Walking Home Ground Read online

  Leaves are turning color on the bushes, thicker and higher than they were last time, some of them already a vivid dark red. I’ve missed the growing season, having come in early May, when it was barely beginning, and now again in late September, as it ends. A cleared path heads off from the other side of the boat ramp and I follow it, on damp and spongy ground, through an alley of high shrubs with flowers plentiful: pink thistles, deep blue and pale blue asters, white marsh asters, a bevy of yellow flowers. A wedge of geese passes overhead, honking all the way, dark shapes against light gray clouds. Glancing up I notice the oak opening on the hill above; I’d passed it on higher ground last time. The understory is dense with shrubs, bushes, flowers, and ferns. Every so often small birds fly up out of the thickets and cross the path to the thickets below the oak opening. Some find a perch on the tallest, deadest oak. Somewhere toward the lake is a hidden fen.

  This path takes me to a junction with the trail, established by the Ice Age Trail Alliance, that circles the park. From this point I’ll be on familiar ground, or at least on ground I’ve walked before, though the fullness of the summer’s growth makes most of what I’m seeing unfamiliar. The shrubs give way to grasses, and the ground is firmer, dryer, no longer black muck. Grasses stretch above my head and mingled in them are intermittent stands of milkweed and thistles and tall flowering shrubs with the petals gone. The tall grasses soon give way to shorter ones I can see over. I pass the willow thicket, higher now and leafed out, denser than it was in May. More geese fly over from the direction of the Fox River wetlands to the west. I hear shots in the distance and remember that Marquette County devotes a good deal of acreage to hunting. The Fox River National Wildlife Refuge itself is closed to visitors unless they’re hunters—“refuge” strikes me as the wrong term from the wildlife’s perspective. I feel a bit of misty rain and move on, finding myself now in waist-high grasses waving in the wind. More small birds flit briefly above them.

  I pass the hickories, crushing the nutshells as I walk, the crunch reminding me how plentiful they were in spring and how hard they are to see now. The trail keeps me above a long stretch of fen and below an open field cleared as a sand blow but now grassed over. I climb the ridge into the oak opening again, my hands painfully cold from making notes in the wind, and as I warm them in my sweatshirt pockets, I survey the lake, particularly aware of one corner thick with lily pads. I remember the woman with the dog I’d met in May and imagine that she saw all the changes here happen incrementally over the seasons.

  Along the path the shrubs grow thicker and taller and the boardwalk across the sedge meadow and the bridge over the inlet stream seem secluded. As I pause on the bridge, a woman comes briskly from the other direction along the trail. We startle one another but greet each other as if we haven’t. I’ve been staring at a red-leaved bush with abundant white berries, and when she says she lives nearby and loves this trail, I ask her if she knows what I’m looking at. She glances at the bush and tells me confidently it’s red-osier dogwood. I thank her, immediately aware that I should have known what it was. She moves on, while I shift position to gaze across the garden meadow. I can barely locate the house that was so visible in spring.

  Past the sedge meadow, the oak openings thicken and the winding trail feels secluded, the uplands rising to the east, the lake invisible because of the thickets and now because of the forest. When the trail veers closer to the lake and I can see it again, I briefly test a side path likely formed by animals, but I find the ground too mucky and wet, and I backtrack. There’s more sedge meadow here at the southern end of the lake, and when I find a more promising side trail, I take it to the water’s edge. The ground is a little spongy, but at the shoreline I can see the marl of the lake bottom, touch the reedy grasses growing just off shore, see another line of lily pads.

  Further around the southern edge of the lake a longer side trail crosses a broader stretch of sedge meadow, tempting me again. The ground jiggles under my feet. My footsteps squelch and as I stand at the edge of the lake I realize I’ve weighed the ground down enough for water to rise around the bottoms of my shoes. I think of John Muir’s memory of carpenters working on the house who “noticed how the sedges sunk beneath their feet, and thought that if they should ever break through the bouncy mat, they would probably be well on their way to California before touching bottom.” Sedge meadow fills the space between the two side paths I’ve taken.

