The River Landing

Imagining the Mississippi River

How might this river be encompassed, memorized, and understood?  Stand on the bank of the Mississippi River, anywhere is fine, and view it as the remaining sum of everything it once was.  With its headwaters in the north woods of Minnesota, from a small lake within red and white pine forests sustained by fire; then further south through a wide floodplain between high bluffs, some with hill prairies, a dry, fire-prone community; then tortuously meandering through the deep south; its complex discharge of water, products of erosion, debris, and various lifeforms—from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies—finally flows through a land of southern swamps with buttressed bald cypress and coastal marshes, before dissipating into the Gulf of Mexico.

 

The Mississippi River as it flows out of nearby Lake Itasca, Minnesota (2005).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mississippi River in the Driftless Area at Guttenberg, Iowa, above Lock and Dam #10 (1989).

 

The Mississippi River as it flows through northwestern Illinois' Driftless Area (2003).
 

        Travel the river, but view in frustration only up to the next bend.  So create a panorama of still shots along the way, two dimensions from a dynamic three, flattened and stretched, only a semblance of reality.  And what of the scenes between images?  Memorize the rest and rely upon the unreliability of recollection.  Or measure and record with a scientific method, converting its shifting complexity into static tables of numbers and graphs generated from computer-assisted multivariate statistical analyses.  Synthesize, synthesize, synthesize.  What are the resulting images?  More numbers and graphs.  Where does this leave understanding?  And what about between sampling points?

 

The Mississippi River at Davenport, Iowa, and Lock and Dam #15 (2024).

 

A side channel of the Mississippi River called Andalusia Slough,

about 10 miles downriver from the Quad Cities.  Andalusia Island

is on the right (2022).

 

        One must not overlook the time factor.  For the Mississippi is always changing.   A yearly spring flood is an expected event, sometimes profoundly altering the river’s course.  Within its substrate and biota, subtle links exist that point to earlier versions of today’s river, some going back millions of years.  Other clues are more recent and obvious, such as abandoned channels and oxbow lakes, showing where the river had once flowed.

 

A narrow channel entirely within the Mississippi River's Long Island, just upriver

from Quincy, Illinois (2003).
 

        Still more recent, insignificant on a geologic time scale, is the river’s human history.  A travel route—since the last glaciers retreated northward—in canoes, flatboats, wood- and coal-fired steamboats, diesel-powered towboats pushing lashed-together barges, and trains rolling along tracks following along the river banks.  Because we are less inclined to grant the river its wild demands, it has been civilized with levees, wing dams, riprap, retaining walls, articulated concrete mat banks, and a system of locks and dams.  The Mississippi is a regulated river:  for commerce, resources, flood control until it's uncontrolled, and to carry away what our modern society would rather not think about.

 

The Mississippi River at Quincy, Illinois, with a towboat pushing barges,

a train crossing on a river bridge, and vehicles crossing the river on US Highway 24 (2020).

 

Mark Twain's childhood hometown along the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri (2022).

 

A recently burned hill prairie with a pre-historic Indian mound at McAdams Peak, Pere

Marquette State Park, Illinois, near the confluence of the Illinois and 

Mississippi rivers (2023).

 

A levee break that occurred during the Great Flood of 1993.

Photograph near St. Louis, Missouri, from an airliner window as

the plane banked, October 1993.

 

At the river town of Grafton, Illinois, about 15 miles north of St. Louis,

Missouri, at the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers a few

years after the Great Flood of 1993.  The 1993 high water mark is noted

on the building. 
  

 

View of the American Bottoms from the Illinois bluffs.  St. Louis,

Missouri is in the distance (far left center) (1990).

 

The Middle Mississippi River (between St. Louis, Missouri, and

Cairo, Illinois) at Trail of Tears State Park, Missouri, showing wing dams

and a towboat pushing barges.  Southern Illinois' Shawnee Hills

are visible in the distance.

 

 

Bald cypress at an oxbow lake in southern Illinois at the northern-most

portion of the Mississippi Embayment. 

 

The meandering lower Mississippi River (downriver from Cairo, Illinois)

at the border between Arkansas and Mississippi (yellow line).  Photograph

by staff at the International Space Station on 2 April 2020 (nasa.gov). 

 

        It would be the rare bottomland forests, prairies, and wetlands that appear not much altered from before the dams where links remain to form a rough starting point to imagine what the past may have been like; burial and effigy mounds from pre-historic cultures fill in more of the blanks; and updated maps over the years present in abstract the changing watershed and provide the context.  So much alluvium to be sifted through and interpreted.

 

Wetland within Turkey Island on the Mississippi River near Lock

and Dam #9 and New Boston, Illinois (1995). 

 

Paradise over the Years

One of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar back in the late 1990s was John Prine’s Paradise.  It was easy to learn because I knew the words so well after listening to the song hundreds of times over the years and because it has only three chords.  Paradise tells the story of a small Kentucky town, along the Green River, that was moved so the land could be strip-mined for coal.  The song has been one of my favorites for a long time, and when I’m playing it, I lose myself to the past.

 

Green River, Kentucky, 1977

        I first heard Paradise in the mid-1970s at a Tom T. Hall concert at the Grundy County Fair.  Still in high school at the time, a few friends and I made the 50-mile trip one summer evening from Cicero to Morris after hearing about the concert on our local country music station.  At that time, Grundy County was very rural; the Chicago area’s sprawling suburbs were still many miles away.  And so, as we sat on the outside bleachers waiting for the concert to begin, we looked upon farm country that stretched nearly unbroken in every direction; it may have been the first time I had ever seen the sun set over the actual horizon.

        I remember the concert starting late, which created some frustration within the audience; and when Hall finally appeared, he seemed rather uninterested in playing, as if he simply wanted to be relaxing at home with a drink.  On the second or third song of the show, he played Paradise, and he became much more alive and focused.  I don’t recall that he mentioned who wrote the song; so I thought that either he was the author or that it was an old traditional bluegrass tune.  For the rest of the concert, Hall returned to his somewhat distracted state, and we left the fairgrounds a bit disappointed. 

        Three or four years later I was at a co-worker’s basement apartment drinking beer and talking about music.  When I mentioned that I liked Bob Dylan, he replied that I needed to hear John Prine, who, he said, sounded a bit like Dylan with a southern accent.  He then put John Prine’s first album on the turn table; and listening with an open mind, I immediately liked what I heard:  “Blow up your TV, throw away your paper, go to the country, build you a home.…”  Then Paradise came on, and I instantly recognized the song from the Tom T. Hall concert.  I found out then that Prine was the author of Paradise.  And I made up my mind at that moment to pick up some John Prine albums.

        Not long after that evening, a couple of friends and I were again attending a Tom T. Hall concert, this time at a small venue on Chicago’s north side.  I don’t remember much about the concert except that Hall seemed even more distracted than the last time I saw him.  But to be fair to Hall, after the concert, our small group was bound for Chicago-style deep dish pizza, and that was about all I could think of for probably the last half of the show.  We couldn’t have left the concert hall fast enough for me. 

        But after the house lights finally came on, I noticed that sitting in the next row of seats, just in front of us, was none other than John Prine and Steve Goodman!  At the time, I was much less familiar with Steve Goodman, other than being able to recognize him as someone who had played with John Prine.  So I whispered to my friend Jeff, “Hey, that’s John Prine over there, and he was sitting in front of us during the whole concert.”  So Jeff boldly walked up to Prine and said, “Hey you’re John Prine.”  Prine smiled and replied, “Yeah, I am.”  Steve Goodman just smiled.

        I think of these little stories whenever I play Paradise, and I probably always will.

 

 

Recollections of a Man on Skid Row—Chicago, Early 1970s

Recently my wife Julie and I were planning a trip to Lake Michigan’s dune country, about 50 miles across the lake from Chicago.  And as is my habit before such a trip, I’ll make a visit to the plastic cabinet on our front porch, where the miscellany of my life is being stored:  brochures from sites visited long ago, outdated maps, scattered photographs, bits of this and that being saved for obscure reasons.  And during my search for whatever I was looking for, I came upon an envelope crammed with old black-and-white photographs.

        I shuffled through the prints rather quickly, like a deck of cards, and was almost ready to store them away again before seeing each one—as I remembered the photos very well, and knew there would be no surprises—when one rather abruptly grabbed my attention.  It simply showed a man walking on a sidewalk.  Yet the photo brought forth a flood of memories, and pulled me back to that exact day and time over 40 years before.

 

Chicago, Madison Avenue, early 1970s

 

        In those days, my father, who passed on in 2009, often took my brother Bob and me on Sunday drives.  Sometimes it seemed as if we had no particular destination in mind, just being out of our little neighborhood for a while was enough.  Downtown Chicago and the lake front were our favorites.  We once drove through beautiful neighborhoods of what seemed like mansions in the northern suburbs of Kenilworth and Winnetka, to see how the other half lived.  And we drove through Chicago’s western suburbs past new shopping malls, which my father said was how the future would look; and I felt as if we had just traveled through time.  I remember seeing the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, in the 1960s, before, it seemed, much attention had been given to air pollution control:  a sunny day turned somber, dark, and gray; and my father said that this was progress, and called the wetlands and open fields “wasteland.”  On one adventurous trip, just after Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed, followed by riots with burning inner-city neighborhoods, my father was curious to see the aftermath—what he, a World War II veteran, called a “war zone.”  We traveled down Madison Avenue where the rioting had been the worst; there was no shortage of charred buildings and debris strewn over the streets and sidewalks; yet all seemed peaceful on our Sunday drive, even though tensions must have been tight as a drum.  Though my father seemed oblivious to any danger, he instructed us to shut the car windows and lock the doors.

