Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  Still, as persistent as winter is, the birds are ready for spring. I see robins and red-winged blackbirds and hear birdsong all along the path. Once I have a close-up view of a singing song sparrow and pause to listen to him warble and trill. A few other birds are too fleet of wing for me to identify, but they are distinctive enough for me to realize they aren’t anything I’ve seen or heard already this morning.

  At the entrance to the woods the path runs closer to the flood-plain and I begin to see more signs of flooding the closer I get to the observation deck. The foremost pilings of the deck are now in water and the platform seems to overlook a lake. The river here meanders through the wetlands, swings east and then west and then east again, approaching the deck and turning abruptly south to glide away from it. The sedges are usually high and dry and the channel of the river readily visible. Today, except for a few slightly higher parcels of land that have become islands, it is almost impossible to tell where the river usually runs. Around one of the islands I see a pair of mallards, as well as Canada geese in pairs or groups of three or four, no more than a dozen altogether. At one point a gander on one island storms across the shore of another to chase off two geese that were calmly standing there. The other geese ignore the fracas and drift around the island calmly.

  The sun is bright, the wind brisk, and snow flurries persistent, sometimes so light as to be barely noticeable, sometimes so intense as to cloud the air. When my hands become too cold to write notes or to hold my binoculars steady, I head home, well contented. I didn’t set out to have a lively birding day and I appreciate how lucky I’ve been. All I wanted was to become better acquainted with the river and, with the help of the birds, I’ve gotten that as well.

  The Pattern of the Seasons: Walking with August Derleth

  1

  I END MY FIRST day trying to walk in the footsteps of August Derleth at the Ferry Bluff Natural Area, along the Wisconsin River southwest of Sauk City. A dead-end dirt road brought me into thick woods and a place to park at road’s end, where Ferry Bluff towers above the road; a trail to the south led me through shady forest on a steep climb up to the open space of Cactus Bluff, a lower prominence. From here I have a panoramic view of the Wisconsin River. I supposedly can see the Wisconsin Heights battlefield of the Black Hawk War across the river and, to the southwest, Blue Mound, at 1,716 feet the highest point in southern Wisconsin. It’s possible I do, but it’s hard for me to tell. Mostly I take in these 500,000,000-year-old bluffs and the hawk’s-eye view of the Wisconsin River.

  Downstream, grassy and occasionally well-wooded islands interrupt the broad river; upstream near the east bank is a long, narrow island with young trees throughout two-thirds of it. The river seems very wide here and forest covers both shores as far as I can see in either direction, though beyond the woods to the north and east I also discern narrow strips of cultivated or cleared land and some very tall structures.

  I’m trying to sort out what to make of the kind of day I’ve had, what I’ve learned and what I’ve seen and what I’ve been unable to see in my rambles around Sauk City and Prairie du Sac. It hasn’t been a day like those first days tracing Muir and Leopold. Walking their home grounds at Muir Park and the Leopold Center, I was in specifically circumscribed locales, places expressly preserved to allow me to do that. The Sac Prairie setting that was August Derleth’s home ground is less accommodating.

  It’s not because Derleth has been forgotten in the twin villages of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac. One entrance to Sauk City is the August Derleth Bridge across the Wisconsin River; a historical marker stands at the entrance to August Derleth Park; August Derleth’s image is included on a sesquicentennial mural by the side of the road. The Sauk City Public Library has an August Derleth Room in its basement, housing material from the August Derleth Society, and the Tripp Memorial Museum in Prairie du Sac contains an August Derleth exhibit, complete with Derleth’s chair, writing table, and one of his old typewriters, with photocopies of typescript scrolled around its platen and piled nearby. (The Concord Museum has a similar display for Henry David Thoreau, a parallel that would surely have pleased Derleth.) In Sac Prairie, August Derleth’s presence is inescapable.

