Bill Vossler: When the earth moved
Ernest Hemingway claimed that if a person was extremely lucky, the earth would move once, twice, or maybe three times during their lifetime. Thus I am extremely lucky — or easily moved — as I have been gifted with having the earth move many times during my life, each time filling me with a sense of awe, wonder, and majesty.
Most have involved animals, like seeing a doe flinging up silver jewels of water from her muzzle into sunlight; or noting a dragonfly, clutching the end of my finger, its head jerking robotically as its huge eyes examined me as though to say, "The guys'll never believe what I caught!"; or a vee of Trumpeter swans soaring low over me, their undersides pure white against the impossibly blue sky, while several honked to make sure I would perceive their beauty.
But the greatest instance occurred one day when I was cruising a highway that pierces the great Canadian wilds north of Winnipeg. Late afternoon shadows were flowing into early evening, and wraiths of mists were seeping out from under the kellygreen pines and curling across the tarred cracks in the highway. The mists and shadows twined together, like spirits. They swirled around trees, and into the primeval forest, like playing hide and seek. Nothing else moved in the great misty stretches of the wilderness.
Until I sped around a long curve. There, jowls swinging, walked a huge moose, with racks branching like brown lightning against the sky. My tires screeched as I hit the brakes. The moose strode onto the road, now only ten feet in front of my car. Parts of his antlers were green.
In a sudden last ray of sunlight, he was reflected on the hood of my car. His thigh muscles rippled as he paraded in front of me. Over the purring of the engine and the thumping of my heart I heard the clop clop of his hooves on the pavement, as though a giant pair of hands — God's perhaps — applauded its beauty.
The moose stepped toward the far ditch, which seemed filled with mist thick as cream poured there until it reached nearly level with the highway. The moose crossed the road — he stopped and looked at me to make sure I realized whose road it was, then angled down the ditch with a surety that said, “I know this land.“
Then, except for his great head and antlers, he disappeared into the whiteness and began to run, bodiless, the skull bobbing up and down. A hundred feet further he climbed easily up the other side of the ditch and on the threshold of the forest, turned to eye me, as though to say goodbye, and good riddance.
Then he shook his head and turned into the gathering gloom, and was swallowed by the trees. I pulled over and suddenly found myself outside racing down the road and down into the soupy-white ditch, my body becoming mostly invisible, and up the other slant, hoping to see his form in the dark haze. At the verge of the trees, my shoes and face wet, I peered into the darkness of the pines. But he was gone. The breeze blew in my face, and I smelled the primeval forest, and perhaps the spoor of the moose.
I spotted one of his prints etched in the soft soil of the earth. I knelt and paid my hand in the large footprint easily, and felt it. I closed my eyes and inhaled, lifting my head. And the very earth moved.
The core of my being, the very center of my essence palpitated with the awe and wonder of the ways of nature.
— This is the opinion of Bill Vossler of Rockville, author of 18 books including his latest, "Days of Wonder: A Memoir of Growing Up." He can be reached at bvossler0@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: Bill Vossler: When the earth moved
