The River Landing

The July Transition

“Seasons turn and bring the change, the shifting of the weather vane”—from the song The Breath Between by David Francey

 

On the prairies, big bluestem panicles have emerged.  Corn tassels have grown out and, later each afternoon, cicadas call.  Swallows gather into flocks and perch on utility wires along country roads.  These are some of the signs I look for every July, of summertime passing, even as the longest day of the year remains a fresh memory.

          As I opened the entrance to our cabin’s driveway, I heard a distant dickcissel calling; and across the road, barn swallows and American goldfiches flew over a prairie planting with blooming gray-headed coneflowers and bee balm.  Through the trees, I saw Quiver Lake; during a typical July, I would expect low water with dispersing herons, egrets, and migrating shorebirds on the mud flats, which in some years can be quite extensive.  But recent heavy rains throughout the watershed have caused the Illinois River to rise, flooding over backwaters connected to the river.

 

Quiver Lake with a green ash struggling to survive against

flooding, drought, wind damage, and the emerald ash borer.

 

          Songs of breeding birds were less apparent than earlier in the month, but as I stood on the bluff edge overlooking the river valley, a tufted titmouse’s song drew my attention, and for a short while I listened to a yellow-throated vireo until the bird went silent.  From the direction of the lake, I heard red-headed woodpeckers calling and growling at each other, and down below, flood waters surrounded the bases of green ash, black willow, and silver maple trees that stood close to the lake’s normal shoreline.  My first thought was that it would be easy to launch my new canoe, chained to a tree above the historic high-water line.  The adventuresome part of me said to seize the moment; but the old man inside countered with:  It’s already a hot, humid day, destined to become hotter and probably too windy for canoeing.  Another time, I thought; but a person cannot say that too often until another time is out of reach.

          When I climbed down the bluff, I saw that grape vines had grown over most of the driftwood left over from previous floods.  Vines and flood debris, including large snags, would completely cover our lakefront if I did not clear things away every so often; this year I had been negligent.  There was plenty of work, which would have to wait for a cooler day; but the vines were winning.  Then I determined through careful consideration that reading a book in the shade while being cooled by slight breezes off the lake was the best option.  Or staring off into the distance, watching weather develop as clouds take shape, change, dissipate, or gather into isolated summer storms. 

          Reading a novel might be looked upon as a form of escapism, but in doing so, I try not to lose awareness of my surroundings, even slight movements, sounds, and subtle details.  Earlier in the month, while lost in the meld of mind and book, when the lake level was lower and slowly heading downward, I saw in my peripheral vision a soft-shelled turtle surface twenty or thirty feet beyond the shoreline seeps; great egrets walked in shallow waters on the other side of the lake stalking fish, and as I watched the egrets, a Caspian tern, the first of the summer, dove several times into the water for a fish before flying toward nearby Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  About a week before, I was surrounded by thousands of mayflies in the air, and then I saw others clinging to every piece of vegetation along the lakeshore.  As I passed by, most would take flight at once, many landing on me; and even when I sat calmly against a large tree, they were drawn to me; so, annoyed, I left the beach area for another day.

 

            Mayflies on grape vines at Quiver Lake.

 

          On this latest visit, though, I saw no mayflies or remnants of mayflies.  But there were new piles of flood debris and stranded duckweed in rows parallel to the shoreline, giving evidence of how high flood waters had only recently been; some of the wood had been broken up into small pieces by previous wave action, looking very much like mulch one would buy at a garden center.  The entrepreneur in me wondered if it would be possible to gather up this free “river mulch” and sell it at a 100% profit:  natural and organic, healthy and chemical free.  So the idea is out there now, for anyone with the initiative.

          As I walked along thinking about river mulch, a spotted sandpiper called and took flight from a nearby partially sunken tree branch.  When the bird flew away from shore, wings beating in their typical vibrating manner, it was joined by another of the same species, possibly a breeding pair that could have been nesting nearby.  Then a killdeer called and flew from the bluff side of the lake toward open water and downriver out of sight, searching for open ground for foraging, with or without mud flats.

          Later I heard a calling eastern kingbird and saw it perched on an ash tree’s dead branch; the large branch extended over the water, and every once in a while, the kingbird left its perch and flew over the lake to catch a flying insect high above, and then return to the same tree.  I recalled earlier seeing a red-headed woodpecker performing a similar flycatching maneuver, but in a more awkward manner than the kingbird, flying after an insect one way and then another way and then another before making its catch.  I’ve always thought it strange for a woodpecker to engage in such an activity, which the species does not appear well suited for.  As I contemplated returning to the cabin, two great egrets flew over the flooded willow forest just beyond the other side of the lake; they were heading toward the wildlife refuge and would be searching for shallower waters.

          Conditions along the river and its floodplain are always changing, and that is what makes them interesting, even as the yearly cycle is predictable in a general sense.  So I look forward to the coming mud flats over the rest of summer and shorebirds from the Arctic, along with migrating osprey before too long, and then higher water levels in the fall with the waterfowl migration.  Autumn colors, bare trees, and then snow and the shortest day. 

          The years go by as they will, lengthening daylight for half of the year, progressively shorter daylight the other half, with time moving faster as I age.  And although those shorter days begin after the summer solstice in June, it’s not until the middle of July that I truly sense the transition.

 

Quiver Lake seeps exposed as lake levels drop with the Illinois River, August 10, 2024.

 

Quiver Lake on August 18, 2024 with great egrets foraging in the 

shallow lake waters (a sweep of the binoculars from north to south

yielded 47 great egrets).

 

So Many Days Like This

Morning eyes opened when ready, mind recalling a dissipating dream state:  sometimes a scene from a social gathering, a composite of many such real scenes, former work colleagues from different times all in the same dream space.  Unfinished business?  Unresolved issues?  Or no meaning whatsoever.

        Window blinds opened for a sense of the day’s weather.  Wash up and climb down the stairs.  Coffee outside on the deck for a while to feel the morning breezes; listen to the neighborhood sounds of people beginning their days; take note of the late spring bird community, the reliable members as they appear on the scene:  house sparrow, house wren, Carolina wren, house finch, American goldfinch, northern cardinal, American robin, American crow, blue jay, European starling, common grackle, mourning dove, chimney swift, ruby-throated hummingbird, gray catbird, chipping sparrow, brown-headed cowbird, eastern phoebe, eastern wood-pewee, great crested flycatcher, turkey vulture, Cooper’s hawk, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch, black-capped chickadee, cedar waxwing.

        Breakfast.  Could be scrambled eggs, Cream of Wheat, polenta, grits, bagel and a banana, cereal, or oat meal.  My wife and I share our dreams.  Later, upstairs with the acoustic guitar:  “Born in Chicago,” “How Lucky,” “Brand New Good Old Days,” “It Sure Can Get Cold in Des Moines,” “Good To Be,” “Little Bird in Heaven,” “Monday Morning Blues.”

        Before the day is hot, bicycle the usual route at Compton Park along Killjordan Creek; through the northeast part of town, where, before the civil rights era, Black residents of Macomb were once restricted to make their homes; down Dr. C.T. Vivian Way and Randolph Street; through Chandler Park, the town square, and back home.

        The last morning hour: read, check e-mail, and back to reading.

        Lunchtime sandwiches online from Jimmy John’s and out to Argyle Lake State Park to a specific picnic table.  Over the lake, we’ll look for a belted kingfisher, red-shouldered hawk, bald eagle, great blue heron, green heron, or northern rough-winged swallow.  We’ll follow the park road, through dense forests and ravines, around the lake, then county highways through an intensively farmed landscape to Lakeview Nature Area and our honeybee hive.

         Back home.  More reading, maybe some writing:  an essay for the blog, short story, or the novel-in-progress.  Read until consciousness begins to fade in a natural way; eyes heavy, heavier…and out for around thirty minutes or more.

         Awaken at some point for weight training and exercise with music for the better part of an hour; these days it might be Stillhouse Junkies, Rory Block, The John Byrne Band, John Gorka, Rum Ragged, Kate Rusby, or Antje Duvekot.

         Sit out back under the beautiful Bradford pear tree before dinner.  Gray squirrels crossing over the yard on electric wires; a bullfrog in the pond; busy adult birds feeding young; a barred owl calling; cottontail rabbits, their superfast young zooming around foraging on our costly horticultural plants.  Rabbits would be everywhere, eating everything were it not for predation, the owl’s role.  Animals must eat.  And it’s dinnertime, our day’s largest meal, followed by short episodes of an older television show, from a time when the bar on grossness and offensiveness was much higher.

         Catch up on the day’s news items:  progress toward another Moon landing, International Space Station, wars, civil strife, our porous southern border, wasting the taxpayer’s money, North Korean sabre rattling with missile launches and nuclear explosions, economic sanctions, terrorism, genocide, mass shootings, refugee camps and famine, oppression, hostage taking, criminals and lunatics in high places, COVID down but not out, bridge and road collapses, natural disasters, and the usual climate change mantra wherever it can be squeezed into a story.  Music is better:  Greg Maroney piano with cello, solo piano playlist.

         And finally, sleep again.  A full day; a full, good life.  Fortunate to be where we are, my wife and I.

 

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). 

 

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

 

As I entered our den with a handful of corn chips in a loose napkin, Julie quickly looked up, eyeing me suspiciously.  I like to snack on chips while reading, but bringing in the entire bag would give license to eating all of the chips in one sitting—probably not a healthy choice.  Hence, the handful of chips.

        “Don’t make crumbs now!” said Julie.

        “I don’t make crumbs,” I replied.

        “Well, where do all the crumbs on the floor come from?”

        “I think you might be the crumb maker.  Why do we assume it’s automatically me?”

        “There’s nothing to assume darling.  When I moved your leather recliner the other day, guess what I found underneath?  Broken corn and potato chips that had been lying there for who knows how long.”  And from there she followed with a wide-eyed look directly at the floor and then back at me.

         “Well, I guess you’ve got me on this one.”  Then, trying to salvage my dignity, I said, “But you know, sometimes you sit on the recliner.”

         “Oh, don’t even try to go there mister.”  And so, I quietly sat down with my book and chips, recalling that Julie was not the first to point out that sometimes, for whatever reason, I have a tendency to be unaware that certain of my actions may have effects on my immediate surroundings.  I take that as a sign of intelligent introspection, but I could be wrong.

         There have been similar situations.  Back in the 1990s I had a small office at the Forbes Biological Station located along Quiver Creek at the Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  During lunchtime, I enjoyed taking short walks in the woods, usually finding a nice place to sit beneath a tree.  One of my favorite walks was following the creek to where it emptied into Quiver Lake.  That was low-lying ground, though, and sometimes it could get muddy.  During one of those times, the Illinois River had just gone down from a flood, probably a day or two earlier, so the ground was soft and wet, a situation that I did not discover until my feet began to sink.  The creek bottoms not being a good place for hiking that day, I returned to the levee road and then, after a while, sadly walked back to the office.

         I was sitting at my desk staring at the computer when the director appeared at the office doorway saying, “Uh…Tom…you tracked mud all over the floor.”

         “How do you know it was me?” I defensively asked.

         “Well…the mud clods on the floor lead right to your office.”  I then looked down and saw a small pile of mud under my desk and an undeniable trail leading to where the director stood.

         “Oh…sorry,” I said.  “I’ll clean it up.”

         “Yes,” the director replied, shaking his head as he walked away.  Thinking about this, I could see that Julie knows me only too well, predicting when she saw me enter the den with chips that there was a good chance I would leave crumbs on the chair and then on the floor.  

         Back in high school, one of my friends, Jeff, was already out of school.  He worked full time and had saved enough money to buy a brand new 1975 Chevy Camaro.  Jeff was very proud of his new car.  He kept it showroom clean, and tried never to park it near another vehicle.  Of course, he wanted to show off the car to his friends, but it was obvious that he was nervous about taking it out on the busy streets of the Chicago area.  But when you’re around twenty years old, driving around town in a car full of friends is what you do.

        Jeff’s Camaro still had the “new car smell” when I was invited to be part of the group tooling around town.  “Ah, smell that new car smell,” he would say while taking in a deep breath; like the tiny bits of rubber sticking out of new tires, it was part of the magic and aura of being the first owner of a new automobile.  One doesn’t purchase a new car very often, especially at his age, so he was due this small indulgence without ridicule. 

        Probably no one knows how long the new car smell might last; but one day it is gone, and the car becomes just another used car.  But before such a development could naturally happen on its own, there was an incident.  Jeff, two others, and I had just piled back into the car, probably after eating at Burger King, when a different kind of smell hit us like a freight train.

        “What the…,” screamed Jeff.  “I smell dog shit!  Who stepped in dog shit?  Tom?” 

        “Hey, why are you looking at me?” I said in defense.

        “Okay, everybody out.  Check your shoes.”

        All four of us then frantically hopped around next to the car attempting to inspect the bottoms of our shoes.  Unfortunately, what I discovered was a dirty brown, glue-like, putty-like substance solidly embedded in between the deep treads on one of my hiking shoes.  “Okay,” I finally said with exaggerated remorse. “It’s me.”

        “I knew it!  Well, clean it off,” said Jeff.  “You’re not getting back in this car with stinking dog shit on your shoes.  And make sure you didn’t get any on the carpeting.”  Looking up at the sky, he added, “Damn!  He gets into my new car with dog shit on his shoes.”  The other guys were no less sympathetic.

        “Sorry,” I offered, “I guess that just about does it for the new car smell.”

        Getting my shoes clean was another matter.  I scrounged around and found a stick that I used to get most of it off, but getting all of it out from the grooves and corners of the shoe bottom was impossible.  To Jeff’s credit, he didn’t force me to walk home, and we stayed friends, but all the way home the car retained its new smell, and probably for some time after.  From that day forward, though, I don’t think he ever failed to ask me to check my shoes before getting into his car or home. 

        In the final analysis, I think what some might see as a person oblivious to his surroundings, I see as a person not distracted by unimportant details.  It’s related to a basic human survival strategy that has been honed over millions of years.  How else, for example, could a man within the chaos of a running herd of herbivores, on the African savannas, run a spear through a selected individual in the herd, at a vulnerable place in the body no less, and succeed in the attempt?  That same intensive focus might be applied during a timed mathematics examination, where one has to imagine the details of the problem at hand in the abstract while translating the relevant unknowns into complex equations.  How would Einstein have deduced the structure of the Universe if he had been unable to focus on his thought experiments, if he had been more concerned with not making crumbs or minutely examining the ground before taking a single step?  Now, are crumbs really that important, in a relative sense?

 

The author during a walk on the Illinois River bottomlands.
  

The Way Forward

“There’s no accounting for the inaccuracies of memory or the prognostications one can only see looking backwards.”— Jennifer Delahunty, from “Future Perfect,” an essay published in Fourth Genre, Spring 2022.

 

In my mind’s eye, as clear as what once was reality, I saw the trail winding ahead through a rough forested landscape of bluffs and ravines at Spring Lake Park north of Macomb.  For the longest time, the only wildlife was a fleeing white-tailed deer.  Where are the birds?  I had wondered.  I was there for the hike, but I also wanted to see birds, maybe catch the tail end of the fall migration.  So I slowly kept following the trail, highly attentive to my surroundings.  Still, all I heard was the wind.  But then, after a short while, as if a genie had granted a wish, I heard a faint “kluk, kluk, kluk, kluk” echoing among the trees.  A pileated woodpecker.  I knew these woods were large enough to attract this species, but they’re not common.  In the leafless forest, I was able to track down the bird by listening for its calls and searching with my binoculars.  It was about 500 feet away, climbing the side of a shagbark hickory.  Then, as if my mind-video had lost its streaming connection, the images dissipated, replaced by the actual reality and frustration of being stretched out on the living room couch, starring at the ceiling, as I paused between chapters of Paul Theroux’s novel, The Family Arsenal.

 

Pileated woodpecker (Photo credit:  Cornell Lab of Ornithology).

 

        Doctor’s orders.  I was into the second week of recovery from outpatient surgery:  lie down as much as possible during the day, no hiking, no exercise, lift nothing heavier than a gallon of milk.  I think I never realized just how incredibly delicate is the human body.  Could recovery really take four weeks?

        Outside it was all deep snow and ice; two bad January storms back to back.  My wife Julie shoveling; me watching out the window, feeling helpless as a newly hatched spring chicken.  I adjusted the headphones and listened to solo piano music, hoping to perhaps drift off to sleep and dream of better days.  And while attempting to steer my dream’s subject matter, I thought again about past encounters with pileated woodpeckers.

