Open Pond Campground at Conecuh National Forest is really a prototypical campground experience. There’s a forest, and a lake, and some camping spots tucked in around the shore of that lake. There are some hiking trails, but nothing strenuous, and lightly trafficked roads for biking. But there’s nothing “big” around to see. It’s not like a trip to Yellowstone, or Glacier National Park. Those places are wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But here there is no magnetic monument that mother nature has created that you simply must go see.
Still, the mere fact of these tall, strong and beautiful trees, this lake with food in it (if you can catch it), wood that burns for heat and light and cooking all those fish… all this should present as nothing less than a goddamn miracle of nature and time, awe-inspiring in its perfect simplicity. I wonder if we see so much in our lives, if we live long enough, that the amazing becomes the mundane, and the quest for “the most beautiful” place or thing or house or car or person overtakes our ability to step back and say, would you just look at this shit right here! What a world. (Though I still get that feeling when things grow in my garden. Everyone, look! Brightly colored food came out of the dirt! Holy shit!)
And so I’ve spent a lot of time sitting and relaxing. There are trees perfectly spaced for a hammock, and a dock perfectly placed for fishing. The trees are trying to reproduce, dropping huge pinecones 80 feet to the ground, which make for great, free kindling (sorry trees, not on my watch). Dried pinecones are the perfect fire starter, with plenty of space between the seed scales for oxygen. They burn quickly and brightly, and so far as I know, they emit no cries of pain or loss for what they could have become, and neither do their overseers standing tall all around me, for surely they would have killed me by now if they were upset, or at least dropped a very large pinecone on my head.
I went on a bike ride today, tired out easy, then realized it was 90 degrees and I was biking in the sun and I’m fat and not quite used to the heat. And these are the cool months in Alabama. I returned to the camper and pumped up the a/c, which I haven’t used much. In the evening, down at the dock, last night’s old-timers were at it again. I went over and started casting and we talked about all the turtles in the lake.
Then in the distance I saw something swimming in the water: it looked like a muskrat to me, but the talkative guy, a former state trooper, said there are no muskrats here. “A beaver maybe” he said. “Or a gator,” his friend added.
“A gator?” I asked. “I didn’t think there were gators in this little lake.”
“A guy lost an arm once, 20 years ago,” said the trooper, and his friend concurred.
I haven’t seen any gators, but I’m glad I didn’t go for a dip after my bike ride. None of us could see far enough to identify the swimming thing, but my best guess was for a small duck or a beaver. In any case, it doesn’t sound like there are many gators here, if any, but I guess it only takes one gator making a move on you to be one gator too many.
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