Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  I hear an eager optimism in my remarks in the December 22, 2010, entry: “I thought I could try to walk in our woods and wetlands in Fox River Park once a week all year long, each week trying to learn something new, like the identification of trees, plants, birds, animals, life in the forest, life in the wetlands.” In the next entry I was wondering whether a bad winter cold would keep me housebound the first week of 2011, but I showed signs of having paid some attention when I claimed, “I think I want to start with one of the sprawling oaks before you enter the forest.” I thought it promising that I knew a sprawling oak was there.

  Life tends to intervene in the most ardent plans. Muir’s observations of the landscape of his boyhood and youth recollected in tranquility at the end of a long, eventful life, Leopold’s observations of the landscape of his weekend shack over a dozen years while he was a very active university professor, Derleth’s observations of the landscape of his home ground over decades during which he wrote and edited and published voluminously—these all can lead us, when we have only a single book in front of us, to feel as if the author was unblinking in his attention to his local terrain and not to recognize the way all this scrutiny and knowledge accumulated over time. As Rachel Carson wrote, “The discipline of a writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.”

  Part of the challenge is finding the will to be still and the opportunity to listen, especially if you’re also writing other books, teaching in other states or countries, speaking at distant conferences and university programs, hanging out with your children and your grandchildren in Florida and California and Wisconsin. Time and again we would return to Wisconsin from some distant place and find that the seasons had changed in our absence; or we would realize that, despite our earnest outings along the Niagara Escarpment and the Ice Age Trail, we hadn’t walked in the woods behind our home for weeks.

  And so, after months of wandering Muir’s farm, Leopold’s shack, Derleth’s prairie, and the county section of the Ice Age Trail, I found myself trying to write about the Fox River, just a few steps away from where I live, with less understanding of it than I had of all those other places. Increase Lapham referred to it early on as the Pishtaka, or the Fox River of the Illinois—pishtaka is the Potawatomi word for “buffalo,” as waukesha is the Ojibwe word for “little fox”—and I’d been thinking of it as the Pishtaka lately because the word was unfamiliar to me, as if I’d been living in this place for so long without realizing where I was. After three and a half years of journal entries that record little about this place, I was long overdue to truly inhabit my home ground.

  2

  Wisconsin Journal—Sunday, January 4, 2009

  “Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land. It brings strange stirrings, not only to creatures abed for the night, but to some who have been asleep for the winter.” Thus Aldo Leopold opens the January entry in A Sand County Almanac, following the tracks of a hibernating skunk awakened by the thaw and prowling in the night. “His track marks one of the earliest datable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year.”

  This winter season, here far to the southeast of Leopold’s shack, has already been long. December brought more than forty inches of snow; huge ridges of snow piled high by plows and shovels and snow blowers lined the streets and walks and driveways. In the middle of the night we hear work crews scraping away the drifts in front of our garage, shoveling and sprinkling deicing pellets across the walk to our front door, clearing the driveways. The sure sign of winter here has been the beeping of their short, squat machines as they back up, and the whoosh and whomp of the city plows hurtling first down and then up the street beyond them.

  Behind our condo complex the Fox River wetlands separate our neighborhood from the nearest suburb to the west. Canada geese are our commonest sighting. In the four and a half months we’ve lived here, almost daily I hear their honking and see wedges of them, sometimes small bands, sometimes near multitudes, sailing across the sky. Sometimes I hear them in the middle of the night. We don’t know where they rest overnight and only occasionally encounter throngs of them in outlying fields.

  I’d like to take them for granted. I’ve never been one to hide my feelings about dancing through goose poop on walks through public parks in midwestern towns. At times every riverfront park we stroll in seems to be infested with geese, hanging out and discomforting human idlers like a defiantly lounging motorcycle gang. Once, when Sue and I had been birding in Point Pelee National Park, off the Ontario shore of Lake Erie, we stopped by the Jack Miner Bird Sanctuary, where thousands of migrating Canada geese stop every year. I remember my impatience staring at the geese waddling around behind the fence, my relief that we didn’t have to walk on their side of it, my eagerness to move on.

