The River Landing

From a Mississippi River Island

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

                                River mulch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

References

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

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

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

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

 

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). 

 

Into the Wind

The essay Into the Wind appears in Shark Reef:  A Literary Magazine (Issue 41 Winter 2023) (click on the link).  It is a narrative about certain unusual life experiences with wind and relating those times to a recent move from rural surroundings in Mason County, Illinois, to the university town of Macomb, Illinois.  

We left our country home in good hands, as this video (click on this link) by the new owner demonstrates.

 

A tornado moving along the Illinois River valley on Dec. 1, 2018.

 

Windy day at Lake Michigan, Warren Dunes, Michigan.

  

Return to a Hill Prairie

“When greenery goes out of the landscape in autumn, a haze of bright, ruddy color lies over most of the hills on the east side of the river…and over remnants of prairie which have resisted the plow.”—from the book River World by Virginia S. Eifert, 1959

 

Attorney and writer Edgar Lee Masters’ (1868-1950) relates in his book, The Sangamon, published in 1942, that when his grandmother first looked northward toward the Mason County Hills in the late 1840s, she was saddened.  This central Illinois landscape was wild and uncultivated, and she wanted to see a settled land with farmsteads, accented here and there with well-kept homes.  The hill prairies on high bluffs over the Sangamon River valley also might have conjured up visions of a not so distant past when the land was occupied by a native race of people, a culture alien to her that embraced those same hills as home and as a source of sustenance.  That same location today, though, might have her smile, as the land has become dominated by intensive row-crop agriculture, exuding prosperity; but she may also wonder why those hill prairies are still there.

 

 

          In The Sangamon, Masters often writes of Illinois’ prairies as expansive landscape features; he even writes a poem about prairies, but fails even once to explicitly mention the comparatively small hill prairies which his grandmother as well as he would have witnessed on the steep Sangamon River bluffs.  It would be 1955 before the state of Illinois would publish Robert A. Evers’ landmark study, Hill Prairies of Illinois.  So to be fair, probably not too many people were thinking about such things with the Great Depression tenaciously holding on while another world war seemed inevitable.  As far as The Sangamon is concerned, apparently more impressive to Masters than the hill prairies were certain eccentric personalities of the locality, who now seem to be of little consequence other than adding a bit of color to his narrative; and yet, he devotes considerable space in the book to such individuals.  But today, as one looks toward the Sangamon River bluffs, those hill prairies are the only original prairies left in view; it would be difficult not to notice them, even for a person uninterested in such things.

 

The Sangamon River, bottomlands, and distant Revis

Hill Prairie Nature Preserve on the Mason County Hills,2012.  

 

Just over three decades ago, I first visited Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve (422.8 acres), north of where Salt Creek enters the Sangamon River.  There were no trails that I could see, and maps were not offered; so I pushed through the brush at the prairie’s edge and began a steep 200-foot climb along a narrow ridge of prairie, with woods on either side, to the top of the bluff.  Here I found a place to sit and lean against the hillside, on what could only be referred to as a natural sofa, looking out upon the prairie ridges, surrounding forests, flatlands of the river bottoms, and southward toward the uplands of Menard County with modern no-nonsense farms.  These prairies, I thought, had been there for a long time, an original landscape that existed from well into the deep past. The thought held my attention; I felt as if I had stepped out of a time machine, and I looked closely around me at the loess soil, little bluestem, side oats grama, big bluestem, indiangrass, lead plant, and more.  A gentle breeze blew from the south, enabling turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks to soar on updrafts overhead, but sometimes at eye level.  With the wind blowing through nearby oak trees, the only sound I heard was rustling leaves, the nearest highway being far removed from this preserve in a remote part of a remote county.  I would return here many times over the next three decades, but that first visit will always stand out from the rest.

 

Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve, early 1990s.

 

Loess ridge at Revis Hill Prairie, early 1990s.

 

        For someone who grew up within the old neighborhoods of Chicago and Cicero—with its paved streets, concrete sidewalks, sewer systems, mowed front lawns, and blocks of bungalows, each small house separated from the next by only a few feet—a mindset was ingrained in me early on that most of what surrounded me had been put there by someone, designed and managed to look and function a certain way.  That may be why at an early age I was already drawn to what I perceived as unmanaged landscapes such as the Chicago area’s forest preserves, especially those along the Des Plaines River.  After being free in the forest preserves for an afternoon, returning to the rectangular blocks and sidewalks of our city neighborhood felt like being put into a cage.  That feeling is still with me every day, and I know that it is one of the reasons why I am still drawn to natural areas, particularly those within the Illinois Nature Preserve System.

        At some point, though, I became aware that natural areas had to be managed to maintain their characteristics, which, in a way, suggests a contradiction in terms.  Of course, there are many issues that require this to be necessary, including but not limited to invasive plants that can quickly overrun even a supposedly pristine area, successional changes in plant communities that evolved with frequent fire, decline of species due to habitat fragmentation, and species populations falling below some minimum viable size.  When I began working for the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission several years after my first visit to Revis Hill Prairie, I had long been aware that my precious natural areas were not unmanaged as I had once thought, but actually were among some of the most managed lands in the state, with activities such as prescribed fires, brush and tree removal from prairies and savannas, seed collection and distribution, herbicide treatment of invasive plants, and, in some cases, reintroductions of rare plants and animals.  Being actively involved in these activities on a professional level permanently altered the way I would view a natural area; and that became clear to me one day as I realized that instead of closely looking at a tree to admire its beauties in shape, color, and texture, I would be thinking of the best way to drop it safely using a chain saw—where to place the initial cut, how the tree was naturally leaning, and how it would fall and on what.

        Management at every natural area, though, seems to be always running behind the needs; at the same time, it is also important to monitor the effects of management or lack thereof.  Part of the monitoring process is simply to visit a preserve for a close look with a critical eye.  Was the natural area beginning to look the way it was originally envisioned when it was entered into the system?  Were we making progress or falling behind?  Were there any new challenges?  Eventually, even when visiting a preserve on my own time, purely for pleasure, I found it difficult not to make mental lists of issues that needed attention.  There were always issues, even at the best sites.  But even so, I always took a few moments to reflect upon the meaning behind these protected natural areas and to recall why it was that I was initially drawn to them.  If I had ever lost sight of that, then my tasks would have become routine and mechanical, like a musician merely playing the correct notes, but not feeling the music.

 

                                        *      *     *

This past September, I took advantage of an opportunity to visit Revis Hill Prairie with the Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves, a new group formed to help with the management of nature preserves, especially using volunteers.  It was my first visit to Revis since just after my retirement over four years before, and I was curious to see how the site had fared over the interim.  There were several folks from the Friends group on the field trip and also a few former colleagues.  We climbed the bluffs so well known to me and then gathered to discuss familiar management issues and the challenges of applying consistent follow-up.  As in past times, it’s still a matter of how to accomplish what everyone knows is necessary to preserve a natural area.  I listened closely, but said little, interested more in what others, especially the new folks, had to say.

Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve, 26 October 2022, looking

back toward the direction of the previous 1990s photograph. 

 

        A lot has happened since my first visit to Revis Hill Prairie, illustrating just how long a time it has been:  Thirty years ago, Seinfeld was a new program on network television, the Internet was not yet available to the public, George H.W. Bush was still struggling through the final years of what would be his only term as president, the Soviet Union was collapsing, the 911 terrorist attack was still a decade away and now is over two decades behind, and few spoke of the possibility of a deadly pandemic capable of touching every corner of our modern world.  And I now have the benefit of the type of long-term perspective that only an older person can truly possess, appreciate, and learn from.  Even three decades, though, is nothing compared to how long those prairies on the Mason County Hills have existed.  I have a good feeling about them.  For as Masters once wrote:

        To contemplate the prairie is

        To fathom time, to guess at infinite space,

        To find the Earth-spirit in a dreaming mood.

 

References

Evers. Robert A.  1955.  Hill Prairies of Illinois.  Illinois Natural History Survey Bulletin, Volume 26, Article 5.

Masters, Edgar Lee.  1988.  The Sangamon.  University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

Prairie State Conservation Coalition.  I-View (arcgis.com) accessed 11 October 2022.

 

Related Posts on The River Landing

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve:  A 30-year Perspective on Meanings and Change

Change and Comfort in Nature

Hill Prairie Photo Gallery

Protecting Hopewell Hill Prairies, Marshall County, Illinois

An Illinois River Hill Prairie Fire

 

 

Four Decades of Mark Twain and His River

 “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise”—Mark Twain

“There was a time when my heart was free to wander.”—from The Hobo Song by John Prine

 

During the middle 1980s, while employed at a small college, I shared an office with a man named Bill Andrey.  We both had full teaching loads, but we rarely talked about our work.  Bill liked to reminisce about his life, which included a tour of duty in the Philippines during World War II, and discuss current events, sociology, politics, and literature.  Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) was one of his favorite authors.  When I mentioned to Bill that I had never read a book by Twain, he replied that my education was incomplete; and then he proceeded to tell me all that he knew about this individual.

