Nick Whaley

It’s too hot. It’s too cold. It’s too windy. Too humid. Too much pollen in the air. As a kid, I used every excuse in the book to avoid going outside. It’s not that I hated nature or anything; I would just get bored. Growing up on a wooded lot on a backroad in Sussex County, I had very few neighbors, and none of them had kids for me to be friends with. Whenever my mom would tell me to go outside and play, I would shuffle out alone, look around, throw acorns at the trees to see if I could hit them, look around some more, get bored, and go back inside all within a five minute timespan. Then one fine Saturday afternoon, my dad asked if I would like to go for a boat ride in the canoe.

It was a calm day with no breeze, and the water was like glass, producing a perfect mirror image of the sky. I sat in the front of the canoe looking down at the water just to the side of the boat. I watched as the clouds in the sky distorted only subtly at first before becoming unrecognizable as the small wake from my dad paddling the boat disturbed the stillness of the water. My dad told me he’d show me a secret spot, and he paddled all the way to the back end of the pond. I didn’t see it at first because it was mostly covered by tree branches, but there was the entrance to a creek feeding into the pond. After slowly maneuvering under and around the low hanging tree branches that stretched across the opening, we headed up the creek.

The creek was narrow – probably only fifteen feet wide. The trees on both sides stretched up towards the sky and extended their branches out over the water to meet in the middle to create a tunnel. The leaves blocked out most of the sun, leaving only small patches and slivers of light here and there. In the patches of sun, little bugs danced around on the surface of the water. As a kid with no knowledge of surface tension, this blew my mind. I watched them closely to try to figure out how they could walk and glide across the surface of the water, but I was stumped. Sooner or later something else caught my attention – the air. It was fresh. It was filled with the scent of pond water mixed with earthy undertones from the surrounding woods. Now when I say it smelled like the pond, I’m not talking about dirty, green algae filled pond water that has methane bubbling out of it. I’m talking about cool, clean, clear water that has a certain scent that is indescribable. And then it hit me.

Nature is beautiful.

I don’t need other kids to play with or a specific task to do to keep me occupied when I’m outside. To be able to sit back, relax, and just observe and enjoy nature is the best entertainment a man could ask for.