A bike ride at Blackwater

Along the Wildlife Drive at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.

My new neighborhood was not just the countryside, which our society sees with dominating eyes and determines to change for its own good, but a land, or lands, of the universe, peopled by lives that came to the present out of unrecorded time.  Out on the flats, and no less inshore, I could expose myself to currents of unfailing energy, while light and water kept flowing past, and feel a wealth of other senses moving with me.  Every life was taking advantage of its time.  In learning to recognize these members of a greater community, not only by their labels, as objects of natural history, but for their connections to myself, I started to make some progress.  I pushed out the boundaries that had confined me, and it began to be an open world again.

~ John Hay from the essay The New World in The Way to the Salt Marsh: A John Hay Reader