Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  My interest in knowing where I was grew slowly. Closer to home in Waukesha County, I hiked the Scuppernong Trail a couple of weeks after we’d been on the Muir, and I still recall the impact the terrain there had on me. If you think that brown and gray are two colors that ought to dominate a landscape, the view on every side was a study in their use. Walking alone, meeting no one else, all I heard was the wind rustling dead leaves on the bare trees and my own feet shuffling through leaves on the trail, which often skittered around me in the wind. Sometimes sand was underfoot, sometimes gravel, but mostly leaves and, under towering pines, thick layers of pine needles.

  Often the trail would climb a ridge alongside a deep bowl, sometimes one on either side, and I would wonder about the glacial forces that had been at work there. When I got home I reread Laurie Allman’s chapter on the Kettle Moraine and looked in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape for definitions of moraine, drumlin, esker, kame, outwash plain, and kettle (I was delighted to learn that Walden Pond is a kettle). I made sure I brought Sue with me back to the Scuppernong Trail, crossing the Ice Age Trail with only a little curiosity and unaware that Scuppernong is the northernmost IAT segment in the southern Kettle Moraine State Forest.

  The more tenuous connections grew out of my discovery that, in the IAT’s Waterville segment, between the Lapham Peak and Scuppernong segments, and in the Eagle segment, just south of the Scuppernong, it would be possible to see outcroppings of the Niagara Escarpment if I walked the Ice Age Trail.

  I was born on the Niagara Escarpment. It’s the geological feature that the Erie Barge Canal had to climb using the same locks Increase Lapham helped build in Lockport. I’ve driven often along the escarpment in Southern Ontario, hiked some of it on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, run into it inadvertently on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and vacationed on it on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. The Niagara Escarpment is the geologic feature I relate to most, a feature that begins not far from where I did and ends (more or less, by not surfacing again beyond it) here in Waukesha County, where I likely will.

  The escarpment is some four hundred million years older than the last Ice Age. To simply say the name transports me at once back to the Silurian Period, in the middle of the Paleozoic Era, and simultaneously back to the mid-twentieth century and a view of the Lockport locks. It’s an inevitable and irresistible act of time travel.

  Sometimes, similar though less intense moments happen as a result of having taken that glacial geology class. We took a field trip around Waukesha County, stopping on Highway 18 to gaze at a very clear example of a drumlin, following the glacial channel from its source at Nagawicka and Pewaukee Lakes down the floodplain of Scuppernong Creek to the end of the Lapham Peak unit, and wandering a portion of the Scuppernong Springs Nature Trail in the Kettle Moraine State Forest. At Scuppernong Springs, where Paul Mozina, our guide at Hartland Marsh, leads an effort to restore the marshland and return the Scuppernong River to its original channel, we saw evidence of multiple eras of time. The marsh there once was mined for marl, the chalky, lime-rich deposit laid down in glacial lakes and excavated to use as fertilizer and mortar—the same substance that lines the bottom of Muir’s Fountain Lake. In addition to that early-twentieth-century enterprise, at varying times there were a nineteenth-century trout hatchery, a hotel, a sawmill, a cranberry bog, and eventually a brewery on the site. A Native American encampment preceded all of them. Scuppernong Springs is presently on its way back to its presettlement state, but to walk it is to intersect with half a dozen time periods in ways that may not be so obvious in other places.

  As I wrestle with that moon’s-eye view, zooming in and zooming out as on a satellite map, I try to remember that I should also attempt to see things at various moments in an immense timeline, even if it means also trying to somehow see the invisible and the vanished.

  7

  On the summer day we set off from the northern Waterville trail-head, after a short walk through woods and along a meadow, we have to trudge for more than a mile along the shoulder of Waterville Road to get back onto the trail. Then we’re in woods, soon taking a long solid boardwalk through lowlands, passing under tall trees and through thick undergrowth. The forest seems broad and high. We’re just off the western side of the Kettle Moraine, angling along terrain on its Green Bay Lobe side and following the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, crossing rolling terrain with some steep slopes. It’s quiet in the woods and I often gawk at the older, larger oaks, until I sprawl headlong on the trail from not watching my feet. When I stand up, Sue points at a deer running away from us, no doubt alarmed by the whoomp of my fall. When we cross a subdivision street where I parked a few years before and enter the longer, more secluded stretch of the segment, I start recalling moments from that earlier hike.

