by Robert Root
The breeze is strong in the open along the river and the mid-May day is cool enough for me to be glad to be well layered. The bright sun gives little warmth that the wind doesn’t quickly whisk away. I head back toward the shack, warming up some once I reenter the trees.
Beyond the shack on the other side are more designated sites. The trail leads out of the clearing and up a shaded slope on forest floor covered with low undergrowth. At the top of the hill are the remnants of the farmhouse that burned down before Leopold bought the place. Still visible around the edges of a deep hole in the ground are rows of fieldstones making up the foundation walls. The trail follows the top of a ridge and once or twice I step off to gaze at the woods below, on the floodplain, where the ground at low places near the base of the slope is saturated and ponded. I’m walking under tall oaks now, with the forest floor open between them. I pass the place where Leopold noted the draba on a sand blow, still open to the sky though the sand itself is barely visible under an abundance of oak leaves. Soon I reach the commemorative stone where the “Good Oak” once stood, the subject of the marvelous February essay. The plaque on the stone reads, “Rest! cries the chief sawyer,” the line that recurs throughout the oak essay. The trail has arched around south, and at the stone I’m back near the road on the southwestern corner of the property. Rather than drop down onto the pavement, I backtrack a little and follow a diagonal trail back across pine forest until I emerge at the edge of a sparsely treed orchard and open meadow with the shack beyond it.
Drifting over to the fire pit, I settle onto the Leopold bench facing the shack. Occasionally I can hear distant traffic, but the wind in the trees tends to drown out all but nearby birdsong. The birds are plentiful and full of song. The shack is not as isolated or as remote as I have always assumed it was, even though to get to it you have to take backcountry roads across one very flat plain and over low ridges and along that low paved road with flooded forests and marshland running up to its sides. It seems quite a humble place, yet I’m aware that a great book and the most significant ecological thinking arose from it. I recognize the parallels with Thoreau and Walden, though one man was a bachelor and the other surrounded by his family. Both raise our awareness that where you are is not what makes the difference; it’s what you observe wherever you are that does.
After gazing awhile at the closed front of the shack, not really expecting to receive any particular vibrations and not really disappointed when I don’t (though I remember being stirred by John Burroughs’s Slabsides when I saw it), I move to the Leopold bench just under a boarded-up window, to get a sense of what Leopold and his family saw when they looked out. To the southeast is the patch of prairie that Leopold restored; to the south, beyond the fire pit, are the pines they planted that they would have seen growing year after year; to the southwest, past the woodpile and the ring of benches, are the orchard and the wooded hills beyond them. Three-quarters of a century ago there was only a row of elms, soon to die of Dutch elm disease, and acres of worn-out, barren fields. What the Leopolds could see from the windows of the shack was the restoration of the land, growing week by week before their eyes. Reinforced by memories of what it had been, they had a different sense of place than any day visitor like me is likely to develop. I can only hope that, over time, I can gain some insight into what that sense of place might have been.
2
In some places it may be easy to avoid talking about geology, but in Wisconsin, sooner or later, you will need to talk about the glaciers. Their presence or absence has determined the nature of the terrain you see. When David Rhodes, a Wisconsin writer, published Driftless, everyone knew at once it was a Wisconsin novel, the title alluding to the Driftless Area of the state. The Driftless Area in the southwestern corner of the state missed the glaciation that scraped and scoured and shaped the other three-quarters of Wisconsin. The glaciers determined how far south the northern forest advanced, how far north the southern forest extended, just where the tension zone between them would be established. They determined the physical features of the landscape, creating the drumlins, eskers, kames, and moraines that form the rolling hills and the kettle lakes, fens, marshes, and bogs that fill the lowlands. If you pay attention to the rise and fall of any road you’re on here, you realize that you’re traveling over terrain deposited and eroded in the aftermath of glaciers.
Geologic time is always difficult for me to get a handle on. It’s so vast. It involves so many varied forces working at a pace that is indiscernible yet achieving changes in landscape so huge they are unimaginable. I can look at a river and accept its meanders and shifts in channel, recognize the changes in flow and flood stage; but really comprehending the composition of the land it flows through, the soil it’s wearing away or in an earlier time deposited on a scale far vaster than its present appearance indicates, is much harder to accomplish.
I live close to Kettle Moraine State Forest, an intermittent series of wooded areas preserving the debris deposited by two lobes of the last glacier to cross Wisconsin. The Green Bay Lobe to the west and the Lake Michigan Lobe to the east squeezed a great deal of till and ice between them, and when they melted they left a long stretch of medial moraine interrupted by chunks of ice that, in time, melted as well. Those vanished chunks of ice left deep depressions in the hills; some are still wetlands, others have by now dried out. My county, Waukesha County, is rich in evidence of its glacial past, especially where the Kettle Moraine and the Ice Age Trail, a hiking trail that roughly follows the last glacier’s edge a thousand miles across the state, pass through it. I’m getting to the point where I constantly seem to feel the glacier’s absence but haven’t yet mastered a sense of its former presence.
