Those secret places

I guess these places won’t be secret now.

This weekend I visited one of our secret places, Hawk Creek campground.

My wife and I used to prepare a picnic lunch and drive to Hawk Creek for one of our outings. I will miss this.

There is a high waterfall there that you can walk to and let the roar and splash of the water wash away the cares of the world.

This time I went with my oldest son Paul and his wife Cindy.

I have had, and my wife and I together have had, many such places. After all, that’s the stuff memories are made of.

I had such places even as I grew up in Palouse.

On the weekends, I used to pack something to eat on and head out east on the railroad tracks that ran by our house.

Now, to some it wouldn’t be an earth-shattering experience. But to me it was.

The tracks followed the Palouse River, where the sound of the rapids broke the quiet of the day. A lot of things happened along the river. There were beavers, an occasional deer, and a lot of bird life. I could sit along the bank and just watch.

Over my childhood years I frequently took this route. Oh, those quiet times.

When the two of us visited Palouse, we always went up in Kamiak Mountain, where it was rumored that Indian 

Chief Kamiakin was secretly buried.

If you went early in the morning or just before it started to get dark, the deer were everywhere. Just sitting there, you could count maybe 50 or 60 deer.

We had another special place that we often visited when in the Palouse area, Laird Park (also called Grizzly Camp), which was an old family get-together place where visiting family members would gather with the rest of us.

Later I developed some of my own places.

I visited Hong Kong a number of times and found such a spot at the top of the tram.

The tram car moved on a track, and at the top you could look out over the city. At night the view was spectacular. I always went there. The cost then was about a dime, now a couple of bucks.

We often visited Dorothy’s farm home in Buhl, Idaho.

On the farm, you could follow the irrigation canal down to a little waterfall. There, we could sit and just enjoy the outdoors. We sometimes would fish there and often pulled in good size trout.

While living in Nampa, we often drove out to Lake Lowell.  The lake was full of migratory waterfowl. Just fun to watch.

Everyone has special places, spots that speak to you and enable you to set aside, temporarily, the cares of the world.

And there have been many more such places.

What’s yours?