  But the challenges to walking Derleth’s home ground are multiple. For one thing, it’s so encompassing. He was a habitual walker not only of woods and river bottoms and bluffs but also of residential streets and business blocks. He recorded his wanderings in a voluminous private journal, numerous essays and poems, and six books of personal nonfiction. Some of the books handily have endpaper and interior maps locating the sites mentioned in the books. There’s no shortage of material to draw on.

  In the Sauk City Library’s August Derleth Room I found an article declaring “Derleth was Wisconsin’s Thoreau” and encouraging readers to walk the land that Derleth walked, just what I came here hoping to do. Another article provided locations that figure in Derleth’s books: his birthplace, his boyhood home, his girlfriend Margery’s house, the Freie Gemeindehalle, and the Schwenker harness shop. An article posted in the Tripp Museum exhibit gave addresses for houses specifically mentioned in one book, Walden West.

  I mapped a tour for myself of Derleth-related sites. The birthplace house looked to have been entirely renovated or possibly replaced; the boyhood home was well cared for on a quiet street, as was the girlfriend’s house. Other buildings, like the Freie Gemeindehalle, built in 1884 by German Freethinkers who had come to Sauk City as early as 1852, was interesting in its own right, and some of the other houses were suitable for a tour of home design. However, none of the buildings is specifically preserved as a Derleth-related site. I found myself agreeing with a brochure for a walking tour of Prairie du Sac that advised tourists to view the homes from the sidewalk and to maintain the privacy of the current residents—it would serve no purpose to do otherwise. Derleth often walked the streets of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac, observing the lighted interiors of houses as he passed, claiming, “Each house has about it atmosphere of time past, and this atmosphere of houses is the atmosphere of towns, the ceaselessly changing aspect of time and age.” The theme emerges in several of his books, including Walden West, but in autumn midday sunlight, I could read very little atmosphere of the houses at which I gazed.

  Searching for something more tangible, I drove out to Lueders Road, where the place he started out from on many of his walks and the place he finally ended up are across the road from each other. At St. Aloysius Cemetery, on the outskirts of town, I easily located Derleth’s grave. The grave marker isn’t large, but it’s distinctive: a marble bench with a seated cherub leaning against the square support of a sundial, intently reading. A small garden gnome stands at the base, and on a metal pole beside the bench hang a wind chime with a butterfly to activate it and a golden sun medallion with twin metal spirals below and small cups to catch the wind. At times it is likely the liveliest grave in the cemetery.

  Inscribed in the top of the bench is Derleth’s favorite quote from Walden: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” As with the other places Derleth quotes it, here too Thoreau’s opening phrase, “I came to the woods because . . . ,” is missing, and its absence gives Derleth the broader implication he took from it. The epitaph reinforced my sense of Derleth’s sense of connection with Thoreau.

  Across the road, Derleth’s house, Place of Hawks, stood in deep shade behind thick trees and a high, gated metal fence. From the shoulder of the road I could barely make it out. I saw no signs of life around the place. Together the grave and the house seemed to emphasize Derleth’s absence.

  I looked again at the photocopies of those endpaper maps and tried to decide where to go. The oldest map I had dated back more than seventy years, and Derleth had been dead for forty of those years. Sac Prairie had changed considerably during those decades, which led to the other great challenge to walking Derleth�
�s home ground—discovering today anything that could give me a sense of his yesterday.

  I’d come here prepared to visit several sites in particular, but when I asked the curator at the Tripp Museum about them, he told me that at least two were no longer accessible. What Derleth referred to as the Big Hill across the river had been quarried into oblivion by a gravel plant; a railroad trestle Derleth is pictured near in a well-known photograph, on which he often crossed the Wisconsin River to reach what he called the Spring Slough, now had a long impassable gap midchannel—apparently flood-waters pushed the rails out of alignment and an effort to realign the trestles with dynamite destroyed the center of the bridge. I had envisioned myself climbing that hill, ambling across that trestle, gazing out at the view from places Derleth sat, and diligently journaling my impressions of the terrain and the feelings the moment inspired. I suddenly remembered driving out on Cape Cod once to visit the Outermost House that Henry Beston had written about and arriving at a sign that told me the house had been swept out to sea years before. As then, I was more than a little disconcerted now.

