by Robert Root
Though his walks still take him to the Brook Trestle and the hills across the river, Derleth describes other places where he can most thoroughly be alone, places that inspire some of his most lyrical musing. For example, of Baxter’s Hollow, a secluded area on Otter Creek where he sometimes went to read and write, he claims, “Its isolation exactly suited my solitudes.” Of the Brook Trestle, he says, “It was a good place to be alone. . . . The water flowed past as time ticked away, reminding me unceasingly of my own mortality, until it seemed that in that solitude I grew from youth to middle age, and nothing of change came to that little corner of Sac Prairie.” He tells us the Genz Pocket, west of Ferry Bluff, where he walked in late evenings, “offered the kind of solitude necessary after a day at my desk,” and let him feel himself “an integral part” of nature. In such a secluded place, “I came often face to face with myself, without artifice or mask, a confrontation necessary for that renewal so vital in middle age.” Derleth’s confrontations with memory seem to lead him ever deeper into contemplation of himself. He writes of the Breunig Hill across the river that “once on the hill I was lost in nature, and thus as well in myself.” The passage sounds particularly Thoreauvian and makes clear Derleth’s sense of the linkage between solitude in nature and greater contemplation of himself.
Much of that contemplation arises from his sense of time passing. Early in the book Derleth tells how Sac Prairie “came almost reluctantly into the twentieth century,” but in his youth, during the 1920s and 1930s, “slowly, slowly, the atmosphere of the village changed, its pace quickened, and the leisurely Gemütlichkeit once so integral to life in Sac Prairie faded with the passing generation.” The profiles in the Walden West books are largely devoted to the generations that have passed; in Return Derleth not only commemorates them but also connects to them more personally, as one who will be joining them.
His sense of loss is particularly heartfelt in regard to the terrain he has wandered almost daily, the places like Baxter’s Hollow where “time had its way with it” and “something of the sylvan magic . . . was lost forever.” He writes with nostalgic fondness of Lodde’s millpond, four miles west of Sac Prairie, where he often fished with his grandfather. “The millpond was a place of unalloyed delight. Its setting was sylvan—great soft maple trees lined all the east bank, where we fished, and not far from the edge of the water on the west shore, rearing above the falls, rose the almost sheer hill that was always known as the Mill Bluff.” In Derleth’s memory the millpond “had all the shimmering beauty of a mirage on a summer day. It seemed to be always summer there,” “a place of undeniable magic for a child.” In Walden West his reminiscence might well have ended on that note of celebration, but in Return he adds one more paragraph:
But inevitably change came upon it, too, as upon all things—the mill ceased its operations, the store closed and was torn down, and the mill after, and one day after torrential rains the swollen Honey Creek burst out the weir, and the pond washed in flood down to the Wisconsin and was lost in that greater stream for all time.
Throughout the book Derleth is constantly aware of change and inevitable loss, the alteration of landscape that changes the atmosphere of the place. His sense of loss arises repeatedly and he takes the losses personally.
At the end of an interlude celebrating his hunting of morel mushrooms, he gives us a picture of what he gained in the course of walking his home ground—his discovery of whip-poor-wills’ and red hawks’ nests, woodcocks with their young, lady’s slippers, Indian pipes, and orchids, badger digs, mating blue racers, gyrfalcons, and a great gray owl. “I knew where the brook was at its most amiable, from what heights the countryside was most gracious to the eye in its sweep over fields and mounds, past farms and hamlets, to the hills along the horizon.” Surely in such passages, drawn from the journals where he captured the immediacy of his days, Derleth felt a deep kinship with Thoreau.
Near the end of the book, discussing the ten-acre homestead that made him, at thirty, “a man of property,” Derleth begins an extended comparison of himself with Thoreau. “The house was no pond-side cabin, no Walden; Sac Prairie was that, in its entirety; and it had no more solitude than the solitudes within me, solitudes that never faded and were never wholly plumbed.” In the passage that follows, he deliberately echoes Thoreau’s language in Walden.
When the house was built and enclosed, I had little more means than Thoreau; but I had more varied ambitions, wider horizons, and many debts and obligations. My foundations were as solid; I had been building them in Sac Prairie for three decades; like Thoreau I had been for as many years walking forest paths, cross-lots routes, rail-beds, and woodland lanes; marking the comings and goings of hawks, terns, wild geese, owls and whippoorwills—and here, at this new post, once heard one persistent whippoorwill cry his name 1,507 consecutive times; keeping a record of wilderness talk as well as of the multifarious concerns of my fellowmen; listening to what was in the wind; and keeping my presence at the rising of the sun each morning and its setting in the evening; playing calf to the moon; and observing the morning and the evening stars.
