Living at Silver Creek Preserve

A lot of people ask me what it is like to live on the Silver Creek Preserve. For those of you who have spent any time on the preserve, you know how beautiful and amazing it is. To live here is a great adventure—every day is different and filled with wonder. I find this time of the year to be one of the most inspriring. The animals are busy getting ready for the winter, the days are getting shorter, and the cool air means waterfowl and other birds start to come for the winter. Two weeks ago I heard the first elk bugle and now we hear them all night long. Three weeks ago I saw the first group of sandhill cranes as they started to gather for their journey southward. Now, there are hundreds circling, filling the air with their eerie call, and catching the thermals as they get ready to head south. The moose are on the move as well, back and forth between the hills and the creek-- their usual path just yards from our front door. Everything is busy and everything is changing, not unlike most of our lives. There seems to be more time here, however, to sit back and take it all in. Maybe because we are a little too far from town to have much time to socialize, we spend a lot of time hanging out on the porch and just watching.

Now that I have a son, the wonders of living in this amazing place are all new to me again. It is an exciting journey and I look forward to his first fish caught, the first mud he roles in, the first feather found… all the wonders that make up my days at Silver Creek. I often think of the book my dad gave me when I went off to college, Rachel Carson’s A Sense of Wonder. As she wrote so eloquently,

“A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear- eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

--Dayna Gross, Silver Creek Preserve manager