  On the old endpaper map I could see where the trestle would be and the route Derleth must have taken to reach it, so I drove to the trestle, hoping the curator was overly pessimistic about the chances of getting across the river there. He wasn’t. I parked in a hardware store lot, crossed the street to the narrow gravel shoulder above the river, and stood looking at two trestles end to end. One foundation was below me on the west bank, another was in the middle of the river, and a third was on the east bank. A rusty, gated fence closed off the western trestle. When I peered through it directly down the center of the trestle, I could see the space where the far end had fallen away and the second trestle began. Grasses grew on the section of trestle still suspended above the river. Clearly I’d have no chance of reaching the Spring Slough trestle and Bergen’s Island from this direction, and neither trestle was the one behind Derleth in that familiar photograph.

  By the time I eventually came to Ferry Bluff, I was all too aware of how disconnected I felt to everything I’d seen. Sac Prairie, his name for this area, continued to be well aware of his former presence; but, as I reviewed the day’s wanderings, I didn’t know how any of it could help me understand what it was like for August Derleth to walk his home ground.

  Getting ready to leave the bluff and head for home, I happen to glance up. A hawk hovers and glides high overhead, his broad wings outstretched, his white underside bright in sunlight. He almost seems to be circling my location. I vaguely remember Derleth remarking once that after death he’d come back as a hawk. I wonder if this hawk is him. When you’re needing encouragement, any possible sign can provide it. I give the hawk a little salute. He’s as good a sign as I’m likely to get today.

  2

  In the opening pages of Walden West, varying a description he had given twenty years earlier at the start of Village Year, his first “Sac Prairie Journal,” August Derleth locates Sac Prairie “on the edge of the great driftless area, on a fertile, outthrust paw of land in a fine unbroken curve from west to north pushing out to west by south.”

  He helps us get a sense of the terrain: “The Wisconsin River is its eastern edge; to the west and to the north the undulant prairie rolls in a succession of slowly rising terraces to the foothills and the bluffs; to the south, the bottoms border the river to the Ferry Bluff range in the southwest. Across the river is the soft line of the moraine where the glacier stopped.”

  The moraine he mentions is the Johnstown Moraine, not so pronounced opposite Sauk City as it is elsewhere in the area, but actually the formation that marks the limit of the Green Bay Lobe’s advance during the Wisconsin Glaciation, the final time the Laurentide Ice Sheet crept into the area. The moraine angles northwest toward the Baraboo Hills; everything to the east and northeast of it bears the marks of that glaciation, including the land where the Muirs established Fountain Lake Farm and the Leopolds restored the shack; and everything to the west falls into the Driftless Area and the Central Plain, where outwash and melt-water created Glacial Lake Wisconsin.

  The Wisconsin River flowed a different course before the glacial lake was formed. But in time, a catastrophic flood emptied the lake and the Wisconsin River formed a new channel, carving in the process the sandstone formations of the Wisconsin Dells. The river flowed east and then arched around south to eventually head southwest to the Mississippi. Aldo Leopold’s shack is on the southern bank of the eastbound section, and roughly thirty miles directly south—at least forty miles or more if you travel by river—is August Derleth’s Sac Prairie, twin villages on the western bank of the river.

  The two writers have in common the river and the history of agriculture in its floodplain, but the terrain around Sac Prairie has a different feel to it. From the east you descend to the river to cross into either Prairie du Sac (“Upper Sac Prairie” in Derleth’s labeling) or Sauk City (“Lower Sac Prairie”)—both villages named for the Sac, or Sauk, tribe that US expansion displaced from the prairie stretching west from the river. If you continue west you cross a long stretch of flat land before you reach the bluffs and hills in the distance. As Derleth summed it up: “It lies in a setting of great natural beauty, in a kind of valley, with the slow river flowing broadly past, surrounded on all sides by low, wooded hills—near on the east, far on all other horizons.”

