Big Beautiful World 17 -- Water Lily, Montour Preserve, Montoursville, PA

It’s a big, beautiful world out there. Let’s stop trying to screw it up. There's a generous and undeveloped plot of land snugged adjacent to the Montour Power Plant that has been turned into a nature preserve. The Montour Preserve was originally built in 1972 to provide backup water for the power plant, and for more than 40 years plant management had stewardship of the land. They developed a bunch of public-interest uses for and on the land--hiking trails, the visitor's center, observation blinds, a boat launch, a fossil pit, etc--and recently, negotiated with a non-profit agency to transfer land management. Which is great news because for a while the fate of the preserve was up in the air, and if it disappeared then my water lily would have been gone too.And we wouldn't want that to happen.