Nature calls

One of the things I miss most about life in Britain is the countryside, or not even the countryside, just the freedom to potter about in the outdoors. Here, the land outside the city is agricultural and inaccessible to walkers (no paths, barbed wire fences on a huge scale), and let’s face it, very flat and featureless. There are parks in the city, but they’re very small, and what you might call functional rather than beautiful.

We find we pay increasingly frequent week-end visits to the Nature Park. It’s small (a rectangle exactly a mile by half a mile), and surrounded by dual carriageways, so the chirping of the crickets has to compete with the noise of the traffic, and in winter when there aren’t leaves on the trees, you can see the large concrete building and big square orange logo of Home Depot from pretty much wherever you are in the Park. Nonetheless, green space is green space, and I am grateful for it.

The children share our excitement. When Husband and I suggest an afternoon walk in the Nature Park, they’re like little crickets themselves, jumping up and down and chorusing merrily “oh no, not AGAIN, boooring, do we have to? can I get some extra playstation time if I come?” Their enthusiasm is infectious, and we head off, beckoned by the call of the wild.

It was a really beautiful afternoon there today. Warm sun, strong breeze, clouds wandering across a blue sky, autumn colours at their finest. Autumn has always been my favourite season, but I realise now my previous experience of it has been somewhat impoverished. The trees and shrubs here put on a much better show – deep reds, earthy maroons, bright oranges, startling yellows. I don’t say this lightly. I grew up in the Chilterns, so I thought I knew a thing or two about autumn beauty. The beech woods can be stunning, majestic, exhilarating. But here, the season lasts so much longer, the variety is greater, the display more dramatic, and the weather still summery enough to allow full enjoyment of it.

This afternoon, for example, the Nature Park looked like this (you'll have to click to enlarge to do the colours justice):





















There are always turtles to be seen, paddling along lugubriously or sunning themselves on logs, and a few weeks ago I spotted a muskrat in the water. There are elegant herons, and rather overfed ducks, who swim past hunks of bread floating in the water without even a second glance (this is a Nature Park on the edge of a big city, after all, not the wilderness). Dragonflies and damselflies dart in front of us. Crickets sun themselves on the paths, so old and slow this late in the season that we have to be careful not to tread on them before they leap away. Imagine being able to get close enough to take a photo like this (um... you'll definitely need to click to enlarge that one!).


Large spiders sit in the middle of their enormous webs, and 7-yo, who has been learning about them in science, tells us about their habits, and identifies the different kinds of web.

These are hedge apples, which are such a luminous, almost neon, green that we first told the kids that they were alien brains, fallen out of the sky, (but don’t worry, we only kept that story going for a few minutes – we didn’t want nightmares disturbing their and our sleep). They are solid and large (to give you the scale, this one is pictured in four year old hands), and they make a satisfying splash when lobbed into the creek.

I love this place. For me, it offers the perfect blend of familiarity and novelty. I know my way round the color-coded trails, enough at least to navigate back to the car park by the shortest route if legs are tired, or to promise that we’ll be crossing another creek if hedge apples are being collected. The wildlife and flora still seem exotic to me, though. “Get me” I think to myself, “watching snapping turtles on a Sunday afternoon”, and I tuck the thought away so that in years to come I can say “In America, we used to watch snapping turtles on a Sunday afternoon”. Even the complaining which precedes the trip has developed a comforting feeling of family ritual about it (they complain, but we know from experience that they'll have a good time). It was thus when we lived in Scotland (“why do we ALWAYS have to go to the beach or Tentsmiur?”) and I remember it from the week-ends of my own childhood too. But I couldn’t identify a zipper spider (also known as a writing spider) in those days.

I am very cautious about posting photos on the web, and I guard my family’s anonymity carefully, but I thought this one of our shadows on the water was safe enough.











And, getting brave now, I didn’t think back views could hurt. Here are 7-yo, 11-yo and Husband.


And here is 4-yo.