by Robert Root
The character of the river changes again when it enters the Fox River Sanctuary, home to an interpretive center and a parking lot used as the trailhead for the Fox River Trail, which cuts south into my neighborhood, and the Glacial Drumlin Trail, which heads west toward Madison. The sanctuary sprawls across a broad and open lawn dotted with trees and occasional thickets. From the Prairie Avenue Bridge, I followed the riverbank past platforms for canoes and a launch site and colorful birdhouses on the trees. Several openings along the shore offered access to the river. The trees on the opposite bank mostly hid the traffic and industry beyond them, though a constant drone and whine and occasional whomp made it impossible to hear the river. At one point downstream a fallen tree blocked two-thirds of the channel, though a canoe could still get around it.
Near the end of the open space, considerable dead tree debris has piled up against an abandoned wooden trestle, impeding canoe passage underneath. Beyond the lawn, woods and underbrush have taken over. Of the Fox River Sanctuary’s ninety-five acres, eighty-one are reserved for natural resources, and not all of them are accessible on foot. I clambered up on the trestle, where a wide, intact walkway runs beside the tracks. The tracks arch around up the opposite riverbank toward all the industry and begin to parallel active tracks. Downstream from the trestle I saw riders bike across the river on a footbridge taking them to the trailhead for the Glacial Drumlin Trail. I realized if I followed the defunct tracks back to the bike path and circled around a densely overgrown area, I could reach that footbridge. Just before it, paths veer off either side of the trail, leading to hidden campsites, with canoe rests and openings leading down to the river.
When I reached the bike trail, I climbed onto the footbridge and gazed upstream and down, enjoying for a moment the deceptive seclusion and the river’s quiet flow and trying not to let graffiti marring the base of the bridge distract me. From the footpath heading south, I could see across the river to the railroad tracks through the trees, and I recalled that when we biked the Glacial Drumlin Trail we were beyond the tracks and beyond an often waterlogged wooded ditch, with no sense of the river once we had crossed it.
Along the eastern bank the footpath winds through the woods close to the shore and for a while it feels isolated, but at Campsite 7 it begins to loop around near a fenced border with a municipal waste treatment facility and a recycling center. The high steel fence extends into the river, blocking my progress. Behind the municipal property, the river twists and turns in four large U-shaped bends, creating at least two islands in high water. It’s hard to tell if canoes can navigate that stretch.
On the west side of the river the Glacial Drumlin Trail and the railroad bed it parallels soon veer away from the stream, and on the east side the Fox River Trail keeps its distance as well, running between the municipal facilities and the street until it turns west, passes the last of the city buildings, and curves around a long stretch of thick woods in view of the backs of shopping center businesses. Occasionally, barely discernible side trails lead off the pavement into the bushes and trees. On my walk I found a path that took me into the woods to an area with seven new canoe rests. Two narrower paths led away from them, one toward uncrossable marshland, the other twisting and winding through underbrush in no particular direction.
South of the woods a wide marsh opens up, with a couple of cattail-ringed ponds where I’ve seen great blue herons and sand-hill cranes in the past. A new boardwalk offers a long exposed walk at geometric angles, most of the way through open marsh and sometimes near a throng of large sprawling trees and thickets. In most seasons of the year it’s difficult to realize that the Fox River runs down the west side of the marsh, but past the end of the boardwalk, near Sunset Drive, a worn footpath close to the street leads across a bridge toward a wooden sign announcing the southern end of the Fox River Sanctuary. Looking north, neither the point where the river might veer away from the marsh or where the northern limits of the marsh might be is readily visible.
From Sunset Drive south to the city limits, the Fox River flows through open wetlands in the midst of what the parks department calls “greenways.” Here, where the Fox River Trail follows, little development intrudes. Sweeping views of the river and the wide wetlands on either side often are visible from the trail. Just past a canoe access, the trail slopes down to the riverbank and runs beneath Les Paul Parkway. Several times a year that part of the trail is closed because of flooding that leaves inches of silt drying on it for days after the water level has gone down.
Beyond the bridge the trail turns sharply east and heads back to Fox River Parkway again, a winding street now even farther from the river than it was on the north side of the bridge. It will parallel the street south past the restrooms and playground, picnic shelter and playing field, and a few retaining ponds until just before it reaches my complex, where it turns toward the wetlands again and arches around to enter the woods of Fox River County Park. But just at that first turn away from the bridge, a grassy footpath leads off behind a row of trees along the riverbank. The day I took that path I noticed a few places where I might have access to the river, though the bank was narrow and usually obstructed. Soon the foliage thickened and the path moved farther from the trees. I emerged onto an open field, with a grassy wide track between the trees and the wild flora that dominated the field. Farther on my view of the river opened up somewhat, and I startled a half dozen mallards who flew off squawking. A long stretch of sedge meadow stood between me and the river, and I chose to follow a circuit around the field, near a substantial stretch of young woods. I hadn’t realized how much land there was between the parkway and the river here or how little of the land in the greenway was tended as recreational park. On my way back home on the Fox River Trail, I kept gazing off at the woods and thickets beyond the open fields, newly aware of what lay behind them.
