by Robert Root
Walking back down the path, Sue and I talk about how this kame came to be here. A moulin kame is created by the steady dropping of glacial debris through an opening in the glacier, creating a cone. Other, lower kames surround Glacier Cone. We both look overhead and try to imagine how high above us the glacier’s surface must have reached to have formed a kame this high, in steady increments over time. We imagine that mass of ice melting down below the top of the kame, below the slopes, below the base, all that meltwater eventually carried away by the post-glacial ancestor of the Fox River—flowing, that is, over and then finally past the terrain on which our home stands. Suddenly the high and the low of our home ground seem intimately connected.
The White Ghost of a Glacier: Walking the Ice Age Trail
1
IT’S NEAR THE END of December, but southeastern Wisconsin has yet to see much snow so far this winter. The day is gray and over-cast and the temperature persistently stable at thirty-two degrees. Bundled up and well layered, Sue and I set out to hike a segment of the Ice Age Trail, the thousand-mile-long National Scenic Trail that winds through Wisconsin from near Lake Michigan in the east to the Minnesota border in the west. We’re starting what our Ice Age Trail Alliance chapter calls the “Walk the Wauk” program. By this time next year—or quite a bit sooner, we hope—we’ll have walked approximately forty-five miles of the Ice Age Trail here in Waukesha County at least once and, given the likelihood of our hiking out and back, probably twice. The seasons will have changed considerably by the time we’ve covered our county’s portion of the trail.
We won’t hike the county segments in order, in a determined march from one end to the other, though we do start at the northern limit, near Monches, at the Washington County line. A sign at the northern trailhead for the Monches segment tells us we’re about to enter the Carl Schurz Forest, named for an early Wisconsin conservationist. Carl Schurz was born in Germany and in 1855 settled in Watertown, Wisconsin, in nearby Jefferson County. There his wife, Margarethe Schurz, founded the first kindergarten in North America, modeled on that of Friedrich Fröbel in Germany. Schurz was a lawyer and politician in Wisconsin, a major general in the Union army during the Civil War, a US senator from Missouri, and secretary of the interior from 1877 to 1881.
As secretary, Schurz decried the depletion of forests on public land by private lumbering companies and initiated the first federal forest reserves, essentially starting the movement toward a national forest service and a national park system. During Schurz’s childhood in Germany, his father had managed the forests of Count Metternich, and Schurz once declared, “I learned to love the woods and to feel the fascination of the forest-solitude, with the whisper of the winds in the treetops.” I don’t know whether Schurz ever saw this stretch of forest—probably not—but I like the fleeting sensation of this forest harking back to forests across centuries and continents.
We leave the trailhead and climb a slope, traipsing through a narrow wooded corridor. Open farmland is hidden to the west by the top of the rise and obscured to the east by trees lower down the slope. Soon the woods expand into oak forest, generations of oak leaves making the forest floor a tan and brown kaleidoscope. The canopy, open now in winter, is high above us. Often we descend into a swale, or depression, with high ridges cutting off the horizon, the trail winding through the forest, rolling up and down. We hear no wind in the treetops, but the forest solitude is enough to make me think Carl Schurz might have liked walking here.
It takes a geological imagination to recognize what we’re hiking on as the result of glaciation ten thousand years ago, and part of the point of walking the Ice Age Trail is to get acquainted with the glaciers and what they wrought. I’ve consulted The Ice Age Trail Companion Guide to briefly prepare me for where we’ll be and Geology of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail to keep me thoroughly apprised of how it came to be there. The latter book, by David Mickelson, Louis Maher, and Susan Simpson, is particularly thorough and conscientious, and, even if my grasp of glaciation or geology always seems tentative and superficial, I’m gaining an awareness of what glacial forces shaped the landscape under the Ice Age Trail.
