Prose: Camp Morning

I woke up around 6:30 this morning. The air was calm and mild, and it was apparent that it had rained overnight. Despite the dampness of the ground, the trees, the fly of my tent, I was dry and the air felt pleasant.



My campmates were still asleep. Not wishing to bother them, I wandered over to the bathrooms, where two brown-grey rabbits were taking their fill of breakfast in the large lawn next to the simple building. I watched them for a short while as they moved together across the grass.

After arriving back at the campsite, I decided to put my swimsuit on underneath my leggings and sweater and wandered down to the camper's beach nearby, towel flung over my shoulder. It didn't seem like anyone from the urger campsites were awake - the only sounds I could hear were my own footsteps and the occasional muffled sounds of an airplane taking off from the airport nearby.

The small cove known as the camper's beach was rockier than the public one. Certainly less appealing to the general beach going crowd, but more secluded and about a ten minutes walk closer. The water was calmer than it had been the day before, as there was less wind, but there were still small waves splashing against the rocky little shore.

The sky was overcast, a light grey colour that blanketed the horizon, broken into by the dark, skinny coniferous trees that lined the edge if the lake the whole way around. The water was clear for about ten feet, large rocks clearly visible beneath its surface. As you got further out it became steel grey, a darker reflection of the sky above it, broken only by the steady but shallow rolling waves.

It began to rain lightly, small needlepoint drops hitting the surface of the lake with precision. Each drop left what looked like a fleeting black spot on the water's surface, so that it was as though I had experienced a rush of blood to the head, and spots were dancing before my eyes.

The rain didn't last long. When it had died off, I looked up and watched one crow, then two, then three, circle above me. Then, another bird, flying just high enough that though it looked like it had the white head and tail of an eagle, I couldn't be certain. It may have been a large hawk. It circled around and then disappeared behind the trees. I continued to stare at the space it had been. It circled back. It was still too high up to be certain.

I decided to swim.

I stripped down to my bikini and left my towel and clothes on one of the picnic tables next to the shore. I waded in until I was ankle deep. The water was cool, but not freezing. I walked in until the water had reached my knees, and then, with a shallow dive, swam five or six good strokes before turning over to float on my back. It was colder than I had hoped it would be, but not unpleasant. I could still touch the bottom, so I swam out another twenty feet or so. By this point, the lake floor had dropped away.

I treaded water, momentarily taken aback at the lake and the sky and the woods, all filtered through the grey lens of an overcast day. It was stark and I felt alone, not just in the lake, but in the world.

I swam back to shore and decided to pick my way down the little beach to the point where the lake formed a bottleneck and began to feed the brook that ran through the campground.

I didn't think to put my shoes back on and grumbled at myself as I picked my way across the tiny, sharp rocks that made up the shoreline of the cove. A motorboat sat moored on the shore next the bottleneck, so I walked toward that, and the closer I got to it, the more I could smell gasoline. I was watching the ground as I walked, trying to pick the path of least discomfort among the rocks, but looked up just in time to see a deer on the other side of the bottleneck, picking its way gingerly among the shore, some twenty feet from where I stood.

We both froze. We started at each other for a few pregnant moments, myself both in delight and in an attempt to not scare her off, and she, likely, assessing the threat level of my presence. Then, with a loud huff and a flick of her tail, she bounded into the woods. I remained frozen momentarily. When the crashing through the trees stopped, I leaned over to peek through them. There she stood, grey in the shadow of the canopy, turning to look back at me. It seemed as though we made eye contact, and immediately, with another loud huff and her tail flicking, she bounded deeper into the woods, disappearing from my sight.