Nature & Me

PAIRING! Click for Song

In college we were mostly typical; all night study sessions to assure a C in class, parties where we always were able to make our own little dance circle. It was all so great. But when the stress of grades and boys and being far from home came and it always did, we'd high tail it off campus, into the car on what we called a country cruise. The lonely stretches of two lane highway cutting through vast cornfields matched our quiet desperation.

On those occasions we'd all fall into solitude. Once far enough out Jacki would pull over and turn off the car. Dee would get out and sit on the trunk. Aly would go to the hood and sit back, Jacki on the roof of the car and I would lean against the side, head back so I could see the bonnet of stars covering the night, horizon to horizon. It was on those nights that I solidified my connection to nature and night. I knew I felt a kind of elation in my girlhood when I was on the softball field or on a hike. But it was in college on those country cruises when I knew that escape into nature would be something I would always need.

At eighteen, life was already proving to be trickier than I had imagined. Jacki, Dee, Aly and I would settle into the quiet and let all the crap that got us out there....we'd let it go. Twenty years later, we still escape. This picture is from our last canoe trip where we paddled ten miles down the

Illinois River. Two canoes, two of us in each.

We laughed, drank, sighed, paddled, laughed more and then as always enjoyed those magnificient stretches of quiet, each of us falling into the routine we discovered on those country roads so long ago.