  Derleth’s home ground is essentially that encompassing the hills east of the river, the marshes and bottomlands along the Wisconsin River, the floodplain forest and the islands accessible by way of railroad trestles and railroad tracks, the bluffs and banks lining the west side of the river, and the streets that led him past the houses and shops of the twin villages where he spent the entirety of his life.

  The duration of his wanderings there adds a different dimension to our sense of his home ground than we had with Muir’s dozen years at Fountain Lake Farm and Leopold’s dozen years at the shack. Muir came to his home ground when it was untrammeled wilderness; Leopold came to his farm after it had been depleted and long abandoned; Derleth was born into the fourth generation to have occupied and developed those villages along the river, and he rambled around his stretch of territory for sixty-two years, taking in changes not only in the land but also in the community the land surrounded. He walked through the natural world and recorded what he saw and heard and smelled in tandem with his walks through the social world of his community. His journals preserve his accounts of flora and fauna, as well as accounts of personalities and behaviors and interactions with townspeople. Everything he recorded was potentially of use in his writing, be it fiction—neighbors and acquaintances were accustomed to identifying one another in the characters inhabiting Derleth’s novels and short stories—or poetry—in his journal books he often mentions locations where he wrote specific poems, some published in those very books or in his own subsequent collections—or nonfiction—the journal books are full of conversations and encounters with local people, particularly at Hugo Schwenker’s harness shop, and vignettes of his walks to various locales.

  Derleth never published a nature book per se—the only one that fits that description, In the Course of My Walks, is actually a posthumous editing and reprinting of the nature interludes in Return to Walden West—but he did publish a great deal of nature writing in literary and outdoor magazines throughout his career, material taken from his journals and often included later as segments of his journal books or as elements of Walden West and Return to Walden West. He contributed short prose vignettes and longer essays to Trails from 1933 through 1934, to Outdoors from 1934 to 1942, and to Country Book from 1942 to 1948. From 1945 to 1953 he published a quarterly series of nature essays in The Passenger Pigeon: A Magazine of Wisconsin Bird Study, first under a seasonal title (“Sac Prairie Winter,” “Sac Prairie Spring”), and later under the title “Country Calendar.” Notably, the series was interrupted in 1950 and 1951 by eight contributions under the title “Walden West (Excerpts)”; an explanatory note clai
med that Walden West was “a spiritual autobiography” and “a logical outgrowth of the Sac Prairie Journal.” Seven of the excerpts appeared ten years later in the published book. In the same period he published three pieces in the literary journal Prairie Schooner: “Lives of Quiet Desperation” (Spring 1948), “Excerpts from Walden West” (Fall 1950), and “Passages from Walden West” (Summer 1953). All these excerpts give some indication of both how Derleth found multiple venues for his work-in-progress and also how long Walden West, unlike most of his other books, was in progress.

  The Sac Prairie Journal, as Derleth referred to his daily journal keeping, ran continuously from 1935 up until the end of his life in 1971, and though many of the entries might emphasize town characters or personal business or musings about writing in progress, the nature entries were a continuous element of the writing throughout those thirty-five years. Reading the entirety of Derleth’s journal, most but not all of it available in the Wisconsin Historical Society Library archives, would be a mammoth undertaking. But the four journal books—Village Year: A Sac Prairie Journal (published in 1941), Village Daybook: A Sac Prairie Journal (1947), Countryman’s Journal (1963), and Wisconsin Country: A Sac Prairie Journal (1965)—which collectively cover the period from 1935 to 1942, contain a great deal of material revised and edited from those journals, material that may be thought of as Derleth’s idea of the highlights. They are amicable and accessible and atmospheric.

  Walden West and Return to Walden West are in some ways sequels to those journal books, drawing on much the same source of material, but neither is bound to the calendar and each endeavors to stay true to the intentions announced in their early pages: “An Exposition on Three Related Themes. I. On the persistence of memory; II. On the sounds and odors of the country; III. Of Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”