  I move into oak woodlands, a forest with a high canopy, its understory now entirely filled in, bordered by high hills on the west side of the trail. As I come out of them, I watch for the pool at the center of the fen I’d seen in the spring, but the undergrowth is too tall and I can catch only the slightest glimpse because I know it’s there and I’m looking for it. The cattails near the bridge across the outlet stream have almost all burst open. Back in the county park I take one last long look at the water and the distant shoreline from the dock, then walk up to the signs at the trailhead explaining the different ecozones I’ve passed through. I’ve done better this time at knowing what I’m seeing than I did in the spring. If I lived as close to Muir Park as the woman I met today and the woman I met in May, I would walk the circuit often, becoming familiar with everything I see, not simply memorizing but letting nature stream into me.

  That essentially was John Muir’s approach—to open himself up to nature, to put himself in its midst and be willing to learn what it had to tell him. That’s what he did here and then what he did everywhere else he went. That’s what I will need to do on my own home ground.

  I’m aware, of course, that I am not walking the same place that John Muir walked when it was his home ground—he himself helped change it and he lamented the changes that came after he moved out into the larger world—but, as Aldo Leopold once hoped, what the natural area here preserves and has partially restored offers the chance to gather intimations of Muir’s experience and to lightly replicate it through opening ourselves to it.

  By reading Muir on Fountain Lake Farm I gain insight into an approach to nature and to place with universal application, one still potent and pertinent. It’s important for me to acknowledge that this is no longer the place Muir knew—I haven’t really engaged in time travel here—and to develop some comprehension of the ways in which the environment here has altered—I will be walking my own home ground in its altered, present state, after all—but that doesn’t lessen what I can gain from letting nature stream into me wherever I am, at the moment I’m there.

  Not long after I leave the park I turn a corner and see two sandhill cranes stalking through an overgrown field. I slow the car, then stop by the side of the road. I stay a few minutes to watch them move, admiring their patience and pace. They add to the sense of calm that has grown in me across the morning. Cranes have bookended my autumn hike in Muir’s home ground; before I put the car in motion, I thank them for being there.

  Interlude

  SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 2011. Perhaps spurred on by reading Aldo Leopold, who would have been up and out long before now, I strike out for the woods around 7 a.m. It’s cold, and a light, low fog hangs over everything. Rains have raised the river level, and I can tell at first sight that the wetlands are partly flooded again. I stride down to the observation deck to gauge the water level and find it higher than the last time I saw it, but still much lower than it was a few weeks ago, when I could find no sign of land other than a couple of small, temporary islands. For once I’ve remembered my binoculars, and I sweep them slowly across the floodplain, following the course of the river. I stop when I notice, upriver, two sandhill cranes standing near the bank. I steady the binoculars to observe them more closely. They’re too far away for me to discern their red crowns, but their tall, slender gray shapes rising above the grass are clear. They are still and silent, as motionless as the stark barren shrubs that occasionally rise above the sedges. I watch them for a while in expectation of movement and eventually—too slowly—realize they are watching me as well.

 
; I don’t want them to feel the need to take flight, so I set off through the woods to the other observation deck near the marsh. It’s a brisk, winding, up-and-down walk, and I soon have no sense of the river behind me. Ahead of me I hear ducks and red-wings and, I think, peepers and frogs, see a few squirrels on the ground and first a chickadee, then a woodpecker in the trees. Through the trees I sometimes catch flickers of bird flight above the marsh, and I keep moving until I reach the marsh deck. Three mallards circle the pond at its center, and two begin to float downward to splash into the water. For a minute or two they swim in plain sight, then veer into the sedges and disappear. Red-winged blackbirds abound in every section of the marsh, and I listen to them chortle, hoping more waterfowl will appear. None do. Only after I tire of scanning the empty pond, circle around the loop toward the woods leading back to the river, and reach the rise opposite the marsh deck do I see a pair of wood ducks take flight from the pond.

  The truth is I’m almost scurrying along the path in hopes of seeing the cranes again. I slow as I draw opposite the meanders and spot them once more, still out beyond the river. This time they don’t seem to notice me and so I stand quietly for a few minutes trying to imprint in my memory this image of cranes in the mist.

