Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

This summer my kids and I roadtripped to Traverse City, Michigan, with some dear friends of ours. The last few years we’d made the longer trip to Holden Beach, North Carolina, and I was curious to see how the lake beach felt different from the Atlantic coast. Sure enough, plenty was the same—there were jetskiers, parasailers, teenagers playing sand volleyball, and children making sandcastles and splashing in the shallows.

But I saw one thing at the lake that I didn’t see at the ocean: ducks. Whole families of ducks! Mallards with their beautiful, glossy green heads. The mother ducks, mostly muted brown, but with subtle, tucked-away indigo feathers on their sides. And so many baby ducks, fuzzy and clumsy, some small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. They followed their mothers around our patio, snapping at the grass and eyeing our snacks. They left long lines of tiny webbed footprints on the beach. They swam in the water.

My kids and I took plenty of pictures of those ducks. We would call to each other, excited to see them so close to our back door each morning: “These babies are the smallest yet! Come look!” Once my daughter couldn’t find her hair tie, the one she used to put her long hair into a ponytail on those humid afternoons. As she searched through the books and sketchpads and snacks on our patio table, I saw it, held in the bill of a mother duck. It must have fallen into the grass. Eventually the mother duck dropped it, and I picked it up so none of the ducks would mistake it for food again.

At times like that, it’s hard not to feel like we humans are in the way. During our time at the lake, I was enjoying the beauty, but I also looked around more than once and thought, “This would be much more beautiful if we weren’t here.”

I didn’t mean if my family weren’t there on vacation—I meant if humans had never built highways and strip malls and gas stations. The view of the water and trees and sky is better without jetskis, and rafts, and parasailers. The view of the lake is better when it’s nothing but lake.

I feel this even driving in my city, my view of the clouds and trees obscured by warehouses and high rises and radio towers. We don’t have to go to the water or the forest or the mountains for nature—nature is all around us, all the time. We coexist. But sometimes the society we’ve built makes it hard to notice.

Today’s poem acknowledges the beauty we have—the view we have. It also mourns the beauty that would exist without our interference. Holding space for both is a feat of empathy and imagination.

Lake
by Noah Falck

Sick with boats.
Sick with people in swimwear.

The water bright with tidal plastic.
At sunset, the lake is a city

memorizing the sky
stuck on orange meets

pink meets the last part
of a never before blue.

It’s a ruined work of art.
Now clouded, gray, gone.

Shirtless men point to every
moving thing on the horizon.

"Lake" by Noah Falck. Used by permission of the poet.