This morning was beautiful, a sunny and crisp day. We’ve been hiking the Bruce Trail every weekend for a long time, and we were looking forward to a trip to Speyside and parts north, to sections we’d never seen before. We got the usual coffee while engaging in the usual playful banter, looked at the map, and decided which route to the trailhead was best. The trail is moving east on the sections we haven’t hiked yet, so I headed along Dundas Street in that direction. The road opens up immediately and the limit is eighty kilometres per hour. The trip would be fast. As I got to speed, an animal suddenly appeared just to the right and ahead of the car, and I struck it hard.

It happened so very quickly. From the instant I saw the animal until I realized we’d hit it, a second, or less, had passed, but in the strange chronology of the mind, it seemed to take much longer, and so very much happened. While Alex and I were chatting, his head down looking at the map, I suddenly saw a coyote at full gallop less than a metre away from the front end of the car, its path perfectly perpendicular to ours. I saw its yellow-brown fur, and the reticulated pattern on it, like a tiger’s, running down the length of its body. In a microsecond, I saw its eyes, intent on the safe side of the road ahead of it. I thought I could avoid it. My foot came off the gas and hovered for another tiny slice of the second above the break, and I jerked the car to the left, slightly. But there is no median on this high-speed road, and cars were coming toward us. It would do no good. I was going to strike this animal with the full force of my car, speeding at eighty kilometres an hour, and neither I nor the poor coyote would be able to stop it, and so I simply did the only thing possible, and continued along a straight path, and ran into the side of its beautiful, wild body.

I immediately slowed, looking in the rearview mirror. I could see a small piece of the car, but the coyote wasn’t there. I thought by some miracle I had only glanced it, and it had simply run off into the fields to the north. But I suddenly realized it was still under the car, and we were still moving, at maybe fifty kilometres per hour. Just at that instant, there was a loud thud, and, as I pulled onto the shoulder, there it was, about twenty metres behind.

I was stunned. Alex was overcome. A truck pulled off the road ahead of us, and a man got out, pulling on gloves. I rolled down the window, and glanced in the mirror. To my utter horror, the coyote’s head lifted off the road, wobbling. It was still alive. The man came to the window, and said he’d drag it off the road to avoid an accident. Perhaps he didn’t realize it wasn’t dead. For some reason, I said nothing, and got out of the car to see the poor thing lurch up, and hobble, in agony, onto the shoulder, limping as though one of its legs were crushed, or torn off. I felt sick, and Alex was leaning against the roof of the car, his face hidden.

Realizing that the animal was alive, the man told me to call the Humane Society. This I could do. I couldn’t help the coyote. I couldn’t even bring myself to approach it and look at the state it was in, and the immenseness of the suffering it was experiencing and which I caused. But I could call for help. I got back in the car and made the call.

Because of the proximity to Oakville, and the state of the various services in the two cities, it took three phone calls and an exasperating voicemail trap before I spoke to someone. When I hung up, I got out of the car, and watched from a distance while the man, and now two others, crowded around the wounded animal and did what they could.

“I can’t go over there,” Alex said.

“I know.” But I could go, and I had to. There was no helping it, but I should at least look at what had happened. And so I walked slowly toward it, expecting the worst. Nobody looked up as I approached. One of them had put a blanket over its body. It was curled up as though it was ready for a nap, but its head was up, and it was alert, looking at us with its yellow eyes. Its breathing was laboured; it was almost panting for breath. Blood spilled out of its mouth freely, and the foreleg that I could see, poking out from under the blanket, was soaked with it. There was a trail of bright red blood leading right up to where it lay, and I suddenly realized that I was standing in it.

A van appeared, and a woman in uniform got out. The first man was actually handling the coyote’s head, petting it, and she warned him not to touch it. It could, after all, be rabid. But it was not rabid. It was strong and healthy before the impact. The fur was thick at its ears, and its eyes, even now, were bright, alert, beautiful, and wild, even as it struggled to stay alive.

“It’s a good thing it’s winter,” the woman said. “No pups left alone.” So it was female. “Anyone know what happened?” An older man said that someone had hit it and driven off.

“No,” I said, “I’m the one who hit it.”

She got on the phone to the police, and described where we were. Someone wondered why the police were called. The older man suggested it needed to be shot.

For some reason, I thought this woman from the Humane Society would have everything she needed in her van, and would be able to euthanize it immediately. She explained that she would never touch a wild animal so severely injured, and neither would any veterinarian. The only alternative was to shoot it.

