This week I fly to Nairobi for a conference, to the land of the true safari. But before any of that, on a Friday after work, I went on a different kind of safari, closer to home, and in many ways closer to my heart. I took Mama Lidia to Isobel Lake.
If you have never been, Isobel Lake sits in the grasslands and forest north of Kamloops, a quiet jewel held by the pines. It is the kind of place that does not ask much of you, only that you arrive and let it be beautiful. And it is, in part, wheelchair accessible. I say “semi” because nature is honest about its slopes and surfaces, but the path and the lakeview welcomed us, and that welcome mattered. Accessibility is not a small thing. It is the difference between a parent staying home and a parent feeling the wind off the water. To bring Mama to a place that opened its arms to both of us was its own kind of gift.
The weather cooperated, which felt like a small grace. Blue sky, soft clouds drifting over the forested hills, the lake holding all of it like a mirror. We took our time. There is no rush on a safari like this. The whole point is to look.
And oh, the wildlife.
Our first encounter was the big game of the Kamloops range: cattle. A whole gathering of them, black and brown, mothers and calves, grazing along the forest edge and standing right on the gravel road as if they owned it, which, in that moment, they did. We slowed, we watched, we let them be. There is something funny and lovely about a traffic jam made of cows, about a calf studying you with the same curiosity you are studying it. Mama and I laughed. The Serengeti has its herds. So does Lac du Bois.
Down at the water we found the gentler residents: a family of Canada geese, parents shepherding a little line of goslings across the surface, with a few more grown geese gliding nearby. The goslings were at that in-between age, no longer fluff and not yet flight, paddling along in the wake of their elders. I watched a parent keep its small ones close and thought, of course, this is what we do for the ones we love. We swim a little ahead. We keep them in our wake. We make the crossing feel safe.
That, really, is the whole story of the afternoon. I am the one who usually does the keeping safe, arranging the care, holding the schedule, planning the trip to Africa down to the last vaccination. But on Friday at Isobel Lake, I got to simply be a son beside his Mama, both of us under the pines, both of us looking out at the same blue water. We took a selfie, the two of us, her in her straw hat, me grinning over her shoulder.
Before the long flight, before the harambee of a global conference, before all the work that calls me, I needed this. A slow Friday. A cooperative sky. The big game and the small. My mother’s face turned up toward the trees.
You do not have to go to Africa to go on safari. Sometimes the most beautiful wildlife is the heron-quiet calm of a local lake, the cattle on the road, the goslings learning the water, and the person you love most sitting beside you, taking it all in.
Thank you, Isobel Lake, for being accessible enough to hold us both. I will carry this afternoon with me all the way to Nairobi.
Love. Care. Share.
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