Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  Michael and Kathleen Brady were Irish immigrants who settled in the area in 1855 to farm and at some point quarried some of the Niagara dolomite on their property. Remnants of a stone fence and the escarpment outcropping itself are now all that remain. I moved slowly around the slope where the outcropping was visible. The light-colored underlayers seemed evenly laid down while the darker capstone layers, which bear the brunt of weathering, were bumpy and weathered and uneven. Crevices and ledges and shelves revealed how much more erodible the lower layers were, how resistant the top layers. I thought of how Niagara Falls retreats upriver, the soft underside of the dolomite wearing away support for the resistant rock above, until it breaks off from its own weight and plummets into the debris at the base of the falls. The same principle is at work here, though hardly on such a dramatic scale.

  In the interval since my first visit there, the main trail was rerouted to make Brady’s Rocks less remote, and the path looping through the rocks was cleared to make the rocks more readily accessible. Today we walk the cool, shady loop slowly, the outcroppings often higher than our heads and surrounded by under-growth. We look closely at the greenery atop the rocks, hoping to identify three unique types of ferns found here: walking fern, fragile fern, and cliff brake. Walking fern, named for its tendency to grow a new fern where the tips of the old one touch the ground, is the fern for which Brady’s Rocks are best known.

  Beyond Brady’s Rocks and back on the trail, the terrain levels out as we move through another stretch of the Kettle Moraine Low Prairie, this section lower, wet-mesic and dry-mesic intermingled. We walk in the open, in sunshine with an infrequent but welcome breeze, aware that in the past this part of the segment was agriculturally hard-used. Eventually we find ourselves back in a narrow shady corridor of trees. A boardwalk takes us across marshy wetland, where I’d once startled a smooth green snake that startled me; he surprised me again when I learned he actually is called “smooth green snake.” We pass through an extensive pine plantation, the trees too regularly spaced to be a natural grove.

  When we come out of the last of the woods, we can see a long way to the west, across a panorama of grassland, the most extensive we’ve seen so far. We’re looking across the Scuppernong River Habitat Area. Its boundaries include the Scuppernong Prairie Natural Area, as well as the Kettle Moraine Low Prairie Natural Area, but the whole of the habitat area is much larger than the sum of those parts. For over a decade and a half the State Department of Natural Resources has been attempting to restore the prairie through controlled burns and brush cutting, and the area has the chance to become, at 3,500 acres, the largest low prairie east of the Mississippi. Even if we know it’s only a remnant of an area tens of thousands of acres broad, it’s pretty impressive to gaze upon and walk through, and its combination of sedge meadows, low prairies, fens, and tamarack swamps reminds me of the landscape John Muir entered as a child.

  We’ve entered the bed of Glacial Lake Scuppernong. The lake existed roughly 15,000 to 12,500 years ago, created by meltwater trapped between the terminal moraine of the Green Bay Lobe and the retreating glacier. The lakebed runs along the western edge of the Scuppernong, Eagle, and Stony Ridge IAT segments in Waukesha County, but it also once covered the whole of neighboring Jefferson County and portions of Walworth, Rock, Dane, Columbia, and Dodge counties beyond it. We’ll be in the bed of Glacial Lake Scuppernong toward the end of the final segment of the Ice Age Trail in Waukesha County, and once I know that, I am continually aware of it.

  We walk under a clear sky across open prairie. A sandhill crane takes wing from deep in the grasses, and along the way a plentitude of bobolinks post themselves prominently to sing, all highly visible and occasionally fairly approachable. Kingbirds, a Baltimore oriole, a yellow warbler, a bluebird, and some kind of fly-catcher distract us from time to time. I try not to let my attention on my immediate surroundings be diverted by reflections about Brady’s Rocks and Lake Scuppernong, but I can’t help feeling that together they help conjure that white ghost of a glacier for me.

  That the Green Bay and Lake Michigan Lobes separated and in their joint advance and final retreat left us the Kettle Moraine and all the glacial features around us is due in part to the presence of the Niagara Escarpment evidenced by Brady’s Rocks. Glacial Lake Scuppernong rested above the land west of the southern Kettle Moraine for thousands of years, until the Green Bay Lobe retreated past Lake Winnebago, far off to the northeast. And here, as we walk the Eagle segment of the Ice Age Trail, the rocks and the lakebed remind us of everything that came before. For the time we’re on the trail with them, at least, their presence is impossible to ignore.

