The most important thing about endings, in my opinion, is that they force us to look back on our journeys. Though it’s nice to have my first year at UVM coming to a close, to know that in just a week I will have the worry of schoolwork off of my shoulder, and will be eating home-cooked meals while my dogs beg me for scraps, I feel a bit sad that this saga of my freshman year is almost over.

My phenology spot, the small section of beach, separated from North Beach by a section of rocks, has been with me this entire year. When I arrived here, I was homesick for the ocean, in which I swim almost every day. I biked down to the water sometime during my first week and found this small beach, and wading out into the lake, found that it wasn’t too different from the great Atlantic, besides the salt. I soon joined the UVM Triathlon Club, and embarked on a journey to teach myself how to properly swim freestyle. I sputtered and coughed up lake water, shivered myself warm, and baked out in the sun here. I remember the last day I swam there – some day in mid-October. I went down intent on doing an epic swim workout, only to find that the water was freezing! I think that the mixing of the thermocline had occurred. Since then I’ve been swimming in the pool.

Still, I’ve been visiting my spot, and I feel very connected to it. Once on a cold night, a group of friends and I had a bonfire down at the beach. I’ve seen ducks, snakes, squirrels, and even what I believed to be rabbit tracks. Nature and culture are closely intertwined at my small beach, and I feel lucky that I was allowed to find it, and make something of a home of it. Before I leave, if there’s a nice day next week, I’ll put on my wetsuit and go for a swim at the beach. After months and months of swimming in the pool, I’m sure it will be much different, and I’m excited to see how profound this change is. Next fall, I will return to this place, and continue to treat it as my home – picking up trash and keeping tabs on phenological changes. But for now, I’ll go back to the ocean.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2019 at 10:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.