We Could Have Been in Alaska!

It's a beautiful Fall day in the GNC - colors are bright, air is crisp and moving, the waters of the Schoharie are running clear again - and so I am walking my dogs around Dolan's Lake in Hunter, NY.  One dog is deaf and one is blind, but they know this walk well and help each other as they pant, sniff and pee on the grass perimeter of the lake.

"Lake" is a kind word for this body of water.  It's a pond really if it's anything, a strip of water in a man-made cavity split off from the Schoharie so the local kids have a swimming hole on hot summer days.  Swimming hole is a more accurate description than lake or pond.

So, there I was walking the dogs around the swimming hole on this fine Fall day.  There is a jogger going by one way, a guy doing ski prep exercises against a tree, a couple walking their Lab in the other direction.  We're all minding our own business, sharing the precious privacy early in the morning, before cars, motorcycles and RVs of all shapes and sizes start arriving for Oktoberfest.

WHAM!  WHOOSH! SPLASH! an Eagle with the wingspan of a Concorde dive bombs this little nothing of a swimming hole, fully submerging itself in the shallow water and then WHAM!  WHOOSH! SPLASH! it surfaces ten yards from where it entered and takes off into the quiet sky with a flapping fish in its claws.  The jogger, exerciser, dog walkers and I stared silently at the event, all of us with the same thoughts I'm sure: so accurate was its dive, so powerful was its grip, so steep was the inclination of its flight, so elegant the act!  As it flew away with the struggling trout in its talons, we exhaled together.

I mentioned this is a small swimming hole?  You could swim across in six strokes and you could touch bottom whenever you want to? That there is an electric sub-station on the banks and a picnic pavilion next to the sub-station, and that it is near the parking lot where the Beer Drinkers congregate before and after their chugging?

None of that mattered to the eagle.