by Robert Root
At the end of June, just over a month after I visited the shack on my own, my wife and I drove to the Leopold Center for a Saturday afternoon guided tour. Nina Leopold Bradley, one of the driving forces behind the construction of the center, had died exactly a month before, on May 25, at the age of ninety-three. She had lived to the west of the shack and had often appeared at special events and tours. From the moment I’d learned about the tours I’d harbored the hope of bumping into her, and now I regretted the lost opportunity.
The center was once considered the “greenest” building in America. The wood used to build it primarily came from the Leopold farm itself or from land owned by Nina Bradley, chiefly pine and some local oak and maple, all milled either on-site or nearby. The pines had been planted by the Leopolds decades earlier, a prudent bit of recycling. The lobby boasts the Rumford fireplace, an exceptionally efficient device drawing air from floor vents in front of it and designed to store heat. The building is carbon neutral, thanks to earth tubes for ventilation located below the building, radiant floors and the occasional use of woodstoves and fireplaces for heat, solar panels for energy, strategic placement of overhangs, and plenty of windows for natural light. Outside, an aqueduct channels rainwater into a rain garden. The center that bears his name offers a very concrete example of putting Leopold’s ecological philosophy into practice.
Our tour guide was Anna Hawley, a 2007 graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. She told us her favorite passages in A Sand County Almanac were the August “Green Pasture” essay, about the floodplain (“I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer”) and the November “If I Were the Wind” section that Nina Bradley liked to read (“It is warm behind the driftwood now, for the wind has gone with the geese. So would I—if I were the wind”). Both are very lyrical passages.
We drove down to the shack, Sue and I carpooling with Anna, the others in their own vehicles. We filled the parking area. Among the fourteen of us were a couple from Burlington, Iowa, who knew people now living in the former Leopold home, an elderly woman photographer originally from Poland, two college girls, a teacher from one of the state schools, and a family with two teenaged boys. Some had driven from La Crosse, on the west side of the state; some had connections with Stevens Point, due north along the Wisconsin River. Anna showed us photographs of the land when the Leopolds bought it, pointed out an oak near the side of the parking area that had been there then, and led us to the prairie area, where she identified the wild indigo prominently in bloom and read a little from the book. Then she turned us toward the shack.
We stood in quiet anticipation as Anna opened the door and the front windows, like privileged visitors to a shrine, at once both curious and reverent. Then we trooped inside to sit in a back corner, across from the smoke-blackened fireplace. It was somewhat crowded for the fourteen of us and Anna, and the seven Leopolds must have found their quarters tight, especially when friends accompanied them. The interior walls were white, and the walls and shelves were filled with implements and utensils of one kind or another. Some, like a sturgeon spear used to take carp from the river to fertilize the garden and a perch for a pet hawk and pet owl, dated from the 1930s; others, because the cabin is still in use by Leopold’s descendants, had been added more recently. Bunks occupied the low section of the building and a table and benches were on the higher opposite side. The kitchen area was in the back, where Anna stood near the fireplace to tell us something about the features of the building. More than one person has pointed out that, having been built entirely from found materials, heated by firewood, and lit by lantern, the shack was even greener than the Leopold Center.
Too soon, Anna closed up the shack. She led us down to the river, although it was running high and we couldn’t reach the bank across flooded low areas. She emphasized the sand, explained the formation of Glacial Lake Wisconsin, and pointed out that a considerable amount of land had been added to the property by the shifting channel of the river. Earlier photos, especially one in which Estella Jr. gets water from the river with the Parthenon visible just over her shoulder, show the river much closer to the bluff the shack sits on; now it’s a considerable distance away.
Back at the shack again, Anna read the ending of “The Land Ethic” and thanked us all, letting us depart. I had come to this tour with a list of questions I hoped to get answered, mostly tied to images and occurrences in the book: How abundant are the woodcocks and is it still possible to see their mating flight as recorded in “Sky Dance”? How abundant are the upland plovers mentioned in May’s “Back from the Argentine”? How abundant are the draba, the ruffed grouse, the partridge, the quail? How abundant are the sandhill cranes? Essentially I was curious about how, since Leopold’s time, the variety and abundance of various fauna had changed. Anna had already answered other questions I might have asked about the river, the prairie restoration, and the woodlands. She was certain about woodcocks still being there but didn’t know for sure about upland plovers. I didn’t ask about the other birds because it suddenly occurred to me that what we had seen accomplished at the shack was a significant change in habitat. I mentioned to her that if you change the habitat, you automatically change what can use the habitat, and she said that one of the things the foundation might eventually have to consider was whether to remove the pines and restore the oak savanna environment that was here originally. The ecological thinking that goes on in the Leopold Center hasn’t stopped trying to learn from the land.
