Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  A throng of Canada geese floats on the surface of the river, backlit by late-afternoon sunlight and stretching off around the bend. There are too many to count, most of them barely moving. The trail almost immediately leads into the woods along the river and its wetlands. For a while, weaving near to and away from the river, seldom in sight of it, we continually agitate the geese. They can hear us clumping through mud and over stones and loudly comment on it. The stream is rimmed with ice and the eddies sometimes have a thin coating, but otherwise the water is clear and open. Eventually the trail winds away from the river, first into tall trees and then through dense thickets, and we no longer hear the geese. Wooded slopes rise in the distance on one side of us and on the other we often can’t see the sedges of the wetlands. In a little while we enter a broad meadow, brown grasses high on either side of the trail, and walk in sunshine along a glassy, ice-covered path. We emerge onto an open field heading toward a distant barn and a low roadside fence, where the river goes under another bridge. The river seems to widen here and flow serenely.

  We’re nearly to the limit of the completed trail in the Merton segment. Across the road, after a short walk through some woods and over a bridge, we’ll enter a subdivision that takes us back to Dorn Road and a two-mile walk to the next trailhead. Connecting routes like this link completed segments of the Ice Age Trail. Sometimes they pass through quiet residential neighborhoods, sometimes along country roads, sometimes along crowded four-lane highways. The IATA continually negotiates for easements through more natural environments and continually works to complete new segments of the trail and to reroute older ones as development encroaches, but as yet it still needs the connecting routes.

  Our walk in the Merton segment alters our sense of the Ice Age Trail from what the Monches segment implied it might be. Monches was entirely woods and riverbank, essentially a nature hike; Merton is largely the abandoned railway bed and passage through town and across and along roads, at best a rural walk. Only along that short stretch of the Bark River floodplain, where we saw sunlight gleaming off the breasts of the geese and listened to them murmuring about our passage, did we feel isolated enough to concentrate on our surroundings. We’re not eager to reach the subdivision and roadside connecting route and put it off for a month by heading back the way we’ve come.

  In early February, sunshine and temperatures around forty degrees inspire an impromptu hike of the Hartland segment, the next section to the south, which also passes through glacial terraces of sand and gravel outwash. From the northern Hartland trailhead in Centennial Park, a paved path parallels the Bark River behind a heavy growth of slender trees on a narrow strip of riverbank. It makes me wish the trail from Merton had stayed close to the stretch of the river Milton J. Bates describes canoeing in The Bark River Chronicles.

  In the nineteenth century, rivers were the sites of choice where villages sprang up, exploiting the water’s potential for dams, mills, and commercial transportation. But after highways and railroads and other shifts in local economies diminished the water’s advantages, communities turned their backs on the rivers, building away from them and using them as drainage for sewage and refuse. Reuben Gold Thwaites, canoeing the Wisconsin River in 1887, thought the Sauk City of August Derleth’s parents’ day “a shabby town” of “squalid back yards” where “slaughter-houses abut the stream.” It led Thwaites to muse about the differences among river towns: “Some of them present a neat front to the water thoroughfare, with flower-gardens and well-kept yards and street-ends, while others regard the river as a sewer and the banks as a common dumping ground, giving the traveler by boat a view of filth, disorder, and general unsightliness which is highly repulsive.” Only a downturn in manufacturing and a late-blooming recognition of the aesthetic appeal and commercial potential for tourism, recreation, and real estate of rivers inspired efforts to restore and even celebrate them. Such seems the case in Hartland. We pass many people out walking the paved paths along the river that the Ice Age Trail follows. Once again, in our hiking clothes we feel as conspicuous as voyageurs blundering into a civilized settlement.