“The sand counties of Central Wisconsin,” Susan Flader observes in The Sand Country of Aldo Leopold, “are a legacy of sands slowly settling in the shallow Cambrian sea which covered the interior of the continent half a billion years ago.” The complicated history of a place over the course of half a billion years, with all the intermittent periods of deposition, compacting, exposure, and erosion, with the appearance and disappearance of mountains and oceans, is beyond my powers to imagine, let alone trace. I’m grateful to encounter a writer like Flader, who handles that half billion years succinctly and briskly, and who expresses herself in ways that make Wisconsin’s emergence comprehensible to me. She tells how, “three hundred million years ago, the landmass gently warped upward and spilled the last ocean from the state,” how Wisconsin had been “part of a stable landmass gradually bequeathing its mantle of soil and rock to other seas,” and how, in the same period that the Appalachian and the Rocky and the Sierra chains of mountains were rising, “Wisconsin eroded seaward.” The result was the loss of “thousands of feet of sediments overlying the Cambrian sandstone in central Wisconsin and with them all trace of three hundred million years of life.”
Warping, spilling, bequeathing, wearing away—the scale of all this still seems incredible, but I can somehow see this transformation. The Ice Age that followed lasted a million years and saw four major glacial incursions; the final Wisconsin stage, which lasted sixty thousand years, involved “a series of advances and retreats of a multi-lobed ice sheet.” The Green Bay Lobe, in Flader’s words, “molded the character of this region” fifteen thousand years ago. (She calls it “a mere fifteen thousand years ago” and in geologic terms “mere” seems an appropriate word, though hard for me to use easily.)
What we now identify as the Wisconsin River was flowing even then, in its ancestral form, and the glacier dumped debris that dammed it. The impounded water formed Glacial Lake Wisconsin, encompassing “over eighteen hundred square miles, covering parts of five counties,” and the glacial meltwater and wave action on the lake deposited the sand that identifies the region and left “isolated buttes, mounds, castellated bluffs, and pinnacles rising from a level marshy plain when the waters receded.” Because of the repeated advance and retreat of the glaciers, the region shifted the boundaries of its “
floristic provinces” (in Flader’s term) and created that tension zone of anywhere from ten to thirty miles between them. The southern province was composed of prairies, oak savannas, and southern hardwoods, and the northern province contained pine savannas, conifer-hardwoods, and boreal forest. The tension zone marked the northern limit of the southern species and the southern limit of the northern species. Flader writes, “Some botanists consider the entire sand area as a widened part of the tension zone, its sands accentuating differences in moisture content and temperature, its low-lying glacial lake beds and river bottoms more prone to frosts, its nutrient-poor acid soils preventing any one species from taking over. The result is an intermingling of species from north and south.”
In the prologue to Prairie Time: The Leopold Reserve Revisited, John Ross complicates that picture by describing the area as lying “within the transition zone between the native eastern forests, dense and deciduous, and the western grasslands, so fully open to the sky. Here, the natural expression is that of sweeps of prairie with oak openings. Grasses and forbs fill the prairies.” Ross emphasizes the immensity of the oak savanna that dominated the ecotone between eastern forest and western grassland, covering an estimated thirty million acres before settlement. “In Wisconsin, oak savanna occurred naturally on an estimated six million acres. . . . Now only about 5,000 acres of prime oak savanna, and remnant patches of prairie, remain in Wisconsin.” Two-thirds of the Leopold Memorial Reserve, a privately owned area of fourteen hundred acres, “is floodplain forest and marshland, dotted with ponds and river sloughs. The remainder is hilly moraine that has recently been covered by a mixed oak-hickory-pine forest and broken by a few fields still under cultivation. A sandy substrate underlays the entire reserve and produces an easily eroded soil of low fertility.”
In order to restore the land around the shack, Leopold had to have a sense of what native, natural central Wisconsin was like before the farm was corned out and devastated. The idea behind the reserve is the restoration of that earlier country. John Muir’s approach to conservation as an ecological movement was preservation, leaving things alone and guaranteeing that they would be left alone; Leopold’s approach was restoration, undoing the devastation to the natural environment and returning it to something approaching its earlier state. Both men assumed that nature had achieved a sense of balance among its various communities: Muir’s efforts were directed at maintaining that balance by preventing its destabilization; Leopold was well aware of the effects of destabilization and the complications of restoring the balance. Although certainly Leopold’s heirs have done much to put his land ethic into practice, it’s to be regretted that his death in 1948 cut short the further growth of his philosophy and its execution. It would have been good to hear his voice twenty years later, when his book was undergoing a significant surge in popularity. We see in A Sand County Almanac the extent to which Leopold never stopped observing and growing; as much as we feel his presence in the country around the shack, we can’t ask him, How do you feel about what’s happened here? What do you think you might have done differently? I’m certain he would have already thought about those questions.
