equinox me this

I've been too busy to blog. This job is kicking my butt, but in a good way.

However, to show you I haven't forgotten about you, I'm sharing an old story with you. I went to college in northern Iowa and lived there a year after. I was feeling rather literay in those days. In the fall of 2000, when a friend asked what I did with my weekend, this is what I sent him. It fairly sums up my memories of Autumn in Iowa.

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There where many times in basic training when the only thing that could get me through a day was the memory of something beautiful from my past. It was usually the memory of things I'd seen and loved about the Iowa countryside. And while they're fairly cliche sentiments, the Iowa countryside is ripe with cliche sentiments ready to be snapped by a photographer and made into a calendar or motivational poster. Outside of Waverly you can find: an old barn amidst a field of unharvested wheat, a grove of wild apple trees just ripe for the picking or a lazy river, languidly lapping at its banks surrounded by trees gently dipping their branches into its waters.

I've spent countless hours on my bike riding the unpaved back roads around Waverly. The roads aren't straight like the ones I grew up with. They seem to wander around, avoiding certain fields or stands of trees. You never get bored because you can never see very far. There's always a turn coming, or a hill to go over. And while summer never gets as hot as it does back home, fall is the best time to ride these roads. The trees rival anything you'd see in the northwest and the slight chill actually feels good when you've just finishing climbing a mile long hill. (Iowa's NOT flat.)

Yesterday was one of those perfect Iowa fall days. The temperature yesterday afternoon was hovering around 55 degrees and the sun was already heading towards the horizon. I was bored by my moronic roommates and starting to feel as if I was becoming dumber just by being in their presence, so I hopped on my bike and headed to Cedar Bend park. It's a area of land outside of town along the Cedar River, a river, which by any other state's standard, would be a large creek. The park itself isn't very imposing in it's size. It's long, and narrow and situated on the tops of several high, wooded bluffs along the eastern bank of the river.

If you were in a real hurry, it might take you 30 minutes by bike to go from the entrance to the end of the upper ridge trails and back again. The lower trails, however, keep most people from getting in and out too fast. The lower trails, (my personal favorites) run up and down the sides of the bluffs often with a wall of rocks on your right, a sheer cliff to the river below on your left. Racing up and down just isn't an option. While the upper trails might be safer (since they run on the flattened tops of the bluffs) the woods block any kind of view of the western banks. For that, you have to take your chances on the lower trails. I imagined that the lower ridge was carved by painters who were looking for inspirational vistas. And after they'd laid out all the good spots, they somehow connected them with these suicidal trails.

On this day, I traversed my favorite section of trails, the one's that afford the inherent risk of injury. I landed myself at the end of the park on top of one of the bluffs. There was a clearing of trees that looked down to the river about 100 feet below. Beyond the opposite bank were low, rolling hills covered by trees decked out in their full fall colors and setting autumn sun behind it all deepening the reds, oranges and yellows in the tops of the trees.

I found myself suddenly stunned at the sight before me.

The sun was just beginning to settle into the hills. The air was crisp and had that clean, fresh autumn smell. Below me, I could hear the slow churning of the river and the slight rustle of leaves giving the last full measure of their strength. I was the only person around and before me lay miles of land untouched by human hands. I sat there, watching the sun fall behind the hills. And just as the sun fell behind the trees and hills, a flock of geese flew overhead, aiming for somewhere warmer than an Iowa winter could ever afford.

At that moment, I stopped breathing, as if that could make the world stop just as it was. It was perfect, the entire place. At that moment, there was nothing but me and nature and nothing else mattered. At that moment, I could have died
a happy man.