Choate Own Choice #4

December 6, 2018

My family goes to Maine every summer to spend a few weeks at our family lake house on Swan Lake. My siblings tend to enjoy boating, or swimming, or eating local seafood, but my favorite activity is much more simple. Once a week, I will kayak out towards the center of the lake at night and just sit in the middle and take in the lake and the woods around me. People in Maine tend to go to sleep earlier so I often don't find many lights on around the lake at this time. I will sit and listen to the sounds of loons calling to one another or the faint buzzing of dragonflies passing just a few feet overhead. I distinctly remember one night as I was paddling back in, as I approached the beach, I saw a bat swoop out from the trees on shore and scoop up a dragonfly in its mouth and fly off. I was dumbfounded by the shear purity of the moment, to watch nature take its course, relatively unaffected from human interaction. I began to have the feeling of being a witness to a whole new world that I had never experienced before and had just been revealed to me.

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