Beyond the county park where I walk the woods and the trail along the wetlands, the river enters a final park, Rivers Crossing, named for an expanding subdivision nearby, and leaves it midway through. If you could travel a straight line from the north side of Frame Park to the south end of Rivers Crossing, you’d walk around seven miles, the first two in downtown Waukesha, in the midst of high-rise apartments and commerce and industry, then a mile or so in the Fox River Sanctuary and its municipal plants, and then three miles or so with the river and its wetlands dominating your sense of location. You would also have traveled from where the development of the city and the exploitation of the river began to a place where you would feel as if you were seeing the Fox River in something like its more natural state. You would almost be able to feel you had traveled back in time.
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Walking the length of the Fox River in Waukesha makes me appreciate the section behind my home, the open floodplain, the enclosing woods, the Deep Marsh and Fox River overlooks, everything that makes me pay attention to the natural world there and gives me a sense of seclusion and something like tranquility. Given the uses to which the river in the heart of the city has been put in the past, it’s to Waukesha’s credit that so much of the river has been cleaned up and made easily accessible, especially considering the county’s growth as a Milwaukee suburb. My hometown in western New York bought into the myth of urban renewal in the 1960s and decimated its downtown, encouraging the growth of outlying malls and plazas, which have themselves been decimated in their turn. Waukesha touts its “historic downtown”—it almost seems a state law for cities and towns in Wisconsin to do so. Enough of the old buildings are left, a solid core of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century structures, to give downtown an air of authentic longevity, if not bustling prosperity. The Riverwalk corridor adds to the ambience of the downtown, gives it a place for ready retreat, and lets the rest of the frantic world go about its business somewhere else. With a population of more than seventy thousand, ten times that of Derleth’s Sac Prairie, there’s little sense of a single community here. As in any city of its size, niche communities bump shoulders from ti
me to time but don’t seem to share much of a common core.
With only a few exceptions the much vaunted and long defunct Springs Era is invisible in what is still nicknamed Spring City. In the few months since I walked along the river downtown, an immense (and, to my mind, defiantly styleless) “lofts” building has risen on the riverbank where a grassy area and a parking lot had been, closing the Fox River Trail there temporarily and, for the foreseeable future, casting the trail and the river itself into permanent shadow. Not far away, one side of a building above the river just beyond the Wisconsin Avenue Bridge now sports a mural proclaiming, “Welcome to Guitartown,” and more murals and large decorated guitar sculptures have been mounted all over town, including the interior of the public library, all trying to repackage Waukesha as a city-wide memorial to musical pioneer Les Paul, who was born in Waukesha and is buried in the Prairie Home Cemetery here. As much as I admire Paul, it’s unlikely that the Guitartown Era the city is trying to launch will rival the Spring City era in the imagination. It seems simply to be a costume change, a new layer of veneer. Not since we were called Prairieville has our identity been connected to the land itself, to linking who we are to where we are.
In such an overpopulated area, the preservation of parklands along the river, no matter what the scale, at least acknowledges certain minority values. Granted, as when the first settlers founded Prairieville, the renovation of the Fox River corridor was motivated more by commercial high hopes than by aesthetics or ecology, but aesthetic and ecological benefits have resulted. Majority values need not determine everything a community does with its resources; there are other places to pursue those. Most of what I pass through here every day has the familiarity of everything I passed through everywhere else I’ve lived, in four other states and half a dozen other cities and towns. For the most part, except for variations in weather, anywhere you go in the United States you find yourself where you’ve already been. It can take some effort to search beneath the familiar for the land itself. It’s harder to locate along the river corridor but it’s still possible to find it.
In the places I’ve lived, it’s been the waterways that most distinguished the communities—at least they were what made me feel most connected there: the Erie Canal in Lockport, the Iowa River in Iowa City, the Chippewa River and the Pine River in Michigan (both of which I’ve canoed), Boulder Creek and Coal Creek and Cherry Creek and the Platte River in Colorado (which I mostly walked or biked along), and now the Fox River in Waukesha. Everywhere I’ve felt most at home, a river—or creek or canal—runs through it. All these waterways were at the center of the communities that grew up around them and eventually grew away from them; but despite neglect and abuse and exploitation, it’s those bodies of water that remain at the center of the landscape, if not always at the center of the society. Muir’s Fox River and Fountain Lake, Leopold’s Wisconsin River, Derleth’s Wisconsin River, the Oconomowoc and Bark and Fox Rivers of Waukesha County: if I take a close look at where I’ve been, I can’t avoid thinking about the waterways.
At times as I’ve been walking the Fox River, I’ve been a solitary hiker, and the people I’ve encountered, be they strollers or joggers, bikers or sunbathers, fishermen or idlers, have all had their own relationships with the river. Beyond the riverbanks and the pathways the energy it takes to be part of the hustling, rushing mainstream shuts down our sense of where we are. In our frequent trips between Waukesha and Wauwatosa, where our daughter’s family lives, Sue and I are continually aware of the intensity and pace of traffic, the thumping and bellowing of the car stereos in the next lane, the concentration on cell phone conversations or arguments in the cars ahead of or behind us, the frenzy of the tailgaters and lane changers. To drive amidst all that takes concentration and some degree of resignation. When my wife drives I try to gaze out the window at the passing landscape, looking forward to the lowland marshes on one road, the dips and rises of another, the occasional wooded stretches—anywhere the land reminds me of its presence despite what squats and clusters upon and around it. As when I walk through the woods and stroll along the river, I can often feel that I don’t simply dwell upon this terrain but truly inhabit it. I have no way to connect with the urgencies and anxieties of the travelers beside us on the highways, but even as we flow among them I can feel connected to the land itself, can remember that I’m passing over home ground.
