Healthful exercise
A young woman, arms swinging vigorously, just jogged past our house.
She does this nearly every day about the same time and she seems to enjoy the experience.
She is always accompanied by a dog which trots obediently beside her, smiling in his dogged fashion.
If she wants to run, he’ll run but he’ll reserve the right to sniff the occasional post.
These two are a hangover from the era when everyone walked, jogged or ran in obeisance to the god of fitness.
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Today one keeps in shape by driving a four-wheel drive over a sand dune or looking at an exercise bike and deciding to fix it some day.
There are opportunities for healthful exercise. The good citizens of Duck Lake, Sask., have a museum with an 25-metre tower, with displays on various stairway landings. The view from the top is superb after you’ve leaned against the wall for a while and stopped panting. The huge Glenbow Museum in Calgary has so many things to see one can develop a most satisfactory foot blister.
National parks have dandy nature trails where you can walk 20 kilometres. Often you can walk for a kilometre or more without encountering anyone, although there are still venturesome families.
I hear that in Prince Albert National Park they now have a water taxi to cut down on the hike from the end of the road to Grey Owl’s cabin.
Formerly, walkers had to overnight on the trail but now a quick boat trip across Kingsmere Lake gets you up and back in the same day.
Soon we will have rickshaws to carry us to the boat launch and from Kingsmere to the cabin on Bagwa Lake.
Ah, nature in the raw.