         I saw my first around 1980 while vacationing in a small cabin near a remote lake in northeastern Minnesota, just outside the Superior National Forest.  This was the truest wilderness I had ever seen, stretching to the U.S. border and into Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park.  At the time, I was living in the Chicago area, before I had really begun paying attention to birds; so house sparrows, rock doves, and American robins were nearly the only birds I noticed, and then not very closely.  I glanced out the cabin window as I ate breakfast when a large black and white bird with a red crest, comparable to a crow, drew my attention as no other bird had ever done.  It landed on a tree stump and began pounding its massive beak into the rotting wood, searching for insects, I assumed.  I was excited to see this rare bird, one that I imagined could only be encountered in a wilderness.

         After that, I began thinking of the pileated woodpecker as a bird exclusively of the pristine North Woods.  I never expected to see one south of the Wisconsin border, let alone in Chicago.  So when I returned home, I left thoughts of pileated woodpeckers in Minnesota and focused on my college studies and finding a way into a depressed job market.

        Several years later I was on a summer trip visiting the forested areas of southeastern Missouri when, at Trail of Tears State Park, I had another close encounter with a pileated woodpecker.  The day was hot and humid, and the forest was dense and tall; the sense of being alone in a vast wild area was not an illusion.  And when I saw the bird, it seemed to be a highly appropriate sighting considering the surroundings, but it also challenged my rigid association of this bird with the North Woods.  They were more widespread than I had assumed.  For some reason, though, I never thought about consulting a bird guide for more information, preferring, I guess, to learn by experience.

        Once I began spending more time along the Illinois and Mississippi rivers in southwestern and central Illinois, I soon noticed that pileated woodpecker sightings were quite reliable in the bottomland forests, which tend to have large fast-growing trees such as eastern cottonwood and silver maple.  And I usually had little trouble finding large holes in trees, some rectangular, that had been excavated by these birds as they foraged for insects or hammered out spacious nesting cavities, which might one day be used by wood ducks.

 

Holes excavated by pileated woodpeckers.

 

        One particularly vivid recollection of a pileated woodpecker that I often replay in my head occurred near Andalusia along the Mississippi River.  I was following the Great River Road on a quite indirect route back to Macomb.  Despite its name, the road provided only occasional glimpses of the river itself.  So when a sign announced a small roadside park near the river, I immediately pulled off the highway.  At the parking area, I didn’t see a trail leading to the river, so I bushwhacked my way to the riverbank through some brush and flood debris.  From there I had an unobstructed view of the 8.5-mile-long Andalusia Island across the side channel; the Mississippi’s main channel was on the other side of the half-mile-wide island.  After only a few moments, a pileated woodpecker, about a quarter of a mile downstream, flew across the channel toward the forested island.  Its characteristic undulating flight was unmistakable.  That scene has remained undiminished in sharpness and detail.

 

The Mississippi River and Andalusia Island.

 

*        *        *

Three weeks and I was losing patience with the slow recovery from surgery, even though lying around reading all day is nearly my favorite activity.  Mild temperatures had returned, melting the deep snows of January; northern cardinals and house finches tentatively sang.  So Julie and I seized the day to check on our cabin—closed up for the winter—along the Illinois River valley at Quiver Lake.

         Along the way, my mind easily shifted into birding mode, noting American kestrals perched on utility wires along the highway, a few soaring red-tailed hawks, an occasional bald eagle, and small flocks of horned larks in the bare-soil farm fields and along the roadside.  But there really was not much wildlife in the flat, gently rolling uplands.  Then east of the small town of Ipava, the ravines began to deepen as we neared the Spoon River valley; habitats became more diverse; and there eventually followed the wide Illinois River valley, with bottomland lakes, sloughs, wetlands, forest, and fields.  This is what I needed to help pull me forward to better days. 

         At the Emiquon Preserve and Refuge area we ate our lunch as thousands of snow geese rested in the open waters or occasionally took to the air in gradually building numbers until nearly all the birds were circling; then most of them would settle back to the water until the next cause for alarm, which seemed to be as simple as a lone bald eagle flying too close.  Nearly two miles away, across wetlands and open water, a towboat-barge traveled down the flooding Illinois River; the water was high enough so the tops of the barges were visible above the distant levee.  Later we pulled over to the side of the levee highway to view small groups of waterfowl, and here we heard our first red-winged blackbird song of the year, an event that I have long assigned to be the official beginning of the spring bird migration, the ending of which, by my reckoning, would be in May with the first call of a yellow-billed cuckoo, newly arrived from South America.  Near the blackbirds, a hidden western chorus frog called—another first for the season.

          Our cabin remained intact and safe, and I was relieved not to find a fallen tree blocking our entrance lane or even worse, a tree lying across the cabin itself.  During a brief walk down the bluffs to the flooded lakeshore, I scanned with my binoculars, from the southwest to the north, for birds flying over the floodplain forests on the far side of Quiver Lake.  But of course, I knew as I was doing so that just scanning for a pileated woodpecker would be unlikely to produce one.  We stayed only a short time at our cabin before beginning the hour drive back home; plenty of time to sort through the day’s highlights.

*        *        *

Upon returning to our quiet Macomb neighborhood from the cabin, we both had a feeling that was similar to what we typically had experienced after a long road trip from a very different and wild land.  When I entered our living room and saw the couch, though, I could no longer avoid the thought of having to slide back into a severe rest and recovery mode, at least for a little while.  Back to reading all day and traveling via my mind’s eye—our time at the cabin now being a gentle reminder that there was life beyond the living room walls.  Looking up from my books and glancing out the window would no longer create a sense of frozen exile, but would now pull me forward, along with the imperceptibly lengthening daylight hours, toward a cautious optimism.  More days at the cabin, spring wildflowers, and planning a fall trip to New England, including Maine’s North Woods and its pileated woodpeckers.

 

Reference

DeVore, S., S.D. Bailey, and G. Kennedy.  2004.  Birds of Illinois.  Lone Pine Publishing, Auburn, Washington.

The Fate of Trees

 

To endure in place what the environment can deliver until it can endure no longer, that is the fate of a tree left to its own devices.  Unless the ending is determined by a decision followed by a screaming chainsaw.  The older trees, wide in girth and well above 50 feet tall, are the ones that draw most of my attention; and there are many of these in Macomb, my adopted town of three years.  It takes a long time, comparable to an average human life span, to reach such a size (an obvious point, but one that cannot be stated often enough).  And that is why it is such a sad event when one of the old ones in town is pushed over by a wind storm, even sadder if it is cut, and especially lamentable when the loss is not replaced by a sapling, but becomes part of a mowed lawn.  

          During each of the years that I have lived in Macomb, quite a few large trees in my neighborhood have been lost.  The derecho of June 29^th—which charged across parts of Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, with its 80- to 100-mile-per-hour straight-line winds—directly felled many, which blocked city streets and brought down power lines.  During the same storm, a much greater number of trees lost small branches, large limbs, or whole sections.  Some have remained as scarred veterans, but work crews would eventually take down the worst of the damaged ones.

          In a city, it’s understandable when large trees that pose a threat to buildings are either greatly trimmed to reduce the threat or removed completely without haste.  Ash trees have been targeted for complete removal because of infestations by the emerald ash borer, which eventually will kill any large ash.  It will not be long before Macomb will be completely free of ash trees.  Large elms have long ago been decimated by Dutch elm disease; but surprisingly, there are at least two healthy large individuals in my small neighborhood and maybe others elsewhere.

          Being oriented toward numbers, I sometimes wonder what my town will look like in so many years with the current rate of tree loss.  Within just one city block of my home, as far as I recall, ten medium- to large-sized trees were taken down in the last three years:  two sugar maples, two oaks, three ashes, one Bradford pear, one river birch, one honey locust.  Of these, nine were purposely felled.  How many of these have been replaced with a sapling?  None, as far as I can tell.  This, of course, says nothing about areas farther than one block from my home, and the rate of 3.3 trees lost per year may not continue.  But two ashes on my block are struggling with the ash borer and will soon be dead, at which point they will be completely removed and disposed of, probably next year.  And I have my eye on two nearby sugar maples with more dead branches than would seem healthy.

          As I travel around town on daily errands or for walks or bike rides, I look forward to seeing specific trees on my routes, like waving at an elderly friend relaxing on his front porch.  They give me a good feeling.  But I also see their problems and struggles:  the massive eastern cottonwood on the west side with  some of its large limbs hanging over a neighboring building; the white ash near the town center, with its base pushing against the sidewalk and curb; a pin oak that has long outgrown its small allotted space between the sidewalk and the street; the beech tree around the corner still free of beech bark disease, which is on its way to Illinois from the East; the eastern hemlock at Compton Park that always causes me to think of Michigan’s north woods and the hemlock woolly adelgid that has caused widespread death of hemlocks within the eastern states.

 

Pin oak growing over the curb, Macomb, Illinois.

 

          The old trees struggling with the effects of age are reminders that the fate of every living thing is to die.  It’s a message I can’t ignore, one that makes me appreciate them that much more and forces me to turn some of my attention toward the next generation.  I’m keeping track of three saplings (pawpaw, red mulberry, redbud) on my personal property that I hope to see some day as medium-sized trees, if the next three decades go well— but not much more beyond that even with a best-case scenario.  My three grandkids, though, have a better chance; they might even see those saplings become trees that reach a mature height.  That scene I see in the only way possible, within my mind’s eye.

 

Dead tree with a honeybee hive inside, Glenwood Park, Macomb, Illinois.

 

A few related posts on The River Landing:

The Last Old Oak

The Acorn Year

Eulogy for an Oak

 

 

Shelter on the Porch

“The …[sky] was angry that day my friends.”—George Costanza

 

It was one of those August days in central Illinois where, weather-wise, anything might happen, except possibly a snowstorm.  The recent heat wave seemed to be officially over, but there was lingering humidity with definite warmth still in the atmosphere that radiated a sort of unstable uneasiness.

          I sat on the edge of Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, that was half mud flats because of low river levels, a normal August condition.  There were shorebirds out there on migration from the high Arctic, replenishing energy levels, resting, and preening—staging for the next big push southward.  I searched the birds for rarities, then gradually noticed the atmosphere toward the northwest, across the river valley, becoming a thicker bluish-gray.  It looked like it might rain, but I didn’t recall rain in the forecast.

 

Quiver Lake bottoms with mud flats, seeps, and open water.

 

          After a while, the gray clouds rather quickly changed to a darker shade, and far off in the distance, maybe five miles, rain fell in a curtain advancing in my direction.  The radar app on my smartphone showed a small, fast-moving system, denoted by red, barreling toward me from the northwest, and I calculated that it would be directly overhead in ten minutes or less.  So without haste, I grabbed my backpack of books, spotting scope, and binoculars, then climbed the bluff side to our cabin’s screened-in front porch.

          Within minutes, the storm abruptly hit in all its fury:  rain pouring from the sky and blasting in with the wind straight off the lake, lightning, thunder, twisting trees, falling leaves, twigs, and branches.  Quite a bit of water shot through the screens onto the carpet and some of the furniture.  I retreated further back from the spray and managed to stay dry, being in the storm and sheltered from it in the same instant.  But within a short time, the wind visibly lessened and the rain became a light dribble, more water falling from the trees than new rain from the sky.  And soon the sun was out again, then hidden again, then out again within the patchy sky. I walked out to the road to watch the isolated storm race eastward, away from the river valley and across the landscape, still dumping rain all the way.

 

The described storm on August 9, 2023, moving eastward.

 

          Steam rose from the road’s surface, adding to the air’s rising humidity, also giving off the unique odor of cool water dropped on warm pavement.  And I was transported back in time almost 60 years as I recalled the exact same smell rising from my Chicago neighborhood’s streets after a short, heavy rain when the sun again reclaimed the day.  We lived in a brick bungalow with a small front porch that was sheltered under the same roof as the rest of the house.  When a storm hit, I enjoyed being on the porch, but if the wind blew toward the house, the porch was no shelter at all.  In any case, I would eventually hear my Czech-born grandmother calling, “Tomáš, come in the house.”  But she would prevail only sometimes.

 

The author's childhood home on Chicago's west side, the mid-1960s.

 

*        *        *

In the city, with so many buildings and sometimes tall trees blocking distances, a storm could be on top of you without warning.  But at the cabin, along the shores of Quiver Lake, or out at the county road, you can see for miles unobstructed.  I once watched a slow-moving system drifting in from the west when everywhere else, the skies were clear.  I could see the rain falling straight down below the storm clouds; there was almost no wind and no lighting or thunder.  It was a friendly rainstorm, bringing needed water for plants struggling in the usual mid-summer drought, but only within its narrow pathway.  When the storm advanced over the lake, I began to see the moving front where raindrops made contact with the lake’s calm surface, and I sat on a log and watched until the rain began to fall around me.  For a moment, I thought, Why leave?  It’s summer after all.  What’s a little water?  If I were a kid, I might have stayed, but the adult in me said, Go back inside to the cabin.  (It’s not the first time I realized that kids can get away with so much more than adults as far as indulging in unusual behavior.)

          Many times I’ve been caught in the rain while hiking on a woodland trail, and I don’t recall ever being in a panic to seek shelter.  Water falling on trees, moistening the ground, flowing down ravine slopes; it’s all part of a vast cycle; and being within it seems like the most natural thing in the world.  Even with a hard rain and thunder.  As for the lightning, if a shelter is nearby, I might be better off following my grandmother’s cautious ways.         

Who Needs Privacy?

We could tell by the number of cars parked outside the Black Dog Bar and Grill that seating would be either limited or unavailable.  “Let’s go.  We’ll never get a booth, let alone a table,” said Julie.

        “We can’t really know unless we try,” I replied.  As we entered, I was immediately disheartened by the large number of people standing around with all of the booths occupied. 

        “Come on,” I said.  “There’s a table in back.”

        As we sat and waited for the waitress to bring menus, the door to the men’s room, about five feet away, flung wide open, providing an unobstructed view of the toilet and urinal.  How appetizing, I thought.  The man who had been in there then proceeded to wash his hands at a sink that was located within the dining area along the wall between the men’s and women’s restrooms.  After he was finished washing, he pulled a plastic lever several times on the overhead paper towel dispenser, dried his hands, and then walked away.

        “Well,” I said, “I guess we’ll know who doesn’t wash his hands.”

        “Gross.  Can we change the subject?”

        It would have been so easy for the owners to install a tall partition in front of the restroom area so the entire establishment would not get a full view each and every time the door opens.  And I knew it was just a matter of time before someone forgot to lock the door while inside taking care of business (it happens all the time).  The sound of the towel dispenser actually made me feel as if I were inside the restroom.  Sometimes I wonder:  Am I wrong?  Do other people notice these things?

        “Is it just me?”  I asked Julie.

        “Well, not really.  It’s a bad design.  But, yes, it’s partly you.”

        “Should I say something?”

        “No.”

 

The Black Dog experience reminded me of a summer writing workshop I attended two decades ago in Washington’s Cascade Mountains.  The workshop was held at a rustic off-season ski lodge with a warning that there would be no frills.  I slept five nights in a sleeping bag on the floor in a crowded dorm room.  Fine.  I’m tough.  Sleep on the floor?  No problem.  I was even prepared to eat on the floor and not complain.

        After checking in and claiming a sleeping area in a remote corner, the first thing I did was to satisfy my curiosity about the bathroom situation.  I wasn’t expecting much, but what I saw in the long, narrow room stopped me cold.  Near the doorway there were several sinks side by side; a single shower was at the far end; and in between the shower and sinks were four toilets in a row separated only by a couple feet of open space!  The shower at least had a curtain.  I imagined trying to use one of those toilets and all that that might involve along with other men brushing their teeth, drying off in the shower, shaving, and casually conversing.  “Anyone get the score on last night’s Yankee game?”

        The workshop included three excellent meals each day as part of the package.  And the chef was not simply a fry cook; he was a highly trained artisan who prepared a variety of unusual dishes with an international flair.  It was all so delicious; at every meal, served buffet style, I left the dining area like a giant swollen tick.  But after two days, with my lower abdominal region basically on strike, I began to wonder:  Where is all this food going? 

        All of it didn’t just dissipate into nothing.  The human intestine might be around 15 feet long, so it could store quite a bit of…uh…material.  But I knew at that moment, a reckoning would soon be upon me, like piles of driftwood building up beneath a bridge on a flooding river.  The river would win and take out the bridge at the same time.  And when it happened, I didn’t want to be three feet away from some guy brushing his teeth.     

        On the third day with no action below the equator, I took the matter into my own hands, traveled to a drugstore at a nearby town, and made a strategically timed visit to a gas station that I had scouted out earlier:  it had a single occupancy restroom with a locking door.  And thus unburdened, I was able to enjoy the rest of the workshop without a care.    

 

Those responsible for the ski lodge must not have thought anyone would have a problem with their restroom layout.  Or maybe they were laughing the whole time about their joke that would be a gift that would keep on giving.  But why be embarrassed about a natural body function that all animals for millions of years have dealt with every day of their lives?  Suddenly, one person (me) has an issue.