  But here, along the wetlands of the Fox River, I feel as if I’ve settled onto the fringes of their home ground. Soon I began to rise and peer whenever they flew past my window. The sight of a dozen or so Canada geese winging out of the fog above my neighbors’ homes and gliding easily toward my window, then banking toward the retaining pond just north of our complex or with a few easy strokes lifting above my roofline, has an almost mystical quality to it. For the few seconds they dominate my vision, I am unaware of the condos across the street or the slats of the window blinds, conscious only of the near precision of the geese’s movements, the invisible current that flows among them and makes them a part of the air and the fog, of the morning itself. Something in their flight lifts my spirits.

  Who would have predicted I’d feel that way about Canada geese?

  3

  Wherever most of us go in the landscape we live in, we accept without question whatever is on it now. These roads, streets, lanes, courts, parkways, boulevards, these houses, churches, schools, businesses, parking lots, these traffic signals, signs, utility poles and wires, fences, mailboxes, water towers, these lawns, gardens, trees, sidewalks, bike paths, culverts, bridges—all familiar, all taken for granted, even as we traverse terrain we’ve never crossed before. We seldom envision that landscape as having been any different than it now appears.

  When Sue and I came to Waukesha, the bike path to the north of us traversed a stretch between a wetlands preserve with a rickety boardwalk running through it and, beyond a border of trees, a vast, open, empty field; now, at last, the rebuilt boardwalk is sturdy and solid and invites a stroll through the center of the wetlands, but now, alas, the field is filled with a shopping plaza—a couple of discount department stores, a supermarket, and the same assortment of food and merchandise franchises replicated abundantly elsewhere—that promises to double in size as quickly as possible. When we ride that stretch of bike path now, we seldom remember how open the land was when we first saw it. As Marlin Johnson trenchantly observes, “When land is used for homes and lawns, it often becomes little more than space to live on. . . . Urban and suburban life too easily loses its sense of roots with the land itself.”

  I call up my town on a satellite map and find, at a certain magnification, the major streets, the parks, and the golf courses all labeled, the green spaces all handily colored green. When I switch to a satellite view—What an age! We can see ourselves from space! Anyone anywhere who magnifies the view enough can see the building I live in!—distinctions blur, and gray lines and boxy shapes scatter across a background in various shades of green. I click the little arrows and center my neighborhood on the screen. Our subdivision and the subdivisions around us and all of our streets are neatly labeled, and our houses line up along the streets like legs on a centipede. I put the Fox River at the center of the screen and see two parks identified with tree symbols above their names, one to the west, one to the south. The light green of the floodplain and the dark green of the Fox River Park forest stand out; from above, our condo buildings look like conferencing gray sow bugs. I click myself closer to the river and the woods, and the age i
n which I live slides out of the frame. On the ground, walking the river and the woods, it’s impossible to lose my awareness of the age in which I live, but by satellite and computer I can pretend for a moment that it’s absent. Once, only the land and the river and the woods were here; whatever else the maps identify did not exist. I struggle to lift the scrim of modernity, and sometimes, after I’ve been to a restored prairie or savanna or passed through a long patch of forest, my imagination almost lets me.

  I ground myself in glacial geology. Waukesha lies east of the Kettle Moraine and the ground beneath us rests upon the till, meltwater stream sediment, and offshore sediment deposited by the Lake Michigan Lobe of the Wisconsin Glaciation. All around us are drumlins that reveal the southwestward flow of the ice sheet before it melted away, leaving what geologist Lee Clayton terms “nondescript undulating topography,” “moraine ridges,” “flat outwash plains,” and “hummocky areas of supraglacial stream sediment.” It took immense amounts of time to form the highlands and lowlands of the landscape hinted at in a relief map of the county. I search that map to locate roads I drive on where I’m impressed by the steepness of a descent or ascent, the changes in elevation in a short stretch of highway, and remind myself it’s always glacial outwash terrain those roads are crossing.