“You should all leave,” she said. “You don’t want to be around when it’s shot.”

I simply looked down at it for a second, panting blood, its injuries dramatic. If it wasn’t euthanized, it would simply die in an hour, or two, all the while in some kind of agony I don’t want to imagine. I suppose I looked distraught, because the older man took my arm warmly and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do on these roads. And it won’t be much longer.”

And so, as they drifted away, I simply thanked the ones who had stopped, and I thanked the woman from the van, and I went back to the car.

Alex was still upset, his hands mostly covering his face. “Should I take us home?” I asked.

“No, we should go hiking.”

And so we did.

In Speyside, the trail is beautiful and tight, and crowded with fragrant cedars growing from fissures in the ancient rock of the escarpment, split from centuries of ice and rain. It snowed last night. The trail was undisturbed. Snow capped the rocks, and coated each needle on every evergreen. It was quiet, except for the occasional call of a crow, and the crack of wood in the distance.

Nobody had passed the trail here before us — the snow was pristine. The only tracks were those of coyotes, following the natural depression the trail made, moving ahead of us in what appeared to be a gallop; two animals, traveling side by side and marking the snow on our beloved Bruce Trail, hunting rabbits, or simply running freely through the forest. We followed for a while, and once, we missed the marked path and had to double back.

I loved the impression of those tracks. Here, they galloped, and here, they slowed, walking close together. They traveled along the path for what seemed like a long way. I could follow them all day. But soon, the tracks left the main trail and headed off into the trees, and disappeared from sight.

Louis About me, Alex, Bruce Trail, Hiking Coyote, Suffering

After reaching my Munich hotel on the very last part of the trip to Europe in September 2007, I dissolved into a state of exhaustion and depression.

My cell phone had been a thin connection to Alex for the entire trip, and that afternoon, I clung to it. I was leaving the next morning for Canada. The coming night seemed unbearable. I told him I wanted to push up the flight to that very afternoon. Patiently, his voice kind and worried, he accepted that wish, and only hinted at its irrationality.

My composure crumbled. From about the mid-point of the journey with my family, circumstances, and the realities of that dynamic, had pushed me aside from the group somewhat, a situation certainly only tangible in my mind. Thereafter, the clamouring hot fingers of panic were constantly scrabbling at the back of my neck. I had not known the sensation for twenty years or more, when, as a young adult faced with many fundamental shifts in life, I had regular panic attacks. Now, they threatened again, not quite able to overtake me, but clearly lurking on the edge of my consciousness. Helpless and thousands of kilometres away, Alex could only listen.

Munich revisited

The room was much smaller than my first stay at Hotel Uhland. It was really no larger than the combined space of two closets in my bedroom at home. And it was twice the amount of money: Oktoberfest, held on the grounds of Theresienwiese literally steps away from the hotel, was to begin the day after my departure. I had to leave the space for a while in order to regain my sense of composure.

I went to the city centre, and walked through the smoky, crowded Hofbräuhaus. The upper level was unfortunately closed, so I couldn’t view the historic photographs and other items apparently there. But a sense of the familiar came over me, somewhat bizarrely, crammed, as it was, with all manner of people but actual Germans. But the loud Bavarian umpapa band, the smell of German food, the waitresses wearing dirndls, and the enormous steins being slung onto long wooden tables was all just too familiar, taken together, not to be a comforting atmosphere for me. How strange are the things we find solace in, when home is far away.

I wound my way through the Viktualienmarkt, through small side streets, and finally to Stolberg Schokoladen, a chocolatier I had seen in a tourist guide. It smelled beautiful in there. I bought a lovely bar of chocolate with Sweets for my sweet written on the box.

I decided to walk to Nordfriedhof, the large cemetery well north of my hotel and the city centre, and unknown to me at the time, bounded immediately on the east by the Englischer Garten, which I had failed to visit. I suppose it might be considered dark and ghoulish, but I have always loved the peaceful gardens of cemeteries. This one was long and dark, and filled with large mossy monuments, and crosses tilted in shadow against the afternoon light near the perimeter walls. It is a relatively new cemetery, having been built in the nineteenth century, but it seems oppressively old. I didn’t see any names I recognized. Apparently Traudl Junge is buried there, and Paul Troost. I took many sombre pictures. The camera had difficulty registering any light beneath the trees.

