The Faerie Glade

Come away, O human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
- Loreena McKennitt, The Stolen Child

There are special places in the world where magic wraps itself around you the instant you arrive there. This is one of those places. It is also a newt's paradise. (Yes, and as proof of that, meet my little buddy Newt, whom you can see in the "extra photo" area. *waves to Newt*)

I stopped at Shingletown Reservoir for 20 minutes on my way to a routine dentist appointment in Boalsburg on this morning. It had been raining out, but the rain seemed to break for a little while for my drive.

It was misty and gorgeous out, but very damp. I parked, jumped out of the car, and began taking photos of the stream. And so it was that I almost stepped on a small orange fellow who was hanging out by the big rocks near the parking lot. Newt! Red eft, in fact, the terrestrial, juvenile form of the eastern newt, whom you've met before in these pages.

Since I had nearly stepped on the creature myself, I thought the newt needed to be moved to a safer spot. And so I did that, picking up the newt gently and migrating it away from the parking lot to a pile of leaves and rocks along the water.

Then I headed up the hill and into the woods. In the morning, in the mist, it seemed not unlike a faerie glade. You might expect any manner of magic creature to run, jump, swim, fly, crawl, or dance past. Or to hear the sound of ethereal music coming from both nowhere and everywhere at once.

The sound that I actually heard, though, as I was taking photos of the creek was several very loud booms of thunder, the "warning shot," as we say here, just before the storm. The sky darkened (I think you can see this impending darkness in the photo), and then it opened up and began to pour.

Fortunately, I already had my photos "in the bag," and I had my umbrella with me too. So I opened up the umbrella, put away the camera, scooted down the hill, bid farewell to the newt, and . . . with great reluctance . . . left the woods.

The song to accompany this photo is the haunting Loreena McKennitt tune, The Stolen Child. whose partial lyrics are quoted above. Loreena is actually singing the words of a William Butler Yeats poem of the same name that was published in 1889.