Walk

I just got back from a walk.  Wanting some uninterrupted time to listen to a new podcast episode (Welcome to Night Vale, if anyone is curious), and maybe a little exercise too, I put in my headphones and set out for the Greenway which is a few blocks away from my house.  This section of the Greenway, which rambles all over my city, runs along the river, making it a very scenic route.

My first sight on reaching the river was a flock of geese, striding across the path in that particularly unhurried way geese have when they’ve become accustomed to humans.  Most of them were Canada geese, but there was one uglier white one in among them.  There were a few other people out on the path—a man pushing a stroller and walking his dog, a woman jogging who slowed to a walk as she passed me.  I nodded and smiled to them but said nothing to them, busy listening to a man with a deep voice tell me some very strange things. 

A few times along the way, I stopped to look at the water.  I took a few pictures with my phone, trying to capture the twisting colors of the river, brown and incandescent blue-green and black in the shadows and bubbling white.  I stood there as long as I could, just watching, and if I had been confident of remaining unobserved, I might have waded into the water, let it rise up around my knees and soak my jeans.  Maybe not—as I said before, it was cold.

I kept going, collecting images as I went.  The roots of trees extending out over the water, or rippling the pavement with cracks and tiny rises.  A toy gun hung from the branch of a tree.  Two ducks bursting into flight from the surface of the water.  Smooth stones polished to gems by the water—I picked up two, but they’re never quite as beautiful when they’re dry.  The wooden barriers by the path where the slope to the river became steep, inviting me to stop and lean on them and look out.  I did, once.

There’s no moral to this story, no particular reason I’m writing about it.  Just that when I go out like this—out of my house, out of my way, out of my own head—I like to remember it.  I like to think that even something as simple as a walk is something special, because it is.