  On that autumn day I passed through what my hiking guide described as “remnants of pre-settlement vegetation: oak forest, oak openings, prairie and wetland” looking for “a small exposed section of native dolomite bedrock,” part of the Niagara Escarpment. It was a short hike, generally downhill, through forest almost all the way. Generally the forest floor was closed with undergrowth, though occasionally the darkness from the canopy kept it clear of growth but dense with fallen trunks and limbs. I constantly tramped over acorns and oak leaves. At one point the trail wound its way along the edge of a field and then took a turn that brought me into the open. A large hayfield spread out before me, newly mown, with scattered wheels of hay standing here and there. Three sandhill cranes idled in the middle distance, moving with that stately slow-motion strut, occasionally lowering their heads to the ground. This was one of my first crane sightings in Wisconsin, and I gazed at them for several minutes. Eventually one of them complained about my standing there and, rather than prompt them to flight, I moved on.

  The trail went lower and crossed some wetlands and another field, and when I could hear cars on the road again, I assumed I wasn’t far from the southern trailhead and turned around. On the way back I noticed the outcroppings of buried dolomite under my feet and located some off to the side of the trail, but I found no especially pronounced formation. Except for the cranes, a few other birds invisible in the foliage, and the occasional squirrel, I’d seen no signs of wildlife; occasionally I heard distant voices from nearby farms or the sound of machinery but only near the end of the hike did I meet a man in a bright yellow vest, pumping walking sticks, coming the other way. Otherwise I’d been on the trail for an hour and a half alone.

  Now, walking the Waterville segment again, I look for familiar places.

  Soon enough we top a rise and parallel the edge of the spacious hayfield where I saw the cranes my first time through; it’s empty now, but I can’t help scouring the field in hopes of spotting them. After a few minutes of fruitless gazing, we keep walking. As we descend steeply, wind through more woods and out along a grassy and uncultivated field, cross low wetlands on some rather unstable puncheons, and make the slight rise up to the southern trailhead on a county road, I keep thinking about the cranes I saw almost three years earlier, when cranes were not so familiar to me; images from Leopold’s “Marshland Elegy” arise as well. There’s a long chain of connection between the birds and the land, and my awareness of it makes me less disturbed than I once might have been by the abrupt appearance of a hayfield in the midst of my woodland walk.

  On that earlier fall hike the Niagara dolomite was harder to spot, covered in moss and leaf litter. This time through I notice more rocks exposed on the trail, their color and shape familiar to me now from other escarpment sites I’ve visited. I like the idea that the ground I’m walking on here is an extension of the home ground I walked all through my childhood.

  The connecting route between the Waterville and Scuppernong segments is the last one in the county. From the northern Scuppernong trailhead on we’ll be in the Kettle Moraine State Forest all the way to the county line. On a cool June day we start out between two pastures, one fallow, the other filled with stunted stalks
of corn and vast rectangles of hay. The trail is straight and flat until we enter the woods where the land rises and angle south on a continuous upslope. These are ice-contact slopes, gravel deposits once lower than the surrounding ice but, once the ice was gone, now higher than the surface the ice rested on. The climb takes us onto a mostly level area along a red pine plantation and into the sprawling Pinewoods campground. From now on we expect to cross wider, more open trails that we’ve followed on other hikes. The Ice Age Trail is narrow and runs through ground cover, with alternating stands of red pine and oak overhead, though at one point we pass a stretch of low white pine. A couple of orange signs with large black letters advise: “Don’t Shoot This Direction ↑ Houses Ahead.” We wonder how close the areas open to seasonal hunting are. The only people we see in this section of the Scuppernong are a woman and two teenaged girls, each with a large, aggressive dog on a leash, following one of the broader hiking trails. The dogs pull on their restraints and lean in our direction, but the women yank them back and keep talking without overtly noticing us. Until now we’ve seemed to have the woods to ourselves.