  At the southern end of the Eagle segment we look across the highway at the start of the Stony Ridge segment. We’d walked it at the end of April, out of sequence, at first through private property and across and along a couple county roads and then into a pine plantation. The pines were very straight and tall and generally thick; at the start of the section huge lengths of pine logs were piled up in rigidly uniform lengths. Through the bushes along the trail we saw signs of considerable logging as well as considerable slash, the residue of limbs and treetops scattered along the forest floor—a great deal of random tinder. For a while the pines soared above us but among the younger pines, more slender and not yet so tall, a solitary bur oak spread its limbs, reminding us that this was likely oak savanna before the pine plantation was installed.

  We crossed railroad tracks at an intersection of trails. Two women on horseback moseyed distractedly up a horse trail, each active on her cell phone, neither noticing our approach on the footpath. Beyond a wide field thick with sand we ascended an esker, narrower than moraines and ridges we’d been on, with abundant young oaks on either side of the trail and rocky, undistributed till underfoot. Through the trees and underbrush on the steep slopes we saw water-filled kettles on either side. Off the esker the trail became a series of ups and downs, mostly kettle-free, past a nature trail loop originating in the Kettle Moraine Visitor’s Center and a side trail to an IAT backpacking shelter. Topping a rise we descended onto open prairie, back onto the bed of Glacial Lake Scuppernong. Ahead of us was spacious rolling grassland and a mown trail heading for distant tall shrubs and sporadic forest and wetlands marked by a placid stream and a still pond. We reached the southern trailhead of the Stony Ridge segment at the Waukesha/Jefferson county line, near the parking lot for the Emma Carlin Trail. We knew where we were and knew what lay beyond, and felt that mixture of accomplishment and loss that comes with achieving a goal.

  10

  Our trail guide tells us that, once we’ve completed our walk through the county, we’ve hiked 40 trail miles and 5.8 connecting route miles; by walking a segment one way and then retracing our steps to the trailhead we started from, we’ve nearly doubled the in-county miles. At the Stony Ridge southern trailhead we were 273.2 miles from the eastern terminus of the Ice Age Trail, 821.1 miles from the western, and we were pretty pleased to have gotten there, but for a few days I was uncertain what we accomplished other than boots-on-the-ground mileage.

  Sue has said more than once that she’s come to love the Wisconsin landscape through hiking the Ice Age Trail—that she feels as strongly attached to it as she did to the Colorado landscape while we were there. It was good for both of us to be on the trail together, as we’d so often been in the west, both of us thinking about where we were and planning for the next place we’d be going. I certainly felt a greater comfort with the terrain, a greater sense of connection, than I’d felt before we started the project. But I still wasn’t sure what to make it of it until one day, exercising on an elliptical machine in our local fitness center, I tried to zone out and conjure as many images of the entire trail we’d walked as I could, a kind of memory video, in order from north to south.

  I found that I could visualize the Monches trailhead, the Carl Schurz Forest, the boardwalk across the Oconomowoc River, the wetlands along the river, the railroad underpass, the Merton trailh
ead, the walk through the woods, the trail alongside the rail bed, the walk in the open to Dorn Road, the stretch along the floodplain of the Bark River and the geese in the sunlight, the connecting route to the Hartland trailhead, the walk along the Bark River through Hartland, the streets of the downtown district, Nixon Park, the John Wesley Powell wayside, the Aldo Leopold Overlook across Hartland Marsh, the John Muir Overlook and the trail around the marsh, the Foxwood section and the subdivision behind it, the trail behind the church and along the golf course to the intersection with the Lake Country Recreation Trail, the Delafield trailhead, the bike path into and through Delafield and the marsh along the way, the Lapham Peak trailhead, the walk through prairie and savanna, the boardwalk over the marshes, the wooded section of Lapham Peak, the approach to the tower and the descent away from it, the ups and downs of the trail, the end of the flood channel, the Glacial Drumlin Trail leading to the Waukesha Field Station, the Waterville trailhead, the connecting route on Waterville Road, the woods and the dolomite and the open fields and the memory of seeing the cranes, and the connecting route on county roads between the Waterville segment and the Scuppernong trailhead, the path through the farmland to the rise into the woods, the Pinewoods campground and crossing wider trails, the dips and rises through the segment, the pine plantations, the path across and along Highway 67, the Eagle trailhead, the oak stands, the open prairie, the rise behind Kettle Moraine Low Prairie, Brady’s Rocks, the views of the bed of Glacial Lake Scuppernong, the bobolinks, the cranes, the Stony Ridge trailhead, the winding trail atop the esker, the winding trail across more of Glacial Lake Scuppernong, the arrival at County Road Z and the sight of the next trailhead in the next county and having reached the end of the Waukesha segments. All of it—I could see—I can still see—all of it.