Everyone else headed for their cars, but Sue and I decided to walk the rest of the trail so she could see the woods that the Leopolds had planted and get a fuller sense of the terrain. When we came down to the road past the Good Oak plaque, we headed back toward the Leopold Center, stopping to gaze at the oak by the parking lot, the one that had been there when Aldo Leopold first saw the farm, the one still standing seventy-five years later. Then we walked up the road, past the prairie and past the marsh, all the while pondering how we should feel about what remained and what had changed around the shack.
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John Tallmadge, in “Anatomy of a Classic,” makes a telling point about Leopold’s narrator in A Sand County Almanac:
Leopold loves Canada geese, sandhill cranes, and wild game of all kinds, yet he seems charmingly fond of small creatures that no one appreciates, like Draba, the chickadee, and the field mouse. His interest in undervalued and marginal things extends to landscape; he prefers the nondescript scenery of a sand county farm to the romantic sublimities of Muir’s High Sierra or the edenic woods and pastures of [Gilbert] White or Thoreau. Indeed, landscape as such hardly seems to interest him. What goes on in the land is what fascinates, and toward this he reveals an endearing capacity for the deepest feelings.
In “Country” Leopold writes: “There are woods that are plain to look at, but not to look into. Nothing is plainer than a cornbelt woodlot; yet if it be August, a crushed pennyroyal, or an over-ripe mayapple, tells you here is a place. October sun on a hickory nut is irrefutable evidence of good country.” The passage confirms Tallmadge’s assessment, although the contrast with Muir and Thoreau may not be as sharp as he would have us think. The cabin at Walden Pond was constructed on a woodlot, and Muir’s nature studies began around a small lake on his family’s farm. Like Thoreau and Muir, as a youth Leopold tended to take long hikes from his boarding school in New Jersey, studying birds and plants. He had a penchant for the same kind of close observation and solitary exploration as the earlier naturalists.
The connection between Muir and Leopold runs even deeper. Leopold, after all, was thinking about creating a natural area at the site of Fountain Lake Farm when he died, a scheme that reminds us of his familiarity with The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, but the connection began even earlier than that. According to Curt Meine, author of a thorough Leopold biography, in 1934 Aldo Leopold and his brother Carl, returning from a fishing trip to Waushara County, stopped near Endeavor Marsh to inv
estigate a report of a pair of nesting sandhill cranes. A farmer “not only told them where they might find the pair, but gave them a lengthy history of the farm, the cranes, and the marsh.” After spotting the birds, Leopold began to research sandhill cranes both at the marsh and at the University of Wisconsin. In 1937, in the journal American Forests, he published the essay “Marshland Elegy,” which was one of the earliest essays to later be included in A Sand County Almanac and a distinctive rendering of the voice of the later book. It is particularly notable for the time span it covers, giving the reader a history of the marsh as well as a history of the bird. It educates and elegizes at the same time. By coincidence, Endeavor Marsh is located along the Fox River, and it’s notable that, before he purchased his shack, Leopold was already on the path to his book and that the path started near the boyhood home of John Muir.
One of the essays written much later also echoes a subject Muir wrote about in his memoir, the passenger pigeon. In “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” inspired by the erection of a monument to the passenger pigeon in Wyalusing State Park in 1947, Leopold writes:
We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.
Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.
In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth John Muir’s account of seeing immense flocks of passenger pigeons overhead and watching farmers shoot them leads to a long excerpt from Audubon and a shorter quote from Pokagon. It’s a memorable nine-page passage of narrative and description, and it largely serves to record the impression they made on him, among all the other birds he describes in the same chapter. Leopold takes the occasion of the monument not only to lament the extinction of the pigeon but also to tie its existence to the environment—“only the hills will know”—and to the larger issue of man’s profligate nature regarding the natural world: “To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.” It’s another elegy.
Of course, it’s a measure of how the environment has changed that Muir is remembering what he saw and Leopold is lamenting what can never be seen again. In a sense Leopold is building on what Audubon and Muir had made memorable. The cumulative effect is to make clear that, in walking home ground, we need, in John Burroughs’s phrase, to keep a sharp lookout, to really see what’s there; we also need to learn what was once there before we came along and what might not be there in the future, in order to preserve the memory of what’s lost and, perhaps, to impede the loss of what might disappear; and, finally, we need to know what we can preserve and what we can restore. Once we know these things, we have a better idea of what we need to do.
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It’s quiet here this September day, the prairie grasses taller than they were in June, the path mown and separate from the restored plants. Having seen sandhill cranes earlier that morning in the course of my autumn tour of Muir terrain further north, I suspect that it’s the influence of “Marshland Elegy” that makes me revisit Leopold terrain around noon. By now I’ve learned that the Leopolds recorded no cranes in their observations during the thirties, and that the cranes of the essay were inspired by the ones at Endeavor Marsh, not the marsh across the road from the shack. But I’d seen cranes there on my first visit to the shack and the thought of cranes will likely always make me think of Leopold, just as loons always make me think of Thoreau. I have no expectations as I stroll through the pines and across the prairie and note how high grasses now obscure the sight of the shack in the background. The shack, of course, is closed up and as I stand before it and slowly survey the area, I find a humble serenity in the moment.
