View from the Dock, Bald Eagle State Park

We took Friday as a vacation day, packed our gear into the car, stopped at Jim's Italian Cuisine in Bellefonte, grabbed a pair of Italian hoagies and tossed them into the cooler, and headed to Bald Eagle State Park for the day.

We sat in our chairs in the shade, on a day that started out very sunny and quite warm, but then turned breezy and very pleasantly temperate. The clouds were fantastic and dramatic; what a sky show! We swam in the lake, while a bald eagle flew back and forth overhead - a bird that this park is famous for (and named for!), but that I had never seen before in the hundreds of times we've visited there. A first!

And then after swimming, we changed clothes, piled back into the car, and headed for the far corners of the park: the older parts, where everything is very old-fashioned. When you get out of the car, you'd swear you stepped back in time 50 or 100 years ago.

First, we stopped at the original concrete road that was flooded in 1971, when they dammed up Bald Eagle Creek to create the lake. The end of the road goes right into the water, and it is really awesome there, an almost post-apocalyptic scene. At the edge of the flooded road, it is shallow enough for wading, and families come there to fish and hang out. (This prior blip picture was taken near the flooded road, and you can see just a bit of the road on the left.)

On this day, as I got out of the car to photograph the flooded road, a little girl in red (maybe 6 or so) approached me, politely said hello, and warned me to be careful by the edge, for it was slippery in the mud. And I thanked her and promised to be careful. And then she showed me that she had tall rubber boots on, so she could get in the water and wade. And she did. And her brother (about 7, not much bigger than her) joined her.

The boy and girl walked into the water holding hands, and I caught my breath. It was like they were walking into the infinity of past and present - at this juncture of earth and sky and water - together, completely fearless, holding hands. How I wished for a picture, but I didn't want to intrude on the moment. In my heart, I hold that moment as my picture of the day: brother and sister, fearless, stepping into infinity together.

We left there and headed for the boating area. Another old place. Old cement stairs, down to the docking area. I walked out to the dock and startled a heron fishing in the shallows; it winged its way across the water. And I took some pictures from the dock, using various camera modes. I think this one was taken using the posterized camera setting. You can get a sense from this picture of the awesomeness of the clouds on this day.

As I walked along the shore taking pictures, I noticed several Mennonite ladies and their children having a great time at the picnic area along the lake. In their old-fashioned clothes and with the ladies wearing the traditional hair nets, they could have stepped out of time.

In a bed of wildflowers along the lake (which I started to think of as the Pollinator Cafe), butterflies and bees visited the blooms. A yellow swallowtail, its wings ragged but its spirit strong, moved quietly among the blooms feasting on the flowers, enjoying the day.

One of the things I like most about Bald Eagle State Park is the feeling I get when I go there of having stepped outside of time, or of time having stopped. So the song to accompany this picture is Rush, Time Stand Still.