        A few years later, in a high school photography class, I learned about the different cameras available and how to develop black-and-white film and create prints.  My parents indulged this budding interest by purchasing a small photographic enlarger and allowing me to develop film and prints in the house, which, to my mother’s dismay, involved the use of some rather smelly chemicals.  Soon, from money which I earned through various odd jobs, I bought my first good camera:  a 35 mm, Yashica rangerfinder with adjustable lens, shutterspeed, and focus.  Armed with this new camera, then, I was eager to take pictures of just about anything. 

        Downtown Chicago continued to be a prime choice, but I tended to travel there more by the elevated train system (the “L” train) and buses accompanied by one or two friends.  Though Sunday drives with my father were becoming less frequent as I became older, on one of our last, we ended up, once again, on Madison Avenue.  By that time, about 1972, there had not been rioting for a few years, and the perception was that social disharmonies had improved quite a bit since the late 60s.  Our optimistic world view said that that had to be the case:  things always improved, and progress moved everything forward.  But Madison Avenue was still Skid Row, as it had been known for a long time:  a poor, dangerous, high-crime area with flop houses, junkies, prostitutes, homeless street people, gangs, broken-down buildings, filth, and disease.  Skid Row had not improved, and may actually have gotten worse.  Now, some may say this is a harsh assessment, flavored by the flaws of memory.  Fair enough.  But it is called Skid Row for a reason.

        When our car slowed in the traffic, I noticed a tall man walking quickly, taking big steps, dodging around slower-moving pedestrians.  He stood out in the crowd.  And I cried, “Look at that guy!”  His face had a wild, maniacal expression.  And so I quickly readied my camera over the protests of my father and brother.  When the man was just opposite our vehicle, I snapped the shutter, and we quickly drove onward, back to our world, a world away from his.  I think this was the last time we traveled to Skid Row and one of the last Sunday drives, as my life apparently became busier, and being with friends assumed a greater importance.

        As I now look at the print of this man on Skid Row, I wonder about his story.  How did he end up there?  Was he a penniless alcoholic who had just found enough money for a drink?  Is that why he was in such a hurry?  Or did he just steal something?  Was he a war veteran, who had seen terrible things, and been broken by the experience?  Was he someone’s once beloved husband or father who had fallen on illness and hard times?  Or were the hard times of his own making?  Was he dangerous, and would he have been furious to know that his picture had just been taken?  Should I not have taken his picture?     

        Such questions were not on my mind when I snapped the photo, knowing only that I wished to be as far from this man and his surroundings as possible (yet there he is in a cabinet, in my home, along with special moments from my life).  And I also did not wonder why it was that my father brought his two sons through Skid Row on a Sunday afternoon.  As I recall, my mother also wondered, shaking her head in disbelief at her former husband’s choice for a drive with his sons.  But I believe his reason was to impart a valuable and memorable lesson:  Work hard, get an education, save your money, be honest and kind, stay sober, and you won’t end up here.  Although he never offered an actual word of explanation, his message was loud and clear, then as now.

 

Conserving Heat

         It was around three o’clock in the morning, the outside temperature -14^o F, when I heard the coyotes yipping; high pitched squeals of excitement it seemed to me, but only for a few seconds, and then they were silent. They were wandering close to our rural Mason County home, as they often did, and perhaps came upon a bit of food, maybe a dead rabbit. Other creatures, especially small birds, were conserving their body heat against the extreme cold, clear skies, which radiated much of the atmosphere’s heat outward to space, unimpeded by cloud cover. Following that brief moment of consciousness, I soon drifted off again, sleeping away the rest of the night under a warm heavy blanket.

 

Coyotes captured on the trail camera, Mason Co., Illinois

        The next day, recalling the night before and how struggle against the cold is the normal life of wild creatures in a northern winter, I thought about a late October campsite in the Missouri Ozarks over twenty years earlier. The temperature was in the low 30s, so I sat as close to the fire as possible, and fed it often with small branches and twigs. The dry wood burned quickly, and its heat was soon lost to the air. Cottonwood twigs burned the fastest, but produced only a weak heat. Yet cottonwood was the most abundant fuel around the campsite, not far from the Current River; the better firewood, such as oak, had long before been gathered by summer campers.
        I remember sitting near the fire, thinking about heat, light, and energy. During winter’s cold, it’s all about retaining heat. That, of course, is the main purpose behind a mammal’s fir and a bird’s feathers (flight notwithstanding); the reason why wildlife can survive in the Arctic cold and why polar bears look as they do. Once heat escapes and dissipates into the atmosphere, it is gone forever. There is no way, for example, to gather together the heat lost from a campfire and store it into one concentrated place for later release as warmth.
        And what of the energy before being stored as wood that eventually ended up at my campfire? It was once, of course, light, or electromagnetic energy, produced in the sun through nuclear fusion, the sun’s gravitational pull forcing atoms together to fuse into new elements and in the process, converting mass into great quantities of energy that would radiate outward in all directions, with only a fraction intercepted by the earth and its living plants, and an even smaller fraction, orders and orders of magnitude smaller, to be stored temporarily as, perhaps, a cottonwood tree.
        I sat at that campfire long ago under layers of clothing, every gap closed with a zipper or scarf, minimizing the loss of body heat, with barred and screech owls occasionally calling, the side of my body nearest the fire being hot from the flames, the other side much cooler and cooling off. When it was time for sleep, I stopped feeding the fire, which soon became a pile of glowing embers. The tent and sleeping bag were as cold as the night air. But in the sleeping bag, after a short while, it actually felt quite warm. I breathed the cold tent air through a small flap in the bag, but otherwise, was sealed shut inside, the bag’s insulation doing a fair job at retaining body heat.

 

Morning at a Current River Campsite, Missouri

                                    *    *    *
        A few days after hearing the coyotes, the air from northern latitudes in Canada still lingered, and I spent some time watching the bird feeders through the living room window. The birds were busy foraging for black oil sunflower seeds, which I kept stocked in the feeders: pine siskins, purple finches, and fox sparrows from Canada’s boreal forest; American tree sparrows from the tundra that is even further north. I thought about earlier in the week, when I saw a snowy owl fly from its perch atop an electric pole along the highway near our home. A hunter from the northern latitudes, possibly beyond the Arctic Circle, a bird that may have looked face-to-face with a polar bear. These birds from the North came to Illinois to escape even colder temperatures, killer wind chills, ice, snow, and competition for sparse food resources. But here in Illinois such extreme weather would not last long; here, a thaw is always not far off. As long as they could find enough food to maintain energy levels, Illinois weather probably would not be a factor in their survival. As for me, I’ll remain quite comfortable in my century-old farm house, reliably heated by an efficient natural gas furnace and electric heaters. Warm nights…as long as the power stays on.

Capital Memories and River Tales

       Soon after returning from a visit to Washington D.C., I realized that although I’ve lived most of my 60-years in Illinois, with the last 28 within an hour of Springfield, I had never visited the Capitol building. This despite having driven past the Capitol many times to see the downtown Lincoln sites or on trips related to my work with the state of Illinois. It was past time; so on a cool, cloudy late November day, my wife, Julie, and I traveled to Springfield specifically to visit the Capitol building.
        On the way to Springfield, as I considered why I had never thought to visit the Capitol building, all I could think of was that it never occurred to me that it was a place for public visitation. Being a working building, not just an old domed building maintained for show, with its Greek Revival and Renaissance Revival architecture, I envisioned it filled with busy bureaucrats carrying papers from room to room or talking on the telephone. In such an all-business environment, I imagined the rooms rather plain without much decoration, maybe even a bit dingy; nothing much to look at. A visitor would be in the way. On the weekends, the building would be closed.
        And I was wrong on every count. The Capitol building may be a serious building for state business, but it is also an impressive museum with fine art in full view at every turn, with a richly ornate interior exhibiting close attention to minute details, pristine, and welcoming to visitors. In the rotunda, one can look up into the dome and be mesmerized by the color and intricate patterns. The governor’s office is just down the hall, but with only a few office workers during our visit. In fact, it almost seemed that, overall, governmental operations were a secondary purpose of the building. And nowhere is this more the case than in the hall of paintings which contained river scenes of key importance to Illinois’ history…and, in fact, my own history as well.

 

The Capitol in Springfield, Illinois

 

Looking up into the Capitol's dome

                                           * * *
        One painting showed an early 1800s scene of the Chicago River as it enters Lake Michigan, with Fort Dearborn in view. Of course, this same area is now covered by the great skyscrapers of downtown Chicago, sidewalks, and pavement. But the river is still there, although in a highly altered state. As a child learning about Fort Dearborn, I once imagined a scene just like the painting, even as I looked upon the modern scene. The Chicago River is one of my earliest recollections of rivers along with the nearby Des Plaines River. I wrote about these two rivers in my book Side Channels (pages 23-24) in a chapter entitled “Illinois’ Continental Divide: Mud Lake and the Chicago Portage”:
        “Long before Chicago was settled by Americans of European descent and the landscape became highly altered, the Mississippi River and Great Lakes basins were separated by a shallow marshy area called Mud Lake. This prairie marsh fed into the Chicago River, which, at that time, flowed into Lake Michigan. (The Great Lakes’ waters empty into the North Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River.) The nearby Des Plaines River flows toward the Illinois River, the Mississippi River, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The Chicago Portage, a traveler’s trail across the Mud Lake marsh, was located at the point where the Des Plaines and Chicago rivers were at their closest approach. The strategic importance of this site was never obscure to anyone, least of all the Native Americans.”

