The River Landing

Shutting Down the Cabin

 

“Time, that mysterious something, that flow, that relation, that mediator, that arena for event, envelops us and confounds us all.”—from Descartes’ Dream:  The World According to Mathematics by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh

 

Nighttime temperatures were forecast to dip below freezing.  It was a sign to shut off the water pump at the Quiver Lake cabin and drain the pipes.  For most years, it could be four to five months before turning the system back on.  So I tried to stretch out the last visit, putting off flipping the breaker to the off position until I couldn’t avoid it any longer.  When it was done, I took a last slow walk through the woods down to our sandy beach, and sat for a while under a large cottonwood tree to fill my mind with a few more memories to look back upon over the winter.

          I looked for flocks of waterfowl flying in and out of nearby Chautauqua Refuge or a marsh hawk following the Illinois River valley southward, a species I rarely see other times of the year.  Mostly I just sat and stared.  On shut-down day, it’s hard to accept that another season is over, and I’m surprised at how quickly a mere eight months could pass.

          Leaning against the tree, I recalled the red fox sighting, the river otter a few years before, harvests of wild golden oyster mushrooms, cookouts seasoned with wood smoke, Julie indulging in her art on the screened-in front porch, bald eagles perching on our lakeside trees, the first spring wildflowers so many months before—bluebells, Dutchman’s breeches, and spring beauties—and the many cold days, ice, and drifting snow that would have to happen before I would see them again.  I thought about almost missing the winter-spring transition while recovering from an inconvenient surgery that kept me bound to the couch for weeks, reading books, which I didn’t mind, and wondering what was happening at the cabin.

          Then summer hit.  We’re cool-weather people; so on hot, humid days we’re fine with staying home.  But this year when those types of days were finally becoming fewer, a period when I would normally be drawn more to visiting the cabin, we decided to move from our sedate Macomb neighborhood to a rural home with acreage just outside of town.  We scrambled to get as many free boxes from grocery stores as were available, and then we packed and moved and packed and moved until it was all done, and we were in—just before leaving on a thirty-eight hundred-mile round trip to New England, during which time both of us were ill.  Along the way, the cabin was always in the back of my mind, and that was the closest I would get to it for a month.

          Time on my last day at the cabin was running away.  So I looked up into the canopy of the cottonwood, stood to leave, and then thought, as I do every year when shutting down the cabin, that we should have had more overnight visits.  For one of my pleasures is to walk around the property in the early morning with a cup of coffee, out to our dead-end road to see the sun rising over the sand prairies, and later to stand on the river bluff edge before the lake breezes begin, when sounds of birds on the lake or mud flats clearly resound from below, and the floodplain forests of the opposite lakeshore are illuminated in direct sunlight, while my side of the lake is still in shadow.  On overnight visits with clear skies, I might risk running into a skunk to see the Milky Way, sometimes Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn (the spotting scope I use to view shorebirds makes an excellent astronomical telescope).

          Next year, since I don’t expect to be moving again, I hope for a year without undesirable distractions.  After being forced to install an entirely new septic system in our new home (after the original one backed up into the basement just two days after we had moved in), then replacing rotten bathroom flooring due to years of leaking pipes, and making our home safe from haphazard electrical work, I asked myself:  What else could go wrong?  Myself answers: Don’t ask.  A leaking roof?  Don’t even think it.  A shifting foundation?  Shut up already!

          The patient man in me always thinks there is more time for everything, and my time hasn’t run out; limited, though, it is, like every living thing.  So I’ll save whatever I have left for later, and then spend more of it at the cabin, as much as time allows, and be miserly with the rest.  Soon it will be time to turn on the water again, and that will be a happy time.  Time will tell.