 

 

        Up until that point in time, I had never thought about Mark Twain.  My only familiarity with him was from two old movies that I had seen as a child:  Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper.   Bill, though, enlightened me, and spoke of Twain’s extensive world traveling and the many jobs that he had tried before becoming a successful author, which included printer, riverboat pilot, silver miner, miller, and newspaper reporter.  Bill, who had been a devoted, domesticated family man for many decades, spoke with envy of Mark Twain’s life, which I interpreted as a regret that his life had never been and would never be as adventuresome.   He then pointed to a picture of Mark Twain on his bulletin board with a quote that read, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”  I was intrigued with this unconventional character, and I told Bill that I would look up Mark Twain the next time I was in a book store.  At the same time, being only in my late twenties, with a strong wanderlust daily pulling at me, hearing of Twain’s adventures made me feel as if I should have been doing a lot more with my life, such as going somewhere far away, taking chances, having those exciting experiences that I would one day want to look back upon and perhaps write about.  Maybe, I thought, Mark Twain was just what I needed.

        The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Charles Neider, editor) seemed a good place to start.  Here, I expected to read about all of his adventures, especially when he was a young man, before he became prosperous, married, and settled as a parent.  But I soon discovered that The Autobiography is not organized as a strictly chronological narrative; it is like a series of recollections, opinions, and observations, not always put into context, but presented in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way.  This made it difficult to trace a coherent path through the man’s life.  Also, Twain often simply refers to his adventures by pointing the reader toward his other books rather than re-telling stories.  So for a reader unfamiliar with the author’s life or books, The Autobiography leaves one with many gaps, questions, and some confusion about the order of events in his life.  Most of it was written while he was in his late sixties and early seventies with an old man’s perspective, which made it difficult for me to relate to.  I was young, and I wanted to look forward to my future and be inspired by adventure, not be drawn toward despair as if my life was about over.  Even so, Twain’s humor and unique talent at telling a story are quite intact throughout the book, and those were the qualities that kept me interested in pursuing more of his writings.

 

 

        Over the next couple of decades, I gradually read most of Twain’s major and minor works plus several biographies.  And by chance, at times my life truly crossed paths with his.  In 1985, I was on my way from the Missouri Ozarks to northwestern Illinois for a campout at Mississippi Palisades State Park.  While passing through Florida, Missouri, I saw a sign that announced a nearby visitor’s center with the actual birthplace cabin of Mark Twain.  The broken down, old cabin was not much to look at; but it was the authentic structure, so I was impressed by that.  Then realizing that I was not far from Hannibal, it was natural that I would stop to see Twain’s boyhood home and the scene for his famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  A few years later, I was passing through Elmira, New York, on my way to Cornell University in Ithaca, when I saw a small sign beside the road directing the traveler to Mark Twain’s grave; of course, I followed the arrows and signs, and soon I was standing at his very gravesite.  And I thought how strange and coincidental it was that not long before I had stood at this man’s birthplace—both unplanned visits.

        I returned to the Mississippi River many times at various locations since first becoming interested in Mark Twain—from canoeing its wild backwater sloughs in the Driftless Area north of Savanna, Illinois; to wilderness camping alone on seven-mile-long Long Island, about 20 miles upriver from Hannibal, where in the dark of night I heard a pack of barking, marauding dogs not far away, and thought of how that sound would have invoked terror in an escaped slave, who might have used that exact island to make it to the free state of Illinois from slave-holding Missouri; to standing on the levee at New Madrid, in Missouri’s Bootheel region, where locals tell of frequently hearing loud bangs and “bombs” going off under the ground, reminders that the massive earthquake of 1812 was not really that long ago and could again occur; to a road trip from Lake Itasca, source of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, as far south as Nauvoo, Illinois, following as close to the river as decent roads would allow.  (This road trip we plan to pick up one day and follow the river the rest of its way to the Gulf of Mexico.)

        One year I was leading a research crew studying the effects of severe flooding on the forests along the Mississippi River.  In Life on the Mississippi, Twain had this to say of floods:  “A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire.”  In some of our study areas, so many trees died from being under water during the growing season that the scenes we witnessed seemed like winter, but with green ground cover.  To collect information for later analysis, we tramped through many of the larger islands across from Hannibal, the very islands, perhaps, explored by the real life Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (who actually was the boy, Sam Clemens), or at least similar ones in similar locations.  By then I had read all of Twain’s travel books and most of his novels, so I kind of felt as if we were treading upon sacred ground for a Twain enthusiast.

        Eleven years later, my wife Julie and I were celebrating our first wedding anniversary in Hannibal at an old nineteenth century home renovated as a bed and breakfast.  The next morning we took a riverboat cruise from the Hannibal dock, and I was able to enjoy Mark Twain’s river as a tourist, without having to concern myself with collecting scientific data, leading a field crew, or watching out for shallow water or wing dams (piles of rock oriented perpendicular to the bank) just below the surface.

        This year (2022), on our sixteenth anniversary, we enjoyed a luncheon cruise on the same riverboat that floated off from the same Hannibal dock as on our first anniversary.  The river and its islands seemed to have not changed at all in the intervening years.  But I knew that that could really not be the case, because forests and rivers are always changing, although over the short term, change can be subtle.  Still, I’m not sure how much of today’s Mississippi River Mark Twain would recognize, especially with its lock and dam system and leveed floodplain.

 

The Mississippi River at Hannibal, Mo., from a riverboat, July 24, 2022.

 

The Mississippi River at Hannibal, Mo., blufftop view, July 24, 2022.

 

        While planning our recent anniversary visit to the Mississippi at Hannibal, I decided it was time to re-read The Autobiography of Mark Twain, now as an older man closer to the age of Twain when he dictated much of it.  And unlike my first time through, I immediately connected with its narrative, as I looked back on my life of 64 years along with Twain looking back on his.  And when he referred to one of his books, I easily recalled the book and the impressions it made upon me at the time that I read it.  That an autobiography could encompass an entire life of seventy plus years within 380 pages and take mere weeks to read, I found to be humbling; making the average human lifespan, including my own, seem as quick as the flash of a firefly on a warm summer’s evening.  Not surprisingly, there is profound sadness in that thought, especially for an older person, and I see that in Twain as he looked back on his life to craft his autobiography.

 

I’ve always enjoyed studying maps; and on ambitious days, increasingly rare I must admit, the maps inspire thoughts of international travel.  These days, however, given risks of terrorism, on-going wars, poverty’s misery and totalitarianism across much of the planet, and COVID fears resulting in travel restrictions without warning that could strand a person in a foreign land indefinitely, being a world traveler no longer seems like such a good idea.  And I have little faith that this situation will improve during my lifetime.  So I’m fairly confident that I will never see as much of the world as Mark Twain did, not even a small percentage.  But I can still re-read books such as The Innocents Abroad or Following the Equator and be content with that.  I think the late Bill Andrey would agree, and I hope he would say that I have made good progress at completing my education.

 

Statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Hannibal, Missouri.

 

References

Anfinson, J.O.  2003.  The river we have wrought:  a history of the upper Mississippi.  University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.

Feldman, J.  2005.  When the Mississippi ran backwards.  Free Press, New York, New York.

 

Town Walking

 

“He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in a good sense, is no more vagrant then a meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”— from Walking, by Henry David Thoreau, 1862

 

As I stepped off our driveway for a walk around town, I instantly felt conspicuous.  Within any one of the closely packed homes on our street, someone, without a doubt, must have been watching out the window, much as I myself have done occasionally. 

        It was a feeling that I had not yet been able to shake, ever since moving from the country ten months before.  I continued down the street at a brisk pace and a constant cadence, as if being timed with a metronome, as if I had serious business to attend to, keeping my eyes forward.

        My business, such as it might be called, was connecting with the natural world in whatever small way I could.  After nearly thirty years of living in the country, amid farmlands and wild areas, finding and observing wildlife was now a different kind of experience from what I had been used to, and I was still adjusting my expectations. 

        At the end of our block, four-acre Compton Park came into view, with Killjordan Creek meandering through its mowed and manicured landscape.  I kept up my pace, listening for bird sounds.  I left my binoculars at home, as my gut feeling was that using binoculars to view birds in someone’s yard or even in trees along the street would be looked upon as eccentric, maybe worthy of calling the police.

 

Killjordan Creek and Compton Park, Macomb.

 

        How different from being in a remote natural area, where I could stop and examine birds or plants at my leisure, even choosing a convenient tree leaning at just the right angle for a short afternoon nap.  But doing this at Compton Park would surely draw the attention of residents whose homes face the park, and then probably the authorities; best to do all of my napping at home from now on.

        At the park, there were other folks walking for exercise and people with dogs, both of which legitimized my activity, as long as I kept moving.  So I marched along, one foot after the other, no nonsense, attempting to blend into the landscape.  My wife Julie claims that at nearly six feet four inches in height, it is impossible for me to keep a low profile, which recalls an incident where I failed to remain under the radar even on a crowded downtown Chicago avenue.  A friend and I were having a few beers at a sidewalk café and tavern when a man nervously came up to our table and asked us about popcorn.  I innocently replied that there was free popcorn at the bar inside, but you probably had to buy a drink to get it.  The man looked at me as if I were deranged, his eyes darting back and forth, and then he quickly walked away. 