  Re-walking the 45 miles in my mind wasn’t simply a test of memory; it was also a test of connection, measuring the degree to which I knew where I had been. In my mind the trail isn’t divided into nine separate segments but flows continuously from one county line to the next. The various trailheads mark the start and stop of those units on a map or in a guidebook chapter, a more convenient, less daunting way to view the trail, just as subdividing the Ice Age Trail Alliance into county chapters establishes limits for maintenance and volunteer responsibility. But just as thousand-milers tend to talk about the trail as a whole, so I have difficulty isolating one unit from another in memory. Oh, I know which is which and in which ones to find more specific sites, but when I repeat the county portion of the trail in memory, as I have now more than once, I walk without a break from beginning to end, can even stop at favorite locales and look around. Revisiting certain sites and remembering earlier visits there fixed them more firmly in my consciousness, but surprisingly, revisiting previously unknown stretches in memory along with the ones I already knew established an unbroken chain of familiarity, so that, at least in retrospect, I felt at home throughout the trail. Segments of the trail I had never hiked before were now as a familiar and comfortable as the ones I’d returned to.

  Having walked with John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth, not only in their writing but also on their home ground, further enhanced my sense of connection with the Ice Age Trail. Perhaps the commemorative sites for Muir and Leopold helped surface associations but, even without them, I would remember moments at Fountain Lake, at the shack, along the Wisconsin River and in the outskirts of Sac Prairie as I encountered the wetlands, forests, restored prairies, pine plantations, and varied communities along the trail. The cumulative experience of Muir as a farm boy, Leopold as a scientist, and Derleth as an observant resident in some sense foreshadows the experience of any of us in Wisconsin who hope to pay attention to the world that came before us as well as the world around us.

  Hiking the trail changed the way I saw it all. In the months and years to come, because of who and where we are, we’ll likely hike all of it again and again. When we do, we’ll no longer be discovering where we are but rather be taking comfort from familiar terrain, companionably at ease with the white ghost of a glacier, repeatedly restored by walking what has become home ground.

  Interlude

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2011. The big tree just before the entrance to the woods is poised on the edge of the floodplain; beyond it, thick grasses spread out toward the Fox River. Most of the year the tree is hidden behind smaller trees and bushes, but today it stands exposed and open. I step near, press myself against it, and spread my arms, unabashedly tree hugging, and can reach less than halfway around. Its bark is rough and so deeply furrowed that I can slide two fingers and a portion of my palm into a rough groove. On the side of the trunk facing the path, the bark has been riven its length from high up to the base, but the tree still grows. Its gnarled limbs sprawl in every direction, reaching toward every compass point and under no compulsion to grow straight up. One limb begins at the trunk ten feet above me and stretches toward the path until its tips touch the ground.

  Someone has nailed short boards, supports for climbing, at least fifteen feet up the trunk. The higher up the perch, the better the view into the wetlands and toward the river, and there is evidence of a deliberate perch on one particularly stout limb. On this clear, crisp winter day, bright against the cloudless blue sky, flights of Canada geese follow the river and head off to distant fields.

