Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  The term “alphabetical conservation” in the passage above is a reference to the various Depression-era agencies of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration that not only encouraged some restoration and reforestation projects but also helped families move to more promising agricultural areas. In “The Sand Counties,” a sketch in the Wisconsin section of part two of his book, Leopold admits that “the Sand Counties are poor” in economic terms but claims that he wanted to know why the area’s “sand farmers,” those “benighted folk,” were reluctant to move away even with government encouragement; “finally, to settle the question, I bought myself a sand farm.”

  His motives were not so whimsical as he suggests—he initially intended simply to lease land where he could establish a hunting camp and nurture his practice of archery—but the land he leased, however promising as a hunting camp, was in a sorry state. As Susan Flader notes, “The only building was a dilapidated chicken-house-turned-cowshed with manure knee deep on the floor.” Part of the foundation was all that remained of the burned farmhouse, a nearby island had recently been stripped of timber, and the open land consisted of “a corned-out field coming up to sand burs and panic grass” and sand blows on the hills. It took a while for Leopold to see the possibilities in the place and to feel the need to own it. He initially bought eighty acres and later added another forty. His family was enlisted in converting it into a weekend retreat—cleaning out the manure, repairing the shack with driftwood, building the outhouse—and restoring the landscape by planting pines and setting out to convert the fields back to savanna and prairie.

  In the “Sand Counties” essay, after wondering about the reluctance of farmers to leave, he quickly turns to reasons to stay on a sand farm. He cites the appearance of pasque flowers in April, the sandwort “on the poorest hilltops,” the linaria and the draba on the sand blows, as well as the birds partial to aspects of the land, like the sandhill crane and the clay-colored sparrow, a denizen of jack pines, and the woodcock, whose “sky dance” he describes in the April section of the almanac. As he does throughout A Sand County Almanac, Leopold is suggesting here that there are reasons to care about the land other than economic or commercial ones, reasons that might be aesthetic or ecological or, yes, spiritual.

  A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There is a powerful, thoughtful, often lyrical book, essentially a sequence of forty-one essays that leads a reader from a series of short observations of the natural life of the land around the shack through reflections on encounters in other parts of the country to a short series of philosophical articles culminating in Leopold’s expounding on the idea of a land ethic. The most accessible and inviting section of the book is Part I: A Sand County Almanac; together with the first two sketches in Part II: Sketches Here and There, “Marshland Elegy” and “The Sand Counties,” it’s the almanac that makes us feel we’re walking home ground with Aldo Leopold. It’s a tribute to Leopold’s power as a writer that we have that feeling.

  4

  “Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land.” These words from Leopold’s opening of his “January Thaw” entry in A Sand County Almanac were the first I wrote in my own journal of Wisconsin walks and wanderings on January 4, 2009. As a spur to my own contemplations, throughout the year I read monthly sections of Leopold’s almanac and seasonal sections of Laurie Lawlor’s splendid This Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year, a thorough evocation of Pickerel Fen in Walworth County, the county south of mine. Lawlor’s is the more comprehensive study of a specific site across the seasons, an expansion of Leopold’s example of coming to know where you are; Leopold’s is the more compelling because of the brevity and concision of its essays. Our sense of Leopold in place is created not so much by narrative as by being given the chance to see what he sees. What he sees is informed by experience and examination, the advantage of frequent observation and wide study.

  The essay that perhaps gives us the best sense of Leopold’s method comes from the July section of the almanac, the essay titled “Great Possessions” (which had been Leopold’s original title for the entire book). His theme, expressed as a genial pretense that he is hearing the tenants of his land declare their boundaries, suggests that the 120 acres the County Clerk records as Leopold’s property are not really the natural limits of his “worldly domain.” He writes:

  At 3:30 a.m., with such dignity as I can muster of a July morning, I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffee pot and notebook. I seat myself on a bench, facing the white wake of the morning star. I set the pot beside me. I extract a cup from my shirt front, hoping none will notice its informal mode of transport. I get out my watch, pour coffee, and lay notebook on knee. This is the cue for the proclamations to begin.

  It really was Leopold’s method to keep scrupulous records of the natural world around him, a habit he developed as a child. He wrote, “Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding meaning and order in these events.” The Leopold archives abound in notebooks he kept throughout his life, the field observations that produced a meticulous phenology of weather, wildlife activity, the life cycles of plant life.

  In “Great Possessions” he provides an example of his record-keeping: at 3:35 a.m. the call of the field sparrow, followed by the song of the robin; at 3:50 the indigo bunting, then the wren, and then “all is bedlam. Grosbeaks, thrashers, yellow warblers, bluebirds, vireos, towhees, cardinals—all are at it.” Once the sun rises and the coffeepot is empty he and his dog “sally forth . . . at random” and encounter a rabbit, a woodcock, a cock pheasant, sometimes a coon or a mink or a heron or a wood duck or deer. The sounds of neighboring farms replace the morning chorus of birds and Leopold and his dog “turn toward home, and breakfast.”

