Flip 7--Tryon Creek State Park
6/30/2007 6:56 PM Saturday
Location: Iron Mountain Bridge, Tryon Creek State Park
When you are small, everything seems bigger than it "actually" is. Also, distances are longer. I remember these woods feeling immense when I was a first grader; now the park seems more manageable, as if I could walk across it in a few minutes without breaking a sweat.
I feel the presence of the nearby urban landscape. I know there are houses just through those trees. Even as I write this, I am sitting on a sewer grate, of which there are many in the park. The stench of rotting effluent, while not overpowering, is nonetheless persistent and unpleasant.
Mosquitoes and flies orbit my head and torso, as if I were King Kong atop the Empire State Building.
And yet there is a special feeling I got when I strode into the park. I felt a cool air through my legs, and the satisfying crunch of my sneakers on the mud-gravel trail. After a few hundred yards, I could not longer hear the workmen on the deck of the Lake Oswego home that abuts the trail head. I could only hear the gentle wash of Tryon Creek over stones and gravel, and birds high in the tree boughs.
How long will places like these exist? In another 100 years, or 200, urban wilderness may be as mythical as water on Mars. We'll have to drive hundreds of miles to camp or hike, and even then may not be able to find a place unmolested by development.
So in this age of rapid urban expansion, I am grateful for the privilege of seeing a tree older than my great-great-grandfather, mosquito-bitten as it may leave me.
There is something pleasing about a bridge. Though human-made, if constructed out of the right
materials--wood or stone--it can seem a part of the natural landscape, certainly as in place in the woods as a dirt trail. A bridge is an unobtrusive way to cross a stream or ravine.
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