I sought this house in the country to transact some private business, too, but with all the more obstacles a century of time and human experience could bring about; all my occasions were not within, but almost as much outward, and here in the open country I was closer to the stars. I did not intend to live meanly here, but to live within my limitations, and to pursue a modest career with my pen at a suitable distance from my neighbors, and toward this goal I advanced with as much confidence as Thoreau had toward his, living a life perhaps not quite as I imagined, and meeting a modest success which was hardly more than I expected or sought, knowing that such goals as fame and wealth and social status were altogether too shabby to be held up as on the same plane as peace and love and truth, all as implicit in the gentian’s blue and the song sparrow’s threnody as in the drone of the bee, the cricket’s churr, the peewee’s invitation to come into his woods, in trees, blossoms, grasses, in the thunderheads forever on the horizon, the tints of the dawn and the afterglow, as in the higher laws that govern the universe. I knew that the universe was wider than my view of it, and would always be, and I learned that if the mass of men lived lives of quiet desperation, too often they were, for want of confidence or courage, the authors of that desperation.
The passage is finely wrought to spark echoes of Thoreau’s own prose in Walden. It strikes me as one of the more self-revelatory passages in Derleth’s writing, and it explains one of the major themes of the Walden West books, a theme not emphasized in the journal books. Derleth had often associated his Sac Prairie life with Thoreau’s Concord life, but here he fleshes out the distinctions he felt obliged to make between them, as if clearing the air of any confusion of motive or identification.
The segment is one of the longer ones in the book, and it’s followed by three striking segments. A one-page interlude on “the first batrachian voice announcing winter’s end and the advance of spring” recounts Derleth’s habit of going out nightly around and on the vernal equinox to hear the first spring peeper or spring cricket frog. It ends partly in memory and perhaps partly in anticipation: “I have waited under many a clouded heaven, in vain, under new moon and evening star, beside the still leafless trees black on heaven, in the quiet, windless, chill air to hear that first frog call, to know renewal once again, to meet one more spring.” I can’t help feeling that the ending of the passage is something close to a prayer.
The concluding profile of the book, about Judge Jim Hill, is one of the most positive profiles in the two books and, in its conclusion, about the ways Hill faced the end of his life, suggests a kind of identification Derleth felt with the man.
Though he withdrew a little from some of his activities as he grew older, he never retired. He came to his office and listened to the tribulations of his clients until illness struck him down, and again, after his recovery, until a further illness forced him to his final bed, still tranq
uil, uncomplaining, knowing as he had always known that death is as much a part of life as joy and sorrow, birth and love.
Before Return to Walden West was published in 1970, Derleth suffered a long stretch of illness arising from complications following gall bladder surgery in August 1969. His illness was severe enough that a single journal entry covers a two-month span. His final entry is dated January 11, 1970. He died of a heart attack on July 4, 1971, at age sixty-two. I don’t know if he had premonitions of his death when he wrote the final words of the Hill profile, but he had written often enough of the end of solitary lives, and it strikes me that in this final profile he was stepping back from his focus on himself but not entirely avoiding a last expression of his own values, perhaps an imaginative rendering of what he hoped his own end would be.
Certainly throughout Return to Walden West Derleth is very much discouraged by encroaching change but seemingly accepting of the ends to which the passage of time leads us all. His final one-page interlude begins:
I never found that nature failed me in the continuity of time and place so essential to my well-being. While the condition of man on his planet slowly worsens, the pattern of the seasons changes not at all, however much nature’s aspects reflect the damage wrought by man in his avarice and his devotion to false, unnatural values.
Here he sounds like an environmentalist for our own times. In the next paragraph he celebrates the continuity of the natural world with an account of the change from winter to spring, and in the third paragraph he muses about the social world:
In the village as in the country, birth and death know no winter; here life is more patently unceasing change. Familiar faces vanish, long-known voices sound no more, gone to ground. The young grow up to confront a life ever more complex, and in their time are harried to the grave, scores of men and women who may never see the beauty of the earth they live in, who may never know themselves as integral to nature.
In the final paragraph he locates himself in his home ground:
I walk among them, it often seems, increasingly an alien, informed by compassion and understanding, but less content among my fellow men than in the marshes or the hills, on the river or along a country road at night, where I am closer to coming full circle, to awareness of that ultimate darkness that is the merging of the self with time and the inevitable dust.
It is a somber ending to the book.
In his conclusion to Walden, Thoreau tells us, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” In his professional activities and personal relationships Derleth sometimes seemed to live several lives simultaneously, but his role as Sac Prairie’s own Thoreau seems to have been central to him. Return to Walden West ends his nonfiction Sac Prairie Saga with a mixture of resignation and acceptance that attempts to let him come to terms with the life he had chosen for himself, walking his home ground.
7
I come back to Ferry Bluff in early April, about a year and a half after my first visit. The sun is out, the trees are greening, and the new grasses overwhelm the dead grasses of the previous season. The forest canopy is thriving but not yet thick; light penetrates the floodplain forest along Honey Creek and illuminates the face of the bluff along the road. Across the empty parking area at the end of the road, I walk down to the riverbank to inspect a border of mud, thick with animal tracks, between the dry ground and the shallow, clear water of Honey Creek. The creek moves slowly above the bare, light-brown bottom on its way toward the Wisconsin River.
