Concerned about
a long spell of declining physical activity, I recently started taking long walks
each morning. Wherever I’m going, either walking or driving, the dog rarely
stays behind and Farina has been my companion on these ambles through the dust
and weed along the back roads of Oak Hill, Florida. I had long thought that
walking the rural dirt roads out here for any distance would be tantamount to a
stroll through hell. I imagined myself choked with dust, savaged by mosquitos
and their biting brethren and tormented by heat and humidity. None of that has
proven to be close to the reality I’ve discovered. Fact is, my walks have all
been in the kinder seasons of what passes for autumn and winter at this southern
latitude. On several walks I’ve been protected from a January chill by long
sleeves, and on one occasion even left home wrapped in a scarf and gloves. But
those occasions are fewer than the days when I get by in nothing heavier than
jeans and a T-shirt. I suspect that come summertime, the walks will bring me
closer to that imagined stroll through hell. For now, it’s all pretty much a
soothing passage through pastoral sights colored by horses, goats, a herd of
burros and staring cows. And some rather nasty winged creatures.
An
almost daily sight on the roads I follow is the black vulture. Few would call these
ominous looking and foul-smelling birds a pretty sight, feeding as they do on road-kill
or dead animals in pastures. Florida wildlife experts describe black vultures
as aggressive, on occasion killing or injuring lambs, calves, cows giving
birth, or other incapacitated livestock. It may be true that under the right
circumstances they are aggressive birds but they waste no time in getting
airborne when my big dog comes loping toward them. Last week I came upon a dozen
or so vultures feeding on a threesome of large leg bones, by then all but
stripped bare. When I got a closer look, it was easy to see that the bones were
parts of a discarded deer carcass. Apparently, an uncaring hunter cut off the
desired parts and tossed the remainder on the roadside. Some hunters in these
woods don’t follow the rules.
A
favorite sight along these walks is a small pond at road’s edge, a watery refuge
that suddenly appears from behind a spray of palmetto fronds and always seems
so placid and inviting. It is obviously a pond created from the run off of a
larger pond across the road but the larger one lacks the secluded charm of its
smaller offshoot. I stop without fail each time to gaze for a minute at the
pretty scene. I’ve never seen more than a solitary duck drifting on the water’s
surface, a graceful shape slipping in and out of the reeds. It all looks
peaceful enough but in this area an alligator could float to the surface at any
moment.
Not
far from the pretty pond is a small detail in the road that I noticed only
after a dozen or more passings. The road in this case is blacktopped and while
old, ragged and worn, it offers a different feel after a couple of miles on
dirt with the ever-present potholes and washboard surface. And In the surface
of that worn blacktop road is an unexpected and out of place accident of
design. I’ve puzzled over it and can’t figure how it came to be there. Anyone
would recognize it as a leaf shape set into the road but this one is different.
I’ve
seen examples of images burned onto a surface in the case of a sudden and
intense flash of heat. The first time I saw the leaf shape in the road I
thought of that. But a closer look reveals that the image is pebbled and either
hammered or pressed into the road surface. It resembles a maple leaf but has
only four points to a maple’s five. How that leaf shape came to be in the
blacktop is something of a mystery.
A
shorter walk from home in the opposite direction leads to a bee colony at the
end of my road where it dwindles to little more than a trail. A junk baron in
town owns the land down there and probably inherited the hives from a previous
owner. Once every week or two a truck comes to collect the honey-filled frames
and carry them to where the honey is bottled. A gift bottle arrived at my gate
one day so I can attest to the honey’s goodness. It came from a neighbor who earned
two dozen bottles of free honey a while back for scaring off a trio of honey
thieves who thought no one was around. Since then the junk baron keeps my
neighbor in shotgun shells to ward off potential thieves.