        Look at dogs:  they have no shame:  anywhere, anytime, and they’ll look you in the eye, maybe even dog-smiling, as they’re “doing it.”  Pure honesty and guilelessness on full display.  Dogs have many other admirable qualities, and who are we humans to think we are so superior with our pumped up egos and fancy restrooms?  In fact, maybe taking a hint from the dogs is not a bad move.  Mark Twain, a keen observer of humankind and dogs once said: “I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”

        I might have to think about this from time to time when I am in a philosophical mood.  The meaning of life, the extent of the universe…whatever.  But I would not want to take it too far.  Julie loves dogs.  But even she has her limits.

 

Big City Compassion

 

After scanning in my beer and bag of potato chips, the cashier at the local convenience store said, “That’ll be $9.97.  Would you like to round it up for a donation to the Children’s Cancer Fund?”

          I thought, Three cents?  That would be a pretty chintzy donation.  I can’t do that.   But the fact is, with high inflation and broken supply chains, I haven’t been feeling so generous in recent years. 

          “Not today,” I replied.  Although she never uttered a sound in response, I could almost hear her thoughts:  What a cheap son of a bitch.

          When she handed me the three cents in change, I grabbed my groceries and waited for the customary “Thank you.”  But after several uncomfortable seconds, her silence told me there would be no “Thank you,” no “Have a nice day.”  So I said, “Thanks,” and left.  Thanks? I asked myself.  For What?  Giving me my change?  Why did I thank her?  I never used to be such a sensitive person.  Could it be that a Post-Pandemic Stress Syndrome let this situation get to me, past my normally thick defensive walls?

           Those protective walls, with an added aura of detachment, are a survival strategy that I attribute to growing up in Chicago.  I’ve seen it in other folks from big cities; it’s what we use to fend off scam artists and other predators.  For example, on any trip to downtown, a person is likely to be approached at least once by someone asking for money:  “Can you loan me a dollar?”  When this happens, you don’t slow down, and you definitely do not stop or engage the person in conversation.  You simply keep walking, eyes facing forward.  A firm “No!” might be allowed, but you’re better off not saying anything.  Any hesitation will be viewed as weakness.  As the late Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, once said, “Weakness is provocative.”  Now, this may seem crass, but the alternative would be to “loan” out money willy-nilly with absolutely no hope of ever seeing it again. 

           How far should this attitude be taken?  I once saw a man crawling along the sidewalk during a typical busy downtown Chicago morning; over and over he shouted, “Help me, help, someone help!”  Every person who passed, and there were many, stepped around him and kept on walking, not even slackening their pace; and this made me wonder if he was a daily fixture in the neighborhood.  Maybe he was not really in dire need of assistance; maybe he was only waiting for a person soft-hearted enough to “lend” him money.  Eventually, that person would come along, and he knew it.  I once read an article about street people begging for money; in one example, the article told of a street person who actually lived in a nice suburban home; the “job” he commuted to every day was begging for money in the streets of downtown.  One must always be wary of scam artists, especially in a big city.  And so, you walk on, so does everyone else, and you’re an invisible, anonymous part of the compassionless crowd.

          Now, take that same person with the hard exterior shell out of Chicago and place him in a small town.  Suddenly, he doesn’t blend in as well.  Just one example may suffice.  Over fifteen years ago, my newly-wed wife Julie and I were walking from a parking area toward a venue to hear a lecture— on birds and nature, I believe—at a small Sangamon River town in central Illinois.  As we walked along, I could see further ahead at one of the building’s entrances that an old woman was lying on the ground near the door.  I quietly said to Julie, motioning with my hand, “Go around to the other door.”  Julie, who grew up in a small town, looked at me with shock and maybe a bit of derision, saying, “No, we have to help her!”  And she quickly left my side to help the old woman, who by now had two other folks about to help.  So the situation’s being taken care of, I thought.  But Julie proceeded onward, with me reluctantly following.  And wouldn’t you know it, Julie actually knew the woman!  Later I tried to explain how I had been conditioned in the big city to avoid scam artists who fake illnesses, and if you get involved with someone else’s accident, you’re opening up yourself to a lawsuit.  Yes, I’m a victim.  But Julie just responded by saying, “She wasn’t scamming anyone for money; she’s an old woman who fell and needed help!  They took her to Emergency at the hospital.”  I remember thinking at the time that it was a good thing we were married and not simply engaged to be married.

           Although I have been away from Chicago for over three decades, and I worry about softening, I believe at least the foundations of my social interaction skills have remained intact, despite occasionally questioning my own reactions to certain situations.  For instance, there was the time I witnessed a man’s car running out of gas in the center of a major intersection in Murphysboro in southern Illinois.  I stood observing the situation from inside a nearby corner gas station, about 200 feet from the stranded car, with a few people ahead of me in line.  The twenty-something driver, a Pillsbury Doughboy sort of man with baggy sweatpants, ran with two large empty gas containers to the pumps and then entered the station in a panic after seeing the long line of customers waiting to pay.  He begged and pleaded to be allowed to cut in line.  Of course, the cashier let him go ahead of everyone else.  No one complained.  I briefly wondered why he had two gas cans, where one, with just a bit of gas, would have been sufficient to get his car moving, at which point he could have then driven to a gas pump for more.  I began to think this man was a bit lacking in some common sense.

           After he paid for his fuel, he quickly ran for his car, struggling all the while with the obviously heavy containers of fuel, one in each hand.  It was at that point I noticed his sweatpants were quite a bit lower on his waist than when I first saw him.  And as he ran, just as I thought his pants might fall down, they did, indeed, give way to the earth’s gravitational pull:  to his ankles, entangling his feet, and abruptly and quickly tripping him up.  The gas containers went flying as he lurched forward, all the way to the ground, face forward.  I thought, Good thing he was wearing underwear.

           As I stood in line, the thought occurred to me that maybe I should have offered to help him carry the gas back to his car.  Since no one else in this small-town gas station offered help, on that point my conscious remained clear.  This man, I remember thinking at the time, was more than just unlucky; he probably had that kind of thing happen to him all the time (maybe minus the pants falling down), going through life, as he was, without much common sense.  I simply could not feel sorry for him, even if he was Jesus in disguise.  And if I had helped him, I would have lost my place in line.  And for what?  To be his enabler, so he would never learn common sense.  But at least I became undetached enough to think about helping. 

           Maybe on my next visit to a convenience store, I’ll donate three cents to whatever charity they’re promoting.  No, let’s round it up to a nickel.

 

When to Give Up: Chronicle of a Cormorant Colony

 

“…there’s no success like failure, and…failure’s no success at all”—from the song Love Minus Zero/No Limit by Bob Dylan

 

On a mid-April visit to our cabin at Quiver Lake, near Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, I was looking for signs of the advancing season, such as flowering plants and bird sightings.  Then, over the brisk winds blowing off the lake, there came, from the flooded black willow forest across the lake, the unmistakable guttural sounds of double-crested cormorants.  They were re-establishing their nesting colony of the previous year, which had failed for unknown reasons by early May; they simply left, all of the nests abandoned.

      This year I vowed to keep better track of the situation.  I was not sure when the colony became active again, but it was definitely not active two weeks before this recent cabin visit.  So, with eight weeks or more for egg incubation and time to fledge, I was expecting to see and hear a lot of cormorant activity this year.  When conditions were right, I would canoe over to the colony for a closer look.

      But by my next visit on May 4^th, the cormorants had already abandoned the colony!  I kept hoping that I was wrong and that they were all out foraging for fish, but if that were the case, I should have seen cormorants coming and going.  During the intervening days since the last cabin visit, the Illinois River had dropped quite a bit, and since the river is connected to Quiver Lake, the lake level had also fallen.  I wondered if the dry ground under the colony had given predators, such as raccoons, easy access to the nests.  Was that the reason the cormorants abandoned their colony?  I wanted to take a closer look, but time and opportunity did not converge until twelve days later.

 

***

Cottonwood seeds floated in the air like a light snow flurry and this year’s crop of silver maple seedlings grew well during the longer days of mid-May, in some areas forming lines parallel to the lakeshore, marking a previous high-water level.  The river itself had probably already hit its peak spring flood, and would be slowly falling toward its normal summer low period, but that would only be an average expectation; another big flood would not really be surprising.

      At the lake’s shoreline, I was surrounded by vigorous bird songs and calls from house wrens, warbling vireos, Carolina wrens, Baltimore orioles, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and bobwhite quail.  Yellow-billed cuckoos had already arrived, which for me signaled the end of the spring migration, but there were still some Tennessee warblers passing through on their way to the boreal forests of Canada.  Buffalo gnats were becoming annoying—as they always are in May—but to endure them, I reminded myself of the fact that insects of all kinds are the protein source needed to grow healthy nestlings that must be ready to fly before too long.  All of these environmental cues together formed the backdrop to the advancing bird breeding season, and I imagined those cues to be a strong reinforcement of the drive to reproduce.  And yet, the cormorants abandoned their colony.  I launched my canoe with little delay, and in the time it took for only a few strokes of the paddle, I was on the far side of the lake, heading for the failed cormorant colony.

      It was almost like a dystopian scene, with all of the abandoned nests in surrounding trees appearing newly rehabilitated but completely unused.  An active colony would be chaotic, with tree branches and leaves covered in bird droppings and messes.  It seemed like such a waste, after going through all of the trouble to migrate to Illinois and then assemble at this particular location, to engage in numerous flights back and forth to gather so much nesting material of twigs and larger sticks, and then, somehow collectively to make the decision to give up and leave.  How would they even communicate such a decision throughout the colony?  I can imagine some individual birds giving up and moving on for whatever reason, and some birds staying, but for all of them to leave, there must have been a compelling reason.

 

Abandoned double-crested cormorant colony at Quiver Lake, 16 May 2023

 

      Was it, in fact, predation?  Or could they have been somehow harassed into leaving?  In some circles, the fish-eating double-crested cormorant is not a popular bird.  It’s curious that the colony was abandoned two years in a row.  And a similar sequence of events happened in 2019:  There was an active cormorant colony by the third week of April, and it was abandoned sometime between then and the middle of May.  Before that, since 2011 when we acquired our cabin, either there was not a colony at Quiver Lake bottoms or I never noticed one if it was there.

      In the end, double-crested cormorant colonies will succeed somewhere and fail elsewhere, maybe more failures than successes.  Otherwise, the population might grow exponentially to the point where we would have so many cormorants (individuals live for six years on average), a population crash— related to an increase in diseases and overexploitation of habitat and food resources—would be inevitable.  Their reproductive drive accounts for failure.  That’s why each pair usually raises three or four young each year, sometimes with two broods.  As another example:  Why does a cottonwood tree produce so many seeds, when most of them never germinate?  How many years must go by before even one makes it into a tree?  What would the landscape look like if all of the seeds each year grew into trees?  At any rate, it seems that the Quiver Lake cormorant colony might be due for success.  For this year, though, they’ve apparently run out of time.

 

References

Dorr, B.S., K.L. Sullivan, P.D. Curtis, R.B. Chipman, and R.D. McCullough.  2016.  Double-crested cormorants.  Wildlife Damage Management Technical Series.  U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services.

Kleen, V.M., L. Cordle, and R.A. Montgomery.  2004.  The Illinois breeding bird atlas.  Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication No. 26.  xviii + 459 pp.

Serious Business

It was a classic mid-winter morning, with a dull, light grayness reflecting off the cloudy sky and the neighborhood scene unenthusiastic in its muted colors.  Though last night’s dusting of snow had already melted on the streets, most of it held on tightly to the dormant lawns.  With temperatures barely above freezing, the damp air seemed much colder, capable of snuffing out a fire, easily dissipating a body’s life.  But I had already spent too much time in the house this winter.  So, to see truly what the world had to offer, I ventured out.

          Soon a train’s whistle loudly rang out from the north part of town, and in my mind’s eye, I could see its massive engines pulling a string of graffiti-covered cars past Macomb’s downtown depot and Forgottonia Brewing.  A semi-truck along East Jackson Street roared and grunted its complaints as its driver shifted through the gears.  Distant crows called and a momentary Carolina wren’s song caught my attention.  What was it doing, singing on such a day?  But after walking a block to Killjordan Creek and Macomb’s Compton Park, a chill remained, with any new internal warmth quickly lost to the wind.  There were few hikers and dog walkers on this particular morning, and I liked it better that way.  Still, I picked up the pace, even as I wished to linger.

          At the far end of the park, I crossed the creek at South Pearl Street, and, much too soon, began heading toward home.  But here I took special notice of the creek’s natural meanders, with repeating patterns of curved collapsing banks opposite areas of alluvial deposition, which park managers attempt to limit—this inevitable tendency of all flowing waters.  But this is what I look for on my walks:  the unmanaged, natural processes, behaviors, and interactions, even the smallest examples.

 

 Killjordan Creek at Compton Park, Macomb, Illinois.

 

          At a private birdfeeder near the park, I saw a black-capped chickadee cautiously dart in on a flash, grab a seed, and then quickly fly off to shelter within a neatly trimmed ornamental shrub.  All in seconds.  They are fast and wary.  The feeder and seeds were, of course, provided by the homeowner; but as a species, the chickadee’s essential behaviors are innate, successfully honed over the millennia by trial and error—even, but especially, the wariness.  For the survivors, that is.

          As my block came within sight, a quick movement caught my eye:  a Cooper’s hawk, predator of birds, landing on a lower branch of a pin oak tree.  And then I noticed all other birds were scarce, keeping a low profile, quiet.  A few days before, this very hawk, most likely, aggressively pursued and caught a dark-eyed junco that sought refuge in our backyard quince bush…next to the birdfeeder.  The hawk kept grabbing into the bush with its powerful talons.  Then, a slightly misjudged countermovement, and the junco was no more.

          Serious business in the neighborhood.  Parents driving their kids to school and special events, bringing them back home; folks going to work and back, on shopping trips to the grocery store; the regular house-to-house mail delivery; a UPS truck, a FedEx truck; garbage collection every Thursday; clearing snow from roads, driveways, and sidewalks; walkers with their dogs; a chattering fox squirrel as I walk past; keeping bird feeders filled.  The routines of everyday living.

 

Birding for the Crested Caracara and Reexamining Priorities

 

Immediately after the car’s engine started, The Eels’ song “I Like Birds” came over the stereo.  This is one of the signature songs from my favorite movie, The Big Year.  My wife Julie and I were off on a quest:  to find a bird called the crested caracara that had recently been seen (February 10, 2023) at the Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge, about an hour east of our home.

        Julie recognized the song from the movie that we had seen at least five times over the last couple of years.   She smiled and asked, “Did you purposely put on this song?” 

        “Well, yeah, it seemed appropriate.  We’re kind of doing a Bostick-like thing today.” 

        Kenny Bostick is one of the main characters in The Big Year.  He gives up nearly everything in his life, including his marriage, in a competition with other serious birders to see who can find the highest number of bird species within a calendar year.  In order to accomplish this goal, he has to chase after rarities all over the U.S., especially when a rarity is reported by other birders on rare bird hotlines.  If he wasn’t just a movie character, Bostick would be traveling to the Emiquon Refuge to seek out the crested caracara, a large falcon that is typically found in the U.S. only in parts of Texas, Florida, the Gulf Coast, and far southern Arizona.  Seeing one in Illinois is a big deal, a sighting not likely to happen again for a long time.

        On our way to the Emiquon area, we saw thousands upon thousands of snow geese all over the skies of Fulton County.  And just east of Table Grove, an entire farm field of corn stubble was covered by a dense flock of snow geese that extended for what seemed like a half mile and that came almost right up to the highway.

        “You know, if we stopped to take a picture, they would all fly,” said Julie.  She knew what I was thinking.

        “Yeah, they’re very jittery.  Just about anything can make them all take flight at once, screaming their heads off the whole time.  And then they’ll circle around several times in a giant cloud, and all come back down to the same place where they started out from.  It seems to me that they waste a lot of energy.  So what does that say about 'optimal foraging theory?'”  Julie just looked at me, about to roll her eyes, as I struggled against entering “lecture mode.”

        As we passed through Lewistown, I tried to drive slower and pay more attention to any large birds in flight or perching in treetops.  We were close to the Illinois River valley and the Emiquon Refuge and Nature Preserve.  I was fairly confident of seeing the caracara when we started out on our trip, but as I witnessed the vastness of the river valley before me, I knew that we were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

        “This place is so big,” I said.  “Where should we look first?  I know, look for the birders.  When you see a big group of them, you’ll be able to tell by their behavior if they’ve found the caracara.  If they’re all intensely looking in the same direction through spotting scopes, they’ve got something good; if they’re all standing around talking, with each birder looking in a different direction, they haven’t found it.”