The Monches segment begins in the valley of the Oconomowoc River, which meanders through what once was a wide glacial meltwater channel. The river itself is not visible from the forest but arcs around the eastern side of Monches, through the inevitable millpond marking where the village began; the Ice Age Trail won’t cross it until about a third of the way through the segment. The oak forest has grown on what the geology book identifies as “high-relief hummocky topography.” This means that, when glacial ice melted, sediment that deposited on top of it, in varying thicknesses, settled onto earlier deposits to form an uneven landscape, sometimes in high relief, sometimes in low relief. The meltwater channel cleared and leveled the ground it passed over, and the river that succeeded it carved its own channel lower into the floodplain, leaving relatively flat terraces on either side. Of course, to see all this occurring would require time-lapse photography covering thousands of years—the scale and scope of Ice Age glaciation would never be obvious to a bystander in any of those millennia.
Eventually we come down out of the forest, veering through a grassy field and into denser, younger forest as we near the Oconomowoc River. The water is clear, shallow, and undoubtedly cold, often interrupted by dead trees and fallen branches that teeter across exposed boulders. The riverbed in some places is thoroughly rock-strewn, and the banks are low enough that they don’t drain well. In wet years a long stretch must be persistently waterlogged. Though we’ve had little snow, we’ve had plenty of cold—in some places small ponds are simply iced over and in others, water flows from beneath rugged canopies of ice. Just before a long narrow agricultural field, a high wooden bridge arches over the river and a series of boardwalks and puncheons extends through the floodplain forest on the eastern side. The bridge and boardwalk are new, a restoration project by a volunteer work crew of the Ice Age Trail Alliance. It’s easy to see that a combination of heavy snowmelt and spring rains could make the lowlands mucky and saturated. A low terrace that will take us to the end of the segment gives us drier footing, and more puncheons sometimes guide us over the lowest parts of the trail.
Except for occasional yellow blazes on trees to mark the trail, until we reach the bridge we have little sense of a world outside the forest. But coming out of the lowlands, the forest narrows again and we notice houses not far beyond the top of the slope, perched on a higher terrace. Often driftwood, tree limbs, and trunk sections are piled at the border between the private yards and the woods; a couple of times we pass overturned canoes. We’ve seen few other people on the trail, but those we have—a couple of mothers with their children—make us realize that the Ice Age Trail, at least in this segment, offers some very accessible recreation for nearby homeowners. The women and children were lightly layered, all of them in sneakers, chatting casually as they ambled along, comfortably strolling what to them was home ground. With our hiking boots and daypacks and steady, determined pace, we felt a little melodramatic about our appearance, our outsider status uncomfortably obvious.
Past the houses the wooded corridor narrows still further, even as the river widens. Fields and farmlands spread off to the east; west of the woods the floodplain opens up into sprawling wetlands filled with thick, tall, tangled brown grasses. Exposed to the sky, the river takes on a placid, bright gray gleam as it curves through the grasses into the distance.
Soon we come to another expanse of oak forest, younger than the Schurz Forest, more studded with saplings. We cross a small creek on a low, flat bridge and pass a Leopold bench with a memorial marker: “These Woods Are Where My Spirit Lies . . . When You Are Lost, Come Here And You Will Find Me.” We started the walk at the sign honoring Carl Schurz, so it doesn’t surprise me to find another memorial on the trail, but I keep thinking about it as we walk on. Something about this personal commemoration seems more difficult to achieve in the commemoration of
a public figure. Whether the man memorialized in the bench marker ever said anything close to what’s inscribed there, the memorial has a reciprocal effect: it honors not only the man but also the place that mattered to him. There’s something elevating in the association for man and forest alike that cemetery headstones and public monuments can’t capture. To his friends and family, some part of him is still here on what he felt to be his home ground.
We are close enough to County Highway Q, a stretch of the Kettle Moraine Scenic Drive, to hear the traffic. It pulls us away from glacial reflection. Soon the trail curves around a high embankment for the railroad and emerges in view of a long concrete overpass that the train tracks cross. One of the three arches in the overpass, close to the trailhead, serves traffic on the road, and another serves the river, which continues on its way south. We stand near the sign for the southern trailhead of the Monches segment, sipping water and noticing local traffic. In that moment it’s clear that, no matter how much it’s the glacial terrain that lures us out onto the trail, the present is too much with us for us to imagine for long that we’re walking in the past.
