Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  The rewards of quiet attention are confirmed at once. The first bird of the morning appears a few yards away, an ovenbird, his white breast black-speckled, his eye fixed on me. Near the water’s edge a yellow warbler flits through the undergrowth, and a boreal chickadee lands on a limb above him. A tree swallow crosses my peripheral vision to light and hop into a nest hole at the top of a nearby tree. A white-throated sparrow calls in the distance, “Oh, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” like reassurance from an old friend. I smile back at the day.

  At the trailhead, on the hill above the lake, a mown path leads down a gentle slope toward an open field, past a widespread stand of tall, bare oaks standing apart from one another. I’ve read the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) write-up of the upland and wetland communities found in this state natural area and have maps in my backpack to help me distinguish among them. In early spring, after a long, unrelenting winter, most of the easily identifiable flora won’t have established themselves, but a stand of oaks doesn’t challenge my knowledge of botany.

  Heavy rains have fallen in the past few weeks, and rivers are flooding all along the Mississippi watershed, which is to say most of the United States. A subcontinental divide separates the Wisconsin River—the swollen tributary of the Mississippi that I drove across earlier today—from the Fox River, which meanders just across the road. This Fox River (Muir’s, not mine) is the one that runs through Lake Winnebago to Green Bay and the Great Lakes, the one explorers, voyageurs, and traders traveled up, before portaging across to the Wisconsin River to reach the Mississippi.

  A small stream connects Ennis Lake and the Fox River. The lake bottom is marl, not a porous soil, and the lake itself is a kettle lake, formed by glacial ice and surrounded by glacial uplands. From all that rain and runoff from the uplands, the fens and sedge meadows along the lakeshore should be well saturated.

  Past the oak opening the path descends, circles the northern end of the lake, and crosses the edge of a wet-mesic prairie. The grasses here are tall, five feet or more, big bluestem and Indian grass. They are high enough, and my vantage point is low enough, that I can barely see the lake at the bottom of the gentle slope, only the eastern shoreline and the tree-covered uplands above it. I walk through a willow thicket, which is just beginning to bud, higher and denser than the grasses, and when I emerge, two sandhill cranes rise out of the grass and wing away from me. I’m so chagrined at startling them that I barely hear the whoomp of their beating wings as they disappear beyond the woods. Red-winged blackbirds nearby ignore me and continue their shrill song at the lake edge and throughout the meadow.

  The path arches through another stand of trees. Across the field I see a stone house, the one that the ecologist and Muir scholar Erik Brynildson restored and lives in, on the site of the house the Muirs built on Fountain Lake Farm. Seeing it, I gain at once a sense of the space between the homestead and the lake.

  A ridge rises above the eastern shoreline of the lake, topped with a sprawling stand of oaks. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir includes a picture of the lake he drew as a boy, sitting on the roof of the bur oak shanty his family first inhabited on the site. I clamber up among the oaks to the top of the ridge, hoping to find the angle at which he sketched the lake. Muir’s drawing takes in what he identified as the garden meadow and seems to be a view from a higher angle than possible anywhere nearby—the bur oak shanty was nearer to the site of the house—but this ridge, much closer to the lake, is the best angle I’m likely to have. From here I can see the clear brightness of the sky and the outline of the western shore mirrored in the placid waters of the lake.

  Layers of leaves keep the ground open below the oaks, and the bare trees cast stark shadows in the morning sun. A yellow-rumped warbler darts among the trees, and a downy woodpecker works along a high branch farther into the woods. When I stop scuffling through the leaves, his pecking is the only sound breaking the silence. Only when I turn back to the lake do I realize that a woman and her dog are standing near a bench down on the trail, the dog clearly aware that I’m up on the ridge. He watches me while I descend as amiably as I can.