  We are enclosed in green, the trail a narrow corridor through underbrush, sunlight dappling it through a high, thick canopy. The high point of the trail is at 1,066 feet and the trail soon becomes a series of ups and downs, elevations changing between 50 and 100 feet. The southern trailhead will be 200 feet lower than that high point. We gain a ground-level appreciation of what the geology guide means by the term “high-relief hummocky topography.” We continually climb and descend, at one moment on top of a slope, at the next winding through a densely overgrown gully or swale bottom. The forest undergrowth is generally so thick that it’s hard to see very far into it, but I’m continually aware of slopes falling steeply off on either side of us or, in the low sections, rising high in all directions.

  The ground beneath our feet keeps changing, sandy at times in the lower regions, packed mud in other low sections, flat needle-covered sections under the pines, and on the slopes unsorted or undifferentiated rocky till. I recognize plenty of oaks as well as pines, and other hardwoods, such as maple and hickory and probably basswood, black cherry, and aspen. At times we find ourselves passing among towering red pines, sometimes in a seemingly endless plantation, other times down a mostly clear narrow corridor beneath them, the trail largely carpeted with pine needles. On a winding turn in the trail we find a middle-aged man in an Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt and a baseball cap, standing off to the side, reviewing scenes he’s shot on a large digital camera. He glances up at us, smiling, and says, “This isn’t a forest preserve—this is the forest.” I smile back at him. He has it right. For a good long time now we’ve had no inkling of where the forest might end or what might be beyond it. I keep the thought in mind as we continue down the trail.

  8

  In the course of its route across Wisconsin, particularly in the northwest section of the state, the Ice Age Trail passes through rugged terrain, where forests are deep and broad and chances of encountering black bears and at least hearing timber wolves are not unlikely and backpacking is the only way to get from one trailhead to another. In those sections it’s possible to truly feel as if you’re walking the wilderness. At times on the Lapham Peak and Scuppernong trail segments I had a similar feeling of immersion, of being intimately connected to the landscape, as if I were only one more of its standard elements. It’s a feeling I prize, as if for a little while I have surrendered connection to the inorganic, manufactured world and merged my essence with the organic, natural world. It’s a very temporary, ephemeral feeling. I welcome it when it comes and I’m sorry but not surprised how quickly it passes.

  But I have no illusions about the wildness or naturalness of the Waukesha portions of the Ice Age Trail. The very trail itself is a constructed thing, and as local members of the Ice Age Trail Alliance, Sue and I have been on volunteer work crews rerouting and maintaining portions of the trail we’ve trod on as hikers. In the state natural areas and the state forest, long-term projects have focused on clearing away invasive plants, restoring native growth, conducting controlled burns, and building boardwalks and bridges. Almost anywhere we’re likely to see prairies and wetlands and oak savannas that resemble those of presettlement years, we’re seeing restoration successes at the hands of dedicated volunteers who have removed the impact of almost two centuries of cultivation and development to bring those places back to what they were. And, though the Ice Age Trail often avoids them, historical reminders of the uses to which the land has been put remain sprinkled nearby throughout the Kettle Moraine—remnants of the marl plant, rail bed, trout hatchery, and hotel at Scuppernong Springs, remnants of the spring house, bottling plant, turbine dam, trout pond, and hotel at Paradise Springs, at least three log cabins and one homestead site—and all those contemporary recreational areas—campgrounds, hiking, biking, and skiing trails, horse and snowmobile trails, a winter sports center, dog trial grounds, three Ice Age Trail backpacking shelters. There are times when you can imagine what the country was like when it was a string of farms, when it was dotted with commercial enterprises, when what we pass through now wasn’t here.