        “Or we can just ask,” replied Julie. 

        “Yeah, well…we could do that too.”

        Then we saw several cars parked along a gravel lane not far from the main highway.  “Look! Birders!” I nearly shouted.  “I’ll drive past them, and all you have to do is roll down your window, look them straight in the eyes, and say ‘crested caracara’ like it’s a secret password.  But realize, in any other context, you would look like a lunatic.”  To our disappointment, though, none of the birders had yet seen the caracara.  But the previous day, it was sighted in that exact spot, which is why the birders were gathered there.  So we drove onward, thinking that we had as much chance of seeing the bird there as anywhere.

        Further away on another gravel road, a car came toward us from the opposite direction.  I slowed to a crawl, opened the window, and made a sign for the other car to stop, which it obligingly did.  And I simply said, “caracara?”  The driver kind of smirked, but said “no” in a suspicious sort of way, as if he actually had seen the bird but did not wish to reveal that fact, keeping the information to himself so that he and only he could count the bird, and thereby beat out his birding competitors by one species on the 2023 list of elite Illinois birders.  But no, that’s crazy talk, I thought.  Or was it?

        At the Emiquon Nature Preserve observatory, a quite friendly, talkative older woman approached us while walking her three highly energetic, unleashed dogs.  I felt relief that she wasn’t angry, as one of her pets had just barely escaped being run over by my car. 

        “What’re you all lookin’ for?” she asked.

        “A crested caracara,” I curtly answered while adjusting my spotting scope.  “A crusted…what?  Wait, I’ll look it up on my phone,” she replied.

        “No, it’s crested, crested caracara,” said Julie.  “It’s rare around here.” 

        “Oh,” she replied. And then we heard quite a few details about her personal life and religious interests before she and the dogs went happily on their way.

        After that encounter, we drove around a bit more within the Emiquon area on the gravel backroads and on the state highway that sits on top of a narrow levee with no shoulder to speak of:  a very dangerous situation for birders who are prone to stop with no warning if they see a bird with even the slightest possibility of it being a rarity.  And I began to realize that we probably would not see the caracara.

        “You know,” I sadly said, “yesterday was really the day for seeing this bird.  Birders came from Chicago, and they saw it, according to the internet birding hotlines.” 

        Julie gave me a rather strange look.

        “I’m not making this up!  They’re the hotshot birders, though; they always see the rarities.  I guess we shouldn’t have waited, but I had to take my 96-year-old mother to the cardiologist!  You know, she does have an aortic aneurysm that’s about to explode.”

        Julie turned to face me and raised her eyebrows.

        “Still,” I continued, “I’ll bet we would have seen the bird if I had canceled her doctor’s appointment.  Next time…well, never mind.”  And we headed to Havana, across the Illinois River, for lunch.

 

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.

  

With the Wind at My Back

 

If the wind is at your back and you never turn around
You may never know the wind is there
You may never hear the sound—from the song Ignorance and Privilege by John Gorka

Hey Woody Guthrie, where are you?  The big dogs are back at the door—from the song Woody Guthrie by Vince Herman (Leftover Salmon)

 

For more than a week, the Illinois River’s depth had been gradually falling toward its usual late summer low-water levels.  But in the last few days, it had risen somewhat, and so I took out the canoe across Quiver Lake to the river for what might have been my last chance for a while, before the lake would become unnavigable as a mosaic of shallow water and mud flats.  The weather was clear and warm, and with light early morning breezes, the trip out was easy.  Later in the day, winds would blow stronger.

          Where Quiver Lake connects with the river, I waited for a towboat-barge to pass, took a photograph with my smartphone, and posted it on Facebook.  The towboat’s wake could be dangerous; usually, though, the waves are not a cause for panic in a canoeist, only something to pay attention to.  High in the sky over the river, a large flock of American white pelicans soared in a tight, slowly winding and rising column, reminding me of the DNA molecule’s double helix; sometimes bald eagles and hawks join the pelicans.  But before I could get a better look, the canoe started bouncing in the towboat’s waves, and I realized it was time to get serious about crossing the river.

 

An Illinois River scene near the entrance to Quiver Lake, Mason County, Illinois.

 

          On the river’s opposite muddy bank, I beached the canoe and then pulled it onto higher ground, well out of range of any huge swells that would be created by a v-bottomed yacht, should one pass by.  Nearby was a large silver maple tree that leaned at about the same angle as my living room chair; so, here in the shade I placed two PFDs (personal floatation devices) from the canoe as a back rest.  And with my day campsite completed, I settled in for reading, journaling, observing life along the river, and, after a while, lunch.

          Birds were noticeably less vocal than they had been only a few weeks earlier, but just as I made a mental note of that fact, a Bell’s vireo sounded off from a thicket of willows and swamp privet only a few feet away; then I immediately saw the bird in clear view, even without binoculars.  And I thought that only a fellow birdwatcher would appreciate how unusual this easy sighting was, the Bell’s vireo being notoriously difficult to locate in its preferred thick, shrubby habitats, even while its song tauntingly rings out, almost like mocking the observer. 

          I have no idea what other birders might reflect upon at such times.  But my thoughts usually include recognition of how fortunate I have been to be able to do such things purely for my own pleasure and how life’s circumstances have led me to such a moment.

          If certain decisions had not been made years before I was born, my situation today could easily have been quite different—if, in fact, I would have existed at all.  What if my maternal grandparents had chosen not to leave Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s for America?  During the military occupation of that country during World War II, Nazis guards threw my grandfather’s brother, Jarda Zelizko, to his death from a speeding train.  Would my grandfather have had a similar fate if he had stayed?  Or maybe a version of me would have lived in Czechoslovakia or Poland under communist domination and oppression for decades until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.  I don’t imagine canoeing and birding would have been encouraged during those times. 

          In 1945, the man who would become my father was in the U.S. Navy on his way to the invasion of Imperial Japan, when the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima effectively ended the war, saving him from whatever fate might have awaited.  A few years later, in Chicago, he met the woman who would become my mother, and a few years after that, I came into this world—1957, the same year, in fact, that the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, which further intensified the Cold War and set off the Space Race, rapidly increasing the pace of new developments in rocket and computer technology as well as their military applications.

          I remember in the 1980s, the scientist Carl Sagan musing about why we have not detected or been contacted by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.  Maybe, he thought, we’re alone in the Universe.  On the other hand, he suggested it could be that many such civilizations get started, but none make it very far beyond the point of discovering how to harness the power in the atom:  they all soon blow themselves up in massive nuclear wars.  So far, we’ve survived only seventy-seven years with nuclear weapons; there have already been several close calls; and the world seems never to have a shortage of new tyrants just waiting to seize power, who would like nothing better than to acquire those same weapons of mass destruction.  In many ways, the world is more dangerous than ever before.  And the big dogs, never really vanquished, are, indeed, back at our door.

 

At this point, it may seem that the stream of consciousness beginning with a Bell’s vireo on a mid-summer canoe trip has meandered a long way off from that observation, but I think the distance is not at all far.  I am not ignorant of history, of why I am here and others are not; and I see no reason to feel guilty because of possessing that knowledge, that awareness of being privileged and where it came from.  Being aware of it is highly important; and thinking about it for a time is sufficient acknowledgement in my view, and that is why I do it.  And yet, others may feel the need to do something more, like raise awareness or give back somehow (usually with money), and that is fine.

         For my part, by the time I was ready to leave my comfortable shade tree for the river, the wind had picked up considerably, just as the forecast had predicted.  And it blew from the northwest, just as predicted, while I would be paddling to the southeast and then eastward back to my small cabin on the bluffs overlooking Quiver Lake.  A stiff wind would be at my back most of the way, making it an easy float trip, while still remaining alert to any sudden wind shifts or unpredictable gusts.

 

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.

 

The Crow Must Die

        “Look!  There goes the Cooper’s hawk!” said Julie.  We had been seeing or hearing at least two all summer, probably a breeding pair with young.  But like most other observations, we again noticed only one hawk.

        “It landed on the bridge,” added Julie, referring to the small foot bridge over Killjordan Creek at Macomb’s Compton Park.  I couldn’t see the bird because of a tree that blocked my view.  But when I finally got a good look, what I saw was a crow on the bridge’s railing.

        “Oh, it was a crow, not a hawk,” I said.

        “No,” Julie adamantly stated, “I saw a Cooper’s hawk.”  So I think I may have offended her, suggesting that she mistook a crow for a hawk, the type of comment that would have caused some birders to draw blood—but not Julie, who understands a birder’s ingrained inability to not immediately correct another birder’s apparent incorrect species I.D.

        “There it is,” I nearly shouted, “and it’s after the crow!”  The two birds engaged in some rather complex aerial dynamics for what seemed like only a few seconds before each headed to separate trees, with the crow uttering low guttural sounds.  Otherwise, there was silence in the park, as its other wildlife residents waited to see what would unfold.  Meanwhile, a woman rode past on her bicycle, totally oblivious to predator and prey assessing each other, working on their next strategies of death and escape.

        Finally, apparently weary of the high drama, the crow took to the air, with the hawk immediately taking up the chase.

        “That hawk is determined to get the crow,” I said.

        “I feel sorry for the crow,” Julie countered, “but really, I don’t know if I feel sorrier for the hawk, which has to eat too.”

        “I think the hawk has the advantage here.  It has a much greater ability for quick and sharp maneuvering in flight than the crow, and its talons are deadly.  It’s really a great example of natural selection’s fine tuning.”  And here, I stopped talking while I was ahead (before the rolling eyes).  But I kept on thinking:  For accipiter hawks to have developed such outstanding flying abilities, so very many birds have had to die over deep time.  But their prey have developed counter tactics, also products of the same evolutionary process.

        “Hey,” I said, abruptly jolted back to the moment, “there are two more crows, and now they’re chasing the hawk!”  The crows worked together as a team, successfully driving the hawk out of the park.  That is, for now.  Before too long, though, I was confident, the hawk would also have its success.

 

A Time for Swallows

Immediately after pushing my canoe from Quiver Lake’s shoreline, I was joined by several tree swallows, each on a unique flight path back and forth over the lake.  Some came so close that I could almost feel the air breaking over their wings.  This late spring morning was cool and clear, with only barely perceptible breezes now and then.  So I drifted on a nearly frictionless glide to the opposite shore, lightly paddling once in a while to orient the canoe, feeling warmth from the sun’s rays on the side of my face, occasionally looking back at the familiar bluffs with our cabin.

 

Quiver Lake, with the Mason County bluffs on the right.

 

        The Illinois River was on the down side of its spring flood, but still high enough for much of the wooded bottomlands between the lake and the river to be under about a foot of water.  More than enough for my canoe.  So I paddled forward into the woods and soon found some black willow trees growing close enough together so that I could wedge the canoe between them and prevent it from drifting off.  I then carefully slid myself to the bottom of the canoe, leaned back, unpacked my books and breakfast sandwich, and settled in to memorize the scene for days when I would be compelled to do other things.

        Tree swallows were also busy in the flooded woods, chattering to each other as they returned to or left their tree-hole nests or while foraging for insects over open water between stands of willows.  The bird community^a here was highly active, engaged in the serious business of raising young.  I was especially pleased to count so many prothonotary warblers.  This species, also a tree-hole nester, does not inhabit upland areas, and so, to see one of these birds requires a trip to the bottomlands during the short songbird breeding season (at other times, they are either elusive or have migrated south); but logistics, weather, and other priorities may not always converge to allow for such a trip at the proper times.  Even as I heard their songs sounding from the trees around me, I realized that it could be a full year before I would see this species again.

        After reading a chapter in Larry McMurtry’s book Roads, I paddled through an extensive stand of willows that earlier in the spring supported a colony of double-crested cormorants.  On calm days in mid-April, I could hear sounds coming from the active colony, including the birds’ guttural communications, from over a third of a mile away at our cabin.  On this day, although the trees still held their stick nests, there were no cormorants nearby.  The young, I thought, had probably fledged not long before, dispersing throughout the river valley, as it seemed unlikely that the adults would have abandoned their nests before that could happen.  For this year anyway, preoccupied with certain of life’s unavoidable obligations, I had not been around enough to know of anything that might have happened at Quiver Lake.  On one day, the area was full of cormorants, and now it wasn’t.  Not much more could I say.

 

Black willow trees with double-crested cormorant nests, 11 June 2022.

 

        Tree swallows were with me all morning, up until I returned to our sandy beach to call it a day.  The next stage in the yearly cycle would have the river falling to its usual summer low-water levels; at the same time, Quiver Lake would drain into the river, and leave behind mud flats and water too shallow for a canoe.  And then the migrating shorebirds, some from the high Arctic, will show up to forage for invertebrates hidden in the mud.  I looked forward to following tree swallows, with my binoculars, flying over the bottoms, until they leave for the south in October.  And I know I will be thinking about those distant willows, across from the mud flats and patches of lake remnants, that once held nesting swallows and singing prothonotary warblers, fairly confident that we’ll all be back again next year.

 

^aBird list from the Quiver Lake area, Mason County, Illinois, 11 June 2022.

    Wood duck

    Double-crested cormorant

    Great blue heron

    Killdeer

    Mourning dove

    Yellow-billed cuckoo

    Red-headed woodpecker

    Red-bellied woodpecker

    Northern flicker

    Great crested flycatcher

    Eastern wood pewee

    Eastern kingbird

    Warbling vireo

    American crow

    Tree swallow

    Northern rough-winged swallow

    Tufted titmouse

    House wren

    Carolina wren

    American robin

    Wood thrush

    Gray catbird

    Prothonotary warbler

    Song sparrow

    Eurasian tree sparrow

    Northern cardinal

    Indigo bunting

    Common grackle

    Red-winged blackbird

    Baltimore oriole

 

 

Time to Get Out of Town

“Sometimes a house can seem like a prison…that’s the time you got to get away.”—from the song Get Up and Go by Leftover Salmon (Vince Herman)

 

        The Black Hills of South Dakota was our destination, roughly nine hundred miles from our home in western Illinois.  Before crossing the Mississippi River at Gulf Port, I looked directly into the mid-morning sun rising over the distant bluffs, for one last look at Illinois.  The air was humid, still, and hazy over the river’s six mile-wide bottomlands as a farmer plowed black dirt fields, getting ready for spring planting; songs of various migrating birds sounded out from a nearby patch of woods.  The scene was calming, but familiar; so I turned back to the car recalling the main reason we chose the Black Hills for our trip:  a road journey to fire our imaginations and breathe new life into a long dormant wanderlust.

         My wife Julie and I were going “out west.”  But where was the West?  And how would we know when we got there?  In a way, we already were in the West, as someone east of the Appalachian Mountains might say.  And yet, Illinois is widely known as being in the Midwest, which I’ve always thought was a boring term:  neither east nor west, inoffensive, not taking a stand; not hot or cold—lukewarm.  Illinois, though, or at least central Illinois, has strong ties to regions west of the Mississippi River, just as southern Illinois, with its cypress swamps, cottonmouths, and black vultures is the South; northern Illinois is the North with its remnant stands of white pines and paper birch; and eastern Illinois’ beech forests tie it to North America’s eastern deciduous forest community that reaches to the Atlantic coast.

        Illinois, in fact, is connected to the West through the vast grasslands of central North America, which are recognizable on a global scale (biome), roughly resembling a large triangle flipped on its side, with its base stretching from southern Saskatchewan to central Texas throughout the Great Plains, and its apex—the Prairie Peninsula—pointing eastward through the northern three fourths of Illinois with part of southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Indiana.  This was how it stood for thousands of years, with the boundaries of the grassland triangle and degree of interspersed woodlands changing as the climate and interactions with fire and humans dictated.  Even though most of the original grasslands and savannas have long been converted to modern agriculture, pasture, and urban developments, I knew that remnant natural areas still exist, more so the further west we traveled.  And throughout our trip, I would pay close attention to the lay of 
land itself, for subtle clues that help explain what I would see in the context of what once was there.

 

(Image downloaded from the Internet)

 

Part of the Prairie Peninsula at Goose Lake Prairie Natural

Area in northeastern Illinois.

(Image downloaded from the Internet.)

 

        In Illinois, I learned to read the landscape based on how the land had been influenced or not by glaciation during the Pleistocene Epoch, which ended about 10,000 years ago.  Only small portions of southern and northwestern Illinois escaped being covered by glaciers at some point during the Ice Age, and these areas have much rougher topography then the rest of the state.  Western South Dakota, where the Black Hills are located, also escaped glaciation; and these rocky hills, mountains actually, rise above the surrounding grasslands as a forested island. 