On the way back to the city centre, I happened to come across der Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, the tiny memorial to the victims of National Socialism. I had never heard of it. It was tucked against the corners of two streets lined with what appeared to be the palatial residences of a lost aristocracy, now converted to a series of shops. It was a sad, small memorial, surprising for its inconspicuousness.

I returned to Marienplatz and sat at an outdoor café, where I ordered some goulash soup. Once again, I was assumed to be a native German by the waitress. Next to me, a young American woman struggled to order dessert of some kind, and could not understand the subtleties of the fresh cream and pastry she would soon find sitting in front of her. I have always wondered at English speakers in foreign countries, who begin immediately with their native language, without first asking — even in English — if the person can understand. On my two month European tour in 1984, my travelling partner egregiously made this mistake time and again.

By the time I’d finished my meal, evening was settling in. It would be dark quite soon. I would have to face the cramped quarters of my room, and the emptiness of night.

In the room, I looked at the pictures I’d taken that day. All but two were the photos from Nordfriedhof.

I consider myself a rationalist. I cherish reason, I attempt to use logic in discourse, I eschew the irrational, and I don’t accept the supernatural assertions of religion, theism, or the occult. I am ashamed of what I did next. I feel a smaller person for it.

As the forms of the crosses and monuments slid by on the camera’s view screen, I deleted each image, one after the other, until all were erased. These shapes of death would not be the last pictures I took on my European trip.

I called Alex again, and we talked about the next day, and his voice and his kindness settled me. I lay in bed with the phone next to me. I read for a while. The clamour of panic had since mostly receded. This was the final night. Standing behind me, the events of the entire trip seemed distant.

Found

On the ground in Toronto, there was a security delay. We waited quite some time while the aircraft was boarded by security personnel. We had to walk past a security line while officers checked everyone’s passport. It was somewhat unnerving. The long, serpentine line at the customs desks inched forward. The customs officer asked a few questions about my stay at an Austrian farm, which I had disclosed on the entry form. I walked through the customs area, and out the gate into the main airport, scanning the crowd for Alex.

I couldn’t see him. I waited fifteen minutes or so, then searched the area, walking around the environs of the gate. He wasn’t there. I was getting alarmed. I had no Canadian money, but, after many unsuccessful attempts, I managed to place a call with my credit card to the office, where I was told Alex had neither checked in nor called all day.

The plastic handle of my suitcase was slick with sweat. My heart quickened a little, the unwholesome but distant feeling of panic nudging the edges of my consciousness. Where could he be? Images of what might have happened to him on the road to the airport, in their ugly, quiet insistence, bubbled up in my mind.

I paced the floor in front of the gate. The crowd thinned. The display with details of my flight dropped down the list on the large panel above the gate’s doors, minute after minute. It would soon be gone. I’d be gone. I had no idea either where Alex was, or what I would do, or when I should do it.

As I turned to cross the floor again, he suddenly appeared in front of me, his familiar face breaking into the sweetest of smiles; he seemed tall, towering above me, his long arms coming out to touch me, his eyes, a brilliant blue, a long drink after a dry thirst, telling me what he didn’t have to say: You are home.

Louis About me, Alex, Germany Munich, Nordfriedhof, Panic, Travel

I wake Alex up early, and we pack towels, books, and drinks into the car. We’re on our way right on time, and we stop at the usual place for bagels and coffee before setting out on the highway.

It’s a beautiful day, the best of the summer, and the last of the summer. There’s not a cloud in sight. It must be thirty degrees. If only it had been like this the many other weekends before. It has been a summer of rain and false starts and cancelled plans, but now we’re on our way with one last try for a day trip away from home.

The trip is a long one, more than two hours, and on the way we have to fill up. Before, as we’d move west and south, the clouds would gather, and the temperature would drop, but today, the sun stays bright, the sky crisp blue and hot. It’s perfect weather.

When we reach Port Rowan, it’s a further twenty or so minutes on the road leading along the forty kilometre spit toward Long Point. The weather still holds, the air is still hot and beautiful. There are lots of cars around, and as we get near the park, it seems it will be a crowded day in there. But not where we’ll be.

