“Country is what you make it; country is all in your mind.” — Tom T. Hall
Earlier this summer, a Wisconsin black bear wandered through western Illinois, making his way close to Saint Louis before being sedated and safely transported by authorities to wild areas with other bears. Though I never saw the bear, he captured my attention, and for a while he was daily in my thoughts as a symbol of the wilderness that once was Illinois. In my mind, I clearly saw open savannas covering a rolling landscape, closed canopy forests of tall bottomland oaks and hickories along the major rivers, and treeless prairies without end. He also caused me to recall that in my life, domesticated though it may be, there has always been a need for some type of connection to “wildness.”
As the bear traveled through Illinois, he attracted crowds and media attention.
(Photo credit: Screen grab from FOX 2 News St. Louis 2 July 2020)
This year, my wife, Julie, and I moved from a rural area along the Illinois River valley to the small town of Macomb in McDonough County. Our new home is on a quiet, shaded lane with carefully mowed lawns and manicured gardens. To move was not an easy decision; we thought about it for several years, examining the pluses and minuses of leaving the country life. Having both been raised in urban areas, we knew what town life would mean: being closer to neighbors, the usual commotions and noises of even a small town, placing a distance between ourselves and the cycles of nature that we had long taken for granted, replacing nature’s randomness with orderly city blocks and streets in a well-behaved landscape. When speaking of our former home, I grew fond of telling visitors, “There are no laws out here.” In town, there are laws with plenty of enforcers. I also expected that a special effort would be necessary to continue to connect with nature on a daily basis.
But to my pleasant surprise, making that connection was only slightly difficult. For the many bird species residing in our neighborhood or passing through town on their migrations made their presence known in a myriad of ways each day. Early on during our move, a barred owl sounded off in the middle of the afternoon, almost like a welcome, helping to make us feel our decision had been right. I thought, If owls are common here in town, what else could be here? And I tried to establish a tradition of beginning most mornings sitting in the backyard with a cup of coffee, listening and watching. There were the reliable species—such as the American robin, northern cardinal, Carolina wren, mourning dove, American goldfinch, European starling—that I would see or hear nearly every day; but there was always something else to cause excitement, if I waited long enough: the rare Cooper’s hawk flying overhead for only a few seconds of observation; a ruby-throated hummingbird visiting our newly planted flower beds; a turkey vulture flapping its long wings low over the treetops, not yet able to catch air thermals for soaring. One day as I sat reading in the shade, I noticed a slight movement just beyond our lilac thicket: a doe with two fawns. I stayed perfectly still, while they calmly walked past, about twenty feet away, to rest beneath our neighbor’s redbud tree. Such a close encounter had never happened during nearly thirty years living in the country, where deer hunting is quite an integral part of the local culture. It was another welcome to town.
Doe and fawn under neighbor's redbud tree, Macomb.
When I first heard about the bear (eventually named Bruno in the media), he was near the Quad Cities in Iowa, and before too long he swam across the Mississippi River into Illinois. He was traveling in a distinctly southern direction, almost as if by an unwavering compass heading. “Where do you think he’s going?” Julie asked, anxiety behind and in front of every word. “Looks like he’s heading to our house,” I calmly replied, even knowing full well that meeting up with a bear in the wild—let alone near home—was one of her long-time fears. At a much earlier time, I might have said that a densely populated town would be the last place a wild bear would go. But I remembered that it was only twelve years earlier when a wandering cougar, presumably from suitable habitats hundreds of miles away, showed up deep within the city of Chicago, but also not far from a narrow habitat corridor along the North Branch of the Chicago River. Frantic residents phoned the police, who shot the poor creature dead. So a black bear leisurely passing through Macomb on his way elsewhere did not seem so farfetched. Fortunately for Julie, the bear only came within ten miles of Macomb.
It makes me feel good to know that these symbols of the wilderness stand poised just beyond civilization, which they sometimes easily enter, like the timber wolf that was photographed in Marshall County along the Illinois River valley in 2009. I associate timber wolves with some of the wildest country I’ve known: Isle Royale in Lake Superior, Michigan’s upper Peninsula, and northeastern Minnesota. Simply seeing these place names on the page brings back a lifetime of good wilderness memories, giving me a small jolt of the wanderlust I so strongly felt in my younger days. And the connection to wildness is made; that’s all it takes. Wilderness is as much a type of place as it is a perception of the land, a feeling; in a way, all in one’s mind. I know it when I see; and I don’t require official parameters or a legal definition, as the federal Wilderness Act of 1964 providesa, or to have someone explain it to me. My focus is on the connection between what I see or envisage and its meaning, which may be easy to make in a place like Isle Royale, a federally designated “wilderness,” but more difficult, yet not impossible, in, for example, a small stand of forgotten timber just off an obscure Illinois back road.
Timber wolf in Marshall County, Illinois, in 2009.
(Photo credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service)
I may be able to think of an undeveloped island in the Mississippi River as a wilderness, but it is important for me to know that the big wilderness areas are still there, even though I may not visit them very often, and some I may never visit. Because the day will surely come when age wins out (still many years away, I hope), when carrying a backpack full of gear to a remote campsite is no longer an option (even though I have not actually exercised that option for quite a few years), and thinking about wildness may one day be all I can do to maintain a connection with nature, notwithstanding the birds outside my home office window or in the back yard. But more significant, those large, intact habitats keep the possibility alive for a cougar, timber wolf, or black bear to once again venture into Illinois…and again and again.
Isle Royale (572,000 acres) in Lake Superior.
A shallow interior slough at Long Island (7.4 miles long by
2.0 miles at its widest point) on the Mississippi River,
near Quincy, Illinois. This wild island is part of the
Great River National Wildlife Refuge.
aThe Wilderness Act of 1964 (PUBLIC LAW 88-577-SEPT. 3, 1964) states the following: A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
References
Barnum, S. 2020. Black bear spotted in McDonough County. Saturday, June 27, 2020, pages A1 and A2. The McDonough County Voice, Macomb, Illinois.
Gorner, J, J. Manier, and T. Shah. 2008. Cops kill cougar on North Side. Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2008-04-15-0804140895-story.html referenced 27 August 2020.