        These thoughts combined with memories of several previous travels between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains fueled my imagination as we drove on the Great River Bridge crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, Iowa.  Then we were greeted with towering, rocky cliffs bordering the river valley, and I had a sense of being far from home, although we had logged only fifty miles at that point.  My mind began to fill with images from other trips west of the river:  southern Iowa’s rolling pasturelands with deep, wooded ravine systems, which escaped the last two major glacial advances (the Illinoian and the Wisconsinan); extensive prairies on high bluffs bordering the Missouri River valley in western Iowa’s Loess Hills; a large buffalo herd at Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska; prairie dog towns; golden eagles and Swainson’s hawks further west; treading water attempting to canoe upstream against the Missouri River’s current; eighty mile-per-hour speed limits on South Dakota’s interstate highways, a speed where the car handles much differently and demands a lighter touch than when driving on much slower rural two-lane highways near home.  I recalled that Native Americans are more of an obvious presence on the land west of the Mississippi than in Illinois, and I expected that we would talk about that quite a bit, especially in the Black Hills (Paha Sapa), considered sacred ground to the Lakota.

 

A lone bison grazing in the Black Hills, South Dakota.

 

Pronghorn at Badlands National Park, South Dakota.
.

 

        Well into my seventh decade now, I’ve begun to view traveling on long trips as a risky undertaking, not being as enthusiastic for adventures of the road as I once was, finding the safety of home more of a comfort than a restriction.  But that same comfort is an enabler to closing off and becoming set in ways of living and thinking.  Of course, dangers on the road far from home are real, unpredictable, and potentially deadly:  accidents that could result in multiple car pile-ups, tired semi drivers weaving back and forth over two lanes, road rage maniacs on the loose, criminals at rest stops, vehicle breakdowns in remote areas, and driving through severe weather.  So it comes down to a choice between accepting risk with its promise of new knowledge and experiences and giving in to fearfulness for the sake of being safe.  I wonder if feeling safe loses it meaning after a long time of low-risk living?  The answer is one I hope I am never up to pursuing.

 

References

Pielou, E.C.  1991.  After the ice age:  the return of life to North America.  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

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. 

 

Beginning with a Small Yellow Flower

 

“These days I seem to do a lot of dreaming…Just try to be in the here and now…These are the brand new good old days”—from the song Brand New Good Old Days by Leftover Salmon (Vince Herman)

 

This spring, I could not seem to get enough views of green lawns with yellow dandelions, especially on sunny mornings when the sun’s rays hit at just the right angle.  Along roadsides and lightly mowed lawns, the two contrasting colors stand out, even more than carefully tended tulip gardens.  The dandelions grow wild as chance may allow, despite being unwanted, perhaps even reviled, by most landowners.  And yet they survive.

          Maybe it’s the tenacity that also draws my attention, something to count on every year, along with the colors following winter’s grayness; standing tall and healthy in spite of the odds and the herbicides.  After two years of COVID fears, anger and frustration at posturing political leaders, and sorting useful information from misinformation, I had the feeling this spring of slowly emerging from an underground bunker, still quite unsure of the landscape, but with growing confidence.  For a long while, I have no longer felt that other customers at the grocery store are dangerous enemies, and it’s nice to see faces again, even though I have never been a “people” person.  Perhaps spring dandelions will become, for me at least, a symbol of COVID’s eventual final demise, but it’s probably too early to put much weight behind such thoughts.

          April has long competed with October as being my favorite time of year:  the songbird migration is in full motion; colorful male warblers are back from Central and South America for the breeding season; spring ephemeral wildflowers are in full bloom; and daytime high temperatures are still mostly cool, before the more frequent hot, humid days of May and June.  It is also a time when our honeybee hives become highly active, with the bees frantically gathering nectar and pollen to support a soon-emerging cohort of young bees. 

        One late April day I took a walk along the bluffs of Conner Creek to check on our hive at the Lakeview Nature Area’s apiary; I was worried that recent unpredictable temperature swings from day to day might have been hard on the bees.  Along the way, I was admiring the green grasses of the rolling bluffs with a generous scattering of dandelions, and when I looked downward near my feet, there stood a single, perfect yellow dandelion with a honeybee seriously focused on digging down far into the dense array of minute florets, which together actually make up what we see as the “flower.”  But paradoxically, this scene brought to mind an image from the previous winter:  heavy snow blowing and drifting, with more falling, and forecasts of 10 to 12 inches by the next day; a cup of hot tea in my hand, sweetened with honey from our Lakeview hives, a little taste of the previous season’s wildflowers; thoughts of the honeybees surviving the winter cold in a dense cluster of bees (around 68^oF), with warmth generated within their bodies and fueled by consumption of honey.

 

 

        What might this next year hold in store, I wondered, after the nectar this particular bee was collecting might have found its way, as honey, into my winter tea?  Would my optimistic thoughts that threats from COVID would finally be over this year prove true?  Yet even as I focus on my own struggles to cope, I know there are many other serious threats facing our world today.  But without any significant influence on how such matters might develop, I’m fine with putting it all aside—maybe for a while, but more likely longer, or maybe even indefinitely. 

        So far, I’ve survived.  And it’s a good life:  I’ve got a good wife; great new music coming out all the time, available with the click of a mouse; new good books to look forward to—so many talented writers, it’s hard to keep track; honey harvests coming up; and plenty of toilet paper.  Sometimes, though, the hives don’t make it through the winter.  I’ve learned that it’s best not to take the good times too much for granted.

 

Reference

Winston, M.L.  1987.  The biology of the honey bee.  Harvard University Press, Cambridge , Massachusetts.

Ten Essential Songs (One Man’s Opinion)

 

 

Music has been a continual focus and backdrop in my life ever since those first accordion lessons back in the mid-1960s and the acquisition of a hand-sized transistor radio (as opposed to a radio with vacuum tubes).  Of the many songs I’ve heard and enjoyed over the years, some have extra special meanings, each capable of bringing back specific memories or feelings from a certain time period or an experience, much like smells can accurately conjure up recollections in the smallest details; I’ll envision scenes and can sometimes recall what my thoughts were, my worries, frustrations, and what brought joy, inspiration, or sadness.  So I thought it would be interesting to create an annotated list of these songs.  But realizing that listing hundreds of songs and explanations of why each is important to me would be impractical and probably boring, I decided to whittle the list down to ten, for no other reason than humans have ten fingers. 

        The list would consist of only songs that I have considered essential, but essential only for myself, as someone else would probably develop a completely different list.  They would not necessarily be the best I have ever heard, just the ten that I would never want to do without.  Or, if I had music playing at my funeral, these would be the ten songs playing in the background (although, I might make an exception to the limit of ten and add Rock of Ages and Amazing Grace).  Each song would have to fit several criteria:  strong ties to personal meanings or experiences, compelling story and/or emotion, clear mental images, instrumentation, overall sound, and tune.  I tried to weigh all of these factors in deciding which songs to include.  In doing so, I had to leave off some truly great music. 

        But this necessarily begs the question of why anyone, other than my wife Julie, would care about any of this?  If I were famous or influential, there would likely be widespread interest in the minutia of my life.  And yet, I still have likes, dislikes, and opinions.  So for what it’s worth, I made the list anyway, even if it matters to no one else.  The songs are not listed in order of importance (such as the best being first), but rather, they are listed in terms of where they fit into the chronology of my life, from the high school years in the 1970s up through recent times.

 

Ten Essential Songs

Sunday Morning Coming Down (Kris Kristofferson).  This song brings me back to my high school years, to a time when I first truly latched onto the type of music that moved me.  And it was the lyrics that did it.  Although certain songs, like The Weight by The Band, stood out for years, it was when I discovered artists like Kris Kristofferson and paid closer attention to Johnny Cash’s music that I really began to relate to the music in a personal way.  Kristofferson’s lines about waking up on a Sunday morning, fumbling through his closet for the cleanest dirty shirt, and then stumbling down the stairs for a walk alone through a city park appealed to my sense of being an outsider.  In high school, I never belonged to a popular clique, didn’t attend sporting events, didn’t belong to clubs or the band, and had few close friends.  I was also drawn to songs with more mature themes than the average teenager probably would have been, although it would be years before I would try a beer for breakfast, let alone having a second beer for dessert.  (Link to YouTube Sunday Morning Coming Down)

Big River (Johnny Cash).  This is definitely not a kid’s type of song.  It’s about a man trying to track down his wayward girlfriend along the Mississippi River.  The song is full of river scenes that made me want to be just about any place other than in high school, especially not in a gym class surrounded by a bunch of kids yelling and throwing a ball around.  One friend of mine kind of liked Johnny Cash, but other than that friend, my new musical tastes set me apart.  When music was a topic of discussion with other high schoolers, names like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith were bandied about with pride, but mentioning Johnny Cash as a favorite never came up…except by me, and that was usually followed by some strange looks and sometimes laughter.  I saw musical preference as just a simple matter of what sounds good to the particular individual and what strikes a chord because of personal meanings.  But in high school, the music you listened to took on much more importance; it was a kind of status symbol to some, and it had to be the same as what was popular with others.  I could never see their point.  (Link to YouTube Big River)

Boots of Spanish Leather (Bob Dylan).  Part of my sadness in high school and the reason why the mood of songs like Sunday Morning Coming Down appealed to me was the lack of a girlfriend and the real feeling that it could never happen.  Being easily intimidated by the opposite sex and then turning into a bumbling, stammering fool while asking for a date didn’t help.

          At any rate, after hearing Bob Dylan’s song Watching the River Flow in 1971, I became an instant Dylan follower, and I soon became familiar with most of his music.  Some of his lyrics were and still are difficult to follow (for example, Desolation Row), but Boots of Spanish Leather really tugged at my heart for its story of a lost love sailing away across the ocean, unlikely to return for a long time, and the reluctant acceptance of that fact.  I may not have had a girlfriend to lose, but over the high school years there were several females, the objects of my pathetic infatuations, who ignored me completely (to clarify, however, a girl once actually did notice me walking down the sidewalk when she yelled out her open window, “Hey Tommy, you walk like a deadbeat”—mentioned here just to keep the record straight).  So I imagined that unrequited love, which I had a lot of experience with, and being dumped must have felt about the same, which is why Boots of Spanish Leather resonated.  Nanci Griffith’s version of this song is the best.  (Link to YouTube Boots of Spanish Leather)

Paradise (John Prine).  I wrote about this song at length in a recent blog post called “Paradise over the Years.” Here is a link to that post:  Paradise over the Years.  (Link to YouTube Paradise)

Homecoming (Tom T. Hall).   I was born in Buffalo, New York, and lived there just past the toddler stage when my parents divorced.   My mother, brother, and I then moved to Chicago to live with my maternal grandparents.  Although dad soon followed us to Chicago, my parents never reconciled.  Seeing dad was then referred to as a “visitation,” only on Sunday, from eleven o’clock in the morning until precisely five-thirty in the afternoon.  This pattern was by decree until I turned eighteen, but continued well into my early twenties, until I left home for college.  After that, I saw my dad less often.  When I moved further away from Chicago, visits were down to about twice a year.  At the time, I never thought about the sacrifices he went through because of the divorce or that he left a good job, his hometown, and his close family network in Buffalo so that he could be near his sons (my mother has always painted a highly negative picture of him, which continues to the present day, even though he died in 2009).  Soon I became pre-occupied with my own life, and never much considered his struggles or went too far out of my way to see him more often.  My view was that offspring move out and away; parents stay behind; and all go on about their lives, demanding little from each other.  Tom T. Hall’s song Homecoming is right on target as it illustrates a son’s regret—in the end, however, easily pushed aside—at being neglectful of his aging father.  (Link to YouTube Homecoming)

The Orchard (Kevin Evans).   A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about my longtime fascination with Irish folk music.  Here is a link to that post:  The Highlands.  (Link to YouTube The Orchard)

Oh, Abraham (John Gorka).  Well before Julie and I were married, she introduced me to the music of John Gorka, encouraging me to listen to his CD, The Company You Keep.  It’s an overall excellent album, but the song Oh, Abraham stands out.  It is a serious, complex song, but also has some of Gorka’s unique humor here and there.  In my interpretation, the song is a commentary on our society: its inequities, the growing partisan divide in our country, and the question of whether or not the original dream of the country’s founders has been lost.  The song reminds me of a well-crafted literary essay, of the type that invokes deep thought; may be a bit difficult to truly define; and at the same time, is relevant in a variety of situations.  And, with every listen, it makes me think of Julie.   (Link to YouTube Oh, Abraham)

Long Way (Antje Duvekot).  Antje Duvekot is another Julie-inspired addition to my music library.  Early in our marriage, I was frequently listening to the Irish folk band, Solas, which I had only just discovered.  On their live album, Reunion:  A Decade of Solas, Duvekot joined the band on stage when they played one of her songs.  Julie picked out Antje Duvekot’s voice from the crowded stage and encouraged me to listen more closely; she was simply drawn to Duvekot’s voice and stage presence, but it was also a good song (Reasonland), with abstract lyrics reminiscent of Dylan.  The following year, we attended Duvekot’s concert at Macomb’s Tri States Public Radio station, where I first heard Long Way.  Later, while listening to John Gorka’s Oh, Abraham, I picked up on what I thought was a connection to Long Way; and then I remembered that at the radio concert, Duvekot mentioned her admiration for John Gorka.  So there might be a connection.  Both songs mention Jack Kerouac, and both are about traveling around the country—although Oh, Abraham is less about that.  Long Way is essentially about the freedom of the road and being young without serious responsibilities.  The song speaks directly to the wanderlust that I felt so strongly when I was younger, and so it makes me feel young again.  (Link to YouTube Long Way)

Firefly (Edward David Anderson).  I came upon this song during the pandemic year of 2020.  Julie and I were in the process of selling our country home in Mason County and moving to the small western Illinois town of Macomb.  Upon learning the names of the prospective buyers, Kim and Ed Anderson, we naturally looked them up on Facebook.  We saw that Ed was a well-established, working musician with several CDs, YouTube videos, and an extensive touring resume as a solo performer and with a band called Backyard Tire Fire.  I liked the idea of our old house being occupied by another musician (Ed calls it his “new old house”).  In his song Firefly, I recognized several parallels to my own life during my early twenties:  being directionless; not yet meeting the one special woman that would be my wife and feeling hopeless on that topic; and making my own way, not bending to convention or to what others were telling me I should do.  I could have really used this song back in 1977, when I was depressed, going nowhere, and working at a dirty paper warehouse.  (Link to YouTube Firefly)

Pachelbel’s Canon in D (Johann Pachelbel).  This tune stands apart from all the others on the list because it is an instrumental.  So its meaning to me is purely from the circumstances surrounding it rather than a personal connection that could be made by anyone relating to lyrics.  When Julie handed me a list of songs to put together as a playlist for my stepdaughter Kate’s wedding in 2019, Pachelbel’s Canon was on the list.  But being only familiar with the tune and not its name, I did not recognize it as a song that I knew until playing the mp3 download as a test.  I also didn’t realize that it is well known and very popular at weddings.  In the world of classical music, I am still fairly ignorant.  So I try not to embarrass Julie, like the time we attended the Illinois Symphony, and I said, loud enough for others to hear, “Do they really need this guy waving his arms all over the place?” referring to the conductor.  “I mean, all the musicians have the music in front of them, and they’ve all probably practiced it hundreds of times.”  A woman sitting to Julie’s left leaned forward, and she and Julie gave me “a look.”  I pretty much remained quiet for the rest of the evening.  (Link to YouTube Pachelbel's Canon in D)

 

        So, will this list of ten essential songs change as time goes on?  Probably, as long as I decide to restrict the list to ten.  I’m always searching for new music, and one day there might be a song that makes such a strong personal connection that I’ll have to bump one of the current ten off the list.  But I guess it really doesn’t matter.

 

A Big Dark Bird on the Wind

 

“…as for every other man alive, all passes, all is lost, all melts before our grasp like smoke…youth is gone before we know it, and that, like every other man, we must grow old and die. —from Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe, 1935

“If you could do anything, what would you do?” asked ten-year-old Jaycie.  “Fly,” I replied without hesitation. —A recent conversation between the author and his granddaughter

 

Against the cloudless sky, a big, dark bird soared effortlessly over our western Illinois town on the steady afternoon breeze.  Black as a crow, but obviously much larger, with wings held at a shallow angle, the bird, at first, seemed to float aimlessly wherever the air currents meandered, unsteadily teetering like an unsure tightrope walker.  But after watching for a time, I could see that it actually had a rather loose yet definite command of its direction and altitude.  So without even using binoculars, I knew by its size, color, and distinctive flight pattern that this was a turkey vulture. 

