Echo Valley.

That`s what we locals call it: Echo Valley. Our land slopes down toward the fields and stream, but we cannot actually see it through the trees. Our little stream rushes down through the woods to join the one in the valley bottom and together they slide through pools and forest to the sea not so very far off. Once joined with the sea, they are spread over most of the earth and some part of them rises as vapor, returns as cloud and snows back upon us again. Returning, like an echo, you might say.


This is a place we visit regularly: walking down the hill and into the wider world of fields and open sky. Years ago, before we went sailing, Heather and I would walk here on dark starlit nights with our star chart in hand. "There is the Dipper and the North Star. There is Orion -that brilliant line is his belt." So we would walk with our heads back and our feet feeling their own way down the deserted valley road. Recently, we have walked in the ruts left by cars in the snow, watched the ducks quacking on the ice edged flooded creek as the snow melting on the fields fills the creek to bursting. Water burbles dark brown through vegetation choked ditches.

The most visible thing in the heavens is the Milky Way; the edge-on view of our own galaxy: a great river of star foam washed across the night sky. A sort of negative or reverse echo: black sky and bright star path reversals of these white fields and dark stream waters. Some nights, we hear ducks up there too.