 

 

 

An old Swiss-made watch inherited from my grandfather, Vincent Zelizko, born in 1903 in Bohemia, when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

 

 

 

 

 

From a Mississippi River Island

“Shiftin' lands, broken farms around me, muddy water's changin' all I know”—from the song Muddy Waters by Phil Rosenthal

 

Under billowing clouds imperceptibly changing shape in the rising warm air, the Mississippi River gently flowed past Credit Island.  I stood on the river bank looking toward Illinois and the mouth of the Rock River.  Over the millennia, so much life and history had passed this way with the river’s flow.  Though little was revealed by a casual glance, I knew there was much more here than a scenic view.

            Credit Island, now part of the Davenport park system, just happens to be a place where detailed history has been recorded or reconstructed:  an early trading post where credit was offered to Native Americans to provide animal hides; site of a War of 1812 battle that involved the future president Zachery Taylor and the Sauk Chief Blackhawk; part natural area and part recreational retreat for city dwellers for over a century.  And yet, I thought, what about times or places where events may not have been significant enough to be recorded?  Or where there were no witnesses to see a flood, tornado, or wildfire.  Or, over deep time, as a river island gradually erodes away, with new islands forming, and the river changes course.

 

Credit Island on the Mississippi River opposite the Rock River Confluence.

 

            Some clues to the past remain.  But how does one link an old, rusted square nail, still embedded within a weathered fragment of ancient lumber, to an actual event?  Was that nail part of a shanty boat that sank or a pier taken out in a flood long ago?  What of an old whisky bottle, out of sight for decades before erosion brought it once again to the light of day?  Was there a drunken brawl late one evening along the riverbank?  Did someone throw the bottle overboard from a steamboat bound for New Orleans?  There could still be stories left to be told, but they likely have already been lost, or could still remain hidden memories for a time in an anonymous mind, inevitably to dissipate into the infinity of time.

            Within piles of natural woody debris that gather along the river bottoms, there are more hidden links to real events, if only those links could be followed; each piece with its unique history; untraceable; the result of storms that felled trees, ripped branches, or created floods of such magnitude that bottomland forests died by summer’s end, their remnants gradually carried away over the years.  Logs, branches, twigs, bark, leaves, and seeds eventually rotting to nothing or becoming smoothed over and pulverized into ever smaller sizes from scraping and moving about with the current and waves; and as a river flood recedes, some of this is left behind as a kind of “river mulch” in a layer over the ground, almost like a narrow carpet parallel to the river bank marking the high water level.

 

                                River mulch.

            The island itself, though, has its own story, that of originally being scraped from bedrock, grain by grain, carried across the land embedded within a continental-sized glacier more than ten thousand years ago, then drained away within torrential meltwaters as the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, finally deposited here and there within the river’s floodplain.  The Mississippi and Rock River valleys were two such drainage ways, transporting floods of glacial meltwaters, carrying various loads of clay, silt, sand, and gravel, all set down at different times and locations as the current slowed.  At some point, vegetation was able to anchor some of the shapeless alluvium into an island.

            Standing on the river bank, I could not help being drawn to the Rock River; I kept pivoting in that direction, no matter what else was happening.  And so, I gave in to the pull, and in my mind’s eye, left the Island, crossed the Mississippi, and followed the Rock River through north-central Illinois and further north to its headwaters in Wisconsin beyond the great Horicon Marsh, a gathering place each fall for thousands upon thousands of sandhill cranes, Canada geese, and other water birds.  Several times in my life I have watched this wildlife spectacle, each time marveling how so many large birds in flight never collide; they never even seem to come close. 

            The Rock holds many of my special memories, all coming to the foreground simply from gazing toward the river’s mouth.  I imagined a young man zooming along on his first long motorcycle trip over forty years ago, exiting the Illinois Tollway at Dixon, following the Rock River highway to the small town of Oregon and beyond: a big city kid, frustrated with crowds and city congestion, completely taken by the charming small river towns, making a mental note to return one day.