        Later, we were walking along, looking for a place to eat, another nervous man walked to us and said, “Popcorn.  You want popcorn?”   “No,” we replied, shaking our heads. We eventually deduced that “popcorn” is a type of illegal street drug and were surprised at the boldness of these peddlers.  In the city, it may be possible to melt into the crowd, but people are still watching.  The watchers were somewhere, predators secretly observing the street scene. 

        On hikes around Compton Park, I’m just one of many walkers.  But when I hiked the roads near our former country home, I stood out even more than I apparently do in town, because, from my observations, folks living in the rural countryside rarely, if ever, hike for pleasure, for exercise, or to view wildlife.  A lone hiker on a country road is a curiosity, probably assumed to have a vehicle breakdown, a DUI, or to be a vagrant generally up to no good.  I was out on a remote country road one day when an old farmer in a pickup truck stopped to ask if I needed a lift somewhere. 

        “No, just out for a walk,” I said. 

        “Really,” he replied with not a little skepticism. “Well I never heard of such a thing.”  He slowly drove away, shaking his head with disbelief and probably thinking I was a strange individual. 

        I have noticed that walking with a small child removes all suspicion.  As at Compton Park, when hiking with my nine-year-old granddaughter, we can linger anywhere for any length of time to look at plants, dirt, fish in the creek, and even stare into the clouds; people simply smile and probably think, What a nice old guy, teaching his grandchild about nature.  I could probably get away with robbing a bank if I had a little kid…well maybe not.

        Sometimes on my walks around the neighborhood, I’ll try to imagine what the area looked like before the 1800s, when prairie, savanna, and forests occupied the land.  Killjordan Creek was there, as well as the gently sloping hillsides bordering the creek corridor, but not much else of the present scene.  There may have been many trees bordering the creek, as there are today, but most of the level land upon which our town was built was likely grassland.  Prairie fires would have swept across the land, pushed by high winds, mostly unhindered by deep ravine systems; those fires would have kept trees from expanding very far from the creek.  Some of the birds that I hear and see along the modern-day creek would have been part of that original Illinois landscape, but those requiring large grasslands have long been gone and will never return.  White-tailed deer still follow the creek through town from the surrounding countryside. Sometimes they stray from the creek and we find them lounging in our backyard, munching on our flower and vegetable gardens.  It’s the price we pay for the gift of wildness remaining.

        Without the town, I would use Killjordan Creek and its connecting streams to navigate the land, following the easiest slopes into and out of ravines systems, crossing the flat uplands perhaps with a distant large bur oak in sight as a landmark, using a compass in combination with the sun and time of day to fix my position and determine the route.  That is what I might have done in a former time, and what I still sometimes do when hiking through a trackless natural area.  But these days, I mostly follow neighborhood streets oriented on north-south or east-west lines along rectangular city blocks.  I turn corners at ninety degree angles and look both ways before crossing a street.

        Though I walk at an unwavering pace through town, my senses are heightened and I am keenly aware of my surroundings.  I notice details I miss when driving the same routes:  a crumbling curb; cracks in the sidewalk and streets; the identities and unique shapes of trees; pieces of sidewalk uplifted by tree roots; manhole covers made a century ago by the Neenah Foundry Company of Neenah, Wisconsin. So many different styles of homes, front yards and their fixtures, the miscellany of numerous lives laid open to the outside world. 

        So let the barking dogs from living room windows and calling crows announce my presence as they are wont to do.  They may think to drive me away, but I will return on another day, for walking is a key to staying grounded and maintaining some aspect of an elusive balance during these turbulent times.

 

Another walker from another time:  Cermak Road and 57^th Avenue,

Cicero, Illinois 1971 (Photo by Thomas V. Lerczak).

 

This essay first appeared in the anthology These Interesting Times:  Surviving 2020 in the Quad Cities, published in 2021 by the Midwest Writing Center, Rock Island, Illinois.  Click on the image below to expand.

On April 10, 2022, I was interviewed by Don Wooten and Rebecca Wee on WVIK's NPR program Scribble about Town Walking, other writings, and the adjustments of moving from the country into town.  To hear the interview, click on this link:  Interview.

 

Wheelbarrow Blues

[Prefatory Note:  A slightly altered version of this essay appears in Roads We've Taken: a Writers on the Avenue Anthology, published by Pearl City Press, the publishing imprint of Writers on the Avenue.]

 

“Now as I look around, it’s mighty plain to see, this world is such a great and funny place to be.”— from the song I Ain’t Got No Home by Woody Guthrie

Roosevelt's wheelbarrow army, 1937 (Downloaded from the Internet, courtesy National Archives)

 

The morning was hot and muggy, not much good for doing anything out of doors.  And yet, I uncharacteristically found myself moving some wood mulch with a wheelbarrow, and it reminded me of a man and some incidents that happened about a quarter century ago.

        At the time, I was living in a tiny rental house along the Illinois River, just north of Havana.  My retired landlords, Lawrence and Doreen, lived in a rather spacious home and property, across a narrow sandy lane.  Lawrence frequently hired a local laborer, Bill, from down the road to do yard work and maintenance on both of our homes; often I would see Bill making multiple trips back and forth between the properties with a wheelbarrow, his face stoic and unreadable.  Bill was in his mid-60s, slow and low talking, Great Depression lean, and tough as iron. He always wore long-sleeve work shirts rolled up to his elbow and a dirty John Deere cap that seemed just a bit too large for his wiry build.  He was a hard worker, but sometimes it looked to me as if he stretched the work out just a little too much.  Lawrence, a highly educated engineer who designed and ran foundries, must have known this, but he wanted to help Bill out by giving him work.  “Five dollars an hour,” Bill used to groan in a voice seasoned with years of hard farm laborer work with little chance of financial gain or movement up the social ladder.  With few savings, an unhealthy wife, and still supporting a pajama-boy son—who couldn’t seem to find let alone hold a job—Bill was glad to earn whatever extra cash that he could.

        Bill worked consistently and did what he was told.  In fact, he did exactly what he was told, even when the orders might send him in the wrong direction; so Lawrence had to be careful with his instructions.  Once, Lawrence purchased several sapling trees that he directed Bill to plant alongside of my rental house.  “They go in here, here, and here,” Lawrence hastily and absent-mindedly indicated with a shovel, making slight depressions in the ground.  Would I have taken the initiative and measured an even distance between the holes and set them in a straight line before digging?  Or would I have done what Bill did and plant each tree exactly where Lawrence’s shovel arbitrarily touched the ground, even though they were not evenly spaced or in a straight line?  I’m not really sure.

        When Lawrence returned later in the day to check on Bill’s work, he nearly shouted, “Why did you plant them in a crooked line and so close together?!”  Bill, ever defiant, replied, “You said ‘Here, here, and here,’ God damn, and that’s what I did.”  “What can I say,” Lawrence replied, “you’re right, but dig them up and re-plant them evenly and in a straight line.”

        Another memorable incident from another day, related to me by Doreen at some point well after the fact, occurred when Lawrence instructed Bill simply to, “Burn those leaves,” most of which had been blown by the wind nearby another small house that Lawrence owned just beyond my backyard.  After hearing the story, I surmised that Bill probably thought it would be easier to add leaves to the existing pile and burn the pile in place, rather than raking everything into a new pile.  Fair enough.  Except once the fire began, the flames quickly grew, spread, and began moving ever closer toward the house.  Unsure of what to do, Bill responded to the situation by running in a panic for Lawrence, who was in his home, probably relaxing with a book or watching the news.  Bill’s loud banging on Lawrence’s front door, though, certainly must have gotten his attention without delay.  “We got trouble!” shouted Bill.  And the two old guys moved as quickly as they could, ultimately controlling the fire before it reached the house.

        There is no way to know what words were exchanged between the two after that scenario, but I would not be surprised if Bill blamed the near catastrophe on Lawrence for not first telling him to move the leaves away from the house.   Bill was notorious for blaming Lawrence’s instructions when situations went awry.  And he and Lawrence would sometimes argue back and forth about the proper way to carry out a task.  On the occasion when Lawrence’s way was found not to be the best way, I would imagine that Bill felt more than a little self-satisfaction.  But maybe my interpretation is simply projecting my own early notions of boss-worker relations onto a person who never came even close to such thoughts.  I’ll never know.  Over the years, though, I have known quite a few men going through life with a chip on the shoulder, with an unmistakable “us” (working man) against “them” (management) attitude.  And Bill fit that mold fairly well.

        I know the attitude well because that was the world from which I came.  It was learned behavior, and where I learned it was at a paper factory, only my second job after just two years out of high school.  A major part of my work was watching large sheets of paper (several feet in length and width) gently fly off a noisy conveyor belt and pile up on a platform that could be lowered or raised.  When the pile of paper accumulated to just high enough, I would push a little button to lower the platform a few inches, thus allowing room for more paper to pile up.  If I became distracted and forgot to lower the platform, the paper would build up until it jammed, and the entire operation would have to be shut down temporarily until all of the crunched-up paper was removed.  So pushing that little button was an important job, even though I guess I knew that a dog probably could have been trained to do it and actually stay focused on the task—unless an uneaten biscuit lay within smelling distance.  Still, I felt to be pretty far down the warehouse social hierarchy.  Only the box packers in the mailroom were lower, or so it seemed to me.  When a “white shirt and tie” from the office entered our warehouse domain, I felt low down and that they considered themselves better than me.  We in the warehouse used to joke about them being afraid of a little dirt and hard work.  When someone in the office made a mistake, we were quick to say:  “Of course, they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, them and their college degrees.”  On a daily basis for two years, then, I was schooled in us-against-them thinking.  (At the same time, no one ever said that any one of us could not aspire to more.)