 

The Chicago River at Lake Michigan

 

Mill at New Salem

 

The reconstructed mill at New Salem State Park

        Standing before a painting of the 1830s mill on the Sangamon River at New Salem, I recalled my first visit to this site on a grade school field trip from Cicero—a nearby Chicago suburb—in 1971. The teachers set the class loose at New Salem State Park to walk among the reconstructed log buildings. I remember the bare logs and wooden planks of the buildings, the crude tools and machines, and split rail fences. But I do not recall seeing the river and mill, although both surely were there. And it was years later that I read the story of how a young Abraham Lincoln solved the problem of a heavily loaded river barge stuck on the dam; Carl Sandburg wrote the following description of this event^a: “On April 19, rounding the curve of the Sangamon at New Salem, …[a] boat stuck on the Camron milldam, and hung with one-third of her slanted downward over the edge of the dam and filling slowly with water, while the cargo of pork barrels was sliding slowly so as to overweight one end. She hung there a day while all the people of New Salem came down to look. Then they saw Lincoln getting part of the cargo unloaded to the riverbank, boring a hole in the flatboat end as it hung over the dam to let the water out, plugging the hole, then dropping the boat over the dam and reloading cargo. As she headed toward the Mississippi watercourse, New Salem talked about the cool head and ready wit of the long-shanked young man.” Of course, on that 1971 field trip I thought about Abraham Lincoln at New Salem 140 years earlier, but that was an ancient time beyond comprehension; I might as well have been pondering the beginning of time. Even my high school graduation four years into the future seemed too far away to contemplate, let alone where I would be living, not far from that very site, 46 years later.

 

Starved Rock on the Illinois River

 

        The Illinois River at Starved Rock State Park was another early river encounter for me, happening sometime in the middle 1960s. The Capitol’s painting of this site shows what might be a pre-European-contact scene from a Native American village on the north bank of the river, facing the rock on the south. Side Channels (pages 13-15) has a short chapter about some of my perspectives of Starved Rock:
        “The Illinois River came into view as I approached the base of Starved Rock, just before beginning a daunting climb with my father and brother to the top of the rock, 125 feet above the river. It was the first time I had visited Starved Rock State Park, sometime in the middle 1960s, and the first time I had seen the Illinois River. A short distance upstream of the rock, the crashing, turbulent waters of the river passed through the partially open gates of the Starved Rock Dam. Behind the dam, the water spread out into a large lake nearly one mile wide and seemed, to all appearances, stagnant. Was this a river, as I had been informed? I was familiar with the sluggish Des Plaines River coursing through the forest preserves near my Chicago home, and that river flowed freely. So the body of water before me only vaguely seemed like a river; not even the dam seemed consistent with the image in my mind of what a dam should be: a large concrete wall completely holding back a large body of water, with nary a drop of water making it through the dam. What purpose, I thought at the time, could there be for a dam that allowed a torrent of water to pass through….
        But such engineering technicalities aside, from atop Starved Rock, one cannot help but be pensive, literally standing upon history, with thoughts pulled back hundreds of years. Names such as La Salle, Hennepin, Tonti, Marquette, and Illiniwek floated in the air and are written upon park landmarks and trail heads. Yet all around the park, the modern works of man cannot be ignored, and one may wonder what the river and its valley might be like hundreds of years into the future, how primitive today’s view from the rock would be to a hyper-technological society with everyday contrivances unimaginable during our era, much as cell phones and wireless Internet on laptop computers would have been unimaginable to the French explorers of the seventeenth century.”

 

Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi River 

 

Fort Defiance at the Mississippi and Ohio river confluence

        Two paintings depict scenes along the Mississippi River, at the French 18th century Fort de Chartres in Randolph County and at the Civil War’s Fort Defiance at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, where I once sat at the neatly manicured state park observing the joining of these two great rivers. In Side Channels I wrote about sitting “…on the piles of rock used to stabilize the riverbank; on the right was the Mississippi, on the left the Ohio. At over one mile in width below the confluence, the Mississippi stood alone, second to no other river in North America, waters from New York to Montana mingling in one massive, muddy, rolling, and eddying force of nature.” It was a lonely spot, perfect for contemplating history, the scene depicted in the painting long gone.

                                          * * *
        And so, looking for new adventures, we traveled to a city familiar to us both, which might seem to be in the wrong direction to fulfill our goal. But it was the right move; the Capitol building left such an impression that I thought about it for weeks; those paintings of the river scenes I could not escape. They have become more fine Illinois memories.

 

^aFrom Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years, One-Volume Edition, by Carl Sandburg, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., New York.

 

The book Side Channels is available in hard copy from a variety of online booksellers including Amazon.

 

 

A Lesson Learned

Or, What would Lewis and Clark have said? 

         I had been spending quite a bit of time this winter indoors, so while a warming trend held, I treated myself to a day in the field to visit and monitor the state of various central Illinois nature preserves.  One site that I had neglected for a couple of years was the 172-acre Letcher Basin Land and Water Reserve, on the Mackinaw River bottomlands in Woodford County. 

          With snow only recently melted, the ground was wet, but when the gravel ended on the county road, the road surface turned soft and slightly muddy.  Over the years, I had learned to respect a muddy road, and so I gingerly proceeded, knowing that stopping on a muddy road is sometimes the worst thing a person can do.  When the road led straight down the river bluff, I was tempted to turn around.  But the wheels maintained traction, and so I proceeded onward.  At the dead end, I parked on slightly higher ground.  I would deal with getting back up the bluff road later; I wasn’t worried…much, and prepared for my hike.  I had a four-wheel drive truck, after all, not like that infamous afternoon in Montana years ago.

          The year was 1997, and I took my new Dodge minivan for a test drive out West.  While in Montana, I wanted to camp along the upper Missouri River, along the National Wild and Scenic section, upstream of the large reservoirs of the Dakotas, to where the river resembled, more than any other stretch, what Lewis and Clark first saw in 1805.

          At the Wild and Scenic Rivers visitor’s center in Fort Benton, I explained my intentions to the young National Park Service ranger, whose demeanor and bouncy enthusiasm suggested a certain degree of naivety.  But I carefully and seriously listened to her detailed directions to an “awesome” campsite that hardly anyone knew about, where it would be very quiet and secluded:  just the river and me.  She waved good-bye and said, “Have fun.”  I said, “Okay,” and I was on my way.

          The park ranger’s directions were accurate in every detail; she had obviously been to the area many times, and I felt bad because I thought that such a young person would be inexperienced and not really know what she was talking about.  After about a half mile, the gravel ended, but the road’s surface was solid and dry.  Before heading to the camp site, I parked off to the side and climbed the bluff for a view of the Missouri River valley, and it was just as I had imagined.  How great this night would be, I remember thinking:  just the river and me.  For the hour or so that I spend on the bluff top, no other vehicles came down the road.  It was another good sign.

          Delaying no longer, then, I drove onward, as the road hugged the base of the river bluff, looking for a side trail, as described by the park ranger, that was wide enough to drive on, and that would lead to a lower lying area (the camp site) next to the river.  After continuing on for only a short time, I found the trail, and saw that it followed a steep incline of about ten feet before leveling out in a small grove of scattered cottonwood trees.  Caution kept me from driving on the trail down the drop off.  I was not used to what types of conditions my new minivan could handle, but the steep drop off looked challenging for any vehicle under any circumstances.  So I parked along the roadside next to the bluff, and walked down to the camp site to investigate the possibilities.

          It would be primitive camping, indeed.  But I had plenty of water and food, and all of my camping gear.  I was ready.  I imagined a perfect night with only the sounds of the flowing river, wind in the trees, owls and coyotes calling.  And then I felt the first drops of rain.

          I had no idea of the forecast and did not think to ask the park ranger, who also did not think to provide that information.  It could be one storm cloud followed by clear skies or the beginnings of a day or more with heavy rain.  As the rain’s intensity increased, I reluctantly gave up the idea of camping.  Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery would have been disgusted.  I felt wimpy.  So I started the minivan‘s engine and waited.  Would the rain stop?  That did not look likely, and I was so glad that I chose not to drive down the steep trail, now an incline of slippery mud, to the low-lying camp site.  Why hadn’t the park ranger cautioned me against doing that?  As the rain continued, I slipped the van into drive, and feeling glum, recalled a motel on the edge of town.

 

Fort Benton, Montana (from the Fort Benton Chamber of Commerce)

 

          Immediately the van’s front wheels (front-wheel drive) began losing traction.  I noticed the road was slick as I walked back to the van, but I had never experienced anything like this.  It’s called Missouri gumbo:  clay with unique mineral characteristics that make it hard as pavement when dry, but extremely slippery, to a biblical degree, with even a small amount of water.  As I drove forward, the van slipped and slid from one side of the road to the other, just barely under my control.  On a slight rise in the road, the front wheels could gain no traction, sending mud flying onto the windshield, with the van eventually sliding backward and to the side of the road.  The river was not far beyond, and if it had not been for a slight shoulder along the road, the van would have slid directly into the river.  What I needed was momentum.  So I drove in reverse for about 100 feet, and started forward, making it almost to the top of the rise, wheels spinning furiously, before sliding back down along the road’s shoulder.  Then I backed up further than 100 feet for even more momentum.  On the third try, the van, with wheels spinning all the while, crept inch by inch to the top of the slight rise, on the left side of the road.  How fortunate, I thought in panic, that no vehicles came from the other direction.

          But now that I was moving, I would not stop for any reason!  When the road rose in small hillocks along the base of the river bluff, I increased my speed, and bounced from one side of the road to the other like a bumper car.  Then the road finally became gravel, and the white-knuckle drive of terror was over.