  From Centennial Park the river flows strongly through snow-lined banks and substantial cottonwoods. The trail soon arcs through a corridor of trees at the base of sloped lawns leading to a higher level of residences, sternly designated as private property. We clatter over a solid, well-built boardwalk, cross an arched wooden bridge, and walk another narrow corridor of trees above a flat, leaf-covered riverbank. At Hartbrook Drive, we face the raised embankment of State Highway 16 and detour through an underpass. The cars whooshing overhead sound more frenzied and determined than the train crossing the Oconomowoc over-pass. The trail heads away from roads to follow the Bark all the way to downtown Hartland. There we leave the river, rise onto the main business street, and begin an urban stroll, down village streets and over city bridges, into Nixon Park. Misinterpreting signs, we head south on Cottonwood Avenue and discover ourselves at the Hartland Ice Age Wetland, an extensive marsh along the Bark River.

  Hundreds of geese congregate in open water deeper in the marsh, away from the road. The brown grasses and the blue water and the multitudes of geese replay the scene we admired at the end of our Merton hike, as if the geese had all floated downstream over the course of a month. The wetland stretches a long way off on either side of the road, occupying the lowlands created by a glacial spillway, overlooked by housing on the highlands above it. Across the river and across the road, in a little cleared space, a sign like the one for the Carl Schurz Forest commemorates John Wesley Powell. Four years older than John Muir, Powell grew up on a farm in Walworth County, just south of Waukesha County, and, like Muir, really made his mark in the American West. Powell’s exploration of the Colorado River was memorably epic, and his contributions as the head of the US Geological Survey were significant. His connection with Wisconsin marshland is tenuous, but as a Wisconsin-born conservationist Powell merits recognition, though the sign is easy to ignore by passing drivers on Cottonwood Avenue and a little challenging for hikers to reach.

  In Hartland, the Ice Age Trail takes us by two other commemorative sites for Wisconsin conservationists. From the Powell site we backtrack a little through a residential area to get to the Aldo Leopold Overlook, above the eastern end of the marsh. At the top of a forty-five-foot glacial hill we find, appropriately enough, a Leopold bench with a view of the marsh. Below us is a frozen pond, with a couple of nesting boxes jutting up out of the ice. Beyond a stretch of tall sedges we see the geese crowded along the open water of the Bark. This is not the marshland that inspired Leopold’s “Marshland Elegy,” but it will do, and for a conservationist whose writing is intimately connected with the Wisconsin environment, it seems an inviting place to read that essay.

  From the Leopold Overlook, the Ice Age Trail skirts the wet-lands on one side and housing developments on the other and rambles to the Hartland Marsh–John Muir Overlook. A sign at the top of a rise quotes Muir’s description of Fountain Lake and refers to this marsh as an Ice Age wetland. A footpath loops deeper into the area. Two years earlier, on our first hike with our IATA chapter, Sue and I took a tour through the marsh led by Paul Mozina, who had been laboring for years to remove invasive plants crowding out native growth. He’d burned six hundred piles of brush, mostly buckthorn, cleared the forest floor, and planted native flora. We saw red oak, white oak, bur oak, cottonwoods—some trees were magnificently huge—white wild geraniums. After long walks on boardwalks around the marsh we hiked to an old homestead, only a totem pole and a stone bench and fireplace still standing, and crossed the Bark River. We startled a great horned owl that flew off while we stood watching.

  It was only much later that I began to link the Wisconsin Conservationists Hall of Fame signs for Schurz, Powell, Leopold, and Muir with Mozina’s work on the Hartland Marsh. The memorial signs for those historic ecologists are meant to be affirmative and perhaps inspiring, a link between the volunteers who serve as stewards and work crews fo
r the Ice Age Trail and the pioneering figures who advocated for the land. But in their out-of-the-way locations, they testify to the tangential presence in the public mind of the people they commemorate; those commemorative overlooks would be easy to bypass for anyone not following the blazes for the Ice Age Trail. But almost anywhere on the completed and conscientiously maintained sections of the Ice Age Trail—off the connecting routes and on the trail itself—or here in the restored areas of Hartland Marsh, a person would be at once aware that some contemporary volunteers share the spirit, the passion, of those earlier figures and perhaps sense that their connection to their home ground is deep and thoughtful and strong.