        Bill may have resented me in a similar way.  Lawrence and Doreen, though over thirty years older, quickly became my closest friends.  They frequently invited me over for drinks, meals, and their own family get-togethers, where I met many of the extended relatives.  Bill rarely if ever crossed their threshold.  And at least a part of his work was directed toward my house and property; while I, as the renter, was never expected to do much related to maintenance.  I also worked for the state of Illinois, and had all of the usual holidays off, plus plenty of vacation and personal time off.  One of my favorite activities was sitting under the shade of a large hickory tree in the yard watching birds and reading a book for hours on end, probably with a glass of ice water or a beer within easy reach.  Many times, while reading, I would see Bill working, plodding along; and sometimes I would hear him muttering “God damn” under his breath.  If he looked in my direction, I’d usually wave, but without getting much recognition in return.  Sometimes body language says it all.

        His attitude toward me became clear one day when he and Doreen were talking in her yard, trying to determine how her flowerbed had been flattened the previous night.  “Who would do such a thing?” Doreen asked in exasperation.  “I know who done it,” Bill said, and confidently pointed directly at me.  “It was him! I seen him.”  Bill was right, of course, and he didn’t hesitate to rat on me.  The previous evening I was in my canoe on the Illinois River, and I remembered seeing Bill near the riverbank as I paddled past his house on my way to a tavern up the river for a six-pack of beer.  I returned well after dark on a moonless night; then, following a path up the river bluff along the edge of Lawrence and Doreen’s property, while pulling my canoe behind me, I slipped and fell right into her flower bed.  Because it was so dark, I had no idea of the consequences of that fall...until Bill’s ignominious accusation.  Of course, I was immediately highly apologetic, as I explained myself away.  As for Doreen, her anger melted into a smile and laughter, which probably infuriated Bill.

        After I purchased my first home and moved away from Lawrence and Doreen, we continued to maintain our friendship.  In this way, I was to learn of Bill’s death from cancer only a few years after my departure.  So he must have had a special suffering that he kept inside all the time I knew him, never saying a word.  A few years later, Lawrence left this world, followed shortly by Doreen.  And I am left to ponder the meanings, which I am reminded of every time I need to use a wheelbarrow.

[Postscript:  This last time with a wheelbarrow, a blister began to develop on my thumb, and I thought, What’s next, a callous?   How long before I could no longer claim to have hands as soft as a baby’s bottom?  If Bill were still around, I doubt that he would feel sorry.]

An early evening in June on the Illinois River

 

 

Author's Note:  Names of individuals were changed to protect anonymity. 

.

 

Landmarks and Trail Markers

By Thomas V. Lerczak

For nearly thirty years, my sense of orientation on the landscape has been tied to the Illinois River valley, especially that area around Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge. Even though the river and its valley were not always in view, I knew where the river was in relation to where I happened to be at any time. Before that, when I lived in the Chicago area, Lake Michigan filled a similar landmark role, even though I had traveled to its shores only a few times a year; I could almost feel the big lake’s presence as the sun rose over its endless horizon. On the east side of the lake in Michigan, though, I felt disoriented, and sometimes briefly traveled the opposite direction from my destination, until I remembered Lake Michigan was on the west, not the east.
        But now I find myself living in the small western Illinois town of Macomb, amidst a landscape of table-top flat farm fields and gently rolling hills with widely spaced ravine systems. Among the level agricultural fields, there are few trees, and the view may be unobstructed for miles. What feature could I use here, far from the Illinois River, to navigate? For a time, I felt unmoored. And then one day, heading home and still over five miles from town, I noticed a distant water tower barely discernable, just above where a faraway tree line met the sky. I recognized this tower: it stands on East Walker Street, only a few short blocks from my new home, on a high spot in town. Thereafter I could associate home with the water tower, almost like a big, white signpost rising above the entire town.

 

    The East Walker Street water tower, Macomb, Illinois

 

                Looking out the author's back door.

        On such a landscape, I cannot help but think of the old trail marker trees set up by Native Americans at strategic locations to help guide their journeys at a time, long ago, when much of west-central Illinois was a mosaic of savanna and large expanses of treeless tallgrass prairies. They created the trail markers by, perhaps, bending a sapling oak into an arc, then keeping it staked in that orientation until the tree accepted its new form and continued to maintain the shape. One such white oak I recall seeing near Athens, Illinois, apparently pointed, for over three hundred years, to a good crossing on the Sangamon River miles away to the northwest. Other trail marker trees pointed to springs of clear, fresh water; villages; or important trails, such as the Chicago Portage, the shortest distance for travelers between the Des Plaines River—flowing toward the Illinois River and then the Mississippi—and The Great Lakes Basin.

        View of Macomb from the northwest side of town.

 

        Countryside about five miles southeast of Macomb.

 

        And what of life’s journey when critical circumstances converge and choices are required, possibly changing the trajectory of one’s life toward a new pathway? There was the moment I simply knew the woman sitting across from me would one day be my wife or the day I began to seize control of my life, instead of letting it float rudderless over the falls.
In hindsight, after four decades, I clearly see the trail-marker moment (names in the following reminiscence have been changed to preserve anonymity):

        Twenty years old, and going nowhere, right in the midst of Jimmy Carter’s Misery Index recession. To me, it actually did seem as if America’s best days were behind. So I felt lucky to have a job at all, and a union job no less.
        The Morgan Paper Company in a near Chicago suburb should not have been such a bad place to work for a little while, until something better came up. But in the warehouse, running the paper cutters and packing shipments, they didn’t need to hire the best caliber of people: no skills to offer, little or no education, prone to vices, bad grammar and profanity. I couldn’t believe that this was my lot in life, but sometimes it’s easier to stay than to go, especially when going meant stepping off into the unknown without a paddle.
        In fact, I helped my friend Cliff get a job at Morgan when the recession was at its worst. I think he was grateful; it was a job after all. So every day, Cliff would walk over to my paper cutting machine to visit for a few minutes before starting work. He liked routine, and I could count on these leisurely morning visits like clockwork.
        But this day, his demeanor was anything but relaxed. I saw Cliff quickly walking down the dirty warehouse aisle between stacks of wooden pallets filled with paper, and he looked nervous and agitated.
        “I hate that old man!” said Cliff.
        “What happened?” I asked.
        “I ask him for the keys to the forklift; he looks at me, spits on the floor, and walks away. And I’m standin’ there lookin’ down at a mass of mucus and spit!”
        “Yeah, he’s an ass, I’ll give you that,” I replied. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you never ask Oliver for anything?” At that, Cliff just threw his arms into the air and stalked off, shouting obscenities.
        Before starting up the paper cutter, I thought another cup of coffee was in order. And for some reason on that particular day, I noticed that the wall and floor around the coffee maker were looking pretty bad. And that’s because before filling up with fresh coffee, certain people would empty whatever coffee was left in their cups onto the floor or against the wall. This really was barbaric. But I must admit that it was learned behavior, and I sometimes did it too. It gave a little sense of freedom and power over The Man. Could it be that these guys I worked with were rubbing off on me?
        As I took my first sip of coffee, I saw out the corner of my eye that my helper, Howard, had finally decided to show up for work, a few minutes late as usual. Howard was a little slow, not quite all there, as we used to say. But he was a hard worker; and, as far as I could tell, he didn’t show up drunk or high like some of the other workers. So most of us in the shop tried to cut him some slack—all except Oliver, of course...the jerk.
        “Guess what I got here,” Howard said as he held out his rolled up fist.
        Oh man, I thought, this has got to be disgusting. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. No, I was sure I didn’t want to know.
        “We better get started, Howard,” I said. “Lots to do today.”
        At which point he began laughing manically, like the lunatic I knew him to be. Howard was probably ten years older than I was, and I think he thought of me as a naïve kid. But because I was his boss, he usually did what I told him to do.
        So I flipped the toggle switch that turned on the cutting machine; and as it came to life, I remember asking myself: Whatever happened to that smart grade school kid who was always at the head of his class and on all the honor rolls? How did he end up in here with this crowd? Then I recalled the feeling of freedom experienced on a recent motorcycle trip to the Mississippi River, which made the idea of leaving suddenly seem easier than staying. And it wasn’t too long before I did just that: off to college and I never looked back.

 

        And so, at that intersection, I took a different road, and life deposited me on the Illinois River bluffs for a time, and now Macomb. I expect it will be some time yet before I fully adjust to my new surroundings, still feeling tied to the Illinois River valley as a center of gravity. But one day recently, with heavy rain pounding down everything in sight, I sat dry in my new home, recalling the previous owners’ comments about slight seepage in the basement and maybe a leak on the sun porch roof, when I thought about little Killjordan Creek, just down the hill at Compton Park, wondering how it might handle all the extra water. Much of its headwaters are small ditches within the city of Macomb. So when the rain stopped, I took a little hike. And true to expectations, Killjordan Creek flowed high and mighty. There was a lot of water running off the land. To where? And then I recalled that this creek flows into another small stream called Troublesome Creek, which itself connects with the La Moine River about fourteen miles to the southwest. The La Moine River then empties into the Illinois River about thirty-three miles to the southeast.