          At least I had learned the capabilities of my minivan.  The fact that I have not been stuck or stranded on unpaved roads since that day almost twenty years ago indicates to me that I learned my lesson well.  And I guess I have my well-wishing, smiling park ranger to thank for that.  In fact, I had no problems driving out of the Letcher Basin Reserve on my recent visit, but I did put the truck into four-wheel drive just as a precaution.  And I had a cell phone if that did not work.  I’m not sure what Lewis and Clark would have thought of that.

 

[For a link to another story from the same trip out West, called Days with Pelicans and Bison on the Prairie, click here.]

[To read chapter 26, called Ties, from the book Side Channels that relates another story from the same trip, click here.]  

20,000 Hits!

        Recently the number of hits on The River Landing weblog passed the 20,000 mark.  To me this seems pretty significant. When I started The River Landing in 2008, I was not really sure what to expect.  I mainly wanted to establish a web presence in order to market my upcoming book Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir, which was published in 2011.  But the Internet is a big "place."  I never really expected too much.

        As far as using the weblog as a book marketing tool, the idea was only mildly successful.  At the same time, The River Landing has evolved into something more:  It has been a strong motivation for me to write in order to keep the weblog viable for search engines.  I have tried to post once per month, and I am usually working on one idea or another for the next post.  This has been a highly satisfying experience, and it has given me confidence to continue writing.

        It has been said that one way to improve one's writing is to write more often.  I hope that has been the case as a result of The River Landing.  But of course, I am not the best judge.  To celebrate the 20,000 mark, I am providing links below to my three favorite posts.

 

1.  The Acorn Year

Bur oak tree, leaves, and acorns.

 

2. Change and Comfort in Nature 

Dead canopy oak at Funk's Grove Natural Area.

 

3.  Recollections of a Man on Skid Row - Chicago Early 1970s

 

Days with Pelicans and Bison on the Prairie

        Occasionally during quiet moments, my wife asks, what am I thinking?  And usually the answer is:  nothing.  She seems surprised by the fact that my mind appears to be blank; and, I guess, maybe I am too.  But there was one particular time when I wished she were there to ask about my thoughts, when I was at our cabin watching a soaring group of American white pelicans high above the Illinois River valley.  The sight of this species never fails to inspire a vivid recollection of a trip I once took nearly twenty years before across the prairies of North Dakota.

          Most folks probably associate pelicans with a place such as Florida rather than Illinois, let alone North Dakota.  But the plains of North Dakota are in the main part of the American white pelican’s breeding range.  Yet as strange as pelicans flying over the low, rolling hills of North Dakota seemed at the time, that memory is merely an entry point to another recollection of a much more quintessentially “western” experience.

          I was on my way home to Illinois from the Pacific Northwest, eager to cover the miles on the remote Great Plains where speed limits seem almost nonexistent.  But after Montana, even in the comfort of my Dodge minivan, I needed a rest; so I fixed my sights upon Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota.  Nearly a decade before I had briefly stopped there after a job interview in Colorado, on my way to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, when I first saw the pelicans in North Dakota, and I always planned to return for a real visit.  This was that time.

 

The Little Missouri River at Theodore Roosevelt National Park  

 

          My focus was the 29,920-acre federally designated wilderness area within the park, where a large herd of bison roamed free.  A trail system led through the wilderness area, a rugged grassland and savanna landscape alongside of the Little Missouri River and its system of bluffs.  This was very open country, impossible to get lost.  And so, I saw no reason to stay on the trails.  I wanted a better look at the bison herd, so I climbed to a nearby bluff top for a panoramic view of the flat plain below.  I found a natural seat on the ground, just below the bluff top, leaned back, and relaxed.

          Below me, the bison herd went about its peaceful business of grazing.  Individuals slowly moved along apparently at random as they ate; but even so, the herd as a whole seemed to move together in a definite direction.  I noticed they were gradually getting closer and closer to a large black-tailed prairie dog town.  The prairie dogs were getting quite agitated as the bison got closer, appearing at their holes briefly, then barking and going below, only to appear again after a very short time.  Sometimes they would run for their lives in panic from hole to hole, while the bison were oblivious, not showing any care where they placed their feet or wallowed in the dusty soil.  The low frequency, rolling grunts and bellows of the bison echoed against the hill sides like living thunder, and I shut my eyes and quickly fell asleep.

          When I awoke, I stood to stretch, and was shocked to alertness by a grazing bison just above me on the bluff top, no more than twenty feet away.  I slowly crouched and remained still, knowing that getting too close to such a large, powerful animal would be extremely dangerous, not to mention foolish; a slight turn of the head, and those sharp horns would show no mercy.  But after a few minutes, I looked around and the animal was gone.  How could it simply vanish into nothing in such an open landscape?   I planned to be very wary and careful on my hike back to the campground.   Meanwhile from where I stood, I could see below me that the bison herd had moved, and was now centered directly over the main hiking trail.  For safety’s sake I had to find another route.

          The bluff sides, though, were very steep, except where I initially climbed up several hours earlier, wherever that was.  For a while it seemed that each time I tried a route down the bluff, my path ended in a sheer drop.  Then just as I seriously began to think about retracing my original route (backtracking is always my last resort on a day hike), the bluff side’s angle showed itself to be a little less steep.  And so I carefully slid and partially crawled down the rather slick ground to the level prairies at the base of the bluff.  [Wet, Missouri River soil, called “gumbo,” can be more slippery than ice, as I discovered a few days earlier on this same trip during a rainstorm while driving a muddy road in Montana…but that is another story.]  And then it was an easy walk back to my campsite, with the bison herd left far behind.

          Those were adventurous times, indeed, still riding high on the indestructibility and optimism of youth.  Though I might be a bit more cautious these days, given the same opportunity, I like to think I would follow those same pathways again.  Seeing pelicans soaring over the Illinois River valley on a cool October day, and knowing they probably came from the high plains out West is a direct challenge.  Will I sit and watch or get up and do something?  What I do know is that when I see those birds, my mind is anything but blank.

Change and Comfort in Nature

(with acknowledgement to D.B. Botkin)

 

"When learned men state a fact in a voluminous report one feels it impertinent to doubt their word." - From A Hive of Bees, John Crompton 

 

By Thomas V. Lerczak

 

            There is great comfort in the concept of stability.  It makes me feel good, for example, returning to a favorite forest, even after many years between visits, and finding it appear to be unchanged and stable.   Even as I grow older, the forest seems the same, and it makes me feel young, as if I have stepped back in time.  In what seems like a chaotic world at times, having something to count on is important and maybe even necessary.

            But it works only if I don’t think about it too much.

            In his book Discordant Harmonies, Daniel B. Botkin writes:  “Wherever we seek to find constancy [in nature], we discover change…[and] we find that nature undisturbed is not constant in form, structure, or proportion, but changes at every scale of time and space.  The old idea of a static landscape…must be abandoned, for such a landscape never existed….”  He made these statements after many years of studying the natural world in great detail in a scientific manner and from a variety of angles. 

            I have been thinking about these topics because of recent drought years in the Midwest followed by a record-breaking flood on the Illinois River, and then the harshest winter in decades; these weather events have led me to think about the concept of stability in nature.  On this topic I cannot help but think of the climate.  A stable climate, of course, is highly desirable for a variety of reasons; agriculture and preservation of natural areas are two that immediately come to mind.  Our wants and needs notwithstanding, however, historical records bear out very clearly that over the long term, climate is no more stable than any other aspect of nature, and there is no reason why we should expect it to be any other way.  One example is the Medieval warm period, a time when the Vikings were able to colonize Greenland.  It was not long, though, before the onset of a colder climate called the “Little Ice Age,” which may have continued through the 19^th century.  During the Little Ice Age, crop failures and famine were common.  In Illinois during 1816, cold weather and frosts occurred repeatedly in July and August.  Going back further, we find many examples of the climate changing, not the least of which were several great ice ages, where the last one, called the Wisconsin Glaciation, ended only about 10,000 years ago.

            Another example that stands out is the 1930s drought combined with the misery of the Great Depression.  Folks who can relate firsthand accounts of those days are, alas, dwindling in number with each passing year; even so, memories can be unreliable.  To even get a sense of the 1930s, I might read a book such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or listen to a few of Woody Guthrie’s dust bowl ballads, with titles like “The Great Dust Storm” and “Dust Bowl Refugee.”  And still, I’ll never really know what it was like back then.

            The article “Late Quaternary Vegetational History of Illinois,” by James E. King of the Illinois State Museum, has shed even more light on past climate changes.  He made a study of ancient bog sites in Illinois in order to reconstruct changes in Illinois’ natural landscape following the Wisconsin glacial period.   He did this by studying the pollen that had fallen into the bogs and then remained ever since.  By constructing detailed graphs showing years versus pollen abundance for a variety of plant species, King was able to show what types of plant communities occurred in the area over thousands of years.  One of the most striking of his findings was that prairie grasslands, which covered about half of the state just before settlement by Americans of European descent (roughly before 1800), did not occur in Illinois until about 8,500 years ago; before that, Illinois for a time was covered in deciduous forest.

            How did prairie take over the landscape from forest?  The answer seems to be extreme heat and drought combined with fire.  A drought not measured in decades, but in centuries.  Perhaps 35 centuries.  It was the mother of all droughts.  For all that time, the climate must have been so severe that prairie was able to move into Illinois from the even dryer West on the Great Plains; trees died, and forests and the advancing prairies became tinderboxes, which must have burned on such an intense scale that, over time, prairie vegetation—which requires open, high-light conditions—supplanted forest.  Following the expansion of the prairies, the climate changed yet again allowing wooded communities to expand as much as they were able to against frequent prairie fires, most probably set by the Native Americans.  When the first Europeans viewed the Illinois country in the late 1600s, what they saw was really the latest state of a dynamic landscape that had been ebbing and flowing with climate changes and other factors for thousands of years.     

