The Cows are Watching

This blog is about getting out and exploring places whether they are close to home or far away. So why call it, “The Cows are Watching”? I think the question deserves an answer or more to the point a story about one of my little adventures or more precisely misadventures. 

This past summer I took my kayak out to a local lake I had read about in one of those books with a list of different nearby adventures. Getting to the lake required paddling up a channel until the lake magically appeared out of the landscape. At least this is what I expected. I got the the boat launch just fine all excited about my little adventure. The launch was on the side a bridge and since the lake was not visible from the road and I had failed to examine the map closely enough to see which direction the lake was from the bridge, I decided that going under the bridge was the wrong direction. After paddling through stagnant and narrow waterways, should have figured out I was going the wrong way, especially when a cow crossed the stream in front of my kayak, I finally decided I was going the wrong direction, mostly because a small waterfall was blocking my route. 

At this point only one option was left, turn the kayak around and paddle back up stream. At the place the cow had crossed in front of me earlier, the spot was a wide little pool with a narrow inlet and outlet, I pulled up in my little 13' wooden boat and realized that there were about 10 cows standing on the rim of the little rise which surrounded the pool, staring at me while chewing their cud. The whole experience was like something out of a Far Side comic, the cows on the rim of the hill keeping watch over me while their companions are on the other side plotting the conquest of the world. 

So the name of the Blog derives from the my experience of the cows watching me as I was paddling my boat the wrong direction. The story does have a happy ending, I did find the lake once I went under the bridge and up a much wider canal.