The Most Beautiful Thing in the World

 Assignment: Write a descriptive essay on what you think is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Audience: General

Length: 1000-1500 words

I love to study photographs of the unspoiled portions of the earth, especially those that include forests, meadows, and mountain creeks.  I wish I could have been one of the explorers or Native Americans who saw the Great American West before it was settled by farmers, harvested by loggers, and dammed by power companies.  What would it have been like to follow the changing seasons on the prairies, watch a family of beaver dam a creek to make a pond (and later watch it fill in and become a meadow), listen to the wolves howl on a moonlit night, or smell the cool pine scent of a mountain forest?  Yet all those things are still there if you take the time to look for them.  

My childhood encompassed the 1970s during a time of renewed interest in conservation.  College-educated city kids who came of age in The Turbulent Sixties were bringing their families back to the land to set up tiny homesteads in the middle of remote areas from the “hollers” of the Tennessee mountains to the wild plains of Montana and Alaska.  Grizzly Adams took us from our modern suburban living rooms on a journey “deep inside the forest” through “a door to another land” and showed us a glimpse of untouched wilderness.  Ranger Rick Raccoon, Smokey Bear, and Woodsy the Owl taught us kids that even we could make a difference by cleaning up trash, being careful with fire, and not polluting our environments.  In my free time I spent hours exploring the woods, turning over rocks in the creek, exulting in thunderstorms, and studying the insects in the grass. Sometimes I just sat under a tree and dreamed.

Slowly the years passed.  The junior high school student struggling with what was probably undiagnosed autism found refuge from school bullies at the top of a maple tree, clinging to branches swaying in the breeze.  The restless college student took to the mountain trails below campus.  The young mother walked her babies to the park, played in the sand with her toddlers, picked flowers with her preschoolers, and rode bikes with her preteens.  The pastor’s wife, heartsick over the negative reactions to her husband’s ministry and some turmoil in their church, took long walks through a chain of islands near her home.  It was during this period that she started taking pictures of insects, sunsets, flowers, geese, pumpkins, apple blossoms, even raindrops on clothespins, immersing herself in the soothing quietness of the outdoors.

Three years ago we moved.  We’d been moving periodically for more than thirty years, but this time we really moved--out of our house, out of our adopted country, away from half our children and grandchildren, and … not into another house.  For a full year, exactly three hundred sixty-five days, we lived a journey that deserves its own telling some other day.  But that year we hiked in half a dozen different states from New York to Georgia; in the mountains and along lakes; in blazing sun, blustery snowstorms, and pouring rain.  We walked on hiking trails, gravel roads, and mountain highways (the two-lane kind).  We had the wind in our faces and the scents of apple blossoms, mud, pine needles, roadkill, farm yards, rain, and wildflowers in our noses.  We heard songbirds, gurgling creeks, deer crashing through brush, semi-trucks groaning up the hills, coyotes, waterfalls, distant trains, and the noisy birds: crows, geese, roosters.

After we bought our house, we still kept up with the great outdoors.  The Susquehanna River flows so close we can walk out our door and have our toes in the water in thirty seconds.  The mountains are all around us begging us to explore all the back roads.  We quench our thirst from a pipe that brings pure spring water out of the side of a mountain, and fill our water coolers to take some home.  We can drive five minutes in any direction and be on state game land where it’s legal to camp as long as you keep moving and don’t stay more than one night in any one spot.  The Appalachian Trail, ranging from easy strolling to hard climbing, passes through Pennsylvania less than half an hour from our little town.  In under two hours we can be in any of at least half a dozen state parks with their beaches, nature centers, and mazes of hiking trails.  Creeks by the dozen race down rocky hills or meander through farmland all over the state. 

Those creeks are probably my favorite places. Their constantly running water keeps them alive with activity.  Bursting with flood waters after a few rainy days, they move boulders, throw up mud, rearrange gravel, and uproot trees in giant watery power surges before calming down into quiet fishing spots, deep swimming holes, and crayfish hideaways.  Deer come to drink.  Cranes pick their way in the shallows hunting their breakfast.  Raccoons make tracks in the mud during the night, hunting tadpoles or small fish.  Eagles and hawks soar overhead.  Tortoises lay their eggs in a sandy bank, a sign that life goes on as the seasons change.

Animals aren’t the only ones enjoying the creeks.  Children splash each other, float on inner tubes, or build dams.  Cousins show each other how to catch minnows in Styrofoam cups during a family cookout on the Fourth of July.  Young mothers sit in the shallows and visit, keeping watch over their little ones splashing beside them.  One little girl tries to find as many pure white pebbles as she can, and years later gives birth to a son who does the same.  A pastor baptizes a new convert; other believers gather around with songs in their mouths and towels in their hands, while kayakers respectfully pause in their journey downstream.  Teenagers go rock-hopping up and down the creek, trying to keep their feet dry before finally, one after another, they all end up in the water.  A 50-something mother and a couple of her teenage sons find respite during a heat wave in a shady pool beneath a covered bridge.

Along the shore, fishermen follow deer trails way up into the hills and come back with supper strung on a line.  Berry pickers, with an eye out for bears, fill their baskets and buckets to make pies and jams, to flavor ice cream, or just to have a snack.  In a tent pitched in the sand, a teenager reads a picture book to a young girl who will one day be a teacher.  Years later, she will read that same book, now a favorite, to her class and recall that first reading by the creek.  Families spend lazy summer days living in cottages dotted along the banks.  Someone dozes in a hammock, lulled to sleep by the sound of water babbling over rocks.  And often, at least in some parts of Pennsylvania, there will be a good-natured debate about whether all this is happening in and around a creek or a crick. 

I am grateful to have all of creation to enjoy, to have fun in, to relax in, and to run to when I need a refuge.  But in order to have a creation, there must be a Creator.  He is the One I worship and praise.  He is my refuge and strength.  He is the One who made me and knows my end from my beginning.  He is the One who heals my body, mind, and spirit.  Creation is just a tool He uses.  If I am awed and soothed only by creation and not by the One who made it, I’m missing the point.  I’m failing to give credit where credit is due. I’m failing to worship the only One worthy of worship and awe.  One of my favorite hymns makes that point:

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander, 

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.

When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur

And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, 

How great Thou art, How great Thou art.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, 

How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

--Stuart K. Hine

Note: The music for "How Great Thou Art", as arranged by Manna Music, is copyrighted. However, the words and the original Swedish melody are both in the public domain.