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Walking in the Forest (30)
NinaM
![Gold Star Critiquer/Gold Note Writer [C: 608 W: 0 N: 1516]](http://i1.treknature.com/misc/g-n-g.gif) (4981) | Hello everyone, today I am introducing you to the mountains as seen from the Regional Park at Ste-Béatrix. After walking all along the river, we climb a small hill and then walk on the edge. After a while there is a nice clearing with a wooden bench and you can just stop, rest a little bit and enjoy the scenery. Those are among the most ancient mountains and this area used to be an ocean. Don't ask me more than that, I know that the glaciers melted and formed an ocean. Now, it is hilly and very wild even though you have villages there and there.
The people came to colonize the area, they had to deforest whole spaces in order to build their houses and villages. Can you imagine the work these people have done? Without looking at such events in an ecological view, one comes to realize the hardship of these people and the strength and endurance they have endured. Those were tough lives and no time to complain... or dig into oneself and one's emotions.
The winter were very rude and cold and the summers are very hot and humid. And short. There are whole armies of black flies, also the flies we call "mouches à chevreuil", "deer flies", they are crazy and turn around your head until you go nuts... and they bite hard!
There are many species of moskitoes... I will try to find out how many. The black flies and the other ones we call "brulot" ("burns") are the worst. The brulots bite in the neck and a big bump grows... bloody sometimes and it's so itchy! Those forests are fantastic but a little unfriendly regarding the temperature and the biters you find in it.
In this big forest you find coyotes, brown bears, moose, wolves, foxes... Walking alone in it, in a bad weather, make you "feel" they are there, you can almost smell then. The forest is so strange, the evergreens don't have needles at the bottom of their trunks leaving whole dark spaces between them... with the soil filled with golden needles, no green grows because of the darkness.
Sometimes a patch is open at the top of trees and there you may find ferns and some small plants growing... sometimes a very young tree managed to get enough light to raise over the ground.
When I walk there I feel the earth is my home and the animals and wilderness are my brothers and sisters even though the forest is a dangerous place to live with many predators, harsh weather and the work involved to survive in it. Yet nature is where we come from, it is our blood and flesh, our "house". I feel home there. My body knows it and I also realize how far from it I had become because of work, of my culture, of the city life. Because of so many things.
To come back to it is to "return" to myself. Home. I didn't know it was such a wild place!
Francine
ISO 100
Saturation added, sharpened in Picasa
Resized in Lightroom, full frame
You can see a read maple leaf, beautiful clouds and this wave of green trees... it is so green because of all this rain. |
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