Seized by Joy

While walking up to Bald Mountain Drive, I noticed a small marker for a trail on the side of the road.

Barely more than a footpath for hikers going single file, it cut through the scrub oak woods, left untouched between subdivisions. The trail was new to me, so I decided to hike down it just to see what might be there.

The path was dry and crunched under my feet. Not much in terms of vegetation other than scattered shrubs of silver-blue sand sage brush sprouting up in the sandy dirt.

As I worked my way down the path, the vegetation grew thicker and greener. That’s when I spotted a tiny winged insect, thin as a stick pin, that latched onto a leaf of a plant that had cropped up on the side of the trail.

A damsel fly!

But here in a desert landscape? Either my eyes were fooling me, or there was a stream or pond nearby. Intrigued, I pushed ahead and saw there were reedlike plants growing in the dry gulch next to the footpath. Only the gulch was no longer dry.

I could hear the crinkling of a stream braiding down the mountain slope to my left. And then I saw, jutting straight up from the gulch, the spear like reed and brown fruiting spike of a cattail.

When I looked to my left, I saw that the thin stream flowing down the mountain side fed into a. small white pipe, which channeled the waters into the gulch, where it pooled and shimmered.

I crouched down to get a closer look and saw that the water was dimpled where the legs of a water strider touched down on the surface.

Then I spotted a second and a third puddle fly. When their legs twitched, a ring of concentric ripples radiated out. The elegant bugs didn’t really move in a specific direction, but slid about on the surface, or rather pushed against the slow motion of the water so as to stay in the same place.

I was gripped with sudden joy as I watched the tiny skeeters sliding about on the water, happy to dwell on that small patch of wet real estate in an otherwise dry mountainside.

Little miracle bugs skating about just because (I think D.H. Lawrence captured it best) “their lives are fun to them!”