        And instantly, as with every sighting of this species, I was pulled back in my mind’s eye to the 1970s.  It was on a limestone cliff high above the Mississippi River and its vast bottomlands that I, as a young man, first saw a turkey vulture.  Unaware of the bird’s presence perching on a nearby tree, I approached the cliff edge, just as the vulture jumped into the air and sailed away.  I later described the bird to one of the staff at Mississippi Palisades State Park, who was not at all surprised, assuring me in my naïve enthusiasm that this was not a rare bird, and that they were actually quite common.

 

The described turkey vulture sighting over the Mississippi

River bottomlands in 1978.

 

        All of the countless sightings I have made of this species over the next four and a half decades would be anchored to that day.  Some, though, stand out from the many:  from the hot, dry skies over the Southwest’s Sonoran Desert to Hawk Ridge over Lake Superior to Pennsylvania’s Little Grand Canyon, viewing the birds from above as they rode the valley’s contours over the Allegheny River.  And at every closer observation, being quite taken by their graceful beauty, but at the same time repulsed by their bare skin heads lacking feathers—bare apparently to avoid having soiled feathers after intimate contact with carcasses.

        The strangest and closest encounter was along the bluffs bordering the Illinois River’s floodplain when I sighted a turkey vulture far away over a field; it seemed to be pacing my vehicle along the bluff road in speed and direction, moving all the while closer and closer until…hitting my windshield full force, as if it were guided by a military-grade GPS to make a precise impact.  Why didn’t this bird make even a minimal effort to shift its wings and tail feathers, thereby gaining the necessary altitude to avoid a fatal collision?  This vulture seemed bound and determined to make a direct hit.  But why?  To what end other than its own demise on a cracked windshield?

        While small birds seem always jittery and worried about life, and larger ones have a seriousness about them, kind of a calculated efficiency, turkey vultures exude a rather lackadaisical nature:  light wing loading allows them to become aloft and soaring with only the slightest of air movements; they drift on the winds, rarely needing to flap their wings; and feed on the margins of the more respectable members of bird society that hunt live prey, glean livelihood from seeds and berries, or both.  They can be a familiar sight on any back country road of the Midwest, feeding on a cornucopia of roadkill, even on lightly traveled routes; and when a vehicle approaches, they cumbersomely fly off in slow, wide arcs, eventually returning to feed—until the next vehicle appears, and then the cycle repeats.  Annoying disturbances these must be, but part of the lifestyle they seem to accept with grace and patience, almost as if they know that everything must die, and all they need to do is to wait.

 

Turkey vultures routinely form night roosts on cell towers.

Photo by Vic Berardi posted by permission.

 

        In fact, they seem to have adapted to the modern rural landscape very well.  And it’s not difficult to imagine that road kills will continue to remain in steady supply for the foreseeable future.  Still, their habitat, although simplified in its present agricultural setting compared to the pre-Columbian state, is really quite complex with known and unknown unpredictable factors.  For now at least, though, life is good for a bird that searches for death.

        So might a turkey vulture be considered the quintessential bird of death?  These days, with my hazy self-image each year imperceptibly morphing closer to that of an “old man,” I find it difficult not to think of death as I observe a soaring vulture dispassionately looking down upon me, its dark plumage and demeanor suggestive of the great abyss:  a profound nothingness, from my perspective, that existed before I was born and will exist after this life has finished its pitifully brief sojourn within the infinity of time and space.  An afterlife I have not much considered, not being drawn to unscientific notions.  Yet who am I to scoff when so many individuals wiser than I have embraced the concept?  As for turkey vultures, I’ll be looking for and observing them until the very end.  Now if I could only convince my wife to agree to dump my dead body into a remote field….

 

Reference

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., and Sargatal, J., editors.  1994.  Handbook of the birds of the world, volume 2.  New World vultures to guineafowl.  Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

  

Tending the Beast

 

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”—Physicist Robert Oppenheimer quoting Hindu scripture on witnessing detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945.

 

During cool days of late summer, when I’m fairly confident the Illinois River will not rise appreciably for several weeks, I begin to gather driftwood that has accumulated on the Quiver Lake shoreline and stack it into piles.  (Without doing this once in a while, the lakefront would eventually become nearly buried in debris from the flooding river.)  Then in a few weeks, on a breezy, warmish day, after the wood has had a chance to dry out, I’ll light the piles, which quickly grow into infernos that make short work of the dry cottonwood branches.

          Soon, enough heat has built up to light the larger logs.  Once a deep core of intensely hot embers has been established, just about anything thrown onto the flames ignites without delay and is readily consumed.  But manipulating the fire so that everything burns requires more than haphazardly heaving on branches and big logs.  Even so, at this stage, it’s difficult even to get near the blaze to shift the direction of burning or add more wood in just the right place.

 

Woody debris floating toward our lakeshore during an

Illinois River flood.

 

 

Burning piles of driftwood at Quiver Lake, Mason Co., Illinois

 

          The bonfires can get as large as I allow, conflagrations roaring four or five feet high before I stop adding fuel, lest the canopies of nearby trees ignite.  And I’ve planned these fires with wide, clear buffers so the flames cannot spread, no matter how high they reach. These techniques I learned while leading controlled burns on woodlands and prairies, experiences I often reflect upon.

          On warm fall days with a good breeze, I have seen prairie grasses like big bluestem light up like gasoline, flames moving across the landscape with the wind, easily reaching to my height, and advancing to a line of backfire that was earlier set burning against the wind; the two lines of moving flames eventually meet in a dramatic crescendo, but then quickly die, smoldering blackness in their wake.

          One of those prairie fires stands out in my memory for a frightening reason:  the local winds and topography combined in just the right set of conditions to produce a tall, swirling vortex of smoke and blowing embers; I watched helpless in awe as the tornadic column grew in height and intensity; then it began emitting a loud rumbling sound, very much like a freight train or jet engine, and flames started shooting upward within the vortex itself.  Did I see the face of the Devil in those hideously beautiful rising flames?  What have I unleashed?  I asked myself.  Of this monster, I had no control, but it was slowly moving toward the backfire, which had left behind a wide, blackened, burned-off area only minutes before.  When the fire tornado moved over the black area it quickly died, just as if an invisible plug had been pulled.  The beast vanquished.

          Such elemental power in those flames, begun with a single match, controlled with pre-planning, and, once in motion, chaotic as any wildfire—for a short time at least.  But these days that type of activity has been left far behind me, after retiring and then moving into town, leaving behind the small prairie that I planted and tended for two decades.  I miss the excitement of those burns, but not the anxiety and midnight dreams of fires out of control.  These days I prefer a tame fire pit in the back yard, burning twigs that fall from the few trees around our town lot.

 

The author and his wife conducting a controlled burn at 

their former Mason County home.

 

A line of moving flames across the prairie.

 

          At the same time, there is a commonality to all of these fires, no matter the size, something primitive:  that of watching the motion of how, from the smallest leaf to the largest log, it is all consumed; feeling the heat of flames on cold days; feeding more fuel to keep it going, and scrounging up more when necessary; the sweet smell of wood smoke.  For all of our technological advances, it is unlikely that the task of keeping a campfire burning has changed at all since someone once discovered that fire could be contained and made to serve a master.  No other creature has learned to do this; it sets us apart as a species, very far apart, in fact. 

          We can place another piece of wood on a burning stack, travel the solar system, or blow up the world.  Just what, I sometimes wonder, have we unleashed?

 

[Click on this link to see and learn about fire tornados.]

  

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.

 

The Last Old Oak

 

“Oaks are not only important members of greater ecosystems, but every oak tree is also a wonderful, infinitely complicated ecosystem unto itself.”—from The Life of an Oak:  An Intimate Portrait by Glen Keator

“The falling of a giant tree, whether witnessed or not, is a dramatic event.”—from The Biography of a Tree by James P. Jackson

“I leaned my back against an oak, thinking it was a trusty tree, but first it bent and then it broke…”—from The Water is Wide, a traditional English folk song.

 

Over a decade ago, when we acquired our cabin along the Illinois River bluffs, there were three massive black oak trees living on the property.  But only after a few years, the one near our driveway entrance abruptly died, and I thought it best to have it cut before it fell.  I knew it was an old tree, but I was still surprised when I counted the growth rings on its stump to find that this tree was over two hundred years old.

          A couple of years later, the second of the three ancient oaks died just as unexpectedly as the first.  Still, it looked as if it could be a standing dead tree for many years to come, and when it finally did fall, it would not block the driveway; so I was determined to let it stand, to provide a home for wildlife, to lose its twigs and branches gradually over the years, and eventually be reduced only to the standing main trunk, until that too would fall, perhaps after decades, finally decomposing into the soil.

          But that was not to be.  When a line of dangerous thunderstorms recently passed over the area, the old snag was literally pushed over by the wind, taking a hackberry tree and our neighbor’s split rail fence with it.  We’ll have to restore the fence, so the fallen tree will have to be removed in sections, cut up, split, and stacked as firewood.  It will provide hours of warmth at the cabin’s fireplace before being finally gone.  And its soot will be returned to the woods.

         As I contemplated the task of how to remove such a large tree, I kept thinking of the remaining old black oak in the northeastern corner of our property.  It stands within a remote, thickly wooded area that I probably only set foot upon once or twice.  Over the years, my focus at the cabin has been mostly toward the west, with its river bluffs, Quiver Lake, and the big sky over the wide river valley.  But that would have to change, as I now began to feel anxious about this tree, of losing it before I ever had a chance to enjoy its living nearness and link to a time when the Lewis and Clark expedition was a breaking news item.

 

            The last of the original three old black oaks.

 

         So before I left for home that day, I blazed a new trail through the woods, the “Old Oak Trail” loop, which I would now include on my walks around the property.  Of course, there are other trees that get special attention on these walks:  the pawpaw, which I planted a few years ago; the big hickory with the strangely angled trunk that speaks of some long ago event that left a permanent influence on its growth pattern; the middle-aged bur oak just above flood level; the green ash down on the sandy beach that has yet to be attacked by the emerald ash borer, a certain death that is only a matter of time; and the big cottonwood that serves as a resting and hunting perch for bald eagles.  But the last old black oak now has my full attention, like a venerable war hero, a tattered survivor of the ages, and a reminder that there is so much more to existence than the brief time span of our current era that is so easy to consider the most relevant.

 

A new trail leading to the last old black oak.

 

[Author's Note:  Another Old Oak Done Gone, posted in 2015, is about the first of the three old black oaks at the cabin to die.]

 

What Didn't Happen

Or How I Saved Two Old People From Certain Death

 

“Old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say ‘Hello in there, hello.’”—From the song Hello in There by John Prine

“What kind of a topsy-turvy world do we live in where heroes are cast as villains, brave men as cowards?”—George Costanza

 

My story began one day at the supermarket when I needed only a container of butter before heading to the checkout.  There was an old man blocking the cooler door, slowly looking back and forth, up and down.  Rather than hovering over him, I took a stroll around the store, giving my time to the old man so he could make a decision and move on.  But when I came around the aisle again, he was still blocking the door.  I’m not very good at standing around, so I bottled up my frustrations and headed to the one cashier that was open.  The butter could wait for another day, which might mean an extra trip…but what the hell.   

          As I got nearer to the cashier’s lane, off to my left there was a slowly moving old lady also eyeing the open lane, struggling with the few items she barely held in her hands.  I could have easily beaten her there; but of course, as soon as I noticed her, I graciously held out my hand in the classic gesture of, Please, you go first.  She smiled as she slowly walked ahead of me, and I could almost 
hear Jerry Seinfeld’s TV mother saying: Yes, you are a good man.  How could anyone not like you?  And then the delay began:  sifting through coupons, discussion about the prices, price check, fishing in the coin purse….  After a long while that dragged on and on…and on, I thought:  F -Bomb!  I COULD HAVE BEEN HOME BY NOW!  But I remained outwardly calm and waited for my turn, when the cashier silently mouthed the words “I’m sorry.”  And I wondered what it must be like in a Florida retirement village, possibly with a name similar to Del Boca Vista.

 

            Image downloaded from the Internet

 

          On the drive home, I quickly calmed down to the car stereo blasting Rory Block’s version of the Robert Johnson tune, Ramblin’ on my Mind:  “…I got mean things, I got mean things all on my mind…I hate to leave you here baby, but you treat me so unkind.”  The blues with a slide guitar always puts me in a good mood.

          With my head swaying to the music, I came to a two-way stop sign and was head-to-head with a car from the opposite direction.  A very old man was at the wheel, with his equally ancient wife (I assumed) in the passenger seat.  So naturally, I calmly waved them on with a few movements of my fingers.  But there they sat, unmoving.  So I took it up a notch, and gently waved again, with a bit more energy.  Yet, still they sat there, looking back and forth at each other and then back at me.  I could almost feel my patience being shred like a cat’s worn out scratching post.  Stoically endure, my inner voice implored.  But instead, like directing a jet at O’Hare Airport, I began madly gesturing with both arms:  “C’mon!  Go!  Go!”  I lost it, I admit.  The wife looked at her husband again, and seemed to ask, “What’s he saying?”  The old man just stared ahead, when finally their car began to inch forward.  It was at that point I noticed a rather large semi-truck barreling down from the right.  I quickly held up both hands in the universal sign of “STOP!”  And I shouted, “NO! STOP!  STOP!”  After the massive truck and its cloud of dust quickly rumbled past, the old people, with whatever color they had before our encounter drained from their faces and with their eyes wide open, seemed a bit rattled, but apparently none the worse for wear.

          Later, as I related this story to a friend, he said, “If they had been killed, I can just hear a cop asking you, ‘So you waved them on, right?’”  Yes, as any considerate person would do, I waved them on.

[Author’s Note:  Please share this post on your preferred social media platform and elsewhere.  For every 500 hits, an anonymous contribution will be made to The Human Fund (Money for People) at the next available opportunity.]

 

For Future Reference

 

“Every mile I make is a memory…”—from the song Ridin’ on the Cotton Belt by Johnny Cash

“Look at that old photograph.  Is it really you?”—from the song This Old Road by Kris Kristofferson  

“It’s okay, it’s alright, I’m alive, and it’s good to be”—from the song Good To Be by Edward David Anderson

 

The Illinois River was at its yearly low level of late summer and early fall.  So upper Quiver Lake, with a direct connection to the river, was reduced to a mosaic of mud flats and shallow water.  I sat in the shade with my binoculars and spotting scope, hoping for broad-winged hawks, osprey, or a large group of migrating shorebirds.  But in lieu of those species, I had good numbers of great egrets, American white pelicans, ring-billed gulls, swallows, and a few Caspian terns and bald eagles.  Quite a few birds to keep my attention, plus the occasional migrating monarch.

          I took in the scene as one might watch a wildlife documentary, waiting for a story to unfold, ready for drama to emerge from behind every shadow.  The bottomland forest beyond the lake remnants taunted me by its inaccessibility, as getting there would involve crossing water too shallow for a canoe and with mud too thick and deep to slog through; all I could do was observe from a distance.  And as I did that I tried to etch the scene into my long-term memory, to be recalled on demand when I am not where I wish to be (waiting rooms, the dentist’s chair, heavy traffic, anywhere it’s crowded, the checkout line behind someone buying lottery tickets using winning tickets to buy more tickets).

 

Quiver Lake, Mason County, Illinois, a late summer scene.

 

          As I strained to fix every color, sound, odor, and feel of the wind into memory, my thoughts drifted, as they often do, to a vivid recollection of my father’s last days in his hospice bed at home.  Did he have special scenes that he could return to at will, up until his final moments?  Was he lost in his own world of thoughts, young again, riding his bicycle from Buffalo, New York, to Niagara Falls?  Did he hear our conversations around him?   He was a quiet, humble man, not prone to deliver monologues of his past triumphs, adventures, or struggles; he passed on few of his favorite memories, and I regret not asking more questions when the opportunities were there for the taking.  I know my time will also come, many years away I can only hope, and I know what I’ll be thinking about:  my wife and our life together; all our trips to places like Lake Itasca, the U.P., Isle Royale, Door County, Charleston, Savannah, Chincoteague Refuge, Lookout Mountain, Taum Sauk Mountain, Niagara Falls, and so many more; and our times at the cabin.

          Other memories, usually lying dormant, are randomly triggered by proximity to place.  For nearly thirty years residing in Mason County, I traveled the back roads many times over, for work and pleasure.  Now, a year and a half after moving fifty miles to the west, with my day-to-day concerns centered around adjusting to new surroundings and the future, I find myself in Mason County mainly when heading to our Quiver Lake cabin, and then only along the river.  But on this most recent cabin visit, I came in from the opposite direction, and traveled over the old familiar countryside again.  With little effort, words and images came flooding back with surprising clarity at nearly every crossroad, creek crossing, road marker, hill, and collapsing barn:  long lost conversations, buried thoughts, and faces frozen in time.  It’s all there, a large portion of my life.  Young again!  If only that were so; the mirror forces the truth, reflecting an aging face that sometimes seems hard to recognize as the same person I’m used to seeing in old photographs.