            Currently, prairie communities in Illinois, the few that are left from the pre-1800s landscape, struggle against encroachment by woody plants.  The 1,500-acre Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, in Mason County, Illinois, provides a good example of this phenomenon.  The preserve is a mosaic of remnant and restored sand prairie, woodland, and savanna; it has been managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources with controlled fires for several decades.  With an excellent fuel source of dried oak leaves and prairie grasses, the fires can be intense, especially with warm temperatures, low humidity, and even moderate winds.  Yet even though trees may show fire scars, most survive the fires intact.  Saplings are typically top-killed, but readily re-sprout from the undamaged root systems, later sending up multiple shoots.  Fire management may have slowed the advance of the woody vegetation onto the sand prairies, but the advance continues nevertheless.  The prairies have not advanced into the woodlands, despite all of the controlled burning.

 

Oak encroaching on the prairie at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

 

            Because decades of fire management have not been adequate to maintain the natural communities at this site, as a desperate attempt to reverse these successional changes to a previous state, to prevent further loss of the prairies, state biologists have made the decision to begin cutting back the advancing oaks with chainsaws and treating the cut stumps with herbicide, thereby preventing regrowth.  On one workday, I joined a crew of resource managers to cut advancing oak trees on the periphery and within the highest quality prairie opening at the preserve.  At day’s end, I looked back upon our work at this nature preserve, a site that has had a special place in my life for over twenty years, a place to escape the rigors and complexities of the modern world, not just in imagination but in reality; it is a place wherein, according to the Illinois Natural Areas Preservation Act, which allowed for the creation of the Illinois Nature Preserve System, “…one may envision and experience primeval conditions in a wilderness-like environment.”  What I saw were slash piles and stumps, and my feelings were ambivalent.  But what was the alternative?  Continued succession to forest and eventual loss of the prairie, and I did not wish that.  And what of the primeval, wilderness-like qualities?  Does a natural area maintained with chain saws and herbicide still qualify to be called a natural area?  Perhaps imagination must now play a larger role.

            With these thoughts in mind, it seems clear that rather than seeking in vain for constancy in nature, our labors might be more fruitful if we looked for signs of change, which are all around us.  But because the clues are usually subtle, patience and attention to fine details will be required.

 

*  *  *

            One of my favorite hikes is through the Funks Grove Natural Area, just west of Interstate 55 in McLean County, Illinois.  It is an old-growth tract of forest, with portions protected as part of the Illinois Nature Preserves System.  Every time I visit this site, I hear the words “forest primeval” in my mind.  Some of the oak trees are the largest I have ever seen, and the forest interior is quintessentially dark and quiet.  At first glance, it epitomizes stability.

            But even this forest is changing, although the change is not usually discernible from year to year.  Giant red oak, bur oak, and sugar maple trees may still form the forest canopy, but seedling and sapling oaks are nearly absent.  There are, however, an abundance of pawpaw trees and sugar maple trees in the forest’s sub-canopy.  These species create deeply shaded conditions that can prevent oak seedlings from surviving.  What will happen when the mature oaks die of old age?  This forest primeval is changing.  The Funks Grove Natural Area may be protected by state law from direct destruction, but the state law cannot change the laws of nature.  Another Botkin quote, from his book Strange Encounters, may help to inform our expectations of the natural world, though the quote may not exactly bring comfort, and it doesn’t make me feel young again:  “Ideas about our relationship with nature…[are] confused by wish, want-to-be, and imaginary worlds that have never existed.”

 

Dead canopy oak with understory sugar maples, Funk’s Grove Natural Area

 

            Many years ago, well before I entered the natural resources field, it pleased me to view natural areas as places where nature was left unhindered to follow its own course, wherever that may have led.  So when I first became aware of the notion of “managing” a natural area, I was quite taken aback:  No, such a view could not possibly be right!  How arrogant, I thought, for people to think they could maintain a natural area better than the natural processes that allowed it to form in the first place.  But those ideas I have left far behind, mainly as a result of studying the science of ecology in detail and corroborating what I learned with my own observations.  For others, though, I wonder if one of the reasons folks in general so easily expect stability in nature is because our increasingly urbanized, computerized population has learned to compartmentalize the natural world; it is a place to visit for a time, much like a museum, that can be left behind and later returned to with the expectation that nothing will have changed in the interim.  Meanwhile, the real world, where the serious business of living occurs, is unreliable, chaotic, stressful, and noisy, offering little in terms of comfort and peace.

            In fact, if a common public perception of an undisturbed, old-growth forest is of stability, then the opposite would have to be along the advancing front of a growing suburban area.  Here subdivisions gobble up the farms, fields, forests, and wetlands faster than one can keep track; nothing is sacred and everything has a price that reliably and inexorably rises with time and more development.  After the wave of intense change passes, there is usually little of the previous landscape left behind:  perhaps only the shape of the land itself as rolling hills and basic drainage patterns, but not much else; a protected nature preserve may remain and be completely surrounded by buildings, roads, and concrete.  In such an environment, the human hand is a tornado, an agent of rapid change and complete transformation.  Who with a love of nature would not prefer an imaginary world of wish and want-to-be?

 

*  *  *

            Along the central Illinois River valley in May, it is worthwhile to take a good look at the landscape of forested bluffs with deep hollows, steep hills, and complex ravine systems.  The forest has an unmistakable patchiness of white against the deep green of new growth from trees such as sugar maple, white oak, shagbark hickory, and hackberry.  This patchiness is caused by the white flowers of black locust trees, which can occur as single trees or small groups.

            Only at this time of year do these trees stand out from the rest of the green, and show just how pervasive black locust has become.  The flowering black locusts add a subtle texture and beauty to the forests as seen from afar.  Yet I find the widespread distribution of this tree troublesome, because black locust trees are fast-growing and spread rapidly.  Black locust is, in fact, increasing at the expense of native trees such as the oaks and hickories, spreading not only by seed, but also by underground runners; a small patch may actually be a single organism, connected together by the root system. 

            Black locust, a member of the pea family, did not originally inhabit central or northern Illinois.  Its natural distribution is mostly south of Illinois, extending into the state only in the southern counties.  It was purposely brought elsewhere mainly for its utility as fence posts, railroad ties, firewood, and erosion control.  But by bringing this invasive species into areas where it normally did not occur, we have changed our forests apparently forever.

            But why should this matter?  Leaving the ecological effects on the forest aside, it is really a question of what we decide to label as natural, which is by default judged as good and desirable, or unnatural, which is usually thought of as undesirable.  Unnatural, with its negative connotation, also implies a human-mediated situation.  But is this really what we want, a dark cloud over ourselves?  Do these labels truly reflect reality?  Why not cultivate a view of nature that also includes human influences?

            Ethnoecologist M. Kat Anderson suggests that human-nature interactions be considered from the perspective of a continuum, where complete use and destruction of nature is at one extreme (clearcutting, bulldozing, and then paving over an area) while pure wilderness (no human influence) is at the other extreme.  An area could then be evaluated not simply as natural or unnatural; but rather, its evaluation could be based on where the site places on the human-nature interaction continuum.  The judgement, then, of whether a human influence is good or bad loses its meaning.  And the question of what is natural also loses its meaning.  For example, it makes little sense to suggest that the prairies of central Illinois maintained by Native American burning for thousands of years were any less natural than the changing climate that allowed the same plot of ground in central Illinois to support Arctic tundra during the Ice Age, then deciduous forest, and finally tallgrass prairie.  Each of these natural communities while they prevailed probably would have seemed stable, though, because changes noticeable at the plant community level would have more than likely occurred over time spans much greater than a human lifetime.

 

*  *  *

            Noticing gradual change over the long term and observing events in nature without bias are difficult tasks.  Sometimes I’ll think about this when crossing the Spoon River’s route 97/78 bridge, west of Havana in Fulton County, Illinois.  The river’s channel is constrained by the bridge, but elsewhere it is active, changing its course ever so slightly with each year.  I know this is happening, even though I can’t actually see it in progress.  The changes are subtle.  It is our poor ability to notice gradual change in nature that enables us to expect stability, especially wherever human influences are absent or minimal.  People speak of “the balance of nature.”  In his book Our Natural History, Botkin wrote about this phenomenon when he stated that “In our minds, we have an idea of nature undisturbed by human influences as constant, fixed, and permanent.”  In other words, “in balance.” 

            Botkin points out that a natural river is an example of how something may be constantly changing, and yet still seem the same, giving the illusion of stability.  A river will be continually changing its course over its floodplain in a very gradual way as it slowly, over periods of years, meanders over the landscape, randomly forming curves, sand bars, pools, and islands.  Channels are eventually abandoned even as new ones form.  View a particular stretch of a river from one day to the next and, barring catastrophes, nothing may seem different; but see the same scene after ten years, and it will be obvious how much has changed, though the same types of features will likely be there as before.  Of course, not all rivers are equally active.  Still, in general, a meandering river epitomizes how changes tend to occur in nature.

            I have noticed this phenomenon along many rivers, but at no better site than the Salt Creek in Mason County, Illinois.  Salt Creek has been channelized over most of its length.  But at Barton-Sommer’s Woodland Nature Preserve, in the far southeastern corner of the county, Salt Creek meanders like a natural river.  I wrote about this site in my book  Side Channels:  “…there is…evidence of previously shifting stream channels [at this preserve]:  curved undulations of the ground that fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.  The meander scars in the ground show that over the long-term, the floodplain is a dynamic environment, altering its shape as the stream slowly moves across the land….”