  It occurs to me now how stirred I have been by the sight of sandhill cranes in Wisconsin. When I lived in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, it was the great blue heron that thrilled me whenever I saw it, rising from a river in front of my canoe, sailing in slow motion overhead, stalking the shallows of a marshy pond. In the Upper Peninsula, along the shores of Lake Superior, it was the common loon that would make me put down my paddle or walk more gingerly to the shoreline. In Wisconsin it’s the sandhill cranes that cause me to slow the car on a backcountry road for a better view of their stately motion through a field or their languid passage across the sky.

  Some portion of the regard in which I hold them may have carried over from reading Leopold. In “Marshland Elegy” he reminds us that cranes originated millennia ago, in the Eocene. “When we hear his call we hear no bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution,” he tells us. “Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility.” Leopold puts all of existence into perspective by reciting the history of sandhill cranes.

  Perhaps that’s what vibrates in me whenever I see a sandhill crane, some sort of sympathetic tuning with a silent chord struck by the simple fact of the bird’s existence. Something tells me when I see it that, however remotely, I am connecting to something far vaster and more vibrant than I can imagine.

  The Taste for Country: Walking with Aldo Leopold

  1

  I APPROACH THE SHACK and farm that is the site of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac by bicycle, on a solid but hardly sleek model borrowed from the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center a mile or so away. It’s an ecologically sound way to get here without prolonging my trek along Levee Road. I’ve already driven past the shack, but I hope this slower approach will give me a fuller sense of the area. On the bike I better appreciate how low the tree-lined road is and how the bases of the trees off either shoulder are deep in standing water.

  Beyond the narrow corridor of trees is a long stretch of wetlands to the south. A map in Prairie Time, a book about the Leopold Reserve, identifies this open water, the inundated grasses, and the flooded forest as the Great Marsh. When I drove by it earlier, I saw two sandhill cranes in a treeless opening. Now, the sight of the marsh behind the trees reminds me of Leopold’s April essay, “Come High Water,” about being marooned by flooding; the cranes reminded me of “Marshland Elegy,” the essay centered on how changes in the marshes alter the habitat of cranes. Already I’m aware of how much I’ll be influenced by what Leopold had to say about what I’ll be seeing.

  Past the trees I spot the shack, closed up and set back across a patch of prairie that starts near the road. From here the shack might be mistaken for an abandoned outbuilding of some kind. The terrain around it is different from the carefully maintained lawns of its neighbors on the north side of the road, where large houses and the accouterments of families give evidence of being lived in. Past the prairie and under more trees, I coast into a narrow, fenced-off parking area, wheel the bike through a gap in the locked gate, and prop it against a tree. Then I step back to the gate and lean against the wooden rail to face the dirt driveway that arches back through the trees toward the prairie. The self-guided tour, for which I have an informative pamphlet, starts here and will take me to nine numbered sites. In the pamphlet, small photographs from the earliest period of the Leopolds’ occupation make clear that what the visitor will see now will be what the Leopolds transformed it into, not what it was when Leopold first began to restore it. The comments about each site end with suggested readings from A Sand County Almanac.

  I’d like to ignore the photographs and concentrate on what I see now, but at the center before I embarked, I saw an exhibit of pictures taken early on by Carl Leopold, one of Aldo’s sons. Together with the reproductions in the pamphlet, those photos, all in black-and-white, show the setting in 1935 to be desolate and empty, especially compared to the lush green forest floor ahead of me and the clear cloudless blue sky above and sunlight illuminating everything. From the gate and from the spot not far down the driveway where the visitor is encouraged to view the pines planted by the Leopolds, it’s difficult to see the shack. The woods are abundant and the forest floor shrubby and green. Tall straight pines line the driveway. We have had a snowy winter and a very rainy spring, and the water-soaked fields I saw as I drove across the state make an extreme contrast with the drought conditions of the Dust Bowl years when Leopold first began bringing his family here. It’s been seventy-six years since he bought the place, and the shack may be the most constant element of the landscape.

