The New River Gorge is known as "the Grand Canyon of the east", which is unfair and unreasonable as a label. After all, our universe is "just a little one". Sometimes the scale of two things makes comparisons between them a bit tricky. What I'm getting at is that the New River Gorge in West Virginia is beautiful in a way that is singular and incomparable.
I worked there as a river guide when I was 18 and quickly adopted the other boaters' superstitious nature about what portends a good day on the river. Some people would never put a boat into the river backwards. Some would never take a boat with a certain number. Others, seemingly, never paddled a raft while sober.
The Gorge had a healthy population of iridescent blue damsel-flies that seemed drawn to our blue boats and yellow paddles. The combination of colors seemed to suggest romance to these miniature barnstormers. Either that, or they had an unnatural zest for piggy-back rides. In either case, they were frequently flitting about and often distractedly erratic in their flight patterns. Over the course of the summer, I figured out that if a damsel-fly landed on my paddle, we were guaranteed a good ride from there on out. Similarly, if a butterfly flew down the middle of the raft, we could run any line through any rapid with a level of confidence that only an 18 year old could muster.
I always wonder if it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but even if it was, why pass up a good excuse to have an awesome day? Signs and wonders are upon us; why not make the most of them? What we don't know about the universe makes what we do know negligible in comparison. Logic is a small dark cave where people hide from experience.
Spring is aggressively in effect in Oregon and you have to be careful where you walk or something will bloom at you. I was out inspecting some of the new arrivals in the yard yesterday when I heard a soft but widespread buzzing and noticed that the few whizzing sentries that normally surround the beehives had been replaced with a growing and frantic cloud of bees. The noise was hard to describe, like a bunch of Gregorian bees chanting, a deep and unprecedented BUZZ. The cloud briefly expanded and then fell into a tiny tornado that rose into a swirling column of bees stretching slowly towards the treetops and shimmering in the late afternoon sun. The column began to lean towards a particular tree as the bottom of the swarm left the ground and, like a giant buzzing slinky, the entire swarm regathered on the highest branch and compacted itself into a writhing ball.
I can't wait to figure out what it means.