3
Leopold evokes the glaciers in the essay “Marshland Elegy,” which opens with these images:
A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog-meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.
The simile is well chosen in descriptive terms but also alludes to the environmental history that accounts for the marsh’s existence. Leopold is someone who is always aware not only of where he is but also of how where he is came to be there. His sense of place is continuously in harmony with his sense of ecological, geological, and social history. He writes of the marsh,
A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet.
Later he succinctly gives us a history of Glacial Lake Wisconsin and the formation of the Great Marsh:
When the glacier came down out of the north, crunching hills and gouging valleys, some adventuring rampart of the ice climbed the Baraboo Hills and fell back into the outlet gorge of the Wisconsin River. The swollen waters backed up and formed a lake half as long as the state, bordered on the east by cliffs of ice, and fed by the torrents that fell from melting mountains. The shorelines of this old lake are still visible; its bottom is the bottom of the great marsh.
The lake rose through the centuries, finally spilling over east of the Baraboo range. There it cut a new channel for the river, and thus drained itself. To the residual lagoons came the cranes, bugling the defeat of the retreating winter, summoning the on-creeping host of living things to their collective task of marsh-building. Floating bogs of sphagnum moss clogged the lowered waters, filled them. Sedge and leather-leaf, tamarack and spruce successively advanced over the bog, anchoring it by their root fabric, sucking out its water, making peat.
The story Leopold tells—and Susan Flader retells in The Sand Country of Aldo Leopold and John Ross and Beth Ross retell again in Prairie Time—is a necessary one if we are to really understand where we are—not simply locate ourselves on a map, but appreciate where and when we stand upon a patch of ground. To do that we need to comprehend where the land itself came from and what it was before we were there.
In the case of Leopold’s shack and farm, the condition of the land when the family bought it was far removed from the condition of the land the Muir family settled on nearly ninety years earlier and less than thirty miles away. The story of Muir’s farm portrays the beginning of settlement’s effects on the country; the story of Leopold’s farm begins with the results of settlement’s effects. With little appreciation for the land as it was, farmers and lumbermen altered the landscape by decimating the white pines and clearing the marshes of tamaracks, plowing them for crops, and overgrazing the pastures they created on the sandy hills. As John Muir’s father discovered quickly around Fountain Lake, the soils of the sand counties offered limited fertility for crops and, once cattle stripped the vegetation, reverted to sandy blowouts. In rainy years fields were too wet, but draining the marshlands, as was done on a massive scale, only created more problems. Once the water table of the marshes was lowered, exposing and drying the peat underneath them, fires were given an almost inexhaustible supply of fuel. Susan Flader notes, “Fires ran at will over the sand counties during the 1920s, eating the heart out of abandoned lands. The worst fire year of all was 1930, when three hundred thousand acres of peat were consumed.” The marsh across the road from the shack burned that year, though luckily the water table was replenished by Wisconsin River floodwaters and the peat preserved.
And then in 1935 Aldo Leopold came to the patch of land in the sand counties between the Wisconsin River and that great marsh. It’s in the “Good Oak” essay, the chapter for February, that Leopold provides some background for his specific 120 acres. An oak killed by lightning has aged for a year before Leopold cuts it down for fuel wood. He uses the occasion of cutting through the tree rings to not only measure the life span of the tree, which covered at least eighty and perhaps ninety years, but also to note what was happening in the natural world and its intersection with civilization almost ring by ring, year by year.
It took only a dozen pulls of the saw to transect the few years of our ownership, during which we had learned to love and cherish this farm. Abruptly we began to cut the years of our predecessor the bootlegger, who hated this farm, skinned it of residual fertility, burned its
farmhouse, threw it back into the lap of the County (with delinquent taxes to boot), and then disappeared among the landless anonymities of the Great Depression. Yet the oak had laid down good wood for him; his sawdust was as fragrant, as sound, and as pink as our own. An oak is no respecter of persons.
The reign of the bootlegger ended sometime during the dust-bowl drouths of 1936, 1934, 1933, and 1930. Oak smoke from his still and peat from burning marshlands must have clouded the sun in those years, and alphabetical conservation was abroad in the land, but the sawdust shows no change.
Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for breath.
Leopold recounts the harvesting of the tree over the course of eight sections. The next six each begin with, “Now our saw bites into . . .” and end with, “Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for breath.” The final section reaches beyond 1860 and the core of the tree, before cutting through the other side of the trunk and bringing it down.