 

Salt Creek at Barton-Sommer’s Woodland Nature Preserve

 

            Our view of how nature works—static versus dynamic—is important because, as Botkin noted, again from Our Natural History:  “…when we sit down to work out how the environment should be, when we set down plans to manage and conserve nature, we get ourselves into trouble because we forget about the naturalness of change…and we revert to our belief in the constancy of the environment.”  Since this is our natural inclination and it provides a feeling of security and comfort, I am not surprised, within the context presented above, to find a group such as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seeking in recent years to prevent no less than the earth’s climate from deviating away from some apparent optimum—dare I suggest, “stability.”  The notion causes me a certain degree of uneasiness.  Because, with all due respect, it has been my experience that our understanding of nature is not complete—computer wizardry (modeling) notwithstanding—which makes predicting future conditions, especially on a global scale, problematical, let alone determining cause and effect.  For example, I would contend that even small systems like remnant native prairies are not understood well enough in order that they can be adequately managed and not continue to fade away.  How well have we done at managing larger ecosystems such as the Great Lakes, referred to by author William Ashworth as the “late Great Lakes”?  Are we ready to tackle the entire biosphere in its unimaginable physical and biological complexity?  Is that even possible?    

            In spite of this, I am still optimistic that progress will continue to be made at improving our understanding of nature and at least properly addressing our environmental problems—as long as we see things as they are and remain inquisitive and bold enough to challenge favored ideas that fail alongside of unbiased observations.  For as Albert Einstein said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”  And that is a comfort.

 

Selected References

Anderson, M.K.  1996.  Tending the wilderness.  Restoration and Management Notes 14(2):154-166.

Ashworth, W.  1987.  The late, Great Lakes:  an environmental history.  Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan.

Botkin, D.B.  1990.  Discordant harmonies:  a new ecology for the twenty-first century.  Oxford University Press, New York.

Botkin, D.B.  1995.  Our natural history:  lessons of Lewis and Clark.  G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.

Botkin, D.B.  2003. Strange encounters:  adventures of a renegade naturalist.  Jeremy P. Tharcher/Penguin, New York.

Clark, R.W.  1971.  Albert Einstein:  the life and times.  The World Publishing Company, New York and Cleveland.

Illinois Natural Areas Preservation Act.  http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=1739&ChapterID=44 referenced on 15 February 2015.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm referenced on 16 February 2015.

King, J.E.  1981.  Late Quaternary vegetational history of Illinois.  Ecological Monographs 51 (1):  43-62.

Lerczak, T.V.  2011.  Side channels:  A collection of nature writing and memoir.  Mill City Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Pirtle, C.  2000.  Escape betwixt two sons:  a true tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois.  Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois.

Steinbeck, J.  1939.  The grapes of wrath.  P.F. Collier and Son Corporation, New York.

Taylor, C.A., J.B. Taft, and C.Warwick (editors).  2009.  Canaries in the catbird seat - the past, present, and future of biological resources in a changing environment.  Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication 30.  Illinois Natural History Survey, Champaign, Illinois.

 

[NOTE:  A pdf file of this essay is available by clicking on Download Change and Comfort in Nature-with columns.] 

 

[This essay first appeared in Big Muddy:  A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley Volume 16.1 (2016) published by Southeast Missouri State University Press.]

The Acorn Year

By Thomas V. Lerczak

    The day I moved into the first house I ever owned in rural central Illinois, I planted a few bur oak acorns and three small seedlings.  Much of the 3.7-acre property was mowed lawn.  But there were some woods around the edges and several large trees, including the biggest, most massive hickory I had ever seen.  I arrived with my final few possessions in the back of my car and the bur oaks.  I remember a new feeling of satisfaction at owning my own home and land, the fulfillment, I believe, of a natural human desire.

    Immediately, though, I saw the need for brushy vegetation around the property’s boundaries; for I could see without obstruction to the neighbor’s house across the road.  If that was what I had wanted, I never would have left the Chicago area many years before.  So I planted the acorns and seedlings, collected from near my former rental house on the Illinois River bluffs, toward the front edge of the property.  With each year, they grew almost imperceptibly in height and width, struggling in the sandy, nutrient- and water-poor soils.  But after seven years, they had far exceeded my height; and one of the oaks, originally planted as a seedling, even provided a fine photo backdrop on my wedding day.  

    The bur oaks, in fact, have become a benchmark in time, never failing to bring me back to that first day when I became a landowner at age forty-two:  from a renter, subject to the rules of others, to the owner and decision maker.  I recall standing beneath the big hickory, thinking that it was likely to have been a contemporary of Lincoln, and now it was my tree.  And it did not escape from me that I was privileged to live in a nation of freedom, where anyone could own their land and home if they chose to do so and work hard toward achieving that goal.  At that moment I finally understood and felt in sympathy with the emotion behind private property rights and the right to live my life as I saw fit.

 

***

    On about one acre surrounding the oaks I have set up conditions for a competition of sorts.  It is not a commercial or sporting event, but rather, may be viewed as a natural interplay between one particular assemblage of plants (prairie) and another (forest).   A few years after planting the oaks, following a time of “letting nature take its course,” I cleared most of the area, leaving only a few oaks, hickories, and red cedars; then I burned off the area and scattered thousands of seeds from a variety of native prairie wildflowers (forbs) and grasses, along with nuts from black oaks and American hazelnut shrubs.  With germination, the competition began.

    As the vegetation has grown, the habitat has become more diversified.  So where once the buzz cut land appealed to few bird species, it increasingly has provided a more complex structure, and more species find what they need to survive.  Robins, for example, still prefer the mowed lawn around the house for foraging, but large saplings now provide a proper structure for nesting.  The taller prairie grasses and low shrubs appeal to nesting field sparrows and song sparrows.   Foraging lark sparrows use the bare sand between bunches of little bluestem grass and sand love grass.  And red cedars, growing from seed that I had haphazardly thrown in the air years before, contribute structural diversity to the habitat, with at least one suitable for a brown thrasher’s nest.  Gray catbirds, northern mockingbirds, indigo buntings, bobwhite quail, and eastern towhees all find the shrubby landscape more appealing for nesting habitat than its crew-cut past.  There are more birds around over the winter too; my record keeping shows that the number of species observed each year is on an upward trend.  In addition to the birds, I have been astounded by the different types of bees and butterflies drawn to the prairie wildflowers, with different species blooming at different periods throughout the growing season, following a natural cycle. 

    The lesson of diversity is clear and needs little elaboration on my part.  Still I know that at first glance, many would continue to think I have simply let the property go.  The former owners once asked if they could dig up and remove some of the flower bulbs they had left behind, concluding that I "didn’t care for flowers."  One neighbor from far down the road once belligerently asked, “Hey! When are you going to cut your grass?”  I simply answered that it was not in the management plan.  I had no idea where to begin to offer a real explanation.  My newlywed wife initially smiled politely as I proudly showed her around the property.  She, knowing me quite well, needed no explanation.  Since then, with an artist’s and Master Gardener’s touch, she has taught me how to maintain a neater, more orderly appearance immediately around our house, while at the same time not diminishing the wildlife values elsewhere.  She maintains, however, that it is a work in progress.  And the sand prairie and savanna, shrub thickets, and woods along the property boundaries continue to reflect a certain natural randomness, controlled by the laws of nature, where competition is a driving force; it is this aspect, in fact, that I find most appealing.

    If I did nothing at all but watch the plants grow, given the present Illinois climate, without a doubt, forest would win the competition over prairie; because for the longest time, perhaps thousands of years, temperature and precipitation cycles in Illinois have strongly tipped the environmental “balance,” for want of a better term, in favor of forest, even on rather dry, nutrient-poor, sandy soils.  To push the balance on my land in the direction toward prairie, I have used fire as a tool.  And once prairie grasses became established, fires have burned more intensely, further pushing the community toward prairie.   The controlled fires burn off all of the prairie plants above ground, and tree saplings that are always encroaching are top killed.  Although during the following growing seasons, all will re-sprout, I am confident that repeated fires over many years will greatly discourage the trees, which have to expend much of their stored energy reserves from the previous year to completely regrow from their undamaged root systems.  The more fire-tolerant oaks and hickories, especially the larger, more established individuals, usually survive the fires little worse off for the experience.    

    This mixture of prairie and forest plants has thus taken on the characteristics of a vegetational tension zone, sometimes called a “savanna,” that is capable of wavering back and forth, albeit over a period of years, toward either of the two main plant communities.  An increase in fire and drought should result in the prairie assemblage thriving at the expense of tree cover; more reliable precipitation and cooler conditions with less fire may give trees an edge and allow them to encroach more successfully upon the prairie.  In the old Illinois landscape, before the Europeans arrived, this was the natural dynamic equilibrium, and this is what I am trying to re-create on my little plot of ground.

    On a much larger scale, topography and soils also once played more important roles on the Illinois landscape.  In areas with mature stream systems and rougher topography, fires moved less easily across the land.  The result was that, in general, flat table lands and the gently rolling lands of central Illinois, once covered by ice age glaciers thousands of years ago, supported prairie, while river valleys and complex ravine and bluff systems supported forest.  Savanna then existed between true forest and prairie in a complex shifting mosaic shaped by climatic conditions, which, over the long term, also changed and continue to change.  In 1820, the benchmark year that ecologists use to separate pre-European-settlement times from modern, just over half of Illinois was prairie, while much of the rest was wooded, although it is unclear exactly how much of this was savanna and how much was true forest.