 

        Killjordan Creek at Compton Park, Macomb.

        I suspect that for most visitors to Compton Park, Killjordan Creek is simply an aesthetic highlight within an attractive, manicured urban park setting, the Walker Street water tower barely in view through the treetops. For me, however, the creek provides a necessary and important link to the Illinois River valley, with its wildlife, wilderness, and yearly flood cycles. Since the sights and sounds of town now dominate day-to-day life, I would struggle a bit without such a connection.

 

References

Krohe, J., Jr. 2005. The La Moine River Basin: an inventory of the region’s resources. Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Springfield, Illinois.

McClain, W.E. 2006. Mysteries of the trail-marker trees. The Illinois Steward 15 (2): 19-22

Accordion Boy

 

By Thomas V. Lerczak

 

[Author's preface:  I first began making notes for this essay over twelve years ago in preparation for being interviewed at Dickson Mounds Museum, Lewistown, Illinois, as part of a series of programs the museum planned on American roots music (e.g., folk, mountain, blues, zydeco).  Up to that point, I had never thought that playing the accordion was much out of the ordinary or that anyone other than my mother would be interested in reading about it; but after seeing the videotape of the interview, which was part of the Smithsonian’s “New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music” traveling exhibit, I realized that placing my accordion experiences into the larger context of history and personal growth could result in a unique and interesting story.  I hope that I have been successful in accomplishing that.  The following essay, first published in Sobatka Literary Magazine (Issue #8), is the result.]

    

The steady breeze that blew in from the west did little to relieve the afternoon’s heat and humidity. And so only one week into my retirement at age 60, I remained inside our air-conditioned bluff top cabin, playing one song after another on my guitar, gazing out across the backwaters and forests of the three-mile-wide Illinois River valley. The songs came easily from deep within as my right hand hammered out rhythms and tunes, and with only a small effort I recalled each song’s lyrics and their meanings while simultaneously thinking about the past, the idyllic scene in view, and what the future might hold. At times like this I have found it to be absolutely true that while playing a musical instrument, the mind enters a highly enhanced state of functioning and awareness on many levels. When I finished Martha Scanlan’s song “Little Bird of Heaven” with its final line “There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand,” I paused for a moment: Yes, there is, I thought, and how fortunate I have been to have music as such an integral part of my life, listening as well as playing.
        My maternal grandfather was the musician in our family. And his instrument of choice was the button accordion, a highly ornate, old-time instrument in the shape of a box that looked like it came straight out of the Middle Ages. There were sets of keys or buttons for the left and right hands to press with bellows in between. Moving the bellows in and out forced air through internal reeds which created the sounds. I don’t recall that my grandfather could read music; in fact, I believe that he played strictly “by ear,” meaning that the tunes were in his head, and he simply “knew” which buttons to press at the proper times. The right hand played the melody, while the left played the rhythm or bass which sounded like “oom pah pah, oom pah pah” for ¾ walzes, and “oom pah, oom pah” in 4/4 time. As a small boy, I thought he was a genius, and I longed for the day when I would be old enough to play a musical instrument.

 

Author's grandfather Vincent Zelizko on the button accordion, mid-1960s.

        Riding a great wave of European immigration to the United States following World War I, both my maternal grandparents came to the United States in 1922 from a part of Czechoslovakia called Bohemia. They brought along few material possessions from the “Old Country,” as they referred to Europe, but in their minds they carried the cultural richness of the home country in the form of secret food recipes, language, stories, and music. Like other European immigrants, my grandparents sought out folks like themselves who spoke their native language, much like anyone would do if transported to a strange foreign land. And with so many immigrants from different countries doing the same, major parts of large cities, like Chicago where they eventually settled, became composed of neighborhoods defined by ethnic origin or race. In these neighborhoods, the home cultures survived in reality, not just memory. In “Little Bohemia,” not surprisingly, the button accordion was king.
        Finally in 1966, at eight years of age, I was deemed old enough for music lessons. The Chicago Park District’s Lawndale Park offered lessons for several types of instruments, but my parents never really thought seriously about anything other than the accordion. I, however, was more open-minded. With The Beatles at the top of the music charts, I remember thinking that maybe guitar lessons were the way to go; my grandfather, though, scoffed at that idea; and the sad fact was that all of the guitar classes were full. But the accordion class had plenty of room for more students, and, besides this, I was assured by my grandfather that “The accordion player always gets the girls.” Of course, I was embarrassed by the idea of “getting girls,” but I thought if this instrument could influence females, maybe there was something to it, something even The Beatles were missing. In fact, who were George, Paul, John, and Ringo anyway compared to an accordion? So accordion lessons it was…for the next ten years.

 

The author in 1966.

Playing before a school assembly, 1966.

        Progress was a bit slow at first, though, probably because I was only a few steps behind my music teacher at the park, who could barely play. My grandfather occasionally tried to offer a little guidance, but I was learning on the more modern piano accordion (with keys for the right hand similar to a piano), which he could not play. And at my lessons I was being taught to play from written music, and discouraged from playing by ear, as this was thought to be undisciplined and merely made-up music. So my grandfather and I never really teamed up, although he did teach me the tunes of several Czech folk songs, which I continued to play without written music. Those songs, in particular, made my 67-year-old grandmother smile, even while she may also have been thinking of the times when she carried my 20-pound accordion a half mile to my school for “Show and Tell.”
        By the summer of 1967, I could read simple music and had shown at least a rudimentary ability. And so I was encouraged to enter Lawndale Park’s annual talent contest, where I would be in competition with other children who were taking music or dance lessons at the park. It was stiff competition, indeed, especially the little girl in a ballerina costume and one boy whose parents had purchased a professional accordion system for him called a Cordovox. I thought they probably spent many thousands of dollars on that equipment, which consisted of an electronic piano accordion with four suitcase-sized amplifiers that could sound like an organ. Where did he come from? I wondered. I didn’t remember seeing him at any of the accordion lessons. There was no way I would win.
        On the evening of the talent show, the park district’s auditorium was packed. The audience’s size, by my conservative estimate through the fog of 50 years, must have been at least 200. And the park district staff were highly excited by the turnout, which added to the anticipation and my anxiety of playing before a large crowd. As I stood backstage and peeked through the curtains, I could see several of my neighborhood friends, including the girl who lived across the street from me, sitting in the front row; she would soon be impressed, I thought, and be putty in my hands, although I had no idea what to do if that actually happened.
        Soon the show began. I was too nervous to pay much attention to the first several acts which quickly passed, and then it was my turn. I plugged my small accordion into the amplifier system, and with an anxious stomach waited for my introduction. After the curtain abruptly opened, I stood there ready to puke. The stage lights blinded me to all but the first few rows of the audience. In the sidelines I saw my music teacher nodding to me: Play! And so I began a song called “Juke Box Rock,” with my left hand pounding out the bass rhythm, “oom pah, oom pah, oom pah, oom pah,” which I could feel through the floor. I played with no mistakes, this song I had practiced maybe 100 times (my poor family), but it was quickly over. The audience cheered and clapped. I stood there in shock, probably with my mouth hanging open, and the curtain closed.
        A few more acts followed and then a short break ensued so the Cordovox system could be set up for the last act. When the curtains opened, it was as if we were engulfed by no less than the mighty Heavens; the kid was a deity and his Cordovox was magical; it looked like an accordion, but it sounded like a mixture of smooth organ-like sounds, deep bass notes, and haunting violins, a triumphant combination of talent and electronics. After this performance, I think there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who would win first place.
        Finally, all of the participants were called to the stage to stand together as the judges announced the winners. The kid with the Cordovox , of course, took the first place trophy. I have no recollection who won second place, but then as the third place winner was announced, everyone began looking at me, and I realized that it was my name being called. The door had opened to accordion stardom.
        But the next year saw only minor progress in my playing. I learned many new songs, but I was not learning proper technique or increasingly complex music. My music teacher admitted that he had done all he could with me, given his own limited abilities, and suggested I pursue private lessons with a professional accordion player. And so, I became a student of Tommy Kosatka in Cicero, with one-on-one meetings once per week. I played scales over and over, and learned proper fingering techniques, chords, how to play songs in different keys, and how to improvise, which to me seemed very similar to playing by ear. I learned how to read and play more complex music and how to add a personal touch to an arrangement. Mr. Kosatka challenged me to do better and not be afraid of any music, no matter how complicated; I would simply learn pages and pages of music one measure at a time over a period of weeks. I learned rock, jazz, pop, crooner ballads, and, of course, polkas. Many polkas. These lessons provided a firm foundation in musical theory with the precision of mathematics.

 

[Listen to the author playing "Night Train" on a recording made in the early 1970s 

Download Night Train TVL early 1970s.]

