by Dean Kuipers
Here was that sand I had watched in the darkness, expressing itself. Here were its thoughts, its urgency. We had interrupted the pine plantations for the first time in over fifty years, and the sand took advantage to press from its watery glacial heart exactly the trees that it wanted all along, the mix that was implied by plants and animals that made up the surrounding forest.
I didn’t know what to say. It was stupefying.
“This is unbelievable,” I said.
“Oh, it’s glorious,” said Dad. He bent down and ran his hands through the tops of the saplings like a farmer feeling heads of grain. “It’s coming in better than I hoped.”
“I didn’t know you had done any hoping,” Joe said to him.
“I told ya it would grow!” Brett said to Dad, half-mocking. “But you didn’t believe me.”
“Oh, come on,” said Dad, smiling. “I wouldn’t have gone ahead with the cut if I didn’t believe something would come back.”
“That is absolutely not true,” said Brett. “You believed the exact opposite.”
“Well, Brett, you’re really doing it,” Dad conceded. “It’s your plan.”
“All of us are doing it,” Brett said.
“With a little organic matter, those fields will grow some grass, too,” said Joe, pointing toward the expanse of First Field, where the winter rye had been turned under. Despite better nitrogen, it hadn’t done very well. “We’ve just got to pile on the manure or something.”
The conversation immediately turned to grass, and how to improve the crops growing in First Field and Cabin Field. Dad and Brett started listing out how much more lime we needed and varieties of grass to try, and decided they’d ask Joe Carter if he had a cultipacker we could buy so we didn’t have to walk the seed in with tractor tires and feet. It was as if the forest coming up around our legs had never been in doubt and now we were just moving on to other matters. Everything had changed. The cut that we feared would end this project was just its beginning; now we had real work to do.
We stood out there luxuriating in the new field for a while and then we all walked back to the cabin and I had a beer. Joe indicated the vernal ditch just beyond the edge of Cabin Field, saying, “That’s where we need to put in a small orchard. Get some apple trees.”
“We need to try again with some of your berry bushes, too,” said Dad. “It probably all needs fence so it doesn’t get eaten up. The deer are going to be in here like stink.”
The spring air was cool but the low-angle sun burned my face. As we talked, we watched the last of it slosh around in the descending purple and royal blue of the night sky and finally drop into Lake Michigan behind the trees. Brett drank coffee and Dad told us about the hunts he had planned for the fall in New Mexico and Arizona. “You guys have to buy those preference points so you can get out there,” he said. Suddenly everyone hushed and heads whipped toward the Scots pine cut. Joe had his finger up, waiting, as we stared through the stand of red pines at the last bits of sunlight painting the tops of the trees, and the sound came again, a piercing buzz, a strange electric cry that was half birdcall and half joy buzzer: Peeeeeeennnt!
“A woodyfriller!” Ayron said. That was her word for woodcock.
Peeeeeeeennnt!
A woodcock was doing its mating dance in the Scots pine cut. A couple of us grabbed lawn chairs to sit on and we hustled right back out into the five-acre cut talking about Ayron’s nickname for the bird. Making up names for the woodcock is practically a sport unto itself; this little brown handful of heartbeat is the most nicknamed game bird in the country, called the “timberdoodle,” the “mudbat,” the “nightpeck,” the “snipe” or “brush snipe” (lots of Scolopacidae are called “snipe,” but, to be clear, snipe is actually another species), the “night partridge,” the “Labrador twister”; sometimes they’re called a “bogbird” or “bogsucker” because of their feeding method, which is to plunge their long prehensile beak into the thick black humus at the swamp’s edge and pop open their uniquely hinged jaw a bit to suck up a worm or a millipede. In some parts of North America, they’re called by their French name, la becasse. Ayron called them “woodyfrillers.”
We swished into the field and took up positions to watch the sky, but I could hardly take my eyes off the sand and trees. In the deepening purple twilight, the saplings there looked as dense and thick as calf-high rye. One mature black cherry left standing thirty-five feet tall at the southeast corner of the cut shuddered in the evening breeze and showered us with white flower petals.
I said to Dad, “Seriously, did you know it would come back like this?”
“Not quite like this,” he said.
“Ah, you dumbasses, what else was going to happen?” said Brett. “This is how forests work.”
“Well, hardly any grass has come up without mountains of fertilizer. I am totally freaking astonished,” I said.
“HUSH!” said Ayron.
Joe added, “We’re trying to hear the woody!”
Peeeeeeennnnt!
I tried to focus on the dance, idly letting the tips of the saplings poke into the palms of my hands. These trees changed everything. There are few moments in your life when you are overwhelmed with the realization that all time will be measured by that moment, before and after, and this was one; it was clear that we all knew it was a significant moment, that it was the one we had been waiting for, because Brett, Joe, Ayron, and I were all sneaking looks at one another. We were prepared to be wrong, but the fields all around us were singing Hallelujah.
This sand wasn’t struggling; it wasn’t infertile. It was delivering up a promethean eruption of life. It was in upheaval. The land opened itself and came forth with an outburst of cells it had held within it, latent, an entire new forest just waiting in the sand for the cosmic signal, for release into a watery sky. The forest was growing so fast that I felt the saplings beneath my chair would lift me into the last of the sun.