The trail runs along the base of the bluffs on one side and along a drop-off of several feet to the floor of the floodplain forest on the other. It arches away from the creek where willow brush or alder brush grows ever more thickly closer to the river, until it’s impossible to see the creek. I keep glancing at the vertical walls of the bluff, with their indentations and openings visible now through the trees in ways they won’t be once spring turns to summer. Past Ferry Bluff, the highland recedes into a U-shaped recess where a dry wash bisects the slope. One side trail leads off toward the base of Cactus Bluff and a distant canoe landing site, passage along it impeded by fallen trees hanging upside down off the bluff face onto the path. I start the climb up the main trail.
The trail Derleth walked was surely not a carefully demarked route like this one, with wooden borders on either side like high curbs, leading upward and inland, then switching back to rise along the slope of Cactus Bluff to the height where the surface of the bluff emerges out of the woods. This trail bears the hallmarks of the DNR and the Nature Conservancy, who got the place designated a state natural area seventeen years after Derleth’s death.
I emerge into the open on the shoulder of the bluff and follow a partial boardwalk downhill toward the edge facing the river, near a row of informational displays, most in disrepair, and some benches under some low cedars. I edge around them onto the sand and stone of the exposed cliff and gaze out upon the river. It’s a cool day, clear, the sky almost cloudless, the river a deeper blue than the pale blue sky. I take some time to consider where I am and where I’ve been.
In the past year I’ve sometimes needed to drive across Wisconsin to and from Minnesota and sometimes routed myself through Sac Prairie. I would usually swing by the western end of the railroad trestle to gaze at Bergen’s Island and the tracks disappearing into thickets on the eastern bank. I drove to Heiney’s Crossing, the turnaround point in Derleth’s railroad walks, and saw for myself how impassably overgrown the tracks had become; I pulled into Snuffy’s Campground, just off the August Derleth Bridge, in hopes of a footpath to the trestle and was told that none exists and that the woods are now thickly overgrown and rampant with poison ivy; I learned that trying an approach by canoe would be no more likely to help me reach the Brook Trestle further inland. Each detour into Sac Prairie added little to my knowledge on the ground and, despite the consolation of some good cheese and good local wine, I drove away discouraged.
In time I came to feel that the inaccessibility of the Brook Trestle was the essence of the story in the twenty-first century. In Derleth’s time the railroad still ran up the tracks from Mazomanie and across the trestles, above the Wisconsin, and through Sauk City. The trains kept the tracks clear. Now the rails rust and the ties rot and thickets grow in the spaces between the ties. Had Derleth lived to see the railroad end and the western trestle be destroyed, he would have lamented the change. As inspiring as it might have been to visit a spot near the Brook Trestle where someone might have erected a Leopold bench in Derleth’s memory and where a visitor like me might have sat to read what he wrote there, it may say more about time and change that it can’t happen.
Unlike Muir at Fountain Lake Farm and unlike Leopold at the shack, Derleth’s home ground wasn’t so much his as it was a landscape through which he moved without restraint and without impact. Place of Hawks, his fenced-in ten acres, was his workspace and his social space and, because of the demands of being a prolific author and an editor and a publisher, the space that housed “the prosaic events of the day” that he needed most to find solitude away from. Whatever becomes of that house—his daughter April Derleth, its most recent occupant, died in March 2011, and when I passed the house a year later it was silent and empty—Place of Hawks would be the logical place to commemorate Derleth the Wisconsin author. Walking with Derleth the solitary rambler will be a more complicated matter.
Nevertheless I decided to try again, after calculating what present settings might give me echoes of Derleth’s Sac Prairie. I began with a favorite site from his childhood.
August Derleth Park slopes down from Water Street into a vast green open sports area with two parking lots and occupies the area Derleth called Ehl’s Slough, where First Island, Second Island, and Third Island were separated from one another and the mainland by sloughs, along the Wisconsin River. At the time I visited, members of the August Derleth Society had been working
to restore native plants, remove invasive species, and bring the area back to what it was when Derleth walked here. On a cold March day, I parked in the lot closest to the river and followed a paved path north into the trees. The paved path and solid dedicated benches made me aware that now is not then.
Not far along the path a mixed group of juncos and gold-finches were preoccupied with pecking at the pavement. They gave me hopes for spring. The trail divided, to form a loop, and a bridge above a dry slough took me toward the riverbank. A long, flat, open stretch was bordered with a low fence above a bluff, and more heavy benches faced the river. But for the cold I might have sat for a while to watch the river flow or to scan the eastern shore, where scatterings of new greens in the trees livened the winter grays of the woods. It would have been a good use of my time on a warmer day. Soon I reached the midpoint of the loop and began to follow a footpath leading off along the riverbank, high above the water. A fisherman, well bundled up, stood on his boat near the shore, watching his line in the current, and didn’t notice me pass quietly above him. A fisherman just like this could have been observed on the river at any time over the past few centuries. I wove through scrubby growth, then took a side trail leading to the remains of a campfire littered with cans and other debris, a setting hard to date, and finally broke into the open above a sandy slope and a clear view of not-so-distant houses on Water Street. Until that moment I hadn’t been aware of the nearness of the street or the traffic moving on it.