          Fixating on the wildland dramas of the Illinois River valley is preferable to acknowledging the aging process, which every damn one of us must give in to sooner or later.  Neither can I permanently ignore the outside world, as I need it and all of its resources to live, to afford the luxury of watching birds uninterrupted by responsibilities.

        My time at the cabin is definitely an escape, and in many ways can seem like a kind of throwback or an anchor to a better time:  the pre-pandemic world— before Covid became an actual word; when potholes were repaired, hotel staff were pleasant and unmasked, and only the occasional restaurant worker was inexperienced or incompetent; and when no one ever thought of a store running out of toilet paper.  Or at least that is what my memory tells me.

 

            Quiver Lake, an early fall afternoon.

     

On a Search for the Floodplain Warbler

 

“…right now I’ll just sit here...and watch the river flow.”— from the song Watching the River Flow by Bob Dylan

 

It was a mid-summer day in July as I stood before Killjordan Creek in our nearby well-manicured city park, once again lamenting the tradeoffs of moving into town from the country.  Birding is one of those tradeoffs, but I guess I always knew that birding in Macomb would be less of an experience than it was near the Illinois River valley.  Thoughts of the river conjured up images in my mind of wood ducks, pileated woodpeckers, and especially the prothonotary warbler, which I think of as the “floodplain warbler.”

        But I would never expect to see a prothonotary warbler in my town, even along the creek, because this species is so closely tied to wild floodplain forests that it is rarely seen anywhere else during the breeding season.  So I began making plans to visit remote forests along the Illinois River, places that would pull me as far from a tame town life as I could get.  (Too much domestication cannot be good for the soul.)  And I needed to do this soon, because the season was quickly moving along:  swallows were already loosely staging for their fall flights back to wintering territories, mid-summer cicadas had begun calling, and corn crops were in the tasseling stage; soon the warblers would cease their territorial behavior, and would be harder than ever to find.

        Within a few days, the weather and river levels converged to present an excellent set of conditions:  clear, mild weather with light breezes combined with a long-sustained flood on the Illinois River.  The river was four feet above flood stage.  And with that kind of depth, I could canoe through any of the floodplain forests at Quiver Lake—an Illinois River backwater—and Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  The day would be mine; in the flooded forest, there would be no hikers, no ATVs, no fancy glitter-painted power boats, and no personal watercraft.  I would stay the night before at our lake cabin for an early start the following morning.

 

                        *                 *                 *

Soon after sunrise, I carried my canoe and gear to the water’s edge, which was high up onto Quiver Lake’s flooded shoreline.  I quickly floated out into the open water and immediately felt the warmth of the early morning sun on my back; but it was slow to dissipate the night’s humidity, which hung on as a fading mist over the nearby wildlife refuge and as a complex aroma of vegetation, fish, damp wood, mud, and a certain unique quality of the river water that I’ve never been able to identify.

 

               Quiver Lake and its flooded shoreline.

 

          With the river spreading onto its floodplain and into connected backwaters, there was only a slight downstream movement of water.  So, smoothly passing over the bottoms, with only slight paddle strokes, I meandered around small stands of black willows, a couple of which had an eastern kingbird on the highest branches; and I shared the open water with numerous tree swallows that flew quite close to the canoe.  Then a group of great egrets caught my attention, perched in the topmost branches of a tall tree.  Just beyond the egrets was a towboat heading upriver, its loud, rumbling diesel engines dominating all sounds.  Continuing toward the sound of the towboat, I floated across a low ridge covered with vegetation that formed a narrow band parallel to the river; the water was only a foot and a half deep here, and I could see the river about fifty feet ahead.

 

Floating over a natural river levee.  The Illinois River is beyond the trees.

 

          As I reached the edge of the trees, the water quickly became deeper, and I was suddenly floating in the Illinois River itself, finding myself being pulled downstream by the gentle, but quite noticeable, current.  More swallows (barn, bank, northern rough-winged, and tree) flew on all sides as I crossed the river in a beeline to the opposite shore while also moving sideways downstream.  Then I saw some rather large, wide swells (about one foot in height) approaching, undoubtedly caused by the towboat that was out of sight around the river bend.  They were a not-so-gentle reminder to pay attention and leave the daydreaming and birding for later.

          Eventually, I settled the canoe against a shoreline thicket of willow and swamp privet, facing the river, with the current keeping it locked in place.  Only then was I able to truly relax; and so, with my breakfast unpacked, I sat back to absorb the river and river life around me, to memorize the scene in such a way as to be able to retrieve it at critical moments when it feels as if the constraints of town life are closing in.  And just then a prothonotary warbler loudly sang its simple song, truly completing the scene very much as I earlier envisioned, and fully cementing it to memory.  Soon a nearby American redstart’s song rang out against the calls of a quite agitated red-headed woodpecker, with a yellow-billed cuckoo joining in.  And I sat there thinking about my circumstances:  sitting on the bottom of a canoe over several feet of water, being held in place by a flowing river well over flood stage, shade trees towering overhead, schools of young-of-the-year fish about a half inch long just below the water’s surface, no sounds except for bird songs and calls echoing throughout the trees, Lake Michigan upstream, the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico downstream.  Of the 12.8 million people living in Illinois, how many have had such an experience or for that matter were having a similar experience at that exact moment?  My guess is not that many.

 

                  The Illinois River from a canoe.

 

          That last idea, of course, represented the world beyond the river intruding.  Ah, the rest of the world…I trusted that it had survived just fine in my absence.  Although I was where I wanted to be, watching the river flow, the noon hour was approaching; and I could actually see and feel the mid-day summer heat building.  It was time to go.  And so, I eased the canoe out of the current, floated back over the natural levee, through the forest, and into the open backwaters beyond—listening one last time, in vain as it turned out, for another prothonotary warbler.  Circumstances would surely converge again, before too long I hoped, for a return.

 

Towboat pushing barges on the Illinois River.  (Illustration by the late Patti Malmborg Reilly).  This illustration originally appeared in the book Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir, available on this blog as a free ebook download (click here).

 

Bird List for the Morning (July 7, 2021):  Prothonotary warbler, American redstart, warbling vireo, blue-gray gnatcatcher, red-headed woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, northern flicker, tree swallow, barn swallow, bank swallow, northern rough-winged swallow, great egret, great blue heron, double-crested cormorant, killdeer, spotted sandpiper, house wren, Baltimore oriole, eastern wood-pewee, great crested flycatcher, eastern kingbird, American goldfinch, Carolina wren, black-capped chickadee, northern cardinal, American robin, yellow-billed cuckoo, mourning dove, red-winged blackbird, common grackle, indigo bunting, ring-billed gull, gray catbird, white-breasted nuthatch, wood duck.

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. 

.

 

To Hear or Not to Hear

 

“Let the train blow the whistle when I go.” From the song Let the Train Blow the Whistle — Johnny Cash

“I can hear the whistle blowing, high and lonesome as can be.” From the song Starlight on the Rails — Utah Phillips

“I’m tired of this dirty old city.” From the song Big City — Merle Haggard

 

City noises surround me once again, like when I was growing up in Chicago.  As a freight train rolls through Macomb, dogs bark, the car with the loud muffler circles the block, and the first of many lawn mowers fires up.  But I focus on a great crested flycatcher calling, a singing Carolina wren, and then I spot two soaring turkey vultures high overhead.  Glancing at the spruce trees in my yard then shifts my thoughts to the northern Lake Superior country, and my mind fills with images of boreal forests, bogs, moose, and timber wolves, even as the train whistle continues to blow.   

          The whistle, though, is a welcome sound; I imagine the fast-moving train cars traveling quickly through our small town before soon moving onto the rolling countryside, across flat table lands of farm fields, down wooded ravine systems, on bridges over the La Moine River, the Spoon River, and so many smaller streams.  The sound connects me to land beyond the town, if only in my mind.  When the rumble of the iron wheels fades into the distance, I refocus my attention on bird songs, clouds against the blue sky, and the strong breezes that cause rustling leaves and branches to sway.  And of the urban clatter, I try to take little notice.

          It is a skill learned in the big city, this filtering out annoyances.  With so much going on; so many people moving in all directions at once; signs and lights directing a free person to stop, go, turn here, no turning there; one must find a way to determine what is important.  How else to make it through the mob without a collision and through the chaos without vertigo?

          In one of the largest urban areas in the nation, I learned how to go it alone, within a sort of moving bubble, sometimes even reading a book while walking to the nearby bus stop; later, focusing intensely on that same book while riding the “L” train to downtown bookstores.  I had no interest in dirty brick buildings or roadways jammed with automobiles.  And what of the people?  Just a turbulent stream of strange faces I hardy even saw and would never see again.  To all appearances, I may have seemed completely self-absorbed, avoiding eye contact.  And yet, I remained keenly aware of anyone within my peripheral vision, especially someone tracking my movements.

          That was how I once lived before over three decades in rural Illinois, where I actually learned to tune in rather precisely to certain sounds, like bird calls, and also to be more tolerant of circumstances beyond my control.  But even so, whenever I return to the big city, the old feelings and reflexes quickly return, sometimes to the shock of my wife Julie.  There was the time with her when I negotiated a downtown Chicago traffic snarl like a sharp-shinned hawk chasing its prey through a maze of forest trees, or near the Art Institute when I answered a panhandler’s question of “Do you have any spare change I can borrow?” with an abrupt “No!” without slowing my pace or making eye contact.

          Of course, those selected recollections merely illustrate survival techniques, and are not really a recommendation on how to behave on a regular basis:  dismissive of others; slightly paranoid; aggressive; maybe even rude, depending upon the interpretation.  I much prefer being more open to my surroundings, with only a coarse filter most of the time, even waving to folks as I drive down my small town street.  Recalling the comfort that I have found in the sound of a train’s whistle, I wonder if I may perhaps one day even warm a bit to the drone of a lawn mower.

 

Freight train crossing Jackson Street, Macomb, Illinois

 

 

Always an Eagle

 

“My mind ain’t nothing but a total blank…”— Merle Haggard

 

Arriving at the Quiver Lake cabin on an early May afternoon, the first sounds I heard were the clear song notes of a Baltimore oriole.  That was a good start, but having missed most of the bird migration this spring, I was nearly desperate to see as many species as possible during this all too brief cabin visit.

        My preference would have been to be at the cabin during sunrise just after a strong storm system had passed in the night, bringing the migrating birds down into the trees; but time and circumstances offered only a windy afternoon.  Even so, I enthusiastically exited my vehicle, grabbed my binoculars, and began to stalk slowly around our wooded 1.75-acre property.

        There certainly were more birds around than a month before, but the wind made it difficult to hear faint call notes or songs of whatever migrants, especially warblers, might be high in the tree canopies.  And with most trees leafed out, finding tiny songbirds by sight in the chaotically blowing tree branches became an exercise in futility.  Glancing outward over the Illinois River valley, I saw that water levels had risen quite a bit since my last visit, flooding out mud flats along Quiver Lake that may have attracted herons, egrets, or migrating shorebirds.  My afternoon dedicated to birding was by every turn becoming a bust.

        So I gave up on the upland woods and headed to the lakeshore.  Midway down the steep river valley bluff, I recalled that a bald eagle nest was visible, maybe a half mile away, just barely protruding above the floodplain forest canopy between Quiver Lake and the Illinois River:  higher up the bluff, nearby tree branches blocked the view; only a few feet further down the bluff, the nest was hidden by surrounding forests.  Only at one unique elevation was the nest in clear view.

        With my spotting scope set on full power, I clearly saw an adult eagle on its nest, white head and yellow beak shining in the sunlight; and it was attending to at least one nestling.  I had been loosely monitoring this nest for the last four years, and it looked as if at least one eagle had fledged each year.  I also knew there were three other bald eagle nests along the river within a few miles.  So the Quiver Lake nest is not just an isolated case; there is a small local population here between Havana and the National Wildlife Refuges (Chautauqua and Emiquon).  During winter, there are even more eagles around, most having migrated from the north; seeing twenty or more within a few hours of birding along the river valley is not unusual.  Whatever else may seem tenuous or unpredictable these days, a bald eagle sighting in this area is a near certainty at any time of the year.  And that fact alone is enough to bolster my mood; because by the early 1970s, eagle populations had declined so much nationwide that there were no eagles nesting in Illinois.

 

Bald eagle nest at Sangamon Bay along the Illinois River

(near Browning), 1996.  Many trees died in this area due to

extended  flooding in 1993.  See The Eagle Quest link below.

 

Bald eagle nest at Meredosia National Wildlife Refuge along

the Illinois River, 1999.  Many trees died in this area due to

extended  flooding in 1993.

 
 

        In the late 1980s, I remember feeling extremely excited seeing a bald eagle, but also troubled because I was not sure how long they would be able to survive against increasing loss or disturbance of natural areas and the continued, widespread use of a variety of toxic chemicals that can enter food chains ending with the eagle.  In my mind, the bald eagle had become a sad symbol of our nation’s carelessness toward the environment. But now, almost fifty years after the pesticide DDT had been banned in the United States (DDT had been linked to the decline of several bird species, including the bald eagle) and following years of targeted efforts by wildlife agencies to increase bald eagle populations, the species has been deemed officially “recovered.”

                                            *  *  *

        I spent more time than usual watching the nesting eagles before continuing down the bluff side to the lakeshore.  Good things are happening these days, I kept reminding myself, even as my mind was filled with thoughts of the COVID pandemic and the recent foreign cyberattacks on our nation’s petroleum pipelines that instantaneously resulted in panic buying and gasoline shortages on the East Coast.  One lesson of these modern times, it seems, is not to take anything for granted.  I say “anything” because who would have ever expected that at the first mention of a possible pandemic in early 2020, the first thought in the minds of many across the country would be to run to the local supermarket and buy up all of the toilet paper in sight?  Not the number two thought, but number one!

        When I eventually emerged from the dense tree cover bordering Quiver Lake, my view expanded to the open skies.  I panned for soaring raptors, searching especially for broad-winged hawks or ospreys, another species severely impacted by DDT and still recovering. Then I saw a soaring adult bald eagle, which very likely was the mate from the Quiver Lake nest.  And still panning, I immediately saw an immature bald eagle, probably two or three years old, with little doubt, part of the local population.  Feeling the same excitement as my first bald eagle sighting four decades ago in the wilds of northeastern Minnesota, I knew that I would never take an eagle sighting for granted. 

        As I began climbing back up the bluff to the cabin, I heard a singing black-throated green warbler.  Following the repeating song, I found the bird in a small red cedar tree, alternating between singing and energetically foraging for insects.  I simply stood there watching this bird, who was unconcerned about my presence a mere fifteen feet away, minute after minute; the best sighting ever.  I could have easily begun thinking about declining warbler populations and multiple threats these Neotropical migrants face, such as loss of overwintering forests in Central America or crashing into glass-walled buildings, but I didn’t; I just watched, mesmerized, I guess, my mind a total blank.

 

References

Campbell, M.F., editor.  2002.  Finding bald eagles in Illinois.  Illinois Audubon Society, Danville, Illinois.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., and Christie, D.A., eds.  2010.  Handbook of the birds of the world, vol. 15.  Weavers to New World warblers.  Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

 

Links to Bald Eagle-related Posts on this Blog:

 

Bald Eagle Swims with Fish in Talons

Bald Eagle Takes Down a Canada Goose in Flight

The Eagle Quest 

Timeless Scenes Along the Illinois River

Bald Eagles on a Morning Commute

 

A Clear Message

My wife Julie and I were tired of waiting for the world to open up, for fear to be gone, or at least not daily in our faces.  And so we drove an hour west across the Mississippi River, had lunch at a riverfront restaurant (served by a masked waitress), and then went hiking along Iowa’s Flint River.

 

Flint River at Starr's Cave Nature Preserve, Burlington, Iowa

 

        Few folks were on the trail.  Mainly just us; the clear, flowing water; and limestone cliffs exposed behind leafless trees. 

        A small group, though, soon approached, following behind an excited border collie mix.  “He’s not our dog,” a child yelled, when the loose, collarless dog bounded toward us.  We only smiled and continued down the path.

        On our return, there was the dog again, following two other people.  Suddenly, he picked up a stick, dropped it at my feet, and looked at me with a clear message: Well…come on, throw it!  And each time I threw the stick, he brought it back and heaved it at my feet.  He was a simple, pure joy.

        Then we heard the dog’s owner calling, “Peanut!”  And his body language slumped into a new message: The fun is over.  We sadly watched them walk away, Peanut now in a harness, his tail held low.  As for us, it was also time to return back to our own larger reality, and I finally noticed that no one on the trail wore a mask.  Days later, we still talked about Peanut.