    If it was just a matter of planting the appropriate species and setting fires frequently, restoring an Illinois savanna might be rather straightforward.  But today, we must contend with a variety of plants not native to Illinois and some not even native to the Western Hemisphere.  On my land, the most competitive non-native trees are white mulberry, black locust, and Siberian elm, which surround the partially restored savanna.  Native black walnut, sassafras, and hackberry trees, though, can be just as invasive.  With any relaxation in the controlled fire regime on my part, these trees will immediately begin taking over.  In fact, even with frequent fire, it has continually become necessary for me to cut seedlings and saplings by hand and apply a strong herbicide to the cut stumps to prevent vigorous re-sprouting.  So even with all of the cutting, herbicide, and fire, the prairie-savanna is only just about able to hold its own.

    So one may ask some legitimate questions: With all of this manipulation, is what I have created natural or are my efforts just a different kind of backyard gardening and not really anything natural at all?  Am I kidding myself by naming what I have planted, and fight to maintain, a “savanna”?  If it was natural when I left the property to its own devices, have my manipulations made it less natural?  I put the plants there, true; but I did not, of course, create the plants.  Each one survives as an individual just as individuals of each species have always done, surviving or dying according to chance circumstances; but each also exists as a member of a plant community, where survival is moderated by some of the same types of interactions with other individuals and external influences as there always have been.  Native Americans purposely set fires to manipulate the landscape, and no one called that unnatural; instead, many like to say, whether true or not, that they lived in harmony with nature.  Cannot I engage in a similar activity with the addition of a few newer tools?  What really is natural or unnatural after all?  How much of these labels are really only in our own minds as we try to categorize and understand our world?  As I saunter along the trails through this work-in-progress prairie-savanna restoration, I am at no loss for unanswered questions.

 

***

    As a child, when others were more interested in baseball or basketball, I was drawn to the far boundaries of our local city park in Chicago, a narrow strip of woods left alone by the park staff that served as a buffer between the park and railroad yard beyond.  These woods and other vegetation grew according to no one’s mandates.  And something about that notion fascinated me.  Perhaps it appealed to the natural rebelliousness of youth that I was starting to feel:  a clean-cut lawn was tame and under control; the woods were wild.  Later in life, I would seek out wilderness areas throughout the country, from Maine to Washington, Arizona, and the Midwest, for places that I imagined were little touched by human hands.  I found value in the idea that very specific types of plants and animals could somehow come together on their own, in a recognizable way, so that someone someday could define that assemblage, or community, and give it a name.  Tallgrass prairie, floodplain forest, bur oak savanna, oak-hickory forest, and marsh are examples of such natural communities in Illinois.

    Coming upon a remnant natural community is like finding gold.  About thirty-five miles northeast of my home, there is a small prairie on the Illinois River bluffs in the village of Creve Coeur.  This prairie is only about a half-acre or so and surrounded by dense upland oak-hickory forests, but studies have indicated that it is a true remnant of the original Illinois prairies.  No one planted the Creve Coeur prairie; it has been there a long time; in fact, perhaps thousands of years, reaching backward in time to when prairie was at its maximum extent in Illinois.  When I gaze upon something so old with so much history, I feel like an insignificant upstart.

    The Creve Coeur prairie will endure because others have placed a value in protecting these types of natural communities.  In fact, it is protected “in perpetuity” within the boundaries of the Crevecoeur Nature Preserve as part of the Illinois Nature Preserves System, codified by state law in the Natural Areas Preservation Act of 1963.  The System currently contains 372 dedicated Illinois Nature Preserves totaling 56,631 acres within a state of 36 million acres.  It is a repository of a small portion of Illinois’ original biological diversity, representing a time when all of the natural communities were thought to be fully functioning and when no species were threatened with extinction – if that concept even occurred to anyone in the early 1800s.  These are special places, indeed, more than just being un-manicured landscapes.  The roots of their appeal to me can be traced back to those childhood days in Chicago.  And while knowing this has helped in understanding where my current perspectives and obsessions had originated, it does little to address the old and new questions that continue to occupy my thoughts as I walk through my own prairie-savanna restoration.  In the end, though, perhaps the answers are not really very important.

 

***

    Occasionally I imagine myself as an old man in his late eighties, sometimes visiting the natural areas he helped maintain over the years and daily passing the bur oaks he once planted years before, knowing the personal history of each tree as friends on the landscape.  Daily walks are a tradition that I began with planting the prairie-savanna, when I also laid out the trail system to the four corners of my land.  Within a shaded, wooded area, I placed a bench, which has given me a final destination before heading back to the house.  It is a place where I have grown accustomed to quietly sitting and observing, a place especially for contemplating meanings and connections; it is where I sometimes imagine the multiple generations that have let the big hickory tree grow, and how many more might continue this tradition and perhaps add the bur oaks and prairie-savanna to their sphere of protection…long after I am gone.

    But I take no comfort in thinking about a time when I may no longer exist.  Such thoughts rarely have entered my sometimes self-indulgent mind.  It is only in the last several years, as I have shockingly come to realize that I have more years behind than may be ahead, that I have given much energy toward thoughts of inescapable mortality.  Indeed, I’m at an age when contemplating the span of my own life is actually possible in an understandable way.  And the years seem to be passing faster than when I was young:  an hour is still an hour; a day is still twenty-four hours; and yet, when in the context of over fifty years of memories, time seems shorter.  It’s true, as singer-songwriter John Prine once sang, that “the years flow by like a broken down dam.”

    Once while at the bench, a black-capped chick-a-dee called from a craggy mulberry tree.  I recalled that a chick-a-dee certainly has a fleeting life, a few years at most.  How many generations of chick-a-dees, I wondered, have there been during my life time?  They are a successful species, and they get along well with backyard habitats; so I think there will always be chick-a-dees near my home.  And what of the other bird species as short-lived as the chick-a-dees?  In five to ten years I may see an entirely new set of individuals flying among the prairie and woods.  Yet as long as each particular species survives, the bird community will provide continuity into the future.  The same chirps and songs that surround me today, someone else will hear as well a thousand years from now, just as they were heard a thousand years ago.  I find such thoughts are a way of reaching across time, touching the past and future simultaneously.

    On the way to the bench, there are many sapling hickories struggling each year in the hot sun and soil, sometimes having to completely regrow from the occasional fire.  But it is my desire that at least one of these will carry on after the patriarch tree eventually dies and then falls, for nothing lives forever.  As for the bur oaks that I planted, they have had enough to contend with merely surviving certain recent years with extreme drought and heat; acorn production I had not expected for many years.  And so, because I am usually focused on newly emergent spring wildflowers and migrating birds, I completely missed during a recent spring when two of the bur oaks, both around twenty feet tall, had briefly flowered. 

    Later in the same year, as I slowly made my way to the bench, I was stopped cold by a large, shaggy-capped bur oak acorn lying in my path.  Soon I found several more.  Two I quickly planted within the sand prairie far from any other trees; two I planted in pots to nurture them to the seedling stage every step of the way; the rest I left for wildlife or whatever fate chance might dictate.

 

Bur oak acorns and leaves

 

    Now I know for certain that there will eventually be more bur oaks on the land than I originally planted, and one day I may even have to limit their numbers, lest they begin shading out the prairie vegetation.  Perhaps one day folks will refer to this property as “that old farmhouse with the prairie and all those big bur oaks.”   But I guess it is just as likely that the mowed lawn will return with the next owners.  I’ll never know, of course, but it surely will be their decision.

 

Selected References

Taylor, Christopher A., John. B. Taft, and Charles Warwick (editors).  Canaries in the Catbird Seat - the Past, Present, and Future of Biological Resources in a Changing Environment.  Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication 30.  Champaign:  Illinois Natural History Survey, 2009.

McFall, Don. and Jean Karnes (editors).  A Directory of Illinois Nature Preserves, Volume 2.  Springfield:  Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 1995.

 

 [This essay was originally published in Big Muddy:  A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, 2015, Volume 14.2, pages 18-25.] 

 

Download a pdf file of The Acorn Year by clicking Download The Acorn Year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Highlands

 

“…And when I’m gone, may I be one with the air, the land, and the foam, in an orchard green ‘neath the Comeraghs in my sweet Dungarvan home.”  From The Orchard, by Kevin Evans

 

My fascination with Ireland and Scotland began in the late 1970s at a place called Dirty Dick’s Pub in Oak Park, Illinois.  It was an Irish pub, and it was here that I was introduced to Celtic folk music.  The songs told stories of Ireland and Scotland and traveling on the sea.  This was a different kind of music from what I had ever heard on the usual top 40 of the day or FM radio.  After a few pub visits and a growing familiarity with certain tunes, I began to form mental images of what I thought these faraway places might be like:  of course, they were radically different from and more interesting than Berwyn, a near Chicago suburb where I lived at the time.

        Though the songs told of large cities such as Dublin and Belfast, I was more drawn to the images of the small hamlets, countryside, rugged mountains, and coastlines.  I filled my record collection with music from groups like the Dubliners, Liam and Clancy, and the Tannahill Weavers.  I learned about places such as the Dingle Peninsula from a song called Red-haired Mary; Cork, Killarny, and Kilkenny from Whiskey in the Jar; and the Comeragh Mountains at Dungarvan Bay from The Orchard.  Many of the songs told the history of Ireland and Scotland, which I pieced together bit by bit from titles such as Sound the Pibroch, The Rising of the Moon, Foggy Dew, and Botany Bay.  Songs of travel like Wild Rover, and the many seas songs fed the growing wanderlust of my early twenties.

        Though I was intrigued by travel abroad, there was much that I wished to see in my own country.  And so, for a long time my interests in Ireland and Scotland would remain confined to the music and my imagination, whether the latter was accurate or not.

        Music, in fact, had been a big part of my life since childhood when I began playing the accordion at around nine years old.  During my teenage years, I was persistent and occasionally worked hard at improving my playing abilities, but I never really connected with the instrument.  The problem was that I did not listen to accordion music, did not play with a band, was not very fond of polkas, and contemporary rock and country music—the music that I actually listened to at the time—were not accordion-friendly.

