Tuesday, March 12, 2013

If You can Spend Time Alone and be Happy

Rained so heavily, this is the only photograph I took. Once again, good weather for fishing, no trout. No one else around, either, only a ranger that motioned at me from his window-sealed cab to move my vehicle into a parking space. 

Well, if he hadn't, I wouldn't have got this shot taken with the driver's door quickly opened, then closed. I happen to like it. 

Once it really gets warm, that dock will be placed in the water to the right of the picture. Round Valley Reservoir will be speckled with boats, kayaks, canoes, and the shorelines near the main boat launch and this Lot 2 area will host wandering couples, bass fishermen, trout fishermen: specks of red, yellow, blue and brown, etc. that give the place a blithe feeling of airy abandon, as if many realizations of everything being alright come to people here. 

But I have to say I like having spent an entire late fall and winter coming to the Valley and sometimes seeing not a single other car in the large lot and no one else in view. I like a place forbidding with the weather doing the trick here in New Jersey. It's not that I don't like people. I like being alone sometimes. And to be able to be alone often and/or at length would mean that one likes people, since a man alone has to put up with himself. 

If you can spend time alone and feel happy, that means you're a good person who passes the tests of deeper stuff coming up.