  In the natural order of things, terrain changes all the time, often in infinitesimal transformations invisible at the moments they occur and perhaps over unimaginable stretches of time; or sometimes in tumultuous alterations—the bursting of an ice dam, the gushing of floodwaters, inundation at one time, depletion and draining at another. Although human beings for centuries had an impact on the Wisconsin landscape through prairie fires and agriculture and burial and effigy mounds and the wearing of paths into the earth, after the influx of European American settlers in the mid-nineteenth century, change more often was radical, extreme, and myopic, impelled by short-term goals that had long-term consequences for the land.

  Everywhere we walk along the Ice Age Trail in Waukesha County we are walking through terrain that human beings have changed, sometimes in dire and damaging ways, sometimes in restorative healing ways, sometimes in ways that valued personal goals over an appreciation of land as a part of a biotic community, as something more than a commodity. The gulf between community and commodity is likely unbridgeable.

  Still, among all those homeowners who have built with an eye to a vista, all those walkers and joggers who make paths from their own backyards onto the trails in parks and forests, all those who choose to locate their neighborhoods near woods and wetlands and rivers, many must be people who feel connected to their home ground, who value it, who don’t want it to change.

  Muir, Leopold, and Derleth each dealt with change in their home ground—they had to deal with it by virtue of feeling a part of it. As tempting as it is for someone like me to desire a pristine, thoroughly natural setting for the Ice Age Trail, the very act of maintaining it the way we do assures that it can’t be pristine and natural. And it may be that in all the places the landforms of ten thousand years ago share space with the constructed elements of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, we have the opportunity to recognize how transient our constructions are, especially when measured against the endurance of the country we’re passing through.

  9

  By the end of June, we’re in the midst of a drought and the mosquitoes that usually plague summer hiking haven’t been around. We leave the northern trailhead of the Eagle segment on a balmy day bright with unobstructed sunshine. When we enter the trees, I recall walking through them a few years before, impressed by their height and breadth, immediately entranced by Wisconsin oaks. I point out certain trees to Sue. Some of the oaks here are more than a century old. Often the undergrowth is thick, but in places leaf fall keeps the forest floor open. At the moment the ground is dry, yet the long winding stretches of recently installed puncheons tell us the trail is usually muddy in the woods and in the low wetlands beyond.

  The trail breaks out of the trees to cross a portion of the Kettle Moraine Low Prairie State Natural Area, filled with wet meadow plants
like blue-joint grass, shrubby cinquefoil, valerian, grass of Parnassus, and Ohio goldenrod. We spot two bluebirds, a common yellowthroat, a chipping sparrow, some Henslow’s sparrows, a yellow warbler, and a bobolink. The trail takes us across a gravel road that leads to a dirt parking lot where we’d rendezvoused with a dozen other members of our chapter two months before for an IAT workday. That morning we rerouted a portion of the trail away from an imminent subdivision, established the tread on the new trail, pulled invasive plants like garlic mustard, and replaced blazes. Across the road we climb up a grassy knoll, arcing around a cluster of trees and high shrubs and past a side trail leading off to a Leopold bench and a scenic view north across the low prairie. At the top of the knoll another Leopold bench, more in the open, provides an even more expansive view.

  From that bench the trail veers west toward the woods, dips down to cross a creek on a solid bridge, then climbs to the section of the trail we rerouted on that workday. We try to stay alert to the changes in the landscape a couple months have wrought. The trail now curves more deeply into the woods, toward glimpses of the prairie, and then crosses a midslope section leading toward the Brady’s Rocks loop. Brady’s Rocks were what drew me to the Eagle segment the first time I came. As far as I knew they were the southernmost outcropping of the Niagara Escarpment in Wisconsin and the last visible sign of the arc that extends all the way back to my hometown. I set out to find them on a crisp fall day, on a side trail then more remote from the main Ice Age Trail. I found some blocks of stone visible on the ground, completely coated in thick coverings of moss, and soon reached an area where I was surrounded by the rocks.