Point Pelee National Park

I’ve been rooting through our photo catalog this week and found this gem that Anne took in August of 2005. It was taken on a side trip to Rochester, NY, from our annual cabin sojourn. It aptly conveys teeming nature with its brilliant greens. It was taken at Point Pelee National Park, which is located in Ontario. Pelee, just a spit of a land, sits like a dagger plunged into the water from the north shore of Lake Erie. It extends a mere five miles south from the rest of the lake’s shoreline, but that is enough to make it a Mecca for migrating fowl that regularly cross the lake. The photograph also conveys the peacefulness of a late summer’s afternoon. Any naturalist worth her salt will tell you though that this is an arena of competition, strife and death, as well as a park teeming with life.

I’ve been flummoxed by the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s thrown me off my blogging game. I both loathe and feel compelled to watch, read and listen to the media’s 24/7 babble. Sampling this news leaves me feeling disgusted, but like an addict, I soon return for another fix. One positive side effect has been that I have been able to lose myself in work this week, where no media can penetrate, unless you count the occasional Cards game.

At home, while Anne works nearly 24/7, leaving no child untested, I’ve taken to watching the Vikings. This History Channel mini-series, which has all the signs of a perennial, shows us what terrorism was like over a thousand years ago. Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) wants to raid from Scandinavia towards the west. His Earl prefers the more traditional eastern course. Placed upon a collision course, these two will have a reckoning when Ragnar sets sail for England. He uses an interesting navigational technique, not the usual lodestone, to sail the North Sea. In England, Ragnar and his trusty crew find easy pickings. Vikings is a little better than the typical swords and sandals, read Game of Thrones, where all the men do is hack at one another and women when seen are naked and/or abused.

Terror is as old as life itself. The denizens of Point Pelee and their ancestors were in turn both predator and prey. Does it eat me or do I eat it? As Vikings portrays terror washed up on the shores of medieval Briton in the form of marauding Norsemen. Their terror was motivated by loot. Animals eat each other, vikings kill for gold, but why does someone blowup marathon runners?