Time stood still

Where is your listening point, your wilderness? Is it quiet, perhaps the light subdued? Surely, it’s away from the bustle in your life and the noise in your head. It’s where life slows down, where thoughts become clear, where you recalibrate and rejuvenate.

Yesterday, I walked into the stillness and dimness beneath the boughs of white pines. Tannish pine needles softened my steps like a carpet as I waded deep into the grove. I looked up, feeling small but secure as the formidable trunks formed dark towers narrowing at the top where a mottled canopy of needled branches fractured the blue sky.

I sat down, and time stood still.

My thoughts becalmed, it reminded me of when I was a boy, how I’d slip away to a clump of low brush atop a knoll in the pasture. Cow paths crisscrossed the thicket, providing me trails. I had found a listening point, a whisper of wilderness in a young child’s imagination.

I was hidden. A creek snaked around the knoll, providing a sort of moat on three sides, while the other side was guarded by elm trees. I was in solitude, no doubt hearing the pipes of Pan which fill children with the comfort and wonder of nature, riding elfin notes from the mythical god of the wild.

From this secluded base, I would scheme frog captures, spy on red-headed woodpeckers probing for insects in the dying elms, and listen to meadowlarks and bobolinks in the hayfield. I would sit, keenly conscious of my natural surroundings. Though stress was not part of my young world, I nevertheless felt an essential calmness.

I did not know it then, but this calmness would be sought more and more in adulthood. I still have refuges, listening points where one hears an inner voice, where life slows down. But the consciousness of natural beauty and its meaning are harder to find. Naturalist Sigurd Olson wrote, “No adult can know such sustained contentment, but there are moments that do come.”

Olson, a guide, educator, and author, experienced that such contentment could more easily be attained in wilderness. He spent much of his life in efforts to preserve wilderness. In the 1920s, Olson went against the grain of those who wanted to create a series of roads into the wild Quetico-Superior region of lakes and forests to make it, as Olson said the slogan was, “the playground of the nation.” It is now, instead, the Quetico-Superior Country, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, preserved and protected, as close to wilderness as the 21st Century allows.

I regret that I’ve never experienced the Quetico-Superior or other places that could yet be considered wilderness. But I take comfort in reading what Olson wrote about feeling one with the land: “So wilderness, too, is a state of mind. You can find it even in small areas, such [as] in a city park screened from traffic. Once there, if you’re in the proper state of mind, you’ll discover your wilderness.”

So, “… there are moments that do come.” A moment came the other day, among the pine trees. I was aware of the beauty around me, my wilderness as it is, filling me with contentment. I stayed as long as I could.

Dave Greschner, retired sports/outdoors editor at the Rice Lake Chronotype, writes about nature and the outdoors, pursues nature photography, and is the author of “Soul of the Outdoors.” He can be reached at davegreschner@icloud.com.