  The path follows the driveway in an arc that takes me out of the woods and across the open prairie, its far edges lined with trees from the road to the shack. I know the prairie is a prairie mostly by my pamphlet. There’s green in the low grasses and light brown in the dry grasses above them. In early May the area seems to still be oppressed by vanished winter snows.

  The shack looks very small across the expanse of the open field and against the backdrop of thick woods around it, the treetops four or five times as high as the peak of the roof. Without its white door, it might easily disappear into its background. I approach slowly, trying to take it in by degrees. Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond has long since disappeared, the house and shanty at Muir’s Fountain Lake Farm no longer exist, but here is the very shack fashioned by Aldo Leopold and his family, still in the family’s possession, simultaneously their getaway spot and an ecological pilgrimage site. I don’t want to overlook anything even as I realize that my self-conscious concentration will likely preserve little in memory.

  There’s scant seclusion about the place. It’s entirely exposed to the southeast. The exterior walls are unpainted and weathered but sound, two windows on either side of the door are securely shuttered, and the white paint on the door is cracked and chipping from years of sun and rain. It seems hardly more than the chicken coop it started out as, low and cramped for seven people to spend a weekend in. The Leopolds had five children: Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl, and Estella Jr. All worked on achieving the changes Aldo had in mind for the place, including transforming the chicken coop into a family retreat. On my self-guided tour I have no way to see the interior, but I suspect “rustic” might be an appropriate term for it—or possibly “Spartan.”

  A Leopold bench rests under one exterior window, simple and solid in design, gray and long-seasoned. Two more sit on either side of a nearby fire pit, and a table and benches sit off to the side of the house, under a candelabra-shaped oak. Two large upright sections of tree trunk also stand near the fire pit, as work surfaces, no doubt. The scene in front of the shack gives off a strictly utilitarian air. Only a lilac bush, not yet in bloom, and a straight and lofty white pine, both
at corners of the shack’s eastern wall, suggest efforts at beautification.

  One side trail leads to the Parthenon, the family’s joking name for the outhouse built by Starker, the oldest son. When it was constructed, it was a stark little rectangle out in the open, but now it stands demurely in a well-shaded stand of trees. The shack and the Parthenon are on high ground, but not far beyond them the land slopes off toward a long patch of reddish-brown sand, and a sandy trail leads off at an angle toward the open banks of the Wisconsin River. I’m curious about where it leads and so follow it away from the shack.

  At once I’m in very different terrain than I had been walking through. The sand at the bottom of the slope opens up into a wide swath and the trees are widely separated on areas of short grasses. The pale blue sky is open and the view of it is mostly uncluttered. Another Leopold bench is set on the border of the sand near the grass and below a cluster of sprawling cottonwoods. Here and there wide stands of low white flowers proliferate across the scruffy areas where sand and grass mingle. The thin blue line I see above the green of the grasses in the distance is the Wisconsin River and I hope that the sand will lead me to it. Along the way a Baltimore oriole high on a birch branch sings exuberantly. He picked a perfect spot for his display, his breast gleaming in the sunshine and his voice filling the air. His song cheers me as I trudge through the loose, deep sand.

  The trail narrows the nearer it gets to the riverbank and ends at a small beach at water’s edge. The Wisconsin is very wide here and still running high. Close to the banks grasses are submerged and trees stand up to their knees in water. The northern shore seems to be entirely forested along its length, and an island midstream is also well wooded. Here on the south shore, the bank to the west seems unoccupied, but to the east I can see houses through the trees, some prudently set on much higher ground. It’s clear to me that the floodplain of the Wisconsin was broader here in earlier days, and Leopold’s essay “Come High Water” confirms that it sometimes extended to the slope behind the shack. The river isn’t entirely a surprise, but as I stand on the riverbank, comparing the blue of the water with the blue of the sky and feeling the sense of a powerful presence, I realize that almost nothing in A Sand County Almanac prepared me to see it. Leopold’s interest was in the land, in the country, but I suspect that what brought those other homeowners to Levee Road was more likely to have been the river. I’m sure I could sit watching it roll by for a long time.