I arrive at sunset, and set out to stretch my legs after the 10-hour drive from Yosemite. Recently warming up to established public campgrounds, I set up camp among the small gravel pads, picnic tables, and campfire rings tucked between young aspen. I grab my binoculars and cross the road to walk by the lakeshore, where a woman and her grandson are fishing. Since getting vaccinated, I am more apt to strike up conversations with strangers, a new hobby in celebration of the common, everyday humanity I’d taken for granted in the before times.
“Catching anything?” I ask.
“Not yet,” they reply.
The surface of the water is tranquil. Distant fishing boats motor back to the docks. The day has cooled little, despite the setting sun.
“Do you go swimming right here?” I ask, wondering what the water and substrate qualities might be.
“Nah,” they reply.
“This looks like a popular fishing spot—I might want to wear my sandals so I don’t get fish hooks in my feet.”
“Yeah, you’ll definitely want to do that.”
I never did get around to swimming.
It’s clear the lake is heavily used—some trash is strewn across the shoreline, but far less than in a place where no one cares. People love and take care of this place. Lots of them. Every once in a while, I pick up a waft of an old, familiar smell: lakeshore on a warm summer evening, algae blooms mixed with fresh oxygen and unrealized vacation dreams.
A beautiful trail winds through the aspen, but I’m instinctively drawn to the marshy lakeshore where frogs, snakes, and turtles might be. Here, where there are no fisherfolk or boats, I soon find the wildlife. Robins forage in the mud between the rocks, and a juvenile—still in the awkward, ugly stage holding onto its spots with little color—forages behind its parent. A swallow gleans bugs off the water, then banks into the trees, dodging the young that are fully grown but still demand a free meal. I wonder if their parents just starve them until they take the hint. Maybe the conflict between human teenagers and their parents is also a natural process of preparing to leave the nest. I think about my parents as the road trip to visit them stretches out before me like the years between now and back then. Thousands of miles to go, many thousands of days since, and we finally get to meet on the other shore.
A western gull swims leisurely, enjoying its alone time as much as I am. The shallows move and I see the wake left by a fish swimming to deeper water. A flutter of freshly hatched moths hover just above. Someone should tell the fish.
Chipping sparrows, with their broad copper crowns, graze the rocky shoreline with the robins. Bluebirds flutter among the aspen branches, fleeing their hungry, oversized young, just as the swallows do. A detest for one’s offspring past childhood is a sound adaptation—the selfish genes cannot be passed on if we exhaust ourselves feeding the first-born for too long. There is so much embedded in our DNA that we shouldn’t take personally.
Approaching a dock and the humans abuzz on it, I turn around to take the trail back. Initials are carved into the tender aspen bark, forming deep, black scars. More carvings inspire more humans to imitate; like begets like. I come across a pair of initials encircled by a heart, with a large X across them. It’s easy to judge what I assume is young, fickle love. I hope they didn’t get matching tattoos. The aspen didn’t get a choice.
As if in a duet with the osprey I watched 24 hours and a day’s drive earlier at sunset on Yosemite’s Tenaya Lake, another hunts nearby. I can see the fish dart away from the large bird beneath the glassy water, dodging its repeated dives, and the raptor tries yet again in a continual game of cat-and-mouse; osprey-and-trout.
At the cusp of nightfall a steady breeze sets in, rattling the aspen leaves like a million tiny tambourines. “Quaking” is not a word I would use for this rattle. These trees do not tremble; they vibrate like breath through a harmonica.
An interpretive sign tells me I’m walking along the “Old Spanish Trail,” a 1,200-mile trade route originating in Santa Fe; winding through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada; and ending in Los Angeles. The sign says the trail was used by “Ute Indians and American adventurers… in search of gold, slaves, horses, and land.” There seems to be a lot the sign is leaving out. Isn’t it likely that indigenous people built and maintained much of the trail long before the Spanish were even a speck on the horizon? Isn’t it more likely the indigenous people were the ones being enslaved rather than doing the enslaving? A brief search indicates both these hunches are indeed true.
I imagine a more honest, earlier version of this sign, toiled over by a public lands historian, perhaps. Then, the timid bureaucrat ranked far above the historian, who has never seen the trail, but edited the sign nonetheless to obscure its real lessons. The resulting trail marker tragically considers slaves just another natural resource to be found in the North American cornucopic bounty, diminishing its horrific reality. Often what isn’t said is more damning than what is. Increasingly, I cringe to read interpretive signs in natural areas, nearly all of them rife with colonial sentiments that reinforce the settler-colonizer ideologies embedded in conservation. There is still so much work to do.
I see the osprey perched now, near dark, on the snagged crown of an aspen. I stand beneath the tree to snap a blurry photo, and the osprey chirps and spreads its wings as it looks down at me, as if to say, “Keep walking, buddy. Nothing to see here.” It’s understandable. I, too, live in a vacation destination where a moment of my daily life can easily become part of a tourist’s snapshot. I walk back to my house-on-wheels in the dark, hundreds of miles from any place I’ve ever called home, glad to have seen some old, familiar avian friends, and sobered by the history of this place.