Reflections on the Eleventh Week of Spring – Our Forty-ninth with a Dam Beaver

    The question was how to celebrate our forty-ninth anniversary Thursday. On past anniversaries we walked on Presque Isle beaches, ate dinner and listened to live jazz at Nighttown, or paddled a canoe then a kayak on Lake Wilhelm. We even celebrated our twenty-fifth in England exploring pubs and Jane Austen sites. 

   “We could go to the movie theater in Cochranton,” Spence said.

    A movie? We’d gone to While You Were Sleeping for our anniversary in 1995. In the dark, quiet theater, Spence fell asleep after the opening credits and didn’t wake until I nudged him during the closing credits.

    I said, “Maybe we could do something new.”

    “Like what?”

    I had a wacky idea, but figured he’d go for it. After all, every year since his folks purchased Wells Wood in the 1970s, Spence had combed the banks of Deer Creek looking for beaver gnawed sticks and pointing at slow flow areas saying “If I was a beaver, I’d build my dam there.” This spring he discovered a real dam. He took evening walks to check the beavers’ progress.

    “What about taking folding chairs down to the creek to wait for beavers to appear?” I said. “We could read while we waited.”

    “I’m your guy.”

    Thursday at 7:00 p.m., I grabbed my camera bag, Annette Dashofy’s No Way Home, and remembered, three and a half hours too late, that one of the folding chairs was in the guest room where Charlie slept. “Do you have your book?” I asked Spence.

    He studied the pile of paperbacks on the coffee table. “I won’t take one, but you can take yours.”

    I set my book on the table, said “We’re in this together,” and stepped onto the porch to fold the aluminum chair. I handed it to Spence and picked up a wicker chair.

    “Leave it,” Spence said. “I can sit on the ground.”

    So much for sitting and reading together.

    In silence, as if the beavers could hear us an eighth of a mile away, we tiptoed down the porch steps. I stopped in the field to take the camera from its case, switch it on, and attach the zoom lens.

    Leaves smooshed underfoot on woods paths. Rocks crunched under our feet by the creek.

    Spence set the chair on a swath of rocks six feet downstream from the beaver dam and waved me into the seat.

    I sat and focused the lens on a pile of debris forty feet away. A beaver lodge? Hard to tell with the tree branches and distance obscuring my view.

    Spence stood behind me.

    Water burbled in a feeder stream, chickadees sang “Hey Sweetie,” and traffic rumbled in the distance.

    After five minutes, Spence tapped my shoulder.

    I turned.

    He grinned, waved, then reached for my hand. After a minute, he let go and peered under the brim of his dusty baseball cap at the beaver pond.

    I faced the pond and watched bugs bouncing off the smooth surface. Fragrance of dame’s rocket and damp floated in the air. A song sparrow and blue jays joined the chickadees for the evening chorus.

    Ten more minutes passed. Spence tapped my shoulder a second time.

    I stood and glimpsed movement by the debris pile. Focusing the lens along its curved edge, I squinted. No beaver. I looked back at Spence.

    He shrugged.

    He stood. I sat. We waited while a feeder stream burbled, the bird chorus harmonized, and lawn mowers hummed in the distance.

    Another five minutes passed before Spence tapped my shoulder for the third time.

    A beaver swam across the far end of the pond to the bank. It submerged. Water rippled in its wake. The beaver’s head emerged ten feet from the dam.

    I stood and focused the lens. The camera flashed and clicked.

    The beaver glided closer and closer until it reached the dam. With a stick in its right front foot and mud on its chest, the beaver patted the top of the dam.

    Flash. Click.

    The beaver glared at me.

    Flash Click.

    It raised half its thirty pound bulk out of the water.

    I suppressed a yikes and my unease with the creature’s hidden, sharp teeth just six feet away.

    Flash. Click.

    The beaver swung around, body splashed the water, and slipped away.

    I turned to Spence. He wore a grin that matched mine.

    “That’s the best you’ll get tonight,” he said. “The splash warned other beavers away.”

    Toting our gear, we tramped over rocks then leaves.

    “We’ve never done that for an anniversary,” Spence said.

    Our forty-ninth with a dam beaver was an anniversary to remember.