2
It’s humbling to confess, after spending more than four-fifths of my life in glaciated Great Lakes states, a good portion of that time writing and teaching the literary nonfiction of place, that I have only lately begun to pay attention to glaciers. In spite of their having left Wisconsin around ten thousand years ago, I seem to be constantly aware of them, constantly struggling to tune my senses to their former existence upon my present home ground.
I’ve tried to anchor my understanding more solidly by taking Marlin Johnson’s continuing education class in the glacial geology of Waukesha County; I’ve heard David Mickelson, an author of the book I constantly consult, lecture on the glacial geology of the Ice Age Trail; I’ve tracked down some of the sources that Johnson and Mickelson have drawn upon, like Lee Clayton’s Pleistocene Geology of Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Clayton’s abstract for his Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey Bulletin very succinctly sets the stage: “Waukesha County, in southeastern Wisconsin, straddles an area that was the junction of the Green Bay and Lake Michigan Lobes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Wisconsin Glaciation. Most of the topography of Waukesha County formed during this glaciation.” I may not always know what glacial remnants are beneath my feet, but I’m constantly aware that they are there.
The eastern two-thirds or more of Waukesha County was once beneath the Lake Michigan Lobe of the Wisconsin Glaciation. This is the lobe that crossed what is now the Wisconsin shoreline of Lake Michigan and the Michigan Basin to the east and reached into northern Indiana and Illinois. In Wisconsin, the cities of Sheboygan, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and, further inland, Waukesha all rose on the outwash of the Lake Michigan Lobe. The Green Bay Lobe of the Wisconsin Glaciation flowed more southwestward from what is now Green Bay, crossed present-day Waukesha County from roughly the north central portion to the southwest corner, and continued only a short way beyond. Its terminal moraine, the elevated ridge of glacial debris marking its furthest progress, curves around to the west and up the central part of the state, looking on the map like the shaky outline of a chubby forefinger. In the eastern counties of Wisconsin the Ice Age Trail largely follows the line where the Green Bay and Michigan Lobes met, and from where they diverged, the trail follows the terminal moraine of the Green Bay Lobe. If we were to hike the trail’s entire thousand-plus miles, from Potawatomi State Park on the Door Peninsula to Interstate Park on the St. Croix River, we would pass near August Derleth’s Sac Prairie, Aldo Leopold’s shack, and John Muir’s boyhood lake. The more northern terminal moraines of other lobes that descended only a third of the way down the state—the Langlade, the Wisconsin Valley, the Chippewa, and the Superior—lead the trail the rest of the way to the border with Minnesota. South of those lobes a relatively narrow band of terrain shows evidence of earlier glaciation prior to the Wisconsin Glaciation, and south of that band is the large southwestern quarter of the state known as the Driftless Area, with no sign of glaciation. When you think of Wisconsin’s landscape, you think in terms of either the glacier’s presence or its absence.
The Ice Age Trail grew out of the desire to preserve evidence of the Wisconsin Glaciation and to encourage people to explore glacial features and learn about glacial geology by walking through the terrain it formed—in essence, to enhance people’s connection with their own home ground. The idea originated in the 1950s with Ray Zillmer, a Milwaukee lawyer and avid hiker. Zillmer’s advocacy of the Wisconsin Glacier National Forest Park led to legislation that eventually supported aspects of his concept. August Derleth was one of the prominent figures in Wisconsin who supported the idea.