  The woman is fit, mature, and comfortably dressed for an early May outing. We chat for a few minutes. I learn that she is a retired biologist with ties to the DNR. She lives nearby and walks this trail often, usually collecting whatever trash she spots along the way. This is a good time to stroll the park, she tells me—it’s too early in the season for picnickers and too early for mosquitoes and deerflies. She mentions I was lucky the man in the stone house didn’t see me on the ridge; he’s been known to yell at people who get off the trail, herself included. A vibrant goldfinch in the fen shrubs between the trail and the lake captures our attention. It reminds her of her recent, rare sighting of a redheaded woodpecker. She also tells me that she spotted the first blossom of spring, a pasque flower, by the side of the path just beyond the trailhead. As a man supposedly intent on close observation of the terrain, I’m embarrassed to have missed it.

  After we part, I take my time jotting down a few notes, giving her time before I follow so we both can get back into our solitudes. The trail moves away from the lake and through a stand of trees, and I let myself be delayed a little more by first an eastern towhee in a slender tree and shortly after, as I cross a boardwalk, a rose-breasted grosbeak in the shrubbery. I haven’t come for the birding, but after spotting these two I feel a little better about overlooking the pasque flower.

  A short bridge crosses a meandering stream in the middle of a sedge meadow thick with hummock sedge and more shrubs at the outskirts. The water runs shallow, the streambed clearly visible. When I look upstream I again notice the stone house in the distance and understand more certainly where Muir was when he drew his picture of the lake and the garden meadow. I appreciate how the scholar in the house gets to see the lake from Muir’s perspective every day.

  The forest is thicker on this side of the lake. Several trees seem very old. A stand of evergreens dominates the highest ground, and more grow intermittently on distant hills around the south shore. On the lake side of the trail the sedge meadow opens up again across a wide stretch of exposed space. In the middle of the lake two fishermen drift quietly in their boat. Just a little way up the hill, near a very old, very gnarly bur oak at the southeast corner of the trail, I spot a gate leading to an old field and remind myself that the Fountain Lake Farm was more extensive than the area the county park and the state natural area now enclose. Around the bottom of the lake the trail enters oak woodland along and upon the hills that go up the west side, follows the shoreline of the lake a short distance, then veers away from it. All the while I am under towering oaks with an open, leaf-littered forest floor and yellow-rumped warblers plentiful and preoccupied along the way.

  I start up the west side of the lake anticipating the arc that the trail makes around a large fen. For a while shrubbery mostly obscures the spring-fed pool at its center. I hear abundant bird-song in the thickets but see nary a bird. The pool comes into clear view when I reach the fen’s north side. By now I’m out of the state natural area and back in the county’s Muir Park. After passing through a swath of dandelions spread across a mown lawn, I’m able to stand on the shoreline and see the marl of the lake bottom close up, a hard gray mud visible through clear water.

  From the dock I gaze again across the lake, a deeper blue now that the sun is higher. The fishermen have drifted out of sight, the woman and her dog have left the park, and I’m alone again, trying to store deep in my memory the panorama of vibrant blue lake and vibrant blue sky and the mirror image of green hills on the opposite shore dividing them.

  One hundred sixty-two years earlier, in spring, young John Muir first took sight of Fountain Lake and the terrain around it and found it glorious. Now I understand—to some degree—his attachment to the place. I feel a touch of envy for the woman walking her dog and the Muir scholar living close by, and their chance to walk around this lake whenever they wish.

>   Before I leave, I return to the trailhead and move slowly down the trail until I spot them. Three pale lavender cups low to the ground in a wilderness of grasses. The first pasque flowers. They convince me spring is here.

  Back roads take me to Observatory Hill. Three trucks are parked in the old field, up in the grass beyond the gravel parking area. The men standing by them tell me they’ve been spraying garlic mustard, an invasive plant, along the roadside and in the field; they say that, unless I want my shoes to turn blue, I should watch where I step until I get into the woods.

  The trail starts where the woods do, near a brass marker commemorating the Carey family, who donated this natural area to the state; it’s also where a tiny bright blue butterfly dances around a large stone. I’ll be passing through a forest of red oaks, white oaks, shagbark hickory, and basswood and making a steep, rocky climb three hundred feet up to the summit. At eleven hundred feet, this is the highest point in Marquette County. (In comparison, Muir Park’s elevation is around eight hundred feet.) The hill is said to be a monadnock, and I confess the word itself inspires me; entirely on Thoreau’s recommendation, I’ve gone up Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, a true mountain. Observatory Hill really is a hill by comparison, but each is, by definition, an erosion-resistant remnant of a loftier mountain range. The core of Observatory Hill is igneous rock estimated to be 1.75 billion years old. It bears witness to glaciation with 12,000-year-old grooves and striations on exposed surfaces.