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Wisconsin Journal—Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Though the sky is a clear bright blue and the sun bright and high, the air has no warmth and a persistent breeze lowers the temperature more. I’m alone on the bike path at midday and hear only the clomp of my winter boots, donned in case of wet as well as in case of cold. My pace is brisk, in hopes of generating enough body heat to sustain me as I explore.
Beyond the deck overlooking the river, the path swerves away from the shore and arcs toward the forest. To the east the forest is at first level with the path and then, beyond a parallel footpath in the woods, rises toward a high ridge. To the west the forest changes character and drops away below the level of the path, the trees more often cottonwood or alder than oak. In spring’s floods the floor of this floodplain forest is usually underwater, even the trees near the path standing in water up to their ankles. When the water at last recedes, it takes a long time for the forest to drain and dry. Throughout spring and summer the shrubs and grasses flourish and the thickness of the canopy shades the forest floor. I’ve never stepped off the path in that direction.
But today I’m intent on wandering through the floodplain forest out to the bank of the river. I’ve wanted to do this since coming down the kame in Glacier Cone Park a month ago and realizing that, by living near the river where it flows out of town, I live in the lowest local section of the watershed. A couple days of rain deterred me earlier this week, but I’ve found my rubber winter boots and wool socks, so I’m undeterred by possible puddles and pools.
At a point on the path where the floodplain forest gives the longest, least obstructed view, I step into the leaf litter and brush past leafless branches and limbs, aiming for a large patch of grass. Almost at once I am reminded of the way fallen leaves and collapsed grasses can camouflage debris beneath them and offer no solid footing. I step carefully on leaf-covered branches and feel the spongy give of the grasses once I reach them. I stoop and weave to get past the smaller trees and lower branches and emerge into the open, feeling my way across long, thick layers of grass that catch my feet if I don’t raise them high enough and give me no idea what lies below them. And then I’m on the riverbank.
The opposite shore is a little lower than the one here, and the grassy space between the water and the woods is wider. The grasses drape over the riverbank, so it’s hard to tell exactly where solid ground ends. A southerly wind ripples the water against the current, so that the river’s broad blue surface seems to be flowing upstream. At certain angles I can forget about the houses beyond the woods. I’m now in the middle of a stretch of river I’ve only seen and photographed from the observation deck to the north.
I have to backtrack into the woods and make my way farther south before I can get out to the riverbank again. I’m getting close to the place where the river bends sharply to the east, flows up to the canoe access site in Fox River Park, and turns south again. Here, my side of the river is more open, the grasses a spacious expanse, the woods farther back from the water. I cross the open space to the river with careful steps, feeling my weight compress the dry spongy surface under my feet, looking for anything that resembles a trail that deer or foxes might have made. I can see the observation deck upstream. I cut back through the floodplain forest, noting signs of high water on some trunks, and circle around to the riverbank one more time, upstream from the canoe launch, to give myself a view of the distant woods I’ve just left.
From the canoe launch looking south, the riverbank on this side is less accessible, more overgrown, though the western bank is broad and open. I know the river con
tinues under a highway bridge and flows at some distance from a paved path leading to a newer subdivision, on its way to Vernon Marsh. But I have no need to follow it further. Satisfied with my sojourn in the flood-plain forest and along the riverbank, I head back up the bike path. At the observation deck I stop to gaze upstream and down, reminding myself how often in the past I’ve let this be the closest I got to the river. When I glance across the widest part of the flood-plain, I realize that, if I were able to tromp through the floodplain forest, I could likely reach the riverbank here as well. I circle the deck and launch myself out across the grass, heading toward the long bend that comes closest to the path. Once I’m standing on the outside of the curve I appreciate how much higher the banks are here than across the river, where the meander is forming an island and where I’ve seen sandhill cranes standing still and Canada geese busying themselves.
The grasses, those infinite papery tan strands, rustle in the wind, shake themselves, and settle and rise to shake themselves again. I watch them for a long time before I lift my gaze and notice a street with rows of houses on either side climbing a slope beyond the floodplain. I look through the viewfinder of my camera and see four distinct stripes: the pale blue of the sky, a horizontal row of multicolored houses and deep green lawns, the thick sepia plain of the wetlands, the deep rumpled blue of the river. The neighborhood is the thinnest stripe, almost insignificant in the midst of river, earth, and sky. I lock the image in my memory before I turn away.
When I return to the path, I’m still warm and my boots are still dry. I realize I’ve been smiling since I left the riverbank. I’ve reached some level of contentment here, some level of connection, and it keeps me smiling all the way out of the woods.