  My portion of the county experienced glacial retreat and re-advance during the Wisconsin Glaciation 25,000 to 14,000 years ago. A glacial lake formed, drained, re-formed, and drained again. Glacial Lake Vernon once occupied the area that over time became the floodplain of the Fox River and, further south of Waukesha, the broad Vernon Marsh. It was the Fox River that finally drained Lake Vernon.

  The glaciers wasted back slowly, and plant and animal life, as well as humans, continually moved into the opened terrain. Mammoths, mastodons, caribou, elk, moose, and bison were plentiful, and people arrived at least twelve thousand years ago. The flora and fauna changed over time, notably in the mass extinction of mammoths and mastodons and the increased population of elk, bison, deer, and aquatic life. By 5000 BCE, say Robert Birmingham and Leslie Eisenberg in Indian Mounds of Wisconsin, “the essentially modern distribution of plants and animals had been established in Wisconsin, although climatic fluctuations would affect the distribution even into recent times.” In his thorough and informative article, “Natural Features and Land Use,” Marlin Johnson identifies Waukesha County’s presettlement vegetation as “primarily maple forests in the eastern and northwestern parts of the county and oak forests, oak openings and prairies in the central and southwestern portions. Large wetlands existed in the southcentral and western areas.” The area of the county where I live was covered by prairie, oak openings, and bur oak open forest, and the prairies across the county ranged from dry prairie on hilltops and south-facing slopes, mesic prairies on moister soils, “tallgrass prairies where big bluestem could grow eight feet high,” and lowland or wet prairies “on soils saturated with water for part of the year, as along the Scuppernong River.” Thanks to some of my wandering around the state and along the Ice Age Trail, I have moments when I can almost visualize fragments of that landscape.

  In hopes of connecting more concretely to the unmapped terrain, I look up the oldest maps I can find online. The 1836 Government Land Office survey maps were created after settlement, part of a national effort to uniformly measure parcels of land across the country. The surveyors would walk straight lines north-south and east-west, each line six miles long, establishing blocks of space measured from an initial point where a baseline and a principal meridian met. For Wisconsin the initial point was at the intersection of the baseline established by the Illinois-Wisconsin border and the Fourth Principal Meridian ten miles east of the Mississippi River; the east-west lines parallel to the baseline were termed township lines, and those north-south parallel to the meridian were termed range lines. Each six-mile-by-six-mile square formed a congressional or survey township, identified by its relationship to the baseline and the principal meridian. My survey township, Waukesha, is Town 6 North, Range 19 East, Fourth Principal Meridian, or T. 6 N R. 19 E.

  In March and April of 1836, a deputy surveyor named John Brink and his crew established the boundaries of the Waukesha township, surveying its exterior lines—the township and range lines—and its interior lines, the ones that divided the township into thirty-six one-mile square sections. The surveyors’ primary concern was the potential a township had for timbering or mining or agriculture, and their field notes dutifully recorded the kinds of trees and other features they encountered on the terrain. As they walked their straight lines, they counted out their hundred links of chain, each chain 66 feet long, 80 chains in a mile (from which we get 5,280 feet in a mile). For each township, surveyors included a general description at the end of their field notes and a sketch map that would later be used to create a more precise plat map. In his general description of T. 6 N R. 19 E., Brink wrote:

  This Township may be considerd first & second Rate Land the East Side of Fox River is thick and Heavy timber with Whit Black & Bur Oak Lynn Sugar Ash Elm Ironwood White & Black Walnut and Cherry & a thick growth of Hazel Oak thorn Plum Prickly Ash Aspen & vines (Except Prairie & Marsh) West Side of River thinly timberd with White Bur and Black Oak (Except Prairie & Marsh) the Prairie is dry and Rolling Soil of Lome and Sand Snow and is generally So through-out the Township.