  I felt hints of that on our first Ice Age Trail outing, not only in Hartland Marsh, but also in a section of woods that Sue and I now routinely hike as IAT stewards. South of the Muir Overlook, through an open corridor between commercial buildings and residential areas and across a busy road and near more housing, the trail enters an open field, where summer grasses grow higher than hikers’ heads, and arcs through it to dense woods. It wanders west along a slope, some farmland visible on the lowland to the north, a tony residential neighborhood out of sight beyond the top of the rise. For the most part this stretch is secluded and closed in, with huge oaks standing along the trail. The trail here essentially crosses the till settled on the western edge of the Niagara Escarpment, which underlies the upland to the east of the trail through Hartland, most notably just east of the Leopold Overlook, and much of the Kettle Moraine from this point on. The escarpment isn’t exposed here, but on our first hike through this section—the one that took us to Hartland Marsh—I was aware of its submerged presence and liked sensing it. At some places on the trail I’m more attuned to the gray ghost of the escarpment than to the white ghost of the glacier.

  Trail stewards help maintain the trail by walking their sections often, picking up trash and debris, hacking back obstructions, removing fallen limbs or trees. I’ve come to this section on chapter workdays when volunteers rerouted the trail around an eroded slope, unblocked a flooding stream, yanked out buckthorn and garlic mustard, leveled the tread. Ice Age Trail volunteers share a sense of responsibility not only for the condition of the trail but also for heightening the connection hikers or casual walkers might feel for the terrain they pass through. Like the Monches segment or that stretch of the Bark River in Merton or the wetlands in Hartland, this one-mile stretch of woods lifts me out of time and immerses me in the moment, in my sense of where I am.

  That feeling of connection dissipates quickly when I leave this stretch of woods. The trail winds past huge houses and vast lawns, passes behind a huge church, and follows the edge of a golf course to a junction with the Lake Country Recreation Trail, a paved bike trail it shares through the city of Delafield.

  We return in March to the junction of the Hartland and Delafield segments, at a busy intersection on State Highway 83. On the ups and downs of the Delafield trail segment, we’re too aware of walking a paved path under towering power lines to concentrate on the terrain. We walk amidst an abundance of other walkers and bikers. Soon we descend onto the streets of Delafield, pass historic buildings like the 1846 Hawks Inn and a busy, bustling downtown, and stride out along the bike path until the Ice Age Trail separates from it. The Delafield segment is essentially an urban stroll through an appealing-enough town, if you enjoy taking a stroll through a town. All along the way I’m reminded of my wanderings—and August Derleth’s—in Prairie du Sac and Sauk City and I suspect that only someone with Derleth’s expansive sense of home ground, his feeling for both town and terrain, will connect to this segment in the way he connected to Sac Prairie. By the time we’re climbing away from the Lake Country Recreation Trail toward the trailhead for the Lapham Peak segment, I realize that at almost no point in the day have I thought about the glacier that formed the terrain all this disguises.

  4

  At the intersection of Highway 83 and Golf Road, where the Hartland and Delafield segments meet, a drugstore occupies one corner, a shopping plaza another, and a park-and-ride lot a third, while multiple lanes of traffic rush in between. The highway slopes down toward exit and entrance ramps for Interstate 94, which spans the bottom of the slope, then rises up the other side of the valley toward more shopping centers. Within a half-mile stretch there are five traffic lights. For his course on Waukesha County’s glacial geology at the University of Wisconsin– Waukesha, Marlin Johnson took his class, me among them, to a parking lot near a coffee shop on the southern slope and asked us to survey this congested area and imagine everything on it gone. A pleasant idea, if difficult to achieve. Johnson was explaining the complications of land formation here, the way the glacier would have dammed the nearby lakes—Nagawicka to the west, Pewaukee to the east—in different places at different times and forced meltwater to find different routes away from the basins. One ancient river channel that resulted was likely formed by a catastrophic collapse of an ice dam that sent a massive amount of meltwater scouring the landscape to the south and coming to rest in the lowest areas it could find. Later, when we drove south on Highway 83, we could see the floodplain of peaceful, placid Scuppernong Creek, the quiet inheritor of that wide, flat channel; and on Highway 18, when we parked at one of the southern access points for the Lapham Peak section of the IAT, we noted the flatness of the land to the east and the wooded rise of the land to the west. For those few minutes at least, we seemed to be connected to the ghost of a glacier.