            As I began to move along the island’s shoreline, my attention was once again drawn downward, to comb the sand for artifacts—perhaps from the old battle—or ancient potsherds or items carved from rock (anchor stones, arrowheads, grinding stones), left behind from vanished cultures who built mounds to their honored dead and effigies of spirit creatures.  Alas, I found nothing, but also knew that if I had stumbled upon something, it would have to be left in place, forever to be a part of Credit Island’s history.

            Yet even a mountain erodes away given enough eons.  Forever is a long time; however great a span one might imagine, forever is longer.  So the river and patience will wear it all away.  Credit Island will not last forever. 

            For now, we can still find bits and pieces of the past, put them together to construct plausible scenarios, and then carefully surmise the rest; we have our stories in this way, and we let them become as real as our thoughts.  As far as Credit Island, how different a visit would be without archaeologist Christopher Espenshade’s words hovering around:  “At first light on September 5, a number of Native Americans had waded to Pelican Island from Credit Island, and an American sentry was shot and killed. The Americans disembarked a force and cleared the Native Americans from Pelican Island. At about this same time, the few British with a 3-pounder and two swivel guns abandoned their position watching the Rock Island rapids, and moved downstream to the western bank of the Mississippi….”

 

References

Espenshade , C.T.  2013.  Archaeological/historical research and military terrain analysis of the Credit Island Battlefield (War of 1812), Iowa and Illinois.  Prepared for City of Davenport, Iowa and American Battlefield Protection Program, Washington, D.C., Grant GA-2287-12-002.  Prepared by Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, Inc. 2530 Spring Arbor Road, Jackson, Michigan 49203-3602. 

Killey, M.M.  1998.  Illinois’ ice age legacy.  Geoscience education series 14.  Illinois State Geological Survey, Champaign, Illinois. 

Theler, J.L. and R.F. Boszhardt.  2003.  Twelve millennia:  archaeology of the upper Mississippi River Valley.  University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Wikipedia.  Credit Island.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_Island.  Referenced on September 8, 2021.

 

Full Circle with a Song

I had just finished breakfast, and following my usual routine with a cup of coffee in hand, picked up my guitar to play a few tunes while looking out the window for birds.  The words to the song Evening Primrose came easily:

 

            Evening primrose in August, bee balm in July,

            Fireflies flying where fireflies fly,

            Catbirds are calling and walnuts are falling,

            From big branches up high in the sky.

 

            Tomatoes in the garden,

            Grapes ripe on the vine,

            About ready for picking, just give me a sign.

            Butterfly milkweed, a big bag of bird seed,

            Let’s slow down these old hands of time.

 

        The song is about a home and property a few miles outside of Havana, Illinois, where I lived for twenty years.  And I realized once again, as I sometimes do while playing the song, that if I had not moved from that property, singer/songwriter Edward David Anderson would never have written it.

        My wife Julie and I both loved our Havana country home, but we needed to move closer to our aged mothers; we thought a university town setting would be interesting.  So just before COVID began appearing on news reports, we bought a home in Macomb, Illinois, about 50 miles west of Havana, quickly moved, and put our old home on the market. 

        That house and property (3.5 acres) was the first I had ever owned, well before I knew Julie.  Most of the land was mowed grass when I first bought it, but there were woods around part of the west and north boundaries, essentially scrubby trees grown over abandoned farm operations that had been cleared years before.  My first act as a landowner was to plant a bur oak seedling that I brought from the Illinois River bluffs, about four miles away.  My second act was to stop mowing.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I didn’t wish to become a slave to a lawnmower.