        While all of this was happening, though, my musical tastes were changing as I became older, especially after I entered high school. Like most kids, I listened to music on the top 40 AM pop stations in the 1960s. None of this included accordion music, except maybe as a background instrument. So I did not listen to accordion music for enjoyment or inspiration. The Lawrence Welk Show, of course, had accordion music. But Lawrence Welk was…well…Lawrence Welk. Squaresville. None of my friends watched this program; their parents did, of course. But how could parents know anything about what was good? Polkas were from the Old Country. I had entered the rebellious teenage phase of rejecting the older generation and their music.
        And while I continued to take accordion lessons, by the early 1970s I became drawn to music that had deeper meanings or stories in the lyrics. Creedence Clearwater Revival sang about the riverboat “Proud Mary” and leaving a job in the city, “working for the man every night and day.” In “Me and Bobby McGee,” Janis Joplin sang about being free, owning little, and drifting around the country, where “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I was drawn to singers like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Tom T. Hall who sang about working and living hard, and the challenges faced in everyday living. Bob Dylan’s sardonic lyrics, commentaries on society’s ills, struck many nerves. And during this time period, the world was literally about to blow up. The Cold War and thermonuclear threat were raging, with the Soviet leader shouting that his country would bury us. There was the Vietnam War, the maniacal Cultural Revolution in China, war in the Middle East, starvation in Bangladesh and Africa, the 60s assassinations, civil rights protests and riots in our cities including my hometown Chicago, air and water pollution getting worse, hippies and free love, and we were putting men on the Moon.
        Through all of this, I played the accordion, diligently learning the music Mr. Kosatka placed in front of me. But it was not long before he could tell that something was missing, and I felt that too. I was competently learning to play the notes, some very complicated songs, but I now know that what was lacking was the heart, a connection to the inner soul and life experience. Just playing the notes as written is not enough; true emotion must be a part of the playing, and that must be real, not something to be produced on demand. When I listened to recordings of my accordion playing, I could hear that something was missing, which was not so apparent when I was actually playing the music. One day when it became clear that I was unprepared for my lesson, Mr. Kosatka finally asked me: “What kind of music do you listen to? What do you want to play?” He rightly knew that the songs I listened to on my record player and on the radio were the ones I should be playing on the accordion; these songs, he hoped, would make that important personal connection to the music and put the heart into my playing. So I bought song books by Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Creedence, and others, plus assorted sheet music of songs I heard on the radio. I played “Proud Mary” and “Me and Bobby McGee” on the accordion. It kind of worked for a while, providing some new inspiration, but there was still something missing. While I played the tunes, I would hear the lyrics in my head; I needed something more than the accordion could offer, especially since in the end, they all still sounded like polkas from the Old Country. Now, a polka may be a fine piece of music, but the fact is that certain types of instruments sound best for certain types of music; one would not attempt “Stairway to Heaven,” for example, on the tuba, although the results might be amusing. I did not wish to be amusing.
        After I graduated from high school, I stopped the accordion lessons, mainly because for a couple of years, I was no longer advancing, and both the teacher and student seemed to be out of ideas. I think Mr. Kosatka knew this too, but he was not about to suggest that a paying student discontinue; if I stayed under his tutelage for the rest of my life, I think he would have been fine with that.
        In the late 1960s and 1970s a part of Chicago’s north side was at the epicenter of a folk music renaissance that produced such icons as John Prine and the late Steve Goodman, as well as the renowned Old Town School of Folk Music. As it turned out, I was able to experience the tail end of this musically rich period, especially at the same time that disco was taking over the airwaves and popular night spots; and this resulted in my musical tastes moving further from accordion music. A key factor was that in 1976, the year I turned 19, the state of Illinois, in its wisdom, lowered the drinking age for beer and wine from 21 to 19; I’m not sure of their rationale, but after only a few years, and probably a lot of DUIs, it was back again to 21. But this brief period opened up a great opportunity, and I wasted no time gathering up a few friends for some serious bar hopping. And not being familiar with any bars, I first looked at the entertainment section of the local newspaper for a place to try out my new drinking privileges. One item stood out: The Bitter Creek Newgrass Band at the Clearwater Saloon on Chicago’s Lincoln Avenue.
        From the outside the Clearwater Saloon looked a bit dingy. From the inside it appeared authentically rustic from years of hard use and benign neglect, rather than from the creative mind of a degreed interior designer; it was a comfortable atmosphere that smelled of wood and long-ago spilled beer. My kind of place. As the only customers early on a Friday evening, we had our choice of tables; so we awkwardly chose one, ordered our first pitcher of Beck’s dark beer, looked around, and waited for something to happen. Gradually over the next hour, more patrons entered along with the band, who began setting up equipment, tuning instruments, and initiating their own night of drinking. Judging from the appeal of bluegrass music in those years, I kind of expected a much older, rather conservatively dressed crowd, maybe even a family-like atmosphere, as bluegrass music tends to have a strong gospel component. But this was “newgrass,” whatever that was. By ten o’clock, the bar had a full crowd with every table occupied, and they were mostly younger folks, probably with an average age of between 25 and 30. The band itself was composed of five unpretentious long-haired characters in faded denim that looked right at home at what might be called a “dirt bar.”

 

The Clearwater Saloon, late 1970s or early 80s.

        As we moved into our third pitcher of beer, the band—with banjo, bass, two acoustic guitars, and mandolin—finally launched into its first song. When they finished, the place erupted in an explosion of applause, yelling, stomping, and whooping. I had never seen a bluegrass audience react in such a way. By the middle of the first set, folks were dancing between the tables with a couple of blue jean-clad young ladies, with long flowing hair, dancing on top of the bar between glasses and bottles. The band played more traditional bluegrass songs plus bluegrass versions of songs by Creedence, The Grateful Dead, and other contemporary country and rock artists (i.e., newgrass). I felt at home and more connected to this music than any I had ever played on the accordion, and I was reluctant to leave even as the midnight hour had long passed.

 

[Listen to a scratchy live recording made at the Clearwater Saloon in 1977 of the Bitter Creek Newgrass Band playing Creedence Clearwater Revival's song "Lodi." Download Bitter Creek at Clearwater Saloon 1977]

 
        My friends and I returned often to the Clearwater Saloon. But its heyday continued only for another two or three years, when it seemed the main customer base settled elsewhere and the somewhat rickety building itself seemed to be about played out. In a few years, its doors would close for the last time.
        I have never experienced another establishment quite like the Clearwater Saloon, where the audience was truly in sync with the live music. I think those years may have been an example of a short-lived, unique convergence of social and cultural trends that can never be deliberately duplicated. Were it not for the brief change in the legal drinking age, I may have missed it completely. It was great fun, but also educational as it opened my mind to new styles of playing familiar tunes as my musical tastes continued to evolve. Even so, throughout all of this, I was faithful in maintaining my accordion-playing skills, but less and less as the years went by. I eventually attended a university in southern Illinois, and I took my accordion with me. And it was with me still when I later moved near the Illinois River and began working as a natural resources manager.
        One day, a friend down the road, at his home along the river bluffs, held a yard party. Several of his friends played guitar and one was very good on the harmonica. With the river valley as a backdrop, they sang as the sun set beyond the western river bluffs, then under starry skies, and well into the early morning. Their songs included many of my favorites from Dylan and Creedence. I could not help being reminded of certain rowdy evenings at the Clearwater Saloon, nearly two decades in the past. Their playing was straightforward and loose, the kind of playing one learned by ear or made up on the spot with a few lyrics and simple chords. They had fun, and I had fun listening. And I thought, yes, I could do this too. The next day, I unpacked a guitar which I had acquired a decade before but never learned to play. Determined not to give up, I would play the guitar at least as well as I could play the accordion, maybe even better.
        At first I was a bit daunted. Holding down strings with my left hand to make the chords was a painful process until my fingertips toughened up. And I discovered that a stringed instrument requires a gentler touch and more subtle movements than an accordion’s keys, buttons, and bellows. The slightest shift in position or touch on the strings in one direction or another can produce vastly different sounds and effects. And while music theory is the same for any instrument, as in the order of notes and chord patterns, the relationship between player and instrument could not be more different. I also had never sung before and did not even feel that I had a decent singing voice, let alone learning a song’s lyrics and meshing those lyrics with a tune and timing the guitar’s rhythms. But then singers such as Dylan, Kristofferson, and John Prine showed that having a melodious singing voice was not necessarily a requirement. (Of course, it is possible to sing along with an accordion, but I decided not to go there.)
        Quality of voice notwithstanding, singing was one of the missing pieces, because the lyrics were important; with the lyrics came the stories and the emotions tied to those stories. To memorize a set of lyrics, I had to think about what they meant, and those with personal meanings were the easiest to learn. For most songs, I may not have lived the stories, but by relating them to my life in a realistic way, I could make the words flow without much effort, each verse logically following another as the stories unfolded. Unlike playing the accordion, it was not necessary to imagine the lyrics. With the guitar, all of the pieces were there, the physical act of playing and the emotional or intellectual part, the meaning and deep truth behind the songs; as when I’m singing Woody Guthrie’s songs of the dust bowl era in the 1930s, I imagine walking down a dirt road in Oklahoma among grassland covered hills, billowy clouds overhead, dry winds blowing through my hair. Each song is its own journey.
        For the last twenty years, then, the guitar has become my instrument of choice. And so, what has become of the accordion boy? After a few years of exclusively playing the guitar, I actually started to miss the keyboard. So I obtained an electronic keyboard that can duplicate the sounds of many musical instruments including drums; in fact, it can put the old 1960s Cordovox to shame. I usually play it in the grand piano mode, where my accordion skills easily transfer. The accordion, I rarely unpack. But as it turns out, my wife has always loved the accordion and polkas. Soon after we met, both in our 40s, she became overjoyed to learn that I was an accordion player. I think it even helped solidify our relationship. So only for her, the girl that I finally “got,” I will, on occasion, play the “Baby Doll Polka,” written in 1954 by Eddie Korosa, a button accordion player personally known to my grandfather. And to my surprise, so many years after I had first learned the tune, I discovered that the simple lyrics actually do resonate as a deep, yet simple, truth.