Zillmer died in 1960 and didn’t see his idea come to fruition. But in 1964 the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve was established, as Henry Reuss, the Wisconsin congressman who authored legislation to create the reserve, points out in On the Trail of the Ice Age, to “assure protection, preservation, and interpretation of the nationally significant features of the Wisconsin glaciation, including moraines, eskers, kames, kettle holes, swamps, lakes, and other reminders of the Ice Age.” By 1973, nine units around the state, consisting of state parks, recreation areas, and forest and wildlife preserves, had been created to protect glacial landscapes and landforms, and the reserve was officially dedicated. Zillmer’s dream had been a thousand-mile-long national park; the Ice Age Reserve was hardly that, since its separate locations were scattered across the state. But the reserve sites were located in places along the line formed by the limits of the Wisconsin ice sheet’s final advance, places that would have been part of the Wisconsin Glacier National Forest Park; the idea of linking them by means of a thousand-mile trail arose readily. Eventually, through the work of volunteers, enough progress had been made on the trail that in 1980 Congress renamed the IAT the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, giving it equal status with the Appalachian and Pacific Crest National Scenic Trails, under the aegis of the National Park Service. In the thirty-five years since then, almost seven hundred of the proposed thousand-plus miles of the trail have been completed, some of them running through national and state forests and state and county parks, some of them running across private lands, all of them maintained by dedicated volunteers in twenty-one different IATA chapters scattered across thirty counties. More than 130 people have officially walked the entire length of the trail (compared with more than twelve thousand on the Appalachian Trail and nearly five thousand on the Pacific Crest Trail).
Sue and I likely will not be among those who complete the thousand miles, but we have been among those working and walking on the trail segments in Waukesha County. A phrase of Aldo Leopold’s sometimes comes to mind when I’m on the trail. In “Marshland Elegy” he described a dawn wind rolling a bank of fog across the marsh “like the white ghost of a glacier.” It seems to me that, when we and the others we sometimes work and hike with walk the Ice Age Trail, we’re walking with the white ghost of the glacier, the glacier forever out of sight, of course, but on the best hikes, still somehow companionably, impressively present.
3
In the Monches segment the Carl Schurz Forest is a definite woods on definitely glacial terrain, and the Oconomowoc River floodplain is more or less enclosed and self-contained. Despite occasional houses and yards at certain points along the trail, it was easy for us to concentrate on the landscape and the forces that shaped it, easy to develop a sense of where we were. The next few segments will give us little chance to feel the same kind of seclusion. It will be like moving abruptly from Muir’s Fountain Lake or Leopold’s shack to Derleth’s Sac Prairie, from a mostly natural setting to a mostly developed one.
On a January afternoon, walking from an ice-coated parking lot near the southern end of the Monches segment, we pass through the stone arch below the railroad trestle just as a freight train rumbles across overhead, as if to confirm the continued need for the overpass. At the nearby trailhead for th
e Merton segment we follow the trail up a steep slope into the woods, paralleling the Oconomowoc River in the distance for a way, then veering off and descending onto the bed of the defunct Kettle Moraine Railway. The tracks were laid down in the nineteenth century by the Milwaukee and Superior Railroad, which intended to cross the state to the Lake Superior ports of Superior and Duluth. But they only got as far as North Lake, four miles west of Merton, and for a while carried mostly gravel and ice to Milwaukee. The Kettle Moraine Railway, an old-timey tourist train running between North Lake and Merton, used the tracks more recently, until pressures from subdivision development, objecting to a loud, smoky historic locomotive blocking backroad traffic, forced the business to close. Rather than agricultural or vacation areas, Monches and Merton have become bedroom communities for commuters aspiring to a more suburban way of life.
To the west a fence closes off the wooden trestle over the Oconomowoc; to the east the rail bed is level and straight and walled in on either side by trees and higher ground. We follow the yellow-blazed Ice Age Trail path running along the southern slope parallel to the railway, as if it were more legitimate than the converted tracks, but when we near the top of the slope, we realize how narrow a strip of woodlands we’re walking through. The sunken bed of the railway makes the first stretch of this trail segment somewhat secluded, but we soon emerge onto the outskirts of Merton.
From here on we feel rather conspicuous following the trail in the open, sometimes on the rail bed, sometimes along a thin line of trees that makes us look incompetently furtive. We pass open farmland, a power station, the backs of houses and garages, on a flat, straight run to Dorn Road, the first of the off-trail connecting routes we’ll have to hike on the shoulder of the road, cars whizzing by in either lane. The road runs up and over a rise, and we descend to a bridge over the Bark River. We’ve crossed into the floodplain of a different river than the one we started near.