Besady and Fonferek's Glen
October 25, 2015
The Sunday before, driving back from Algoma, I pulled off at the Besady Fish and Wildlife Refuge. No plan. Just a feeling that I should stop.
It was supreme fall. That’s the only way to say it. The kind of afternoon where every color is saturated past what seems possible — the sumacs gone electric red, the tamaracks turning gold against the dark spruce, the whole marsh lit up like stained glass. I walked for two hours. No trail, really. Just following the edges of things — the tree line, the water line, the places where the meadow thinned into cattails. Nobody else around. Just me and whatever was moving in the brush.
I took it all in the way you’re supposed to — slowly, without a phone in my hand, without narrating it to anyone. Just absorbing. The air had that cold-earth smell that means the ground is getting ready to shut down for winter. Everything was offering itself up one last time.
On the way back to Green Bay I took the long way, because the long way is always better when the light is like that. I stopped at Fonferek’s Glen in De Pere. It was packed. Beautiful Sunday afternoon and everybody had the same idea. I walked in far enough to get past the families and the dogs and the couples taking pictures, and found a spot where the creek noise covered the voices. I sat there and tried to meditate, or something close to it. Just breathing and listening.
It was pretty. But it was also overrun. I caught myself being annoyed and then caught myself catching it — they get to enjoy it too. That’s the whole point. A place this beautiful shouldn’t be empty. I just wanted five more minutes of what I’d had at Besady, where the world was mine and the color was absurd and nobody needed anything from me.
I drove the rest of the way home with the windows cracked, letting the cold air in.