        You are my Baby Doll

        You are my Baby Doll

        You are my Baby Doll

        You’re my darling now.

        Don’t leave me Baby Doll

        Don’t leave me Baby Doll

        Don’t leave me Baby Doll

        You’re my sweetheart now.

 

 

 

[Download a PDF file of "Accordion Boy" here:  Download Accordion Boy for Kindle.]

 

 

 

 

Mississippi River Full Circle

"In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions."—from Riding the Iron Rooster, by Paul Theroux

It was May 8, 2018, and after nearly 22 years as a natural areas preservation specialist, my last public meeting with the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission (Commission) was behind me. It was a bittersweet moment when my vehicle left the indoor parking lot at the DeSoto House Hotel, the meeting’s location, and with a sense of finality I slowly turned onto Galena’s historic Main Street. With retirement less than two months away, I, of course, eagerly looked forward; but I also thought quite a bit about the decisions and chance occurrences that brought me to that point. And so, ever since I was aware that my last Commission meeting would be in northwestern Illinois, I planned a visit to Mississippi Palisades State Park, along the Mississippi River, a location with deep personal meaning going back four decades.
        I had been out of high school for three years, first knocking around for two years as a stock man at Jack’s Shoe Center in Cicero, moving around, in a never ending stream, thousands of shoe boxes from delivery trucks to shelves, and from one set of shelves to other shelves, as the sales staff gradually moved the shoes out with customers. Not much more can be said about that experience, except that I learned to be diligent and to view time as measured in money and work. When the novelty of that low-paying job wore off (some nights I even dreamed of moving shoe boxes), I found a different job, again requiring few skills, at Sabin Robbins Paper Company running a noisy, dirty paper sheeting machine. And to have accomplished that simple move I felt lucky, because it was the middle of the 1970s, a time seemingly not of great opportunities, but one of high unemployment; recession; Watergate; Vietnam fatigue; good-paying manufacturing jobs on the way out, flipping burgers and frying fries on the way in; gas lines; and the Misery Index of the Jimmy Carter presidency, with his message that America’s best days were behind us.
        So despite having a bit more money in my pocket, I remember being quite depressed; I still lived at home in my parents’ attic and most weekday evenings wasted away my mind on inane television programs, and then returned to work the following day for more dullness, dirt, and noise. The pattern of my life seemed laid out before me in the older middle-aged men working beside me at the paper company: 30-year mortgages for a matchbox-sized home and lot, hearing loss, back pain, job-related injury, retirement. Done. Like young men throughout the ages, I asked myself if there was not more to life. Where was there meaning in this uninspiring routine followed by so many? If there were answers to be found somewhere, I could not find them, but I did know that a new motorcycle would not hurt, and might actually help matters, at least for a while.
        With summer and a one-week vacation from work, I hit the road on my new 750K Honda, carrying along only a small bag of belongings strapped to the back seat, plus a vague notion that the further from Chicago I traveled, the better, less hurried, and less crowded the land would become, and the more wild and pristine everything would be. Distance equaled answers; and I instinctively felt that being in the outdoors surrounded by nature was where I would find contentment.
        And so I chose Mississippi Palisades State Park as my destination because it was at the far northwest corner of the state. I would find out what a palisade was when I got there.
        When I entered the Driftless Area of northwestern Illinois (that is, an area missed by the land-flattening Pleistocene Ice Age glaciers) the hills seemed truly mountainous, and I felt to be very far from home, though it was only about 150 miles. My life experiences so far had been mostly on tabletop flat lands. When the highway suddenly dropped in elevation from the rugged uplands to the flat bottomlands, I saw the upper Mississippi River for the first time: a wide expanse of greenish-gray turbid water, floating leaves of vegetation in the backwaters, forested islands and banks; all wild. But I was later most impressed from the cliff tops of the state park. With a lazy turkey vulture soaring by at eye level and the late afternoon sun in my eyes, the full Mississippi River valley before me, I felt, reality to the contrary, that I was gazing upon a pathless wilderness, with Chicago left far behind in a different world; this was a theme I would return to many times throughout my life of travels, though mostly with disappointment.

 

Mississippi River Valley from Mississippi Palisades State Park, 1978 

        At that moment, I wanted to drop everything and hike those forests, canoe the channels and bays, get lost in the wilderness, and forget completely about living in a Berwyn bungalow and being strangled by my life of no direction. Here was something better than I had ever imagined. I knew, though, that I was unprepared for such journeys, and embarking unprepared on an aimless trek through the “wilderness” would have been folly. So I made a mental note to return one day; it was clear that I first needed to escape the quicksand of the lifestyle I was being pulled down into with each passing year.

                                             * * *
        Given my urban upbringing, my childhood perspective was that everything around me was manmade or put there by someone. Because my little world consisted mostly of buildings, streets, sidewalks, lawns, and neatly planted front yard trees, all carefully placed and domesticated, that view was really not very far from the truth. I can even remember being on the shores of Lake Michigan, with Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers and busy Lake Shore Drive in the background, wondering where all of the sand came from to make the beach. The idea of an area not made by and under the control of mankind was not part of my worldview.
        But on one school field trip, probably in the third or fourth grade, we visited the Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center in the Cook County Forest Preserves. I remember seeing prairie grass for the first time; it towered over me, and the teacher said that much of Illinois was once covered in prairies of these tall grasses. From my experience, grass was supposed to be all green and no more than about three inches tall; this tall prairie grass seemed out of place in the modern world. About the same time, I recall learning that massive glaciers once scoured the surface of Illinois and flattened the landscape on the very ground on which Chicago was built. And I thought if that ice ever returned, we would be in big trouble. Illinois had clearly once been a very different and wild place, probably quite threatening and unpredictable. The thought was a bit frightening, but there was comfort in the fact that that dangerous past was long dead and gone. There was also some sadness in the thought.
        These early experiences made lasting impressions, which remain vividly clear. Also clear is the recollection of my first encounter with an Illinois Nature Preserve. On one of my increasingly frequent visits to Cook County’s Palos Hills Forest Preserves in the 1980s, I noticed a trail head just off the highway and a large sign that said the area was called Cap Sauers Holding. There was also a small triangle sign with an image of a cardinal perched on an oak leaf which signified that the site was an Illinois Nature Preserve; in fact, it stated that “Everything is Protected by Law.” Clearly there was something special about this site. With everything protected by law, I wondered whether I would be in violation of the law just by entering. I went for my hike, nevertheless, and was relieved not to see a police car waiting for me upon my return.

 

        A few years later, just after I had moved to Edwardsville, Illinois, to attend the university, one of my first priorities was to find local public lands to hike in the woods. One day, driving west of town, I saw one of those triangle Illinois Nature Preserve signs and I quickly pulled off the highway. A larger sign said the site was called the William and Emma Bohm Memorial Nature Preserve (11 acres) and that it protected a remnant old-growth forest. This I wanted to see. I was used to reading about old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and I was becoming fascinated by the idea of wilderness from reading books by John Muir and Sigurd Olsen. But in Illinois? The sign also stated that the site was privately owned and permission was necessary to enter. So I drove on, and made a mental note to find out more about these Illinois Nature Preserves.
        What I soon discovered that impressed me the most, and took me back to my first prairie grass encounter, was that Illinois Nature Preserves are, in fact, remnants of the original Illinois landscape. They were not planted; they were in place long before Illinois was settled by Americans of European descent, and they are natural areas (original prairies, virgin forests, wetlands) of what remain from that time. My youthful perception that all of Illinois had long been manipulated and re-worked by someone at some time was wrong. The Illinois Natural Areas Preservation Act of 1963, which established the Illinois Nature Preserve System, refers to such natural lands as “living museums of the native landscape wherein one may envision and experience primeval conditions in a wilderness-like environment.” And it was that aspect, the “wilderness-like environment,” that I was most drawn to.
        In this regard, Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve (1,515 acres), far from any major road in rural Mason County, immediately comes to mind. On my first visit in the early 1990s—several years before I began working for the Commission to protect and manage sites within the Illinois Nature Preserves System—given its name, I was surprised to find such a heavily forested site. In the large prairie that I expected, I would be able to see where I was going, but in a forest without trails, I was a bit intimidated, and so I brought along a compass. Carefully entering the woods on a warm July day, I proceeded westward. The preserve measures one mile from east to west and about two and a half miles from north to south; so I planned to walk about a half mile west and then turn northwest to see what I could find. Very quickly, the small parking lot with my vehicle was obscured by trees; all I could see in any direction were more trees. But a short distance ahead I soon noticed some prairie vegetation; it was a small opening in the woods, with enough light to support a little bluestem-sand lovegrass community. The gnarled blackjack oaks, prickly pear cactus, and open sand gave it a desert-like feel. I earlier read that during the waning days of the last ice age as the climate warmed, the sand now in Mason County had been brought down the Illinois River valley in glacial melt waters and then blown by prevailing winds into upland sand dunes. The quiet was almost overpowering. I continued walking slowly westward while the narrow prairie opening gradually became a bit wider, but then it ended abruptly in a wall of forest. Here I turned to the northwest and soon noticed a larger opening ahead through the trees. I thought this must be the western boundary of the nature preserve and I expected to see boundary signs or a road. But no; this was an even larger prairie opening with large, widely scattered, black oak trees: I was looking at a remnant sand prairie and savanna, one of those rare, hidden pieces of the original Illinois landscape. I climbed about half way up the slope of a small rise, took a seat among the prairie grasses and wildflowers, and remained still. The only sounds were of insects, the gentle breeze, and a singing eastern towhee.