We park, and take out the towels and the frisbee and the umbrella, and start a long thirty-minute walk along the park’s beautiful beach. The lake is stunning. There’s a breeze, but the surface is relatively calm, and perfectly reflects the dark blue of the sky and the slightly pink horizon at the furthest edge of sight. It hasn’t looked this beautiful all year. When we near the water’s edge, we can see right to the soft rippling sand at the bottom for as far as we’re able to look out.

We walk past the rows and rows of moms lying motionless in the bright sun, and kids and dads yelling and laughing in the water. As we near the eastern part of the spit, the crowd thins, and then there are just a couple of families, and then we are at the division line between the park and the boundary along the bird sanctuary. We cross under the metal rope. There’s still a few people even here. A man is taking pictures of his wife and infant daughter playing in a shallow pool of water. “Can you take our picture,” he asks. Of course. It’s always him and the little girl, or his wife and the little girl, and they can never get a picture of all three, he says. They’re very happy, and both of them thank us several times.

Now there is nobody else, but up ahead, we can see one or two bodies along the beach, and somebody’s in the water. We’re here. We won’t have to wear clothes or a swimsuit along this part, at the very edge of the private property that extends to the furthest point of the spit. We find a nice flat space in the sand, and set up our umbrella, and spread out our towels. There’s only a few people here: an older couple at the very water’s edge, where a woman is reading in a lawn chair in the shallows before the lake opens up; a younger couple to our right; one or two others lying in the sand, or moving along the beach.

We walk out into the lake, past a warm shallow full of tiny minnows, and into the expanse of water under the sky. The water is beautiful, reflecting bright blue, and large ripples lap at us as we make our way out as far as possible before the lake would go over our heads. Alex has his goggles. He swims a few short laps of freestyle in the open water.

It looks kind of neat. I go back for my camera, and hold it carefully above the water as I make my way back to him. I get some pictures of him doing strokes, and then he’s standing waist-deep in the lake with the sun behind him, shining off his wet shoulders, his goggles on his head. I take more photos. He glides into the water on his back and free-floats, his face turned to the blue sky. “This feels weird, like I’m falling,” he says.

After a while, we return to our towels. Alex reads. The sun moves toward the western horizon, in the opposite direction of the furthest point of the sand bar. I lie back and doze. I listen to the sound of the waves rolling up onto the sand, the gulls and cormorants croaking or cawing in the distance.

Some time passes, and it’s hot. We take up the frisbee and go out into the lake, and toss it back and forth for almost two hours. It’s the most fun we’ve had. We both lunge as it flies overhead, or to the left or right. You can do this much better in the water, because there’s no danger of a hard fall to the ground. It’s great stretching out into the sky to reach as it flies past, then crashing into the water — either with the disc in hand, or not. The waves sometimes add to the push of water from the lunge, and many times it rolls over my head, or up against my face. I’ve got my hat on, and Alex laughs at the sight. Water pours over the bill in front of my face.

Sometimes I stop while Alex swims for the frisbee. I stand in the deep water and look into the blank horizon, against the wind, which has now picked up. It’s gentle and beautiful, still warm, but holds in its crispness a hint of the coming autumn. Then I fall back and float, looking up at the perfectly clear dome of sky.

We’re done after a while, and return to the beach. The afternoon is getting on to evening; it’ll be turning dusk soon, and we should go.

After we pack, we walk in silence back along the beach. It’s empty now on this part of the spit. Alex is walking slowly many paces behind. When we get to the park’s lakefront, we walk past a little city made out of sand that someone has built. It’s very detailed. There’s even an airport, a parking lot with little sand cars, and a baseball stadium with a diamond and grandstand seating. There’s some buildings with long blades of grass connecting them in arches, and everywhere there are feathers and sticks and grass used as markers and columns. At one end, there are three huge pyramids made of sand. Are they mountains?

Out on the lake, the setting sun is sparkling on the surface of the water at the crest of the little waves. It looks alight, or as though there are small jewels or lights rising above the surface and lowering again.

We’re very tired when we finally reach the car. We drive out of the park, and through Port Rowan toward Simcoe, where we’ll stop and eat. The sun has almost fully lowered. The light is orange and gold, the sky still empty. It’s been such a beautiful day.

We think this was the last day of the summer, at the end of a summer mostly wet and cool that had stopped us from doing the things we’d planned. But now, this last day stands behind us. The most beautiful day, the most perfect company. In the future, we’ll talk about the time we went to Long Point, when Alex swam the freestyle in the lake for the first time, when he stood against the perfect blueness of the sky, and we threw the frisbee and stretched into the perfect clear air of the loveliest day of the summer.

