After a day to myself I realized I couldn’t stop thinking about the bird’s nest from last time. I wasn’t shaking or anything but I just had to know whether or not that egg I had put back in the nest had survived. Call it an instinct of sorts. So I took a break from binging Gundam Seed and drove on down to Price Park to see what had become of that egg. Smooth Jazz filled my headphones as I started walking and instantly I was hit with a dose of reality. The bird egg was gone. Not like it had rolled out of the nest, but it had just vanished, leaving no trace of ever existing. Needless to say, this rattled me a little as I assumed a wild animal may have come and eaten it while I was gone. But as heartbreaking as that felt, seeing that egg become a victim of the natural world’s cycle, I decided I should just take a nice walk in the warm weather while I was still there.
As I walked down a familiar trail, I was fascinated by the trees this time around. On the left you could see dozens and dozens of trees that had fallen over. To the point that it almost looked like they had fallen into the portions of art sculptures with pealed bark as a centerpiece for some. That’s when I remembered you could usually tell how old a tree is by the number of rings it has around it’s center. So after walking a little further I happened to come across one such tree with the top chopped away. The texture of the ringed side was quite smooth to the touch, almost like everyday hardwood floorboards without that glossy finish. While I tried to count the rings and see how old this tree was, I just kept losing count too easily. Definitely an oldie though.
From there I kept walking, hoping still to find something new to talk about as I continued to just explore and examine the different kinds of trees from each side. That’s when I stumbled across a path I had never been down, one with no paved roads or signs. It was simply beautiful at first glance as I saw mud-prints and fallen trees all around it while the sun lit the way for me, almost like it was saying to me “this way, kid”.
Once I started walking through, it reminded me a lot of the forest preserves back down in Hilton Head Island. There was an overall sense of calamity but preservation nonetheless. What I mean by this, is that these trails do feel man-made, but they still feel like they’re a part of the natural environment around us. That combined with the state of the weather, the bright but not too bright sunlight, and the overall smell of nature really reminded me of the nature preserve back in HHI and after getting a nice sense of nostalgia to take my mind off the egg, I knew it was time to head home. While I haven’t been able to dig up much in terms of this park’s history, I do plan on digging further come the next blog. But that’s all for now folks.