        The following spring I dug up a ten-foot by twenty-foot section of lawn grass and scattered the bare soil with prairie wildflower and grass seeds.  I eventually expanded the area to about 1.5 acres, scattered acorns, and also planted a few.  Over the years I planted hazelnut, dogwood, and sumac shrubs, and more prairie seeds; and I set everything on fire every couple of years to keep the woody vegetation and ticks in check and to encourage grasses like big and little bluestem, Canada wild rye, Indiangrass, and sand love grass. At some point, I named it “Sand Hill Savanna.”  Meanwhile, I began a FeederWatch study through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which I would complete yearly for twenty winter seasons.  I became connected to this property like no other:  our wedding photo was in front of the bur oak tree that I had planted the day I moved in seven years before; a butterfly milkweed plant, which was an anniversary gift from Julie, was getting bigger each year; and we started a raised-bed garden, grew tomatoes and cucumbers, and planted a row of grape vines for making wine.  I thought I would live there until the end.

 

Sand Hill Savanna after thirteen years (2013).

 

            Cucumbers in the garden,

            And they’re ripe on the vine.

            Got a river up the road,

            And it flows just like wine.

            Cardinals are calling and the acorns are falling,

            From that old oak tree high in the sky.

 

Butterfly milkweed at Sand Hill Savanna, 2015.

 

        Life, though, has a way of changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, no matter what a person might say or do or how much you wish it to remain the same.  I was never enthusiastic about moving from our country home, especially into town on a small lot directly next to other small lots.  But we were a block from a manicured city park with a meandering creek.  I went for walks and watched birds without binoculars (I could not imagine standing in the middle of the street with my binoculars trying to find a small bird within a dense shrub in front of someone’s living room window).  And on many days I missed our country home—its prairie, woods, and trails—even as I felt our new home was the best house I had ever lived in, especially after Julie worked her skillful decorating magic.  But it was the right thing to do at the time, and it made our lives easier as Julie’s mother quickly declined and soon passed away and my mother fell, broke her hip, and then moved to an assisted-living facility five minutes from our new home. 

 

            A walk in the woods,

            A stroll down the road,

            Where sunsets are golden and never grow old.

            Wherever I go, the roads that I roam,

            Bring me back to my old country home.

 

Monarchs and honeybees on showy goldenrod at Sand Hill Savanna, 2018.

 

          We worried about selling our old home because of the COVID crisis.  But unknown to us, Ed and Kim Anderson saw the pandemic as an opportunity to move (Ed, being a full-time musician, had all of his gigs cancelled due to pandemic restrictions), and they were searching for a country home with acreage.  They later told me that after pulling up to the property as prospective buyers, the first thing they did, before looking at the house, was to walk the trails through the woods and prairie.  I earlier provided the realtor with an essay I had written about the property (“The Acorn Year”), which they had read before their visit; my thinking was that anyone with interests similar to mine would see the prairie for what it was, rather than as an overgrown yard of weeds unmaintained by a lazy, hungover landowner.  After the house closing, we became friends, and I became an admirer of Ed’s music.

          One day about a year later, one of Ed’s posts came up on my Facebook News Feed.  It read like a poem, but it turned out to be the first part of a new song, Evening Primrose, and I instantly recognized its subject matter.  Later, at one of his shows, I would hear the rest of the lyrics.  Eventually the full song, with accompanying instrumentation, became the opening tune for his new album Still the River.  The album’s back cover states that it was recorded at “The Homestead, Havana, IL.”

          Whenever I play Evening Primrose on my guitar, I feel as if a circle of some kind has been completed.  And as chance would have it, after four and a half years in our Macomb neighborhood, Julie and I stumbled upon a “For Sale” sign in front of a country home with acreage a few miles west of town; about a month later we were almost completely moved in and our home in town was on the market.  As it turned out, earlier in the same year, Ed, Kim, and daughter Ella also moved onward; for them, it was Wisconsin.  But for a short time, circumstances aligned, resulting in some great music and friendships that otherwise never would have formed.

 

Related Links:

Listen to Evening Primrose here.

Visit Edward David Anderson’s official website here.

“Town Walking” is an essay about adjusting to life in town after living nearly three decades in rural settings.

“The Acorn Year” is an essay about the author buying his first house and property and what he decides to do with it.

"Twenty Years at a Mason County, Illinois, FeederWatch Station."