Remembering how high water kept us from the riverbank in June, I again follow the path behind the shack, trudging with some effort across the brown rusty sand. The river’s lower now and I make it easily to the sandy beach area. Across the river I see more exposed shoreline and bare sandbars with gulls spread out across them; further downstream, a dozen or more egrets wade calmly. Midstream the river flows briskly.
Everything I’ve walked on since coming down the slope from the shack has been added by the river since Leopold bought the place, building on earlier deposits of sandbars and islands. To one small island, one of his daughters repeatedly made a bridge, but it’s likely that most of what’s here—the grasses and sand and trees and riverbank—are what he never saw, the river’s restoration project. No doubt the opposite northern bank of the river has changed a lot as well since Leopold’s time. Thoreau wondered about the succession of forest trees; Leopold attempted to heal and restore land where natural processes had been interrupted and human intervention had added to the process of succession; here, the river, aided no doubt by dams upstream and powered by floods in spite of dams, has made its own choices about succession and intervention.
I take my time returning from the riverbank and once more sit calmly on the Leopold bench in front of the shack. I think I’m trying to burn a disc of memory of the setting but after a while I realize I’m simply sitting, which, for a few more moments, seems enough to do. When I set off again to follow the trail past the old house foundation and the sand blow to the Good Oak plaque, I realize for the first time how many of Leopold’s pines I’m walking through, along with all the volunteer oaks. Their height and their sturdy, erect stance makes it hard to imagine that, when Leopold came here, none of them existed.
Once on the pavement I amble to a side road into the reserve. It’s a short distance to the end, where lowered water levels have exposed the pilings of a wooden bridge that once crossed the stream there. Someone has dumped trash in the parking area, a hostile form of human intervention. As I step closer to the water, a kingfisher flies up from the pilings and finds a limb on the opposite shore where he can scold me for startling him. I apologize but continue to stand there a few more minutes, trying to take in everything around me. Then I walk slowly up the road back to my car, pleased to have been alone at the shack, at the river, on the trail.
I drive away distractedly, still sorting out the effect Leopold’s home ground has on me. Off the shoulder of the road leading away from the river I see cranes in the periphery of my vision. I drive on, but I continue to look for them in my rearview mirror until the road turns.
Interlude
SATURDAY, MARCH 26, 2011. Winter seems reluctant to leave Wisconsin. The pond near our complex, which has finally been open water for several days, has a skin of ice over two-thirds of its surface this morning. I notice the ice as I walk past on the bike path, heading toward the ball field in the park just north of the pond. For months I’ve been aware of a bend in the river upstream visible through the bare winter trees and shrubs on the far side of the park, a bend mostly hidden from view in more verdant seasons. Startled that I hadn’t seen it before—or at least acknowledged it—I’ve been intending to take a closer look at it. The idea became more insistent after the February blizzard, when the stark brown trees stood out against the white snow, and the Fox River, still running open, glowed a deep blue behind them, flowing at first perpendicular to the park and then parallel to it.
From then on I looked for the bend each time I drove past. Driving by gives me a more elevated perspective that makes it easy to locate the bend, but on foot I’m not certain exactly where it is. The park is at the bottom of a ten-foot slope and the trees and undergrowth are thicker at ground level, obscuring any view of the river. When I tromp down the slope and cross the grass toward the line of trees, I thread my way through them a little too soon, coming out well below the bend. A rough path along the riverbank takes me to a point where a huge oak sprawls thick trunks in four directions close to the ground. From her
e I have a view of the river bend.
My arrival startles a nearby pair of mallards, who fly off complaining. In the distance two more ducks leave the water to rise up into the trees. I pull out my binoculars for a closer look and find myself staring at the first wood ducks I’ve ever seen in the wild. On the water I discover half a dozen more, and then I spot some buffleheads, some common goldeneyes, a pair of common mergansers, and more mallards—a surprising variety of waterfowl. It seems to be a popular spot. Except for the mallards, I’ve seen none of these birds on the river before. Red-winged blackbirds fly into the grasses on the shore and chickadees call from deeper in the woods. My presence causes no more alarm and I watch through binoculars as long as I can stand still in the cold. Then I find an easier, more direct path out of the woods.
I cut back across the ballfield, the grass flecked with snow, and climb the slope. The sun at 9:30 has begun to affect the edge of the ice sheet on the pond but, as cold as it is, I’m sure it won’t shrink much.
I follow the paved path between the pond and our complex back toward the river. Last weekend we had two days of heavy rain, and with the melting snow and the rain, the river has been running high. The floodplain glistens from the water spread across it, and I am certain that the path will be flooded near the observation deck. We’ve had several dry days and very cold nights and the hummocks of sedge between the path and the river seem separated by ice rather than by water.