  If I’ve read my Trees of Wisconsin Field Guide right, this is a white oak. I check off its features: single straight trunk, broad crown, gnarled branches reaching toward the ground. The picture of the deeply furrowed light gray bark, broken into reddish scales, matches my tree. White oaks grow fifty to seventy feet high, and this one, with its solid if battered girth of trunk and its long reach in every direction, has a magisterial presence. No other large trees stand anywhere around it. My guide says it has a lobed four- to eight-inch-long leaf and an edible acorn; I’ll check for the leaf when the snow is gone, for the acorn in summer, and for the reddish-brown color of the leaves in autumn. The white oak is a native species found throughout southern Wisconsin, and it lives 150 to 200 years. By its girth and sprawl, I’d guess this one has been around a long time.

  Pleased with myself for identifying the white oak, I join my wife on the path and we walk briskly through the woods, hoping to build up some body heat. We emerge into the open on the southern end and wind our way up the grassy slope, glancing toward the woods above us and the broad meadow below. In the distance, beyond the road, a newer subdivision sprawls across a nearly treeless plain. Just at the top of the slope a dozen or so snow buntings rush around the curve, pass us between the path and the woods, and dip and rise and arc across the drive into the lower fields. They are so white they become invisible once they light on the snow. Arctic birds, they winter along the Canada-US border, which other birds abandon for warmer terrain. Perhaps snow buntings think that, compared to the Arctic, this is warmer terrain.

  Once we circle the picnic area near the farthest borders of the park, we decide to veer off the paved path and head deeper into the woods on a snow-packed trail. We notice a large hawk at the top of a tree, and he seems to notice us. He flies off, circles above us, and settles on another tree on the opposite side of the road. We have no binoculars, and the distance and lighting work against easy identification, but from the whiteness of his breast and what we can see of his dark head and back, he’s pretty certainly a red-tailed hawk. I keep glancing back at him until we’re so deep in the woods the trees close off my view.

  When we leave the woods, we pass the white oak again. I slow our pace in order to gaze at it as we pass, inordinately pleased with myself for knowing what it is. I’ve too often walked along the river and through the woods in a state of bland and oblivious appreciation. Each time I’m able to name what I see, I feel more connected to where I am.

  The Land Itself:

  Walking Home Ground

  1

  BEFORE MY WIFE AND I moved to Wisconsin in the fall of 2008, I had given the state little thought. A decade or
more earlier, I’d driven around the southeastern corner, researching the life of Ruth Douglass, a woman whose 1848 diary I’d edited. One afternoon I walked the terrain where Ruth’s father-in-law had been the first to plow the prairie. Walworth County, where he had established a farm and an inn, was on the Illinois border, and Ruth recorded climbing a hill that was “the dividing rige [sic] between the waters of the Fox and Rock Rivers.” I dutifully climbed that same hill. It took me a long time after we settled in Waukesha to finally remember that I’d heard of this Fox River before, had even crossed it traveling to and from Walworth County. The memory helped me decide to start giving the place we’d chosen to live more attention, in the spirit of fellow author Barry Lopez, who once said, “For me to know a man, I must have him walk me out into his land and tell me the stories of that place he has chosen to live.”

  I’d already been acclimating myself to where we’d landed through my reading—including Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Laurie Lawlor’s This Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year, set on Pickerel Fen in Walworth County. Leopold’s and Lawlor’s seasonal approaches inspired me. As our first New Year’s Eve in our new home approached, I decided to keep a separate Wisconsin journal devoted solely to our local outings. I expected to write one journal entry each week and thoroughly record our first full Wisconsin year.

  I started 2009 well, with five entries in January and one a week through February, but it was a cold, snowy winter and we followed the same plowed path nearby whenever we went out, and soon I was writing more about Leopold and Lawlor than about my own walks. And then came bouts of illness and excursions out of state, and by year’s end I’d written thirty-seven entries instead of fifty-two. I abandoned the weekly entry idea. The journal meant to cover one year ended up covering two, and the next year’s intermittent entries recorded not only some far-flung excursions around the state, but also my evolving plan to somehow write about the Wisconsin landscape. By the end of the second full year I’d resolved to read and research and walk the home ground of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth, to see what would come of all that, and also to explore my own home ground more attentively.