Dad was like a completely different person. He was beaming. He had kissed me and said “I love you.” He had been happy in the past couple years when I’d turn up here with Spenser, but it always seemed to have a limit; he was happy to pull his grandson close but hold the forest off at arm’s length. No more. That gap had collapsed. He luxuriated in the sweet forest air. He grinned from ear to ear and looked up into the sky like he was praying.
The mating dance, or “roding,” of the woodcock is one of the most ostentatious and bizarre in the avian world, especially for such a tiny dancer. They’re the James Brown of shorebirds, coming out in a cape and falling on their knees screaming, Pleeeaze, baby! First there was the long and patient series of buzzing calls, the Peeeeent! as the bird strutted around in a clearing in the sand, stiff-legged, announcing his performance. We heard it but we couldn’t see him. Joe scanned with binoculars and couldn’t find him in the saplings, even though he was probably only twenty yards away. This went on for several minutes; we had plenty of time to adjust our chairs and put on jackets and open beers. Then, by some mysterious signal, he burst upward into the air and flapped madly in small circles, maybe thirty or forty feet in diameter, spiraling upward about five or ten feet with each revolution, and then the song became a fast, staccato twittering; Tweet-twit-twit-twit-twit. This was actually the sound of the wind rushing over fast-beating outer wing feathers. The bird was about as big as a bat and hard to see in the deepening twilight, but once he broke out over the tops of the trees he was suddenly quite visible as a spiraling black shape twittering against the indigo sky.
The fast-tweeting spiral went up and up just about to the point where we lost sight of him in the night sky, and then he hesitated just a moment … twit-twit … twit … and began to tumble, like he’d been shot, like a leaf or a piece of paper sliding back and forth on the wind as he fell, all ruffled wings and ragdolling over and over and losing control, leaving no doubt I would die for you, baby, and all the while spilling out his actual mating song, a brilliant mockingbird-like run of tweets and wing squeaks
that sound for all the world like a bird pouring his heart out.
And then he pulled himself together at the last second and landed lightly on the sand, resting for a spell under new leaves, craning his short neck to see if any females had stopped by. You felt like you could breathe then. We all waited five minutes, listening to peepers and bullfrogs on the swamp, and then Peeeeeent!
This went on for about twenty minutes and we didn’t talk much. We just kept looking at Dad. By the time the woody gave up, night had fallen.
The bullfrogs increased in volume. Spring peepers shrilled and pulsed. The drumming grouse off in the swamp pounded his puffed-out breast atop his nooky log. Dad sat with a hugely satisfied smile on his face and his eyes closed for a long time, like he had fallen asleep in his lawn chair. He had white cherry blossoms in his hair.
Suddenly he opened his eyes and said, “Brett, we should go through this field and pull the red oak saplings and let the white oaks grow. The deer prefer the white oak acorns.”
“You go right ahead and do that, Dad,” Brett said.
“Don’t you think that’s a good idea? By next year they’ll be too big to pull.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“The place really feels different,” I said.
“It is different,” said Brett. “We can see now that this place wants to change. It wants disturbance. It wants to grow a new forest. You just have to give it the right conditions.”
We were different. I was acutely aware everyone had let their guards down, and even though it was not a feeling I could altogether trust, I thought if it could come once it could come again and stay. I had only been in camp an hour or two and I could feel it. Reassured by the land, Dad suddenly regarded us as trustworthy. He could love us without having to suffer. He could be who he was, with all his failures and control worries exposed, without further injury or payback. He could let us want what we wanted. He seemed to be in a kind of ecstatic reverie, listening to the night that rushed in after the bird. We sat quietly in the dark on this fourteen-thousand-year-old heap of sand as the cool wind came up. I kicked a little at that sand with my heel and felt both in it and of it. All I could think was: Thank you.
The foresters had thinned out the strip plantations of tall red pines and Austrian pines that stood near Desert Storm, and Brett and Joe had decided that they would help grow more browse by putting some seedlings in there. So later in 2004, after I’d left, they picked up a thousand red pines and shoved them into the ground all over up there.
Later that year, we took a walk to check on the seedlings they’d planted, and discovered that there were about a bazillion foot-tall red pine saplings standing there like they were laughing. It was hard to distinguish the planted seedlings from the volunteers. The forest didn’t need our help; the act of trimming the trees had caused them to reseed themselves.
“God, that was such a hard day of work,” Joe said. “We planted one thousand trees in one day.”
“Maybe we didn’t need to do it,” said Brett. “But maybe we did.”
In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold marveled that, somehow, geese returning to Wisconsin from the subtropics predict with great accuracy when the ice is off the ponds back home. They don’t return on the same day each year, but only when they are certain of the ice-out and their own safety from winter-sharpened fangs. The geese are too exhausted from the journey to turn around and go back south again if they’re wrong. “His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges,” Leopold wrote.