Audio reading of this entry.

Louis About me, Alex, With audio Beach, Happiness, Lake Erie, Long Point

We’d been planning on doing something in the sun today, but it didn’t seem that either of us were up for anything in particular. We half-heartedly strapped the bikes to the back of the car and set off to the Horton’s for a starter coffee, thinking we were going to Caledon, and the bike trails there.

While waiting in the drive-through, we realized that neither of us felt up for the long trip out to a place quite close to Kleinburg. Alex found a brochure in the pocket of his door for conservation areas along the Bruce Trail, in the Dundas Valley and Spencer Gorge areas of Hamilton. We returned home to drop off the bikes, then picked the largest waterfall we could find — Tews Falls — and headed out.

It was quite an impressive sight. I had no idea a waterfall this large was anywhere near where we lived. I tried out my new point-and-shoot camera, and got a few good pictures of the falls from a viewing platform.

Alex was quiet, had been all day. Sometimes it’s difficult to read him. But like me, I think that for him, things just seem somehow out of sync once in a while, or perhaps nothing is particularly appealing. We’d had some trouble deciding what to do when the day began, and, having decided the night before that we were certainly going to do something — but what? — it was a disappointing struggle to come up with a day trip we’d both like.

But, here we were at Tews Falls, and something called “Dundas Peak” awaited at the end of an adjacent trail, so we left the viewing platform and made our way to a point high on the escarpment that overlooked the city of Hamilton.

It was a nice view (but it was Hamilton). We took a few more pictures and enjoyed the scenery a bit, then headed back down the path. We talked about going to Denninger’s for schnitzel and other good stuff. I don’t know what I was saying when I suddenly realized Alex was no longer walking beside me. I looked back, and he was standing and staring at something.

We’d just started to cross a small foot bridge, and he was crouching down and shaking his head. His mood wasn’t improving at the site of a bible verse, God this-ing and God that-ing, scratched onto the wooden rail of the bridge with a pen (beside a big black flourishing graffiti tag).

And God said to Moses, “I AM.” And you shall say to the children of Israel, “‘I AM’ sent me to you. I will bring you out of bondage to a land flowing in abundance!”

The author of this bit of divinely inspired graffito completely misrepresented the quote, as no translation fails to omit God first saying to Moses, “I am who I am”. In any event, Alex was quite animated. It seemed his level of tolerance for anything appearing to be prosyletization had been reached. What with the absurd display of this year’s Olympian track and field athletes, most of them African, blessing themselves until they must have been fairly bruised about the forehead and navel, the dangling rosaries on rear-view mirrors in cars next to us on the highway, the proliferation of cheerful floating Jesus-fish on the rear end of gas-guzzling minivans and SUVs, and the spectacle of some Conservative nobody reasoning that God must support their party because it had stopped raining just before Mr. Harper’s Big Speech, I think Alex was at some kind of breaking point. He wasn’t incandescent, he wasn’t livid, but he was certainly animated. He had certainly had enough.

It’s true, this bit of vandalizing was misplaced and stupid. I couldn’t work out why this quote seemed apropos to this particular god-believer. The scenery around it was certainly pretty, and the wooden railing would surely have been the only workable surface his black ball-point pen could tolerate for many kilometres around, but why that quote? Oh well, believers are not necessarily known for connecting their sentiments to their faith in a way that makes sense to the rest of us.

Dumb though it was, I wasn’t as put off, and downright offended, as Alex was. I did mention that I was thinking of running to the car for a pen so I could add a few words to make the thing profane, but I wasn’t serious. And of course, smuttifying bible verses isn’t just the ultimate expression of one’s emotional immaturity, it’s also deeply offensive to many, many people. One’s cause in life isn’t to offend.

As we started to pass over the bridge, a group of Mennonites were coming toward us, perhaps five men with their wives. “Oops,” I whispered to Alex, snickering, “maybe these are our vandals.” We passed them, the men looking at us and smiling, one or two saying “Hi,” the women looking only at the path.

“It wasn’t them,” Alex said. And of course it wasn’t. These are people so committed to non-violence and cohabitation with humanity that they take great pains to make their very churches blend into the surroundings, should they have to locate the buildings within the greater community. Causing offense to those of a differing faith, or making a show of their own faith, would be a shocking transgression for them. If I am made to have respect for the beliefs of others merely because they have beliefs, and not because of the substance of those beliefs, Mennonites are the only group of Christians I could tolerate it for.