  The tone is light, amiable, companionable, and the detail is rich and engaging, so much so that the reader may end up disappointed that the sounds of the unnatural world have intruded into and overwhelmed those of the natural world. That, of course, is what Leopold hopes to establish. Again and again throughout the almanac his encounters with the natural world are appreciative, contemplative, and alive with wonder, and though the writing is well grounded in science, the voice is conversational and neighborly. The almanac opens with a January thaw, the narrator following the track of a skunk through the melting snow. Repeatedly he is a bystander and witness in the natural life of his farm: to the sky dance of the woodcock, the arrival of Canada geese on the marsh, the return of the upland plover; to the discovery of draba in the sand blow, the quiet of fishing for trout from a rock midstream, the contemplation of the wind, the prairie grasses, the competition among trees.

  The language of the “Almanac” essays is deceptively charming and relaxed. We might well feel that we are enjoying some bucolic idyll, a celebration of rural life such as other, later “cycle of the seasons” nature books provide. The seasonal approach is a sound one, since it makes the writer more observant of his home ground and helps the reader more fully inhabit that space as well, and it allows a narrow focus on particular aspects of the landscape. But in this case it doesn’t provide much of an overview of that landscape. Whatever we think we understand about the terrain Leopold is walking through has come through inferences and offhand remarks, not from a thorough verbal en plein air painting.

  To really understand the country Leopold observed, it’s helpful to look at the photographs of the years in which he was there, 1935 to 1948. As it happens, such photographs abound, not only at the Leopold Center and in the self-guided tour booklet but also in the various biographies of Leopold and his accomplished children. When Aldo and Estella brought their children to the shack in 1935, Starker was twenty-two, his brother Luna was nineteen, Nina was eighteen, Carl was sixteen, and Estella Jr. was eight. The photos are mostly in black-and-white: Nina at twenty-one, planting a pine tree in a grassy field; all the family except Carl, the photograp
her, with the shack and an empty sky as backdrop in 1939; the five siblings at a rough-hewn table with dense undergrowth behind them in 1982, the year before Starker’s death; one photo of the shack from 1936 and another from ten years later, of Aldo and a graduate student seated on a bench before it; a panoramic photo of the property “taken from atop a hickory tree at the gate by Levee Road, 1935”; a snapshot of the chicken coop–cow shed at the start of its repair and renovation into the shack; a picture from the roadside gate of a row of elm trees (now gone) leading back to the shack and a landscape described in the caption as “treeless and almost barren”; a picture of young Estella Jr. fetching water from the Wisconsin River with the Parthenon a little way up the slope behind her; a shot of her mother, Estella Leopold, carrying a bucket of pine seedlings across an empty field.

  Having walked the farm with the tour booklet in hand, I recognize only the shack and the outhouse in those pictures; they may as well have been dropped into the present landscape from somewhere else for all I can recognize of the terrain the photos record. What the pictures tell me is that Aldo Leopold’s almanac of essays represents an idyll in country that no one would consider wild, or scenic, or pastoral—no landscape that evokes, at least in photographic images, an inviting natural setting. That Leopold found fodder for a masterpiece of nature writing there, and that all of his five children went on to make significant contributions to the field of ecology from that setting, says a great deal about how expansive Leopold’s sense of land, of country, was.

  In his essay “Country,” originally published posthumously in Round River and later, with other essays from that book, added to an expanded edition of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold wrote: “There is much confusion between land and country. Land is the place where corn, gullies, and mortgages grow. Country is the personality of land, the collective harmony of its soil, life, and weather. Country knows no mortgages, no alphabetical agencies, no tobacco road; it is calmly aloof to those petty exigencies of its alleged owners.” The theme is one he sounded in “Great Possessions” as well and in more allusive ways in other essays. He makes some distinctions among those who encounter country, suggesting that a public preoccupation with “wilderness vistas” and “sublime panoramas” leads to a shortsighted perspective on the natural world.

  The taste for country displays the same diversity in aesthetic competence among individuals as the taste for opera, or oils. There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through “scenic” places, who find mountains grand if they are proper mountains with waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes. To such the Kansas plains are tedious. They see the endless corn but not the heave and the grunt of ox teams breaking the prairie. History, for them, grows on campuses. They look at the low horizon, but they cannot see it, as de Vaca did, under the bellies of the buffalo.

  In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.

  Leopold invites us to challenge our sense of where we are. The almanac is the result of much living in and with the country where he had chosen to dwell and his perceptions revealed its hidden riches. After reading Leopold, we walk out into our own country, wondering where its riches might be hidden.