How do they know, across a thousand miles? Leopold, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, was satisfied to leave it a mystery, writing, “What a dull world if we knew all about geese!”
Oh, no, not dull at all. Joe and Brett and I wanted to know all about geese, and ponds, and the communication that flies between them. That mystery was everything.
Somehow, in the social cosmos, the goose turns to his comrades on a golf course in Florida and says, “Honk,” which translates to: “There’s open water on the ponds in Wisconsin.” And off they go.
What are the signs? What information or substance or knowledge pings back and forth in the air? Is it in the air, or does it thrum through the earth, or suffuse the ecological unconscious and then pop into the goose’s imagination, or what?
That mystery is everything because without it the real world fails. Geese die. People die, too. Year after year, this sandy deer camp had been calling to us. We couldn’t run away to some other place in the world to find a new dad, any more than a goose could just fly south instead of north. This was the place. You have to defend a place to even know who you are. Staying put is the radical act.
Leopold’s sand county shack was the mirror image of ours, lying directly west across Lake Michigan on a silica heap a couple of hundred miles away in Wisconsin. As he and his wife and five kids stuck thousands of pines into the sand in their own years-long restoration effort, he sketched in the members of what he called the “biotic community” and how they were implied in one another—how a goose thought itself into a pond and how the trails thought themselves into deer and how the glaciers thought themselves into the Wisconsin River and how, finally, the sand thought itself into a family. The point was to pay attention to the thinking of the place. His celebrated “land ethic” arose from these observations: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” That is clearly about maintaining the communicative order. If you remove the wind, or a trace mineral from the earth, or a kind of pollen that flies, maybe you remove the exact thing the goose needs in order to talk to the pond.
We were lucky. The medium we needed in order to talk to one another lay everywhere under our camp. Waiting.
A new affection flowed out of the sand and trees and grew thick among us, and my phone bills doubled and tripled. We called and planned and opined. We got downright blabby. The present and the future seemed to merge; the things we had been hoping to do on the deer camp were happening with such regularity that it felt like we were dreaming in real time. Those trees made Bruce a dad like he’d never even known he could be. The love had always been there, but he had never accepted us. The acceptance had been suppressed in the sand. Dad’s new faith in that soil extended to us and grew and grew.
The farm work intensified, but the new focus was birds. For years, Joe, Brett, and Ayron had spent weekends scouting public land near the cabin looking for honey holes—swampy breaks in the forest where logging or blowdowns or high water had let the sun in and produced berry-laden thickets for grouse and woodcock. Now Dad was scouting birds, too, looking at maps, figuring out where the good places were, and he felt guilty that his dog Rose was getting too old and frail to hunt after all the years she’d been kept in her pen.
I was months into writing my book about Rainbow Farm when it became clear to me that the changes at our cabin were partly responsible for my interest in that story. The story was about two men, Tom and Rollie, who had been killed when they protested a marijuana bust on their campground and music venue, just southwest of Kalamazoo. It was a gorgeous stretch of swampy, roller-coaster hills in the midst of vast Michigan farm fields, and when I went out to see it for the first time, my feet craved it. Tom and Rollie and a whole crew of other people had done a ton of work to make that place their livelihood and a home for their son, Robert, and I know they felt their relatedness flow upward from that place. Its magnetism had pulled them together, just like what was happening on our place.
I talked to Mom and Dad about my Rainbow Farm research pretty much every day. The place was only twenty miles south of Dad’s house and sometimes Mom and Dad even helped out, picking up a package or finding someone for me in the blue-collar towns of Vandalia and Cassopolis, Elkhart and South Bend. Tom and Rollie were gay and had been killed over a pot cultivation charge, so at first Dad was inclined to dismiss their deaths as some kind of justice. But the more he and I talked about the
case, the more indignant he became. “It seems like they got a bad deal,” he finally said to me, which was tantamount to a revolution.
In August Mom was sitting on the beach in Amagansett, New York, as night fell, her face lit by the glowing coals of a fire. Meg’s sister Jane had put on a family reunion that was the most elegant party any of us had ever been to before or since, with white tents on the beach luffing in the evening glass-off and lobster and drinks, even a bagpiper to lament the end of day. Tom and Spenser were at the water’s edge, and we were wishing that Joe and Brett and Ayron had come.
“Oh, this isn’t Brett’s kind of thing,” Dad said.
“Well, I just thought he would enjoy this,” Mom said. “He’s so happy. In his work, and in the stuff you guys are doing at the cabin. He’s like a different person.”
“He is in a good mood.”
“What do you hunt up there, Bruce?” asked another guest.
“It’s a deer camp,” he said.
“And birds,” Mom said. “Brett hunts birds there.”
“Yes, birds,” Dad said. He turned to the other guest to explain. “My son organized some logging on our camp to give us some better habitat for grouse and woodcock. They like it best when there are young trees and bushes. And it turns out that deer really like it, too.”
“Our son Brett did that,” Mom added. “He’s not here.”
“Oh, it’s fabulous. Trees are coming in like crazy.”
“It took some convincing,” Mom said.
“When you start out, you just don’t realize how all these things are connected,” Dad said.