their lives. My train of thought on the afternoon commute from work one day took me down this path, and I found it very interesting to ponder that it was actually quite difficult to determine exactly what that time or times were.

My kids told me that they had the same trouble I did coming up with answers to that. It depends on many factors. Did I mean a specific time, a moment, in which they were happier than they ever had been or were after? Did that mean the best day ever? How do you quantify happiness? Does it mean that you laughed harder than you ever had, that you were having an absolute blast, or did I mean like in that quiet kind of way in which just everything came together to allow you to have a peaceful day in which you felt extremely content? Yes, these are my children, there is no doubt. Their answers were very insightful, and I hope I can use that information to create more happy moments for them in the future.

My answers to those same questions, though, despite it being hard to nail down, seemed to be mostly related to the past six years with Jason. Sure, there were some nights with my college roommates in which we laughed so much and had a blast, but I have to say that in the past years by Jason’s side, he has made me laugh harder than anyone ever has, certainly to the point that I did or was in danger of embarrassing myself, running out of breath, having sore abs the next day, and having to cross my legs to avoid peeing myself in laughter or just to be able to hold myself up. Also, though, there are many days with him that were those quiet kinds of contentment, perhaps from just the peace of having a true companion, or from sharing an adventure, or from spending the day doing what I love with someone who loves the same things.

When I think about the happiest day, one of the days that came to mind was this one that I am going to share pictures from, a day where we crossed from Wyoming to Montana a few times, driving from Billings to Red Lodge, through the Bear Tooth Mountains, and ending up in Silver Gate. This was early on, a few months into our relationship, during a trip that I knew we would eventually consider some kind of honeymoon. We spent the day geocaching, sightseeing, looking for wild animals and adventures.

We had crossed through some intense mountain scenery and played in the snow, and were a little cold and hungry when we hit Silver Gate. We had been scouting for caches we were planning to look for, and got stuck on this one called Bear Claw. The description said it was located at a place that sold bear claws, and the more we talked about this, the more we decided that we wanted one of those very badly. We had worked up an image in our head of hot, fresh tasty pastries, so we were so disappointed when we pulled up and realized that it was just a gas station, and in fact the reference was to Little Debbie type snack cakes, which they were out of anyways. There were no bear claws of any kind to be had here.

Disappointed but soldiering on, we drove up to the entrance of Yellowstone National Park to inquire about camping spots, only to be told that they were full and there were no spots to be had. So we turned back around and drove the twenty or so miles back to Silver Gate and rented a little cabin for the night to a tune that was higher than we wanted to spend, but lower than the peak rate, so a negotiated compromise. Then we went driving around the National Park, finding bison and antelope galore to feast our eyes upon (no no wolves or bears, which we hoped for).

That night, we walked across the street to this little restaurant, the Log Cabin Cafe, and ate the most delicious buffalo burgers you could ever dream of. We still laugh about that, about how we had to eat one after looking at them all day. I remember the feeling walking out of that place, breathing the crisp air, seeing the stars lighting up the sky all around us, and the feeling of love filling my chest and the feeling that it was settling there, that this was the start of something huge.

And this was one of the happiest days of my life, but it is just one of several wonderful ones we have had together since that time, in our various road trips and other smaller adventures we have together. I came to this place in my life to be happy, giving up on my previous miserable marriage, and there are these days that I can count on to show me that this path I chose, this man I chose, was the way to find it.