  The challenge for anyone trying to comprehend glacial geology is imagining the scale of past events in light of the physical world you stand on while you search for it. Marlin Johnson’s class and my efforts to walk this portion of my home ground are centered on one relatively small area affected by the Wisconsin glaciation, one county out of more than fifty that were covered by the ice, and one of seven counties on the dividing line between the Lake Michigan and Green Bay Lobes.

  The Kettle Moraine, which dominates the remainder of the Ice Age Trail across the rest of Waukesha County, extends to the north through Washington and Ozaukee Counties and south through a corner of Jefferson County into Walworth County. The Niagara Escarpment, which underlies much of the Kettle Moraine in Waukesha County and is usually credited with dividing the Lake Michigan and Green Bay Lobes, reaches northeast to the end of Wisconsin beyond the Door Peninsula, arches through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and down the Bruce Peninsula of Ontario, heads east to form Niagara Falls, and crosses western New York state. Fifty counties, 120 miles of Kettle Moraine, nearly 1,000 miles of Niagara Escarpment, glacial deposition dating back 16,000 to 22,200 years—this is what I mean by scale.

  And then there’s the matter of how complicated it can be to explain events that took place over millennia, and how difficult it is, first, to unravel what evidence still exists and, second, to compose an explanation comprehensible to a layperson—say, to a person like me. Glaciers advanced and melted back and advanced again, and streams ran below and through them and around their edges, and what formed at one time got altered at a later time and that got altered still later in a way that exposed a portion of what was there before the earlier alteration. And so on.

  Meltwater stream sediment ran across open surfaces, but ice buried beneath the open surfaces could be covered by till; when that ice melted, the sediment could sink and form kettle depressions and turn the sediment around the kettles into “hummocky” hills and ridges. Lee Clayton, in Pleistocene Geology of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, tells us, “The Kettle Moraine consists of a nested series of partly collapsed outwash fans and eskers, overlain by till in places, and formed at the apex of the angle between the Green Bay and Lake Michigan Lobes.” Outwash fans are the sediment deposited by meltwater at the glacier’s edge; eskers are the meandering ridges formed from the sediment in streams flowing within the glacier; till is the debris on top of the glacier that settles when the ice melts. I find it bewildering to try to sort out the sequence of any of those things happening.
r />   You say a term like “kettle moraine” and, because you have an idea what a “kettle” is and an idea what a “moraine” is—and may even be able to explain the differences among “lateral,” “terminal,” “recessional,” and “medial” moraines—you have a single uniform image in your head. That kettles here might sometimes be “kettles” (formed by the settling of debris on melting blocks of ice) and sometimes be simple depressions on either side of a hummock (it’s the buildup of the hummocks that creates the depressions); that “moraine” here might not be an accurate geological term (Clayton claims “the Kettle Moraine is more nearly an esker than a moraine”); that marked differences in terrain exist along the length of the Kettle Moraine—all these tend to fracture that uniform image.

  Mickelson notes that, throughout the Kettle Moraine, very little till can be found and “nearly all the sediment is sand or a combination of sand and gravel that was deposited by meltwater.” For that reason, Mickelson argues, “the Kettle Moraine is not a moraine by most definitions but instead is an interlobate zone where supraglacial and subglacial streams deposited sand and gravel.” Somehow, “supraglacial and subglacial interlobate deposit zone” doesn’t have quite the ring to it that “Kettle Moraine” does, but Mickelson’s description is a good one to keep in mind when you’re trying to figure out what you’re traveling through on these segments of the Ice Age Trail.