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, 1992

 

        After I began working for the Commission, my relationship with Illinois Nature Preserves soon became serious, matter of fact, and in certain ways routine. A typical day might have included writing a comprehensive site management plan, talking to a private nature preserve owner worried about an encroaching neighbor, studying scientific research articles, investigating a lead on a prospective new nature preserve, pounding steel posts into the ground and attaching nature preserve boundary signs, answering numerous e-mails and phone messages that arrived while I was in the field, and a surprising amount of time in front of a computer.
        One result from being so wrapped up in day-to-day responsibilities and occasional crises, mesmerized by the computer’s glow, was that I sometimes needed to break through the bureaucratic walls and remind myself of my original inspirations. And in doing so I would eventually recall the 1978 motorcycle trip to the Mississippi River bluffs. At the time, I must have sensed that the pathways through life that I was seeking were somehow directly in front of me; the experience, in fact, allowed me to ponder my situation, something I rarely did in those days. Ready for change, by the fall of that year I was enrolled at the local community college taking night classes, trying to make up for lost time. I remember feeling like a different person than I had been only months before: happier, more focused, more alive, more in control of my life than ever before, working hard every evening and weekend to steer my life in a new direction. And I soon learned that answers would not miraculously appear because one stares out over a river valley.

                                             * * *
        A few weeks before retiring, I was leading a volunteer workday at a protected natural area in Tazewell County, where the crew consisted of ten female inmates from the local prison. It was a pleasant, breezy spring day, with clear skies, billowy white clouds and cool air, the new spring vegetation expressing every shade of green. The nearby creek reflected the forest and sky from its clear waters. Sounds of migrating songbirds filled the air. It was a good day to be outside. Every once in a while I heard one of the women utter the words “sweet freedom,” and several others would agree. It made me realize how special this day was to each of them and how different their lives were from mine.
        Near the creek, I directed the group to spread out over a five-acre area to control invasive plants, pulling garlic mustard and seedling bush honeysuckle by hand and using tree wrenches to pull the larger honeysuckle shrubs right from the ground. Most stayed close together, but several of the women moved off, clearly preferring to work alone. I caught snippets of conversation, and could easily identify the dominant individuals, although everyone seemed to get along, joking, laughing, and cheering when large honeysuckle shrubs were successfully pulled. I told them it was a good way to work off frustrations. So once I was sure everyone knew what to do, I spent some time walking over the area, looking for results of the previous year’s work.
        It was during this time away from the main group that I came upon one of the women further down the creek, looking out over the swiftly flowing water, seemingly in a daydream-like state. She was one of the “leaders,” a hardened, tough, no-nonsense individual, with a serious look. When she saw me, she looked up, and in a soft voice said, “Such beauty, so beautiful.” “Yes it is,” I replied. And then she told me how as a child, she and her friends played in a similar stream near their home on hot summer days. I excitedly pointed to a group of minnows swimming against the current in the clear water over a sand-gravel bottom, the small fish shining in the dappled sunlight. “So beautiful,” she whispered. I left the conversation there and walked away, wishing to intrude no longer. She may have been thinking of her childhood home, but I was pretty sure she was also thinking about the dark hell that she would return to in a short time. And, I wondered, was it too fanciful a notion to think that staring off into a creek for a few moments could provide the inspiration that would set a person’s life on a different trajectory?

 

View from Mississippi Palisades State Park, 2018

 

[To download a pdf file of this essay, click Download Mississippi River Full Circle ]

 

 

Edward Abbey and The Fool’s Progress: A Personal Thirty-year Assessment

        I first read the novel The Fool’s Progress (1988; Henry Holt and Company, New York; 485 pages) in 1988. By that time I had already read many of Edward Abbey’s other writings, and I was drawn to his humor, irreverence, and sharp, concise evaluations of issues and situations—particularly his take on our modern industrialized society and its effects on the environment. The book’s main character, Henry Holyoak Lightcap, is based on Abbey himself; although, being fiction, there are major differences.

        Lightcap is a middle-aged man dying of cancer (Abbey died in 1989 from internal bleeding) who travels from the Southwest, where he spent most of his adult life, to his boyhood home in West Virginia. Along the way, he recalls his life in flashbacks, the highs and lows, and airs his opinions and philosophies of life. He is a man, like Abbey, who lived an unconventional life full of troubles with alcohol, bad decisions, poor behavior, and several failed marriages. Many of the stories in the book are based on what Abbey actually did, judging from his nonfiction and posthumous biographies. So in many ways, the loosely semi-autobiographical The Fool’s Progress is a culmination of Abbey’s best fiction and non-fiction writing.
        In 1988, I was in the midst of reading works by many of the major environmental and nature-oriented writers such as John Muir, Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Sigurd Olsen, and more. I was a subscriber to Sierra magazine and belonged to most of the mainstream environmental groups. Living in Chicago’s expanding suburban area, with daily losses of natural habitats, I was ripe for Abbey’s polemical writings. I was also drawn to his writings because he eloquently expressed ideas that were vaguely floating around in my head. On the surface, he seemed to be someone I could listen to for inspiration, at least as far as his views on nature and living a simple, meaningful life. I did not see myself in a conventional suburban situation working an uninspiring nine-to-five job with only two weeks of vacation a year for the next forty years. Abbey’s writings showed how at least one man managed an alternative—if he was being honest.
        After first completing The Fool’s Progress, subtitled “An Honest Novel,” I thought it was the best fictional book I had ever read. I felt as if I personally knew the Lightcap character, although I found it difficult not to view him as Abbey, albeit in fictional form. I savored every word of this book.  These days, my view of The Fool’s Progress must be taken in the context of thirty additional years of living and voracious reading, a formal education in environmental science and ecology, and my professional experiences in the natural resources field (I fully acknowledge that Abbey’s writings were part of the motivation for entering this area of work). In fact, I think it is my scientific training toward objective analysis and digging deep for answers that helped me to view all of Abbey’s writings from a less fanciful viewpoint. And over the last thirty years I have traveled to or lived near many of the real places Lightcap passes through on his fictional journey. Also, there are many ecological references in The Fool’s Progress that I would not have fully appreciated the first time reading the book. So the details of the book came to life much more on the recent read than previously. In addition, as I became older, I have gradually become more politically aware. Much to my surprise, I eventually realized that many, if not most, of my attitudes would fall on the conservative side of the political spectrum; while the stances of environmental groups, in general, fall on the other side. As a consequence, I have long parted ways from such groups. And I never really had much use for radical environmentalism (e.g., Earth First!), which Abbey pioneered and where he probably remains an icon. It is because of the changes that I have gone through over the years that I was not sure how much I would like The Fool’s Progress on this latest read.
        However, following my recent reading of The Fool’s Progress, I still believe it is a great book, deep, and very much a literary novel; it also maintains a strong plot that pulls the reader forward. I am still drawn to the main character, but not as someone I would listen to, learn from, or emulate in any way; in fact, one of Lightcap’s outstanding characteristics is his hypocrisy. Lightcap, like Abbey, complains about modern western society as he reaps its benefits. He longs for a return to a simpler, agrarian time when people lived closer to the land, but forgets to mention the hardships of those times, for example, when a toothache could easily turn deadly. He speaks of following a lifestyle of “voluntary simplicity.” But I ask, what does it take to manufacture his six-pack of beer that he routinely drinks while driving and his truck plus the fuel to power it along an asphalt highway so that he can throw his empty beer cans out the window (Lightcap does this in the novel, but Abbey actually did this). How much of modern, industrialized society is necessary so that such items and everything else that he takes advantage of can be designed, produced, and made easily available? He advocates for rugged individualism and the rights of a free person, but seems oblivious to how his actions affect others, especially in his relationships with women. He complains about human overpopulation, but seems to be fine with his own person. His hypocrisy and self-contradictions, in fact, are much more obvious to me today than thirty years ago.
        Yet my final assessment of The Fool’s Progress is that it is well worth another read at some point. After the first time through, I had planned to return to the book after I turned 60, about the age of Abbey when he completed it. With that now accomplished, I probably should wait at least another thirty years for a third read, and then make a final re-assessment.

 

References

Abbey, E. 1988. The fool’s progress. Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Calahan, J.M. 2001. Edward Abbey: a life. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Loeffler, J. 2002. Adventures with Ed: a portrait of Abbey. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Hepworth, J.R and G. McNamee, editors. 1996. Resist much obey little: remembering Ed Abbey. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

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.

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.