  The higher up I climb away from the farmland below, the more exposed rock I see. Soon a region of red cedars takes over. Midway to the summit, a long rock wall appears, topped with cedars anchored in its cracks and crevices. The trail veers around it, growing rockier and rougher as the woods grow thicker and darker and the undergrowth disappears. For a moment I’m uncertain how much farther I have to go, but then the cedars open up and I wander out onto exposed spaces open to the sky.

  I’ve reached the heights that offer a sweeping view of the landscape off to the south, and I realize I don’t know what I’m looking at. The two large, connected lakes below may be Madden Lakes, a name I remember from a Marquette County map, and the ring of hills on the far horizon may be the Baraboo Hills, but I’m uncertain of the other landmarks I can see. I scour the southwest for any sign of Ennis Lake or the stone house overlooking it; but even on Observatory Hill, I’m not high enough to see past the woodlands that abound in every direction. Farms and pastures interrupt them, of course, but leafless trees dominate the view, making a nearly uniform gray panorama. I wonder how much of what I’m seeing varies from what John Muir would have seen when he and his companions would climb to the summit and lay out watching the stars. Surely the landscape would have been more open, with wide stretches of prairie and oak savanna. I seem to have the habit of setting out to visit the past without remembering that only the present lives there now.

  The sky is still clear, cloudless, a pale and uniform blue. Occasionally shadows pass across my face and the rock where I sit, and when I look up, I see two vultures lazily circling overhead. They seem to be keeping an eye on me. I sit for a while and make notes and wonder, if I stayed until dark, whether the sky would be clear enough for me to stargaze for a while. The night sky would surely still be the one John Muir saw, wouldn’t it?

  As I head back down the trail, steeling myself for the long drive home, I know that I’ve spent the morning in places that mattered most to young John Muir, but I’m newly aware that I don’t fully understand where I’ve been.

  2

  Fen, sedge meadow, wet-mesic prairie, oak opening. The terms keep repeating in my brain like some childhood chant, or like a fragment of an old-time tune for which I’ve forgotten all the lyrics except for those words. In my circuit around Muir Park, these habitats are what I passed, according to what I’ve read and maps I’ve consulted, like the multicolored one on the information board at the trailhead. Fen, sedge meadow, wet-mesic prairie, oak opening. My habitat litany here.

  But I’m no more certain of what I’m seeing than young John Muir would have been when he saw the lake for the first time. I’ve seen such features of the Wisconsin landscape before, but I haven’t been diligent enough to be able to name them. The books I turn to offer good prospects for sorting things out. They range from sweeping overviews of the region to detailed catalogs of habitats, from a collection of cursory capsulations of locales to a thorough exploration of a single site. Like a conscientious student I accurately copy all their explanations and write a long quotation-rich passage that covers all their bases. Eventually I recognize that I’m entirely dependent on those quotations, can’t talk about these things without using their words verbatim, don’t yet own this information. So I tear my pages apart and sort through the pieces and try to find a way to explain it all to myself, as if I knew what I was talking about.

  My approach is almost like zooming in on a satellite map, starting from a long way above the landscape and incrementally enlarging smaller and smaller patches of terrain. It’s the best way to understand the context of what you’re examining and to keep yourself from misreading the uniqueness of the site you’re focusing on. Wisconsin has a lot in common with Minnesota and with Michigan, as states that weathered the same glacial epochs. Looking at such features as climate and vegetation helps to separate some sections of the landscape from other sections in ways that transcend the artificial limits suggested by state borders.

  Biologists identify the northern parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota as the Northern Forest Floristic Province, essentially what we usually think of as the North Woods, and the southern parts as the Prairie-Forest Floristic Province. Between the two is a meandering vegetation tension zone, where the floras of both provinces mingle.