  5

  Aldo Leopold was forty-eight years old when he purchased the farm along the Wisconsin River. Unlike youthful Scottish immigrant John Muir discovering the Wisconsin landscape eighty-six years earlier, Leopold was a native midwesterner; he had been born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, in a huge house on a 130-foot limestone bluff above the Mississippi River. He grew up there and his younger brother Frederic still lived in that house some seventy years later. Aldo’s adult life was spent elsewhere. He attended Yale University, where he earned his bachelor of philosophy and, in 1909, his master of forestry degrees. He joined the US Forest Service and served in the Southwest, the background of his essays set in Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora in part two of A Sand County Almanac.

  One of those essays, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” records a pivotal incident in his life, witnessing the death of a wolf he had shot.

  We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

  He concludes the essay by recognizing the need to “think like a mountain,” to recognize the interconnectedness of nature and the consequences of too narrow a focus about conservation.

  Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the preservation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

  The passage is often cited for its powerful evocation of a wilderness ethic and is widely admired for its literary qualities of precision and balance and thought. When we run across it in the book we are apt to overlook its place in Leopold’s personal history. A Sand County Almanac carefully builds a case for a land ethic. It begins with the unthreatening passage, “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot,” and leads to a point of agreement with his credo, “A thing is right if it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong if it tends otherwise.” It isn’t only a brilliant rhetorical sequence; in some ways it replicates the process of Leopold’s own evolution from simply a careful observer of the natural world to a spokesman for a complex ecological philosophy. Profound and thoughtful as the book may be, it is also a very personal and revealing portrait of the author’s inner life.

  During his time in the Southwest, Leopold had the opportunity as forest ranger and bureau manager to think through the policies and practices of the Forest Service. In 1922 he proposed preservation of the headwaters of the Gila River, and in 1924 the Gila Wilderness became the first wilderness area in the National Forests. That same year, Leopold, now married to Estella Bergere and the father of four children, left the Southwest for a US Forest Service position in Madison, Wisconsin; four years later he left the Forest Service altogether and worked for several years conducting game surveys for a firm manufacturing hunting equipment. In 1933 he published Game Management and soon joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin teaching in the new game management program. When that developed into the Department of Wildlife Management in 1939, he became its chair. In the meantime he had been writing and publishing professional articles and keeping copious records on what he observed.

  In short, the man who bought the corned-out farm in 1935 was learned and accomplished in his profession. It shouldn’t be surprising that very soon he began to wonder how to reverse the damage that had been done to his land and find a way to revive it. His daughter Nina Leopold Bradley has written, “It is unlikely that Father started with a clear vision of what he was going to do with the land around the shack. But the attempt to rehabilitate it brought its own lessons, its own continuous self-renewal, and its own dedication to an increasingly sharper vision.” The ensuing years were an experiment in self-discovery, in trial-and-error, in learning from experience. Thirty years after her father’s death Bradley wondered:

  Did Aldo Leopold truly visualize the deep pine-and-oak forest that now, forty years later, shelters deer and provides drumming logs for grouse? Did he visualize the lush native prairie with its big bluestem grass as high as I can reach, its myriad flowers blooming in succession from spring to autumn? Did he see the return of the sandhill cranes that now dance in the big marsh? Did he anticipate the battle now being waged to prevent the aspen and dogwood he planted from taking over his prairie and marsh? Did he see a family that would never again view land casually?

  Th
e splendid careers of all five children testify to the effect of the time at the farm on Leopold’s family. Whether Leopold imagined what the future of the farm would bring is difficult to answer, though Bradley speaks of what has transpired in a way that makes us realize something of the impact the family project had upon the country they worked.

  The Muirs had come to wilderness, to land unsettled and uncultivated, and watched the effects of their labor alter the country—clear the trees, drain the marshes, plow the prairies; in time one form of farming replaced another and desolated land drained of its fertility was abandoned. The Leopolds had come to desolated land, the result of nearly a century of settlement and cultivation and years of drought and Dust Bowl conditions, in the wake of an era of conservation that people like John Muir had inspired and government policies concerning land use to which Leopold himself had sometimes contributed. If there’s a haphazard progression here, then the question is: what next? Is the future to be an effort simply to keep things from getting worse or is it to be an effort to turn things in a different direction? What kinds of directions are possible or preferable? How do you decide which to choose? How do you decide how to achieve that direction?

  Those questions don’t have easy or definitive answers, but Leopold’s concept of a land ethic provides an important trailhead for seeking them.

  6

  John Muir left Wisconsin behind him and moved restlessly out into the world, most famously through the Sierras and Alaska, founding the Sierra Club and advocating for the preservation of wilderness and the creation of national parks. Though Aldo Leopold’s ideas have been widely disseminated and put into practice around the world, his enduring presence has remained centered in Wisconsin. Not only are the shack and the farm still in the family, but the Leopold Reserve preserves lands surrounding the Leopold property, and the Leopold Center, headquarters for the Aldo Leopold Foundation, is located on a moraine just down the road. The center was constructed near the place where, in 1948, trying to help put out a grass fire, Leopold died.