Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  Epilogue

  LATE SEPTEMBER. UNDER A cloudless sky and in a persistent wind I walk the woods slowly, checking the maps from time to time to make sure I take paths I don’t usually walk. The trails are leaf-strewn now after a few nights of temperatures in the thirties and the leaves that still wave in the wind are losing their green. At midday, with the sun high and the wind lively, the trees shake their shadows across the ground. I take my time on the trail, occasionally angle off from it in the high stretches to gauge the angle of the slopes and the depths of their depressions. Except for a squirrel and a downy woodpecker, I haven’t seen any wildlife, but I’m staying alert in hopes of spotting a fox, as others have reported seeing. The wind in the trees drowns out any sounds from the surrounding roads and only once does a jet airliner intrude overhead.

  I’ve come armed with tree guides but haven’t much used them, except to confirm a suspected ironwood. I spot the white oak just before the entrance, the red pines just inside, the solitary cedar and every shagbark hickory I pass. I pause to admire the largest oaks and identify the maples, elms, and black cherrys. I like the variety but mostly I like the abundance, so many trees, so high the canopy, so shaded the ground and camouflaged the sky.

  I climb one leg of an unfamiliar loop, one I usually cut off to shorten my walk, and descend the other leg, rejoining the trail that will take me to the marsh. Once I’m on the observation deck, the grasses are too high for me to see if the pond at the center of the marsh has any water after this year’s drought. For a few minutes the marsh is silent, but then I hear a chuffing sound and see a deer bounding away along the distant margin of the grasses, heading for deeper woods. I was unaware of him until his cough and flight alerted me, but he may have been too aware of me.

  On my walk today I’ve only encountered an older man trudging one way and a younger woman power walking the other way, and I’ve liked feeling mostly alone in the woods. But now I hear voices, a few women airing their affairs and opinions as they walk together. I think this kind of companionship doesn’t always honor serenity in a setting like this. I leave the observation area and increase my pace to get some distance from their voices, but their conversation seems to stall once they walk onto the deck. I circle up the trail on familiar terrain, temporarily join the bike path, and look for yet another path new to me, one that will take me back to the river through the woods. From the high point of the woods I make a slow descent to a point where I retrace a long stretch to get back on a familiar trail heading farther down toward the river and the western arm of the bike path.

  I’m pretty pleased with the afternoon, the long stretches of quiet, the soundtrack of wind and rustling leaves, the flitting shadows that are sometimes leaves and sometimes birds, the sense of the woods and the winding trails as my home ground.

  Mid-December. Time. Terrain. Transition. These words were on my mind when I woke up today. When I think about my efforts to connect with my home ground, these are the words that come to mind. Terrain of course, for that’s what I wander through and upon. And time as well, for every effort to understand what’s here now raises questions about why it’s here in the form it is, what was here before, and how and to what degree it changed. And that’s transition—or do I mean, transformation? Or are these the same thing? I seem to be someone for whom walking any sort of terrain is virtually a form of time travel, and if you travel through time you can’t avoid awareness of transition.

  I am now (I was surprised to be thinking as I lay in bed in the darkness before the dawn) older by roughly a decade than Aldo Leopold and August Derleth when they died and not yet so old as John Muir at his death, though firmly in his age group. This puts me at a disadvantage in this stumbling after a sense of home ground. I’m discovering mine at an age when Muir was reminiscing about his discovery of his, those dozen years of his adolescence when nature streamed into him and he labored, with some regret, to transform it. Muir’s sense of loss over what he couldn’t preserve stayed with him throughout his life; my experience of where I am is more immediate and limited than his, more vicarious than visceral, and yet Muir’s experience transmits to me an alertness to what was here before.

  Whenever I tend to write in our house, whether upstairs in my study before the windows above my desk, or downstairs at the dining table across from our windowed front door, I gaze out at condominiums across the street that mirror those of my neighbors and me. Beyond them are family homes on residential streets climbing the slope away from the river plain. Most of the houses are only a few decades old. I almost never walk through those neighborhoods and have no sense of the lives of the people who live there. I will never have the sense of place that August Derleth had, living six decades in the town where he was born, walking through familiar neighborhoods, passing houses whose occupants he knew by name and by sight, steeped in their conversations. I am closer to the Derleth of his interludes, the one whose walks took him into the woods and over the river and off to the places where he knew the morels would be found in season. Closer to him but not so intimate with my landscape as he was with his. He was profoundly aware of loss and failure in the human community; but by his final book about his own Walden, he had grown elegiac about loss and transformation in the natural world as well. His sense of time’s effect on terrain reverberates in me, perhaps all the more deeply for my closeness to my landscape and my distance from the society that occupies it.

  It’s fair to say that Aldo Leopold’s spirit hovers above all those who work to restore and conserve natural areas. Certainly those of us who serve as volunteers for the Ice Age Trail Alliance have the hope that opening up the forests and grassland and bringing back native plants and removing invasive and exotic ones will bring anyone who walks any portion of the trail closer to the land, not simply as a site for recreation but also as an opportunity for communion. The spirit is there in the park workers nearby who have been clearing land to bring back the prairie that early settlers once saw (and quickly plowed under), even if it’s in a narrowly circumscribed setting.

  Enough time has passed since the publication of Leopold’s great book—and his death—that the wisdom of his philosophy has been confirmed by widespread practice. I’m grateful for every instance of accomplishment I see in the ecological community. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect,” Leopold wrote in his foreword to A Sand County Almanac. He also wrote, in “The Land Ethic,” “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.” Those who agree with him have done a great deal of the right thing with the biotic communities that matter to them.

  Unfortunately, those who see land as a community to which they belong are a minority, and those who don’t see land at all are the overwhelming majority. Little in our culture invites us to do more than to interact with our culture. “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth observed more than two hundred years ago; “late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours.” We do a lot more getting and spending now than we did then, and the odds are in favor of our doing more rather than less in the future.

  It’s our great devotion to getting and spending that leaves us largely impotent, willingly aloof, in regard to the climate change we’re living through. Our cluelessness won’t impact the climate, except to accelerate change. There will be a transition over time, as anyone who considers the ecological history of Wisconsin can confirm, and the only question is whether we will be able to do what’s right for our biotic community—and how much we are willing to do what’s right—during our short time within it. Only time will tell, and someone else will have to write that book.

  So perhaps this book is merely an invitation to walk home ground, to understand what the terrain is now and what it has been across time, and how the transition that created what it is now came about. Perhaps too it’s a time capsule, a message in a bottle fr
om someone given to looking over his shoulder even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet, something that one day might interest another such seeker, someone looking over her shoulder while she attentively walks her own home ground.

  Sources and Captions

  Epigraphs

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  Prologue

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  Interlude

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  The Taste for Country

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  The White Ghost of a Glacier

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