  I’ve encountered white oak, black (now red) oak, bur oak, sugar maple, ash, ironwood, black walnut, cherry, aspen, hawthorn, perhaps linden (lynn), prickly ash, and witch hazel, but after 177 years, even if I were to walk Brink’s survey lines, I doubt that many of the trees I’d see would be the very ones he saw.

  Brink’s sketch map is more helpful. The township is neatly divided by section lines into thirty-six uniform squares. The sections are numbered from the northeast corner of the township, the top row reading from left to right 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, the second row reversing direction, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, the third row switching again, and so on, ending at Section 36 in the southeast corner. The map chiefly records the waterways and the marshlands and also some occasional highlands. The Fox River enters the county at the northern junction of Sections 2 and 3 and leaves it in the southwestern corner of the map, Section 31. Two walking trails intersect in Section 10, one meandering easterly, the other heading southwest. Sections 3, 9, and 10 show evidence of human occupation, rectangles indicating cultivated fields in the latter two, and buildings in Section 3.

  When I turn to the more detailed plat map I see symbols for buildings, the words “Prairie Village,” and an indication of a spring in the part of Section 3 that will develop into downtown Waukesha. Two more buildings sit on either side of the Fox River at the southern boundary of Section 9. Nowhere else on the map is there evidence of human habitation. I check the sketch maps and original plat maps for the other fifteen townships in what has since become Waukesha County; no other township displays signs of occupation other than a trail running through a portion of it. Only one of the sketch maps is without any gridlines; the other sketch maps and all the plat maps are rife with town lines and range lines. Except for the occasional river or creek or lake or marsh, or the “high hills” prominent on the map for Town 5 North Range 17 East, where my wife and I have walked in the Kettle Moraine, the maps merely hint at topography and offer no way to pinpoint any location that would be familiar to me nearly two centuries later.

  I live in Section 21 of T. 6 N R. 19 E., across the Fox River from Section 20 to the west. I view these sections on the plat map close up and recognize the wetlands along the river and the hills beyond it. I try to strip away the gridlines on the survey maps, erase the constructed portions of the landscape on the satellite view; I try to superimpose on the terrain the images I’ve collected on the Ice Age Trail, extend the forest in Fox River Park all along the highlands east of me where Brink found thick and heavy timber, transfer the restored prairie and the oak savanna of Glacial Lake Scuppernong to the land west and north of me, where the Fox River and Pebble Creek wet
lands still hint at what once was there, the landscape that made Prairie Village so aptly named. I close my eyes and concentrate and see the grasslands roll away and the bur oaks stand out against the horizon and the blue sky and watch the river flow through the wetlands nearby. It doesn’t last long, but for an instant or two I sense myself in the presence of the land itself.

  4

  Wisconsin Journal—Monday, January 24, 2011

  Yesterday Sue and I made a chilly circuit of the Fox River Park. We’ve had a lot of snowy days, often light flurries, and not too many sunny ones in the past few weeks. The cold spell has persisted, with nights below zero and days in the single digits or teens. It’s been colder further north, temperatures reaching double digits below zero anywhere within reach of Lake Superior or bordering Canada, but the wind everywhere over Wisconsin can be insistent and strong, and wicked wind chills discourage walking—or at least discourage us. The dog walkers and joggers are still out there daily, though perhaps a little more glum or a little more stoic than usual. We took our walk while the wind was light, knowing the forest would shield us some once we were in it.

  We were the only ones in the woods. I’d wandered through the park a couple times the week before, while Sue was gone, and I pointed out the trees I’d managed to identify. We started at the white oak and moved on to a short evergreen with two trunks located on the river side of the path just past the entrance, the only eastern white cedar I’ve seen anywhere in the woods. Though it grows throughout Wisconsin, its solitary presence here was a surprise.