The Spring in My Step

An Apostle Islands postcard

Spring means more than just warmer temperatures here along the lakeshore. It also marks a return of motion. For months now, locked in the white stillness of winter, little could be seen moving, the world gone still but for the swish of my own legs, a few tracks in fresh snow (weasel?), a puff of wind in the trees. Winter is a kind of pause, a caesura in the musical notation of the seasons.

But with the thaw, the music begins again - waves strum the shoreline. Creeks break free, their waters scattering towards the lake like anxious dancers storming the dancefloor.

Now, as I hike, my head spins as I think the motions into the season — at this latitude, the earth is rotating at 740 miles an hour. The rock that is our planet roars along through the void of space at some 67,000 miles an hour, traveling a 584 million mile journey we call a year in 365.256 days. Skeins of migrating birds arrow overhead, driven by an irrestible and ancient urge to move. Tree branches fiddle in the wind.

Lost in these thoughts, I step to the crumbling edge of a reborn creek tumbling its two-step the last few feet to the lake, in love it seems with the sheer joy of motion. “Oh I do not know where I am going,” says the poet A.R. Ammons, “that I can live my life by this single creek.” I step over the chattering waters and continue down the beach, the renewed spring in my step its own silent toe-tap to the born again music of the season.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).