        I probably would have eventually given up on the accordion were it not for discovering Celtic folk music.  Groups that played this music actually had accordions in their bands.  And it sounded great!  Irish and Scottish folk songs on the accordion sounded good to my ears; my own playing improved and my musical horizons expanded.

        One day in the mid-1980s I had a tune in my mind.  I’m not sure where it came from, but it “sounded” like a slow Scottish ballad.  Along with the tune, I imagined the Highlands of Scotland, although I had actually seen few photographs of Scotland up until that time.  Still, I imagined rugged mountains covered in tundra-like vegetation with hidden wilderness valleys, cobble-bottomed clear streams with gallery forests, blowing winds, greyish skies with only intermittent sunshine, and few or no people.  I quickly worked out the tune on my accordion, and added it to my usual repertoire.  I had written a song, and I called it The Highlands.

 

***

        Since that time, I eventually did drift away from the accordion at about the same time that I took up the guitar as my main instrument.  My wife, Julie, though, loves accordion music.  At her request one day, I played her a few tunes.  One of those tunes turned out to be The Highlands.  Her response was enthusiastic, even more so after being informed that I had composed the tune over twenty years before.  Without hesitation she encouraged me to copyright the song.  And after writing a few lyrics, before too long, I did just that.

 

The Highlands

        Grey skies, to the Highlands, I’ll journey.

        Great waves, they break on the rocks.

        The wild Highlands they call on me;

        Buried away in my dreams.

 

        In lochs, we’ll sail through the Highlands,

        Leading us down to the shore.

        At sea, one night I must leave you;

        Fair winds, I’ll wait and be gone.

 

            Ancient battle cries;

                The eagle flies;

                The gathering storms will arise.

                Grey skies, to the Highlands, I’ll journey;

                Or never no more may I roam.

 

        Dark cliffs, to the Highlands, I’ll journey.

        Mountains, they rise with the dawn.

        At home, no more will I leave you;

        This night and all through the ‘morn.

 

                Ancient battle cries;

                The eagle flies;

                The gathering storms will arise.

                Grey skies, to the Highlands, I’ll journey;

                Or never no more may I roam.

                

***

        In 2011, I finally saw Ireland, when Julie and I flew across the Atlantic Ocean and landed at the Shannon Airport near the town of Limerick in Ireland’s west.  Julie’s goal was to see Cork, where family legend said her ancestors, in the 1800s, sailed for the United States.  On our visit, we found the exact departure point in the coastal town of Cobh.  From there we drove to Ireland’s far west, eventually reaching the end of Dingle Peninsula, considered the furthest western extension of Europe.  At nearby County Clare, we stayed in Doolin, known far and wide for its Celtic music pubs.  Late one afternoon, we enjoyed a few pints while listening to a group of older musicians playing The Orchard.  For both of us, circles had been completed.

At the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland, 2011

 

[To hear The Highlands on the keyboard, follow this link: 

Download The Highlands.]

 

[To download The Highlands sheet music, follow this link:   Download The Highlands Sheet Music.] 

 

Great Lakes Birding Trip: A Reading from Side Channels

In 2002 I took a birding trip around Lake Michigan.  Illinois Audubon magazine then published an article that I wrote about the trip called “From a Great Lakes Journal:  Of Sand, Glaciers, and Birds.”  I included a slightly revised version of the article as Chapter 27 in my book Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir, which was published in 2011.

Follow this link to hear a reading of a portion of Chapter 27 from Side Channels:  

Download Side Channels Reading CH27

 

 

Side Channels is available for purchase from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble Bookstore, and a variety of other online sites.

A Few Good Notes

We live in a busy world. And as the choices for sending and receiving communications increase (from cell phones to Internet web logs to e-mail), time available dwindles by the day, and life seems busier than ever. So a rather quaint activity such as writing a journal in a mere notebook may seem antiquated and not quite worth the trouble. One may even feel there is little worth recording on a day-to-day basis.

As a child, even Mark Twain became discouraged when attempting to keep a daily journal. Each day he would faithfully write, "Got up, washed, went to bed." After a few weeks, though, the writing ended, with Twain remarking that "Startling events appeared to be too rare in my career to render a diary necessary." But surely he must have had some unrecorded reactions to events happening in the world around him, in between washing and going to bed. He should have looked beyond himself, and years later, might have been surprised to find interest in reading those impressions. Following this article, perhaps the reader may find that the world around us offers an endless variety of events worth recording or providing commentary upon. Nature, in fact, is a good place to start.

Over the years, I have noticed that keeping records comes naturally and spontaneously to birders. Even beginning birders can be seen keeping a list of birds seen on a field trip, usually without any prodding from the trip leader. Though recording an occasional bird list may not qualify as keeping a journal, it is a start in the process of carefully witnessing one’s surroundings. And who knows where this may lead.

A bird list means little, though, if it is done haphazardly and then filed in a drawer to never be seen again. Lists should be made with the intention of eventually reviewing them to look for patterns and inconsistencies or submitting the list to the proper ornithological organization. By reviewing lists collected over a long period of time, one may be able to observe trends such as increases in populations of some species and declines in others. Or one might note that certain species are arriving from their winter or summer grounds earlier or later than usual.

For many migratory species, it is remarkable how close from year to year they follow certain behavioral patterns. For example, from reviewing my notes, I know that barn swallows tend to arrive from South America at their nest under my porch roof in central Illinois about April 15, more or less. When the birds are much later, I begin wondering whether they may have been killed in a hurricane or met some other disaster on their very dangerous route to a dangerous place. Another example is the day on which I first hear a house wren singing, which for the last three years was April 12, April 15, and April 11. These are benchmarks in time on nature’s calender. And I have noticed many other benchmarks in relation to birds, such as the first days in July when I begin seeing southward-moving shorebirds; the loose September flocks of nighthawks foraging in the skies, but seriously bound for the Amazon basin and beyond; the first late fall day when the waters of the local marsh freeze over and all the waterfowl leave; the first red-winged blackbird song in February. Journal writing and taking notice of specific events have brought me closer to nature and have enriched my life.

Today’s easy-to-use home computers and the Internet have brought record keeping to a new level. At the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s eBird web site (www.ebird.org), data from your birding lists may be entered into a giant database that is used by birders and scientists across North America to track bird populations over space and time. The easy flexibility of their system allows even a casual observation to be entered. There is even room for special notes related to the bird observations.

Taking careful notes on bird behavior is where a simple bird list becomes a birding journal. As a beginning birder soon discovers, certain species tend to be associated with specific habitats. So the bird observation and what specifically exists at the siting location are highly correlated. Habitat factors include the type and structure of the vegetation, topographical relief, presence or absence of water, amount of standing dead timber, available food resources, and acreage. By keeping notes on these factors and relating that to where specific birds were observed, one can learn to read the landscape and know what birds to expect.

A birding journal should also record weather conditions at the time of observation as well as notes on bird behavior as they interact with each other, other organisms, and the environment. Yet with such information, the birding journal may be more accurately called a nature journal. Topics may then appropriately include information such as the flowering date of specific plants or the date when a local river crests in its spring flood. And once one becomes accustomed to journal writing about nature, it is only too easy to include comments on whatever events happen to be worth noticing, perhaps even arcane philosophical ruminations on the human condition.

Journal writing will enhance the enjoyment of any trip, long or short. It can provide a record of events unique to the writer. When shared with another person, who is also recording the same day’s events, journal writing can provide a special, simple, and personal kind of entertainment and insight into the trip. For example, on a trip to the upper Mississippi River, each evening my wife Julie and I described the day’s events in our journals. The next morning over breakfast, we each read our journal entries aloud. Part of one afternoon in Wisconsin was recorded in this way:

From T. V. Lerczak’s journal:

"At Rush River Delta, we followed the shallow, clear Rush River along a wisp of a trail nearly to the far reaches of the delta. The trail passed from old-growth floodplain forest (mainly silver maples and a few cottonwoods) to sand bar willow communities. Following the delta from older to younger areas was like running plant succession in reverse. Birds were scarce, but we counted 12 bald eagles along the Rush River and the lake’s edge."

From Julie’s journal:

"In the afternoon, we . . . stopped to explore a wonderful bottomland forest on a delta at the base of Lake Pepin. This was the Rush River Natural Area, I believe. It was so deserted and pristine, and the Rush River–what I would describe as a creek–was crystal-clear. As we hiked and later sat for a while to read and meditate, we stirred up eagle after eagle. This apparently is a hot spot for them, and Tom thinks they like the Rush River for its seclusion and clear waters. . . . All together we saw 12 eagles and I would say two-thirds were mature. They flew quite near, and I’ve never been closer to one in the wild." 

On this two-week trip, we never watched television once, which I think says quite a lot in favor of journal writing.

Mississippi River near Quincy, Illinois

Making the transition from simple bird listing to keeping a nature or trip journal is significant. Yet even if one is seriously keeping a journal, making daily entries may probably require establishing a forced routine; that is, purposely setting aside a block of time to write. Most folks aspiring to write, indeed, say that writing every day is important. But what if truly nothing has happened worth recording? Once you are beginning to write "got up, washed, went to bed," is it time to admit defeat? Here the journal writer must mine his or her thoughts for perhaps one inspired conclusion or one past observation worth committing to paper. Even Edwin Way Teale must have had his uneventful days once in a while, for his entire June 11 journal entry in Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist’s Year reads as follows: "Out-of-doors, adventures are everywhere. Wonders are all around us. If the world is stale, its fascination gone, the fault, we find, is in ourselves. As G.K. Chesterton put it: ‘The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.’"

NOTE:  This essay originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine.