Bravo Beaver!

Since school ended, I have been enjoying a small spot of nature everyday rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape.  Sure, I go to the same park—“the Hogbacks”—but there are so many different trails, and each one has special beauties.  I won’t try to verbally map the terrain today (that’s for some other time), but I want to share something wonderful I saw and what that sight made me think.  My dog and I climbed the main road up to the ridge that looks down over the blue lake.  Blue water allows me to use my own eyes again after I’ve squinted to avoid the too direct glare of today's sun.  Sheltered by the woods, my dog and I walked the hog’s back.  A hogback, which gives this nature area its name, is a geologic feature:  a ridge, formed by differential erosion of an outcropping, that leaves steep drop-offs on both sides of a narrow path.  The silhouette looks like the back of a creature (if not exactly a hog).  We walked the ridge, checking the vernal pools for frogs and wading in the lake.  We continued past the beech trees that have been tortured by the cutting letters of human loves, past the blooming may apples, until we intersected with another ridge.  We turned left and began to climb the second hogback for a view of another river.  Then Panda wanted to go down, down through the grass and over the moss, down and down to the brown river.  I followed him, clutching at branches to prevent myself from going down too fast.  He has a low center of gravity—almost no legs—a corgi; and I am an ungainly woman with a tendency to gather speed as I go and not worry once I start to move.  We made it, and at the bottom, the two of us go our own ways, exploring.  Panda immediately plunges into the river … brown and deep as his eyes.  Meanwhile, I wonder at all the fallen trees.  Did they all fall naturally down the slope and at such odd angles?  I take a closer look at a huge weathered stump, and I see that it was felled by a beaver.  The trunk was at least a foot in diameter, maybe wider.  The animal must have chewed away for days—love’s labor?—and once it was down, he couldn’t move it.  It was just too big.  He hadn’t planned.  He hadn’t assessed.  He wasn’t human.  He did what came naturally.  Bravo, beaver!  What heart.  Maybe he couldn’t use that great big log, but I have to believe that his labor—Love’s Labor—wasn’t lost.  It stood there as a perfect instance, to me, of poet, Robert Frost’s notion that anything we attempt in this life is actually a test of how our will pitches into commitments and then is judged for whether the original intention had been strongly spent or weakly lost.  This quality of pitching in and riding our impulses is the same whether we are working in business, school, art, science, love, or marriage—"strongly spent is synonymous with kept.”  No doubt that beaver built one heck of a dam on one of these fast-moving streams and is now enjoying the fruits of his labor in some saturated beaver meadow—if not in this woods, then in his dream of some other.  Thinking about the beaver, who was off to fresh woods and pastures new, I laughed at the way he reminded me to remind others not to be so over-concerned with calculation and assessment, but to do what comes naturally, remembering that humans, too, part of Nature instead of little gods that control it.