More than anything there is the sense of scale: you can fly for hours and hours of Alaska and you look down and all you’ll see is forests, lakes and snow-capped mountains, with no sign whatsoever of human beings.
I’m terrified to go in lakes because you can’t see the bottom, and not knowing what’s there watching you is really scary to me.
I think it’s mental to pay for water. Where is that water coming from? Are they in the hills puttin’ it into bottles when years ago it used to roll down and go into the lakes?
I grew up in the old neighborhood of Beijing where you had a courtyard and trees. Actually, the whole of Beijing was a garden – the Forbidden City – and the lakes and gardens in the city center were all artificial.
We see evidence that lakes and forests and wetlands can have different equilibria – so you have a savanna system that may be stable and thriving, but it can also tip over and become an arid steppe if pushed too far by warming, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.
All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than other mountains. The weather is mostly sunshine embellished with magnificent storms, and nearly everything shines from base to summit – the rocks, streams, lakes, glaciers, irised falls, and the forests of silver fir and silver pine.
What I remember the most really was just running wild there. Barefooted, swimming in dirty lakes, selling fruit, picking mango trees, hoping not to get caught because they don’t take kindly to thieves in Africa.
In the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where there is a depth of no more than from 5 to 15 feet of water, ancient wooden piles are observed at the bottom sometimes worn down to the surface of the mud, sometimes projecting slightly above it.
The great thing about being a standard-issue, straight white person is you have so much time. Gay people, people of color, we have less time! We have to be a living Learning Annex to everybody. We don’t have time to master hobbies like skipping rocks along lakes.
We’ve got pictures from the Space Station going back 20 years. We can see the glaciers receding in the photography that we do. We can see the effects of lakes drying up and other things that are happening around the planet.
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
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