Eventually, we made our way to Denningers and got schnitzels and a whole lot of other good things, and had a dinner of pork and poppyseed cake and salami.

I suppose I’m amused that just the other day, I was saddened by the notion of some believer not seeing the forest for the trees, heaping empty praise on nothingness while the real beauty of his surroundings escapes him.

If you want true wonderment, you should wonder at the improbability of the universe, of our planet, and, most improbable of all, of our individual consciousnesses experiencing it all. The enslavement to the worship of nothing is deeply sad. In the end, it excludes all possible human happiness, great or small. It’s bondage that humanity truly, truly needs liberation from.

Louis Alex, Believers Believers, Bible

Alex and I went swimming in a fifty metre pool for the first time, and though we were both tired, we were quite pleased with being able to do continuous laps in a medium speed lane. It was an outdoor pool, and the afternoon turned quite cool. I was uncomfortable for a few minutes, but the briskness of the day eventually went well with the exercise. There was a slight, wobbly struggle to the car, but we soon recovered.

We decided to refuel at the chicken place, and on the way out, we wondered what we should do. Going home immediately didn’t seem like such a great idea. We hadn’t been to Bronte Creek together in some time, so we decided on the park.

Bronte Creek on a weekday evening in late August is a pleasure to be in. There were virtually no other people there. We started at Spruce Lane farm, and walked to the end of the dirt road by the pond, and turned back. The light was beautiful and golden. I wished for my camera. “Sometimes it’s better to be without it,” Alex said. He was right. Enjoying the park and his company was better than worrying about pictures.

We went back to the farm, then started a long walk around the big empty fields, copses, and farmhouses. We looked up and guessed at the structure of the clouds high above, lit from below by the setting sun. It was gold and orange and blue. They were whispy and light and beautiful. “Are those cirrus? What are cirrus clouds, anyway,” I asked. We talked about the edge of the atmosphere and the clouds that were there, and the crisp late summer night. “Look!” There were pinstripe clouds, even and regular and picture-perfect, high above our heads. “Can you spot the mares’ tails,” I asked him. He couldn’t. “There, and there.”

“We’re so lucky to be here,” he said.

Looking up into the endless blue above us, and at the golden and orange light, I couldn’t have agreed more. Then I thought how wonderful all of this was, how beautiful the admiration of it, without having to infuse this natural wonderfulness with gods.

As we walked, I imagined a believer might be compelled to talk about the creative genius of God, the beauty of God, the sublimeness of God, all the while exactly missing the breathtaking example of beauty and lovleiness all around him. The universe is so breathtakingly beautiful and light, that being encumbered by gods diminishes the experience of it for people, erodes its tangibility, like a river eroding the limestone banks surrounding it. It’s a sorrowful thing to remember the lens of fantasy that most people are forced to view the world through.

We passed another farm. There were three cows in a field on their way back to the barn on their own. One was quite young, and kicked at the air with its back legs, scampered around the two adults, nuzzled their faces. It was a sweet sight.

I suddenly realized this was the same calf, now much bigger, that I had seen six or eight months earlier, alone in the barn nearby in the cold of winter. I’d been at the park taking pictures by myself, and went to this barn to find some goats. A lonely calf was the only animal there. It was lying in a dark corner, and I didn’t see it until it stood up slowly, and made its way toward me. I pet it a bit, feeling sorry for it, and fed it some hay. It was obviously very lonely (and probably cold).

But here it was on a beautiful late summer night, full of life. It was a lucky sight, for me.

Eventually we found ourselves at the huge abandoned parking lot, choked with weeds, that leads to Spruce Lane farm. There were bats flitting everywhere overhead. “Watch what they do,” I said to Alex, and tossed a rock at one. It immediately swooped toward it, circled it quickly as it arced to the ground, then sped off when it realized it wouldn’t be very tasty.

We got to the car in almost total darkness. The sky where the sun had almost completely set was dark blue and red. The whispy clouds streaked from horizon to horizon. Jupiter stood out like a shining rock toward the south.

I opened the window as we drove slowly on the tiny road that led toward the park exit, letting in the evening air. It had been a perfect day, a beautiful evening. It would be a gorgeous night.

We are so, so lucky to be here.

Louis Alex, Believers Believers, Bronte Creek Park