New Friends, New Foes



Week 3: Storytelling of an Experience in Nature

One fine August afternoon I was training for the 5K race that I would run in nearly a month. I had been sticking to mostly indoor running at the Allen Center, but it was such a lovely day that I decided to take my training outside. Since I knew that the loop around Lake Joanis in Schmeeckle Reserve was about a mile, that was the route I chose to take. I barely got a quarter of a mile around the lake before I nearly ran into a young buck.  I know that the deer in Schmeeckle are very tame, but it still felt peaceful to be so close to a wild animal and have neither of us terrified.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get to know each other very well because he had to go make new friends himself. 

I had almost finished my lap around the lake when I came upon a stretch of geese. Even though I was approaching on the trail at a moderate jogging pace, they didn't seem to want to let me pass. Suddenly, one of them started violently hissing at me, and the rest of the flock soon followed suit.  That was all of the motivation I needed to high-tail it out of the nature reserve as fast as humanly possible  Because of the nature of our meeting, I wasn't able to take a picture of them...which I feel is pretty understandable.

I thought that it was quite ironic that in my short run through Schmeeckle I was able to have both a very peaceful and very scary experience with nature.  My good experiences, such as my one with the deer, far outweigh my negative experiences with evil, territorial geese.  Therefore, I doubt I will stay away from Schmeeckle Reserve for long. I want my students to have many experiences in nature, so that their judgement of nature won't be just from one possible bad experience they might have had.  For this reason, I will try to incorporate outdoor experiences often into my lessons.