  Zoom in more closely and you can see the details that divide these provinces and zones into certain eco-regions—areas determined by their distinctive ecologies—and then subdivide those eco-regions into even more specific areas. Within the Prairie-Forest Floristic Province, a single eco-region encompasses Muir’s Fountain Lake Farm, Aldo Leopold’s shack, and August Derleth’s Sac Prairie, as well as Waukesha County, where I live. However, the Muir and Leopold sites can be found in the same smaller subregion, called the Central Wisconsin Sand Plain, while my home is in another, the Southeastern Wisconsin Till Plain, and Derleth’s site is on the border between both subregions. I’ll settle for sharing the same eco-region with the three of them and ponder the consequences of having different subregions another time. For now I feel more firmly located on an ecological map of the Midwest.

  Returning to Muir Park, I’m aware that its 150 acres contain various wetland and upland communities. Its wetlands include small fens, a tamarack bog, sedge meadow, and wet-mesic prairie; its uplands include oak woodland and oak savanna. This is the point where I need to dig into specifics. I can tell a wetland from an upland, but learning that the fens contain such plants as grass of Parnassus, Kalm’s lobelia, and false asphodel, or that the bog contains pitcher plant, bog birch, and poison sumac isn’t much help, since I can’t distinguish among them and it’s too soon in the season for most of these to be flowering. For now I need simply to clarify the distinctions among the wetlands communities. Fen, bog, sedge meadow, wet-mesic prairie.

  The standard distinction between bogs and fens seems to rest most definitively on how the pools at their center acquire water. A bog has the same origin as a kettle lake—a block of ice deposited by a glacier that melts and leaves a water-filled depression. For the bog, whatever water remains can only be replenished by precipitation, rain or melted snow; it has no source of inflow or outflow, no spring or stream emptying into it or flowing away from it. Lacking the nutrients for its plant life that wetlands supplied by ground-water and continuous internal flow have, bogs develop acidic soils and foster the growth of sphagnum moss, which contributes the decomposed vegetation that forms peat on the bog bottom. The sphagnum moss creates a bog mat that encourages the growth of acidity- and low-nutrient-tolerant pl
ants like various “ericaceous” shrubs (belonging to the heath family) and evergreens like black spruce and tamarack. Over time, a bog can fill in and close up and become forest floor.

  A fen is fed by groundwater, by springs that provide an internal flow of water. It supports plant life that thrives in calcareous (chalky, calcium carbonate laden), alkaline (rather than acidic) waters. These plants, too, decay into peat, but among peatlands, fens can range from near-bogs to near-marshes or near–wet meadows, depending on the level of mineral enrichment the ground-water provides. The shrubs of a fen, like shrubby cinquefoil, will be deciduous rather than evergreen, and its plants will have a high tolerance for calcium. In a calcareous fen, sphagnum moss is absent.

  So far so good. Bog: acidic, fed by rain, evergreen and heathy with sphagnum moss, eventually closed up. Fen: alkaline, fed by groundwater, deciduous and calcareous without sphagnum moss, generally longer lived.

  With sedge meadows and wet-mesic prairies, I am, figuratively at least, on more solid ground, though there seems to be something of a gradient here as well. Some authors feel the need to distinguish between a sedge meadow and a fen and between a sedge meadow and a marsh. The distinction that a marsh is an aquatic community and the sedge meadow a saturated land community is helpful. A sedge meadow will have emergent plants, dominated by sedge (primarily carex), growing on saturated areas or soils covered by standing water up to six inches deep during the growing season. A wet-mesic prairie—I learn that “mesic” means “intermediate between wet and dry conditions; moderately moist”; “wet-mesic” is more wet than dry—occurs where the water source is variable rather than consistent and where soils may be saturated or inundated during the growing season. In a wet-mesic prairie the dominant plants are prairie grasses, such as big bluestem and prairie cordgrass, and some prairie forbs (broad-leafed flowering plants). The wet-mesic prairie is less saturated than a sedge meadow. In talking about wetlands, the degree of saturation or inundation, as well as water source and plant life, determine the kind of habitat I’m likely to encounter.