"The world is too much with us; late and soon/ Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" The words of William Wordsworth ring as true to day as when they were written. We are often so possessed by the pursuit of material happiness that we forget the joy that can be found in nature. Ours is a love/hate relationship with nature. We must either destroy it or immerse ourselves in it. To pay penance for our destruction, we set up parks as refuges for the flora and fauna. One of these parks, Silver Lake in Rochester, Minnesota, is home to thousands of Canadian geese. It is not only their refuge, but mine as well.
Silver Lake is little more than a broad place in the Zumbro River. It was manmade long before I was born. When I was a child, the park contained the usual set of chain swings with plastic seats, a perpetually squeaking merry-go-round, and the ever-thrilling teeter-totter. As time progressed, the see-saw was outlawed and replaced by a wooden fort with tire swings-the kind that became fashionable in the 1970s. The playground equipment may be different, but the main attraction of the park never changes-the geese.
I was first introduced to Silver Lake's most famous residents when I was too young to appreciate all that these birds would come to mean to me. My earliest memories are of feeding hard, stale bread to eager, often over-anxious geese. They did not look like the geese in my Little Golden Books. They were not fluffy and white and benevolent. Their feet and bills were not Crayola orange, but rather the black of brand new tires. They were pushy and aggressive, and they had no manners. As far as fluffiness goes, I was too afraid to actually touch them.
Although I feared these huge geese, I was awed by the things they could do. They could fly to the clouds that I longed to touch. The geese soared and dipped and flew in formations that I recognized as the letter V. No pilot will ever have their skill and grace. I was thrilled when they came in for a landing on the glassy surface of the lake. I imagined that to them it felt like sliding across a freshly-waxed floor in your stocking feet, stopping right before you collide with the refrigerator. The most amazing feat was their ability to stand on their heads under water even though they had no hands.
Now that I've grown older and taller than the wicked geese, some of my impressions of them have changed. The ballet gracefulness of the geese continues to leave me thunderstruck, but now some their antics amuse me. The thought of being mooned by a goose diving for a kernel of corn sends me into fits of laughter. I now find jealous pleasure in watching an elegant goose miss its mark and crash through the perfect surface of the lake. I immensely enjoy feeding a gaggle of geese a few kernels of corn from the converted paper boxes turned feed dispensers. They fight in the most underhanded ways I have ever seen. They bite each other on the soft underbelly and pull feathers out with anesthetic. The fighting leads to a deafening cacophony of honking and squawking-all over a few little seeds.
Although my way of looking at these geese has changed, the magic of this little park never will. Whenever I am at the extreme of emotion, I return to my lake. Being there sends me back to a time when life was simpler and happier. The geese are my friends-yet we are strangers. They help me with my problems, yet give me no guidance. They rejoice with me…yet know nothing of celebrations. I have shouted my joy in this park and drowned my sorrows in the depths of the lake. It is the place that I visit either mentally or physically when I need to retreat or rejoice. I have loved here, I have cried here, I lived and died here.