Following the Gold

 

I don't care for walkin' down town
Crazy auto car gonna mow me down
Look at all the people like cows in a herd
Well I like...
Birds— From the song I Like Birds by The Eels (Mark O. Everett) as featured in the movie The Big Year

 

Clouds and cold canceled a late March day trip to our Quiver Lake cabin.  So I stayed inside, shifting among reading, playing the guitar, or looking out the window.  Despite the weather, maple trees were flowering and lawns were greening up.  So why was I thinking longingly of winter days?  Ducks.  It was nearly one month ago that I last saw Quiver Lake full of ducks.

          Driving up the bluff road on a weak February thaw, lower Quiver Lake was still mostly frozen.  Hundreds of snow geese in formation filled the skies, but without open water, I expected little activity further up the lake near the cabin.  Even so, it would be nice to be on the edge of the Illinois River valley's wildness for a while, away from town life in Macomb.

 

A mid-winter scene at the Quiver Lake cabin

 

          When I slowly pulled down the gravel drive to the cabin, I saw that upper Quiver Lake was all open water, and it was loaded with ducks!  Without delay, then, I climbed down the bluff to the beach, set up my spotting scope, and proceeded to check out each of the hundreds of waterfowl.  Canvasback, lesser Scaup, and ring-necked ducks were the most numerous of the seventeen species in view^a.  After a slow, careful scan of all the birds, I settled back for some behavior watching.  Ritualized courtship activities can be especially entertaining, where poses and body movements are quick; for example, throwing the head back, lowering the head and swimming a short distance, bobbing the head up and down.  Sometimes several males, all acting like fools, surround a lone female, who usually seems to find a gap in the crowd to skitter away, leaving the males behind dazed and confused.  While all of this is very impressive, each year I become overwhelmed all over again by the deep colors and intricate patterns on the plumage of the male birds.  My appreciation for the pure artistry of these birds is only equaled by admiration for their abilities to navigate accurately over hundreds or thousands of miles between overwintering and breeding grounds, surviving daily threats and challenges; and for each species as a whole, surviving numerous back and forth climate changes over thousands of years and massive landscape alterations over the last two hundred.

          As I was lost in the joy and awe of watching these birds, a whistling sound of constant cadence sounded from above, as a small group of common goldeneyes came in for a gentle landing near several other males.  These birds were on their way to the boreal forests of the northern Midwest and Canada to build nests in holes in trees close to wetlands, lakes, or rivers.  I think of the goldeneye as a winter duck, but seeing one always causes me to recall the north woods of Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

          In my mind’s eye, I see a summer trail along the edge of Tobin Harbor, a large inlet providing access to the island’s wilderness interior, protected from Superior’s sometimes violent weather:  I walk slowly and hope to blend into the shadows of the spruce-fir forest, on the lookout for moose, when I notice a female goldeneye attempting to keep a low profile along the shoreline rocks and overhanging vegetation; there are no young about, and I think she may have lost her entire brood to predation….

          That was a golden day, a long time ago, I reflected, nearly thirty-five years; and then I noticed a bald eagle standing on a frozen portion of Quiver Lake, using its hooked beak to tear apart a dead fish.  In hindsight, the North Country has taken on an almost mythical status, so rarely have I been able to return; but the Illinois River valley also has its golden moments.  All too soon, though, it was time to leave; home was about an hour away, with sundown and dinner with my wife Julie soon to follow.

 

From a canoe on Tobin Harbor at Isle Royale National Park, 1986
 

          When I returned to the cabin a week later, all the ice was gone, and there were no ducks in sight.  With wetlands opening up, especially further north, the migrating waterfowl were less likely to be concentrated, except at high quality sites such as the Emiquon Refuge and Nature Preserve, just across the river from Quiver Lake.  I saw pine siskins and purple finches foraging on a silver maple, which still hinted of the north woods.  And yet I could not help but feel that a portion of the migration’s succession of species might have already passed my area, undoubtedly while I had been preoccupied with indoor activities at home.

                                     *        *        *

            Over the last few days at home, I’ve been seeing an eastern towhee skulking around our bare burning bush and lilacs.  And any day now I expect to hear the first eastern phoebe of the year.  The spring migration is in full swing.  But it’s not just the birds I look forward to.  Because unlike when I was young and just starting to notice birds, I now can reflect upon little scenes or stories associated with each species:  where I first saw a species; birding companions sharing my enthusiasm; the uncertainties of a younger life now resolved.  I’ve noticed this more and more as the years have gone by.

^aCanvasback, lesser scaup, ring-necked duck, redhead duck, common merganser, common goldeneye, bufflehead, ruddy duck, northern pintail, mallard, wood duck, gadwall, American widgeon, swan (tundra or trumpeter), Canada goose, greater white-fronted goose, snow goose.

 

A Sign of a Time

"There was a time in this fair land…When the green dark forest was too silent to be real"—from the song Canadian Railway Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot

 

After the back country road that I traveled on emerged from the steep bluffs and ravines of the La Moine River valley, the land became gently rolling and then mostly flat.  And the view opened up to expose miles of snow-covered agricultural fields whose crops had been harvested months before.  It seemed a lonely land, bleak and lifeless.  Then just about as that thought emerged, a large rough-legged hawk, flying not more than 100 feet from the road, caught my attention.

 

Juvenile Rough-legged Hawk (Photo by Vic Berardi, used by permission)

 

          It was on the hunt, searching for whatever small mammals might be out foraging for food scraps like waste corn or soybeans left over from fall harvesting.  I was especially excited to see this bird because while rough-legged hawks routinely overwinter in Illinois, they nest in the high arctic tundra, a land of diminutive plants, too far north for trees; an unforgiving land shared with polar bears, barren ground grizzly bears, muskox, caribou, and snowy owls.  A more different world from central Illinois it would be hard to imagine, and yet I wondered if the winter landscape in view might superficially resemble the tundra.

 

Caribou on the tundra (photo by Kyle Joly downloaded from the National Park Service

at www.nps.gov 22 February 2021)

 

          The rough-legged hawk is a link to that faraway land, a place I am unlikely to ever see in person, but which I know is there; the living rough-legged hawk is proof; and when I see one, I am always reminded that there were periods when tundra-like environments existed in Illinois:  during the Ice Age.  From about 75,000 to 10,000 years ago, the most recent glacier extended from the Arctic, for a time reaching into the Midwest and covering much of what would one day be the northeastern third of Illinois.  Steppe tundra (grasses, sedges, and herbs with few trees) and forest tundra developed along the glacier’s margin, where surely there were rough-legged hawks.

          How strange it is to imagine Illinois with tundra, boreal forest, and glaciers.  Even stranger are some of the fauna of that time, which would have included species that went extinct after the Ice Age:  mammoths on the tundra; mastodons in the nearby boreal forests; and the giant short-faced bear, larger than a polar bear, an unopposed super predator, roaming the land at will.  But that environment would have seemed normal to the few humans who coexisted, having only arrived in North America for the first time near the waning years of the Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years before the present; just as what greeted the first Europeans to see the Illinois country in the seventeenth century—extensive grasslands, open woodlands, and savanna—would have seemed normal to them; as a land of vast corn and soybean farmlands seems normal to me.  The word “normal,” though, requires an agreed upon point of reference.  Writing for Time-Life Books in 1983, Windsor Chorlton had this to say:  Human beings have never experienced the earth’s normal climate.  For most of its 4.6-billion-year existence, the planet has been inhospitably hot or dry and utterly devoid of glacial ice.  Only seven times have major ice eras, averaging roughly 50 million years in length, introduced relatively cooler temperatures; humankind arose during the most recent of those periods.

 

Muskox on steppe tundra.  A diorama at the Illinois State Museum

illustrating Ice Age Henderson County, Illinois (downloaded on 22 February

2021 from iceage.museum.state.il.us)

 

          As the climate warmed and the ice retreated back northward, so also did the tundra and boreal forest.  Individual plants would have survived or died out as the changing environment allowed; but for each species, continually shifting the boundaries of distribution along with favorable conditions; so that, gradually over many years, tundra gave way to boreal forest, with both eventually no longer able to survive in Illinois.  Deciduous forest and prairie species would then thrive where tundra and spruce forests could not.  And this reminds me that the state of nature is continually poised for change, ready to exploit or avoid a situation when the time is appropriate.  Change, in fact, in the final analysis, is the norm; not any one set of conditions that happen to be there when we start paying attention.

          Oh, where the line of thought leads beginning with a simple rough-legged hawk sighting!  Images of where that bird came from, what it might have seen in its life, and what other individuals of the species may have experienced through deep time.  Then, seeing the land in front of me not as it is, but as it had been, and what it might become. 

          But soon the spring bird migration will be underway, with species returning to Illinois from the southern hemisphere.  Where in time and place might sightings of those migrants take me?

 

Selected References

Berkson, A. and Wiant, M.D., editors.  2001.  Discovering Illinois archaeology.  Illinois Association for the Advancement of Archaeology and the Illinois Archaeological Survey.

Chorlton, W.  1983.  Ice ages.  Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia.

Illinois State Museum.  iceage.museum.state.il.us referenced on 22 February 2021.

Killey, M.M.  1998.  Illinois’ ice age legacy.  GeoScience Education Series 14.  Illinois State Geological Survey, Champaign, Illinois.

Pielou, E.C.  1991.  After the ice age:  the return of life to North America.  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

 

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

 

By Thomas V. Lerczak

[Download a pdf file of this essay by clicking Download SPSO 30-year perspective.]

In the summer of 1991, I moved to Mason County in central Illinois.  I was to begin what would be a twenty-eight-year career with the state of Illinois in the field of natural resources.  But even before getting settled into my new surroundings, my first priority was to find large natural areas nearby where I could wander all day by sun and compass.  So naturally, I was attracted to Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve (1,515 acres), about eight miles south of my new home.  It remains one of my favorite places in the Midwest, even though recent visits have been few and far between.

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, Fall 1992

 

      But this winter I had the opportunity to re-visit Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve with a friend, and I once again enjoyed experiencing the preserve’s special features and wilderness feeling, especially seeing it through the eyes of someone experiencing it for the first time.  The day’s adventures reminded me of my first visit in 1991, which I described in an essay called "Mississippi River Full Circle": 

 

      [Given the emphasis on prairie in the preserve’s 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.

 

Prairie opening at Sand Prairie-Scrub-Oak Nature Preserve, winter 2013

 

      In those days, I had only recently absorbed new and developing ideas on the dynamic aspects of ecosystems, especially when considered from a long-term perspective; I understood how they functioned in an abstract, statistical way, but had only begun to appreciate theory from plant ecology textbooks and scientific journals within the context of what I could actually see in the real world.  The biggest revelation I had at the time, though, was discovering how Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve and other nature preserves across the country were being actively managed to maintain or guide natural communities toward a preferred condition. 

      Of course, the removal of aggressive plants not native to Illinois made immediate sense, but resource managers of natural areas would also determine how many trees of this or that native species should be considered appropriate and where they should be growing; such determinations are extended to other plants as well, according to an official site management plan.  Management goals are accomplished by using controlled fires (referred to as prescribed fires), hand tools, chain saws, and herbicide.  Once, after presenting an evening talk on management of natural areas, a colleague asked, “So there is no longer anything natural in Illinois?”  “Well,” I answered, “that depends on your definition of the word ‘natural.’”

      In 2016, Big Muddy:  A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley published my essay "Change and Comfort in Nature" in which I examined how I came to terms with the idea of managing a natural area:

 

      The preserve [Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature 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.

      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.

 

Oaks encroaching onto prairie, at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, 2014

 

      In 1992, I took some photographs of the landscape where I first saw the sand prairie and savanna at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, where I felt as if I had gone back in time 400 years to view the original Illinois landscape, where if a cougar chasing an elk had run across my view, I think I would not have been surprised.  On my return this year, I again photographed that same scene from the same vantage point, and there is no doubt that changes have occurred.  In 1992, acorns from the surrounding woodlands, which seemed dense with undergrowth, had already been sprouting up further into the sand prairie.  By the time of this year’s visit, oaks encroaching on the prairie and filling in the forest understory in some areas had already been cut to ground level, rendering the overall area much more open; and the lone mushroom-shaped oak seen in the 1992 photo had been dead for a while, probably killed from an intense prescribed fire.  But this management has been done in such a way that the scene appears natural, not the work of managers…exactly the way, in fact, natural area management should be done. 

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, winter 1992-93

(Same scene as in first photograph)

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, 21 January 2021

(Same scene as in the first and previous photographs)

 

      Twenty years ago, I walked over Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve following a very intense fire on an autumn day of low humidity, high temperatures, and high winds; during the fire, prairie grasses lit up like gasoline, and five-foot flames roared through the woodlands, fueled by years of leaf and woody debris accumulations.  Leaders in the field of natural resources had been harping for years at conferences that a fire like this was exactly what was needed to encourage prairie over forest.  At the time, I was studying overwintering red-headed woodpeckers that used the preserve in varying numbers from year to year.  The following passage is from in my book Side Channels, in Chapter 13, entitled "Dead Trees, Disturbance, and Illinois’ Red-headed Woodpeckers":

 

      Frequent fires…[at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve] have left their mark on the landscape.  Ultimately, and taken to the extreme, fire favors grassland over trees.  Though black and blackjack oaks at the preserve have thick bark and are fairly fire resistant, they are not immune from damage.  And if a collection of fallen branches, twigs, and leaves has gathered at the base of a tree, a hot fire can do extensive damage.  Eventually, a fire-damaged tree will have fire scars, where fungi and bacteria can enter, and dead branches and dead wood within the trunk where parts of the tree can break off during strong winds…[Snags]and fire-damaged trees in these upland oak woodlands play a necessary role in maintaining the ecological health of the system as a whole....  

      I once stood at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve over the faint, lightly tinted image of a log in charred dust—all that was left of the log following a fire of major proportions.  The image suggested that even within this complex mix of destruction, ecological balance, and rebirth, the red-headed woodpecker has made a home for thousands of years.

 

      I need places like Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve in my life, places to experience that indefinable wilderness feeling, a feeling that was still intact on my most recent visit.  Since I will continue to visit this site every now and again, I guess I should plan on doing another thirty-year photo shoot in 2051, perhaps on my 94th birthday.  What a wonderful gift that would be.

 

Selected References

Kilburn, P. and R.B. Brugam. 2010. How natural is nature?  The effect of burning on presettlement vegetation in west-central Illinois.  The Confluence Spring/Summer Issue:42-55.

McClain, W.E., S.D. Turner, and J.E. Ebinger.  2002.  Vegetation of forest communities at the Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, Mason County, Illinois.  Transactions of the Illinois State Academy of Science 95 (1):37-46.

 

 

Links to Further Reading on this Blog Related to Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

Change and Comfort in Nature

Mississippi River Full Circle

The Missing Red-Headed Woodpeckers of  Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

Record Count of Overwintering Red-headed Woodpeckers

Side Channels E-Book (see Chapter 13)

 

As the Crow Walks

 

“Some days I’d like to be him, that’s my dog.”— From the song Dog Days by Edward David Anderson

 

The outside world has not been a friendly or welcoming place for a long time.  And with the middle of winter yet to arrive, I’ve already had enough of the cold, damp days.  So I find myself hunkering down at home, in a bunker-like mentality, increasingly leaning toward living, in the words of John Prine, “inside my head^a.”

        Time to get lost with a big, fat novel about a pre-historic love triangle or maybe give Melville’s Mardi another try; look up once in a while to maintain the inner fires and not much else.  They can’t get to me.  But how wrong that is.  For in the space of a few weeks last year, a virus that originated on the other side of the world, traveled the distance, and arrived in our small, obscure western Illinois town, and stayed.  Will it next enter our home attached to the mail, on a pizza delivery, or through some other route when our guard is down?  There is no reason why our household should stay exempt. 

        Chaos surrounding the recent presidential election has given rise to rumors of the power grid going out, food hoarding, gas lines, more businesses closing and throwing people out of work, and, like the original COVID panic earlier last year, bare shelves in the grocery stores where toilet paper used to be (the first response, it seems).  Is it possible that rioters and looters could run amuck down our quiet small town street?  I’m reminded of Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction story Nightfall, where an alien world with multiple suns only experienced the night sky once every 2,000 years; and when that happened, society went insane at the sight…then promptly collapsed.  What would I do if an out-of-control mob began attacking our home?  It won’t come to that, I assert, answering my own question.  But should we still plan for the worst?  We have enough toilet paper to last for a month; and we’re on city water, so I think we would have water even if the power went out.  Next priority:  What about our aged mothers living alone in faraway towns? 

        Lacking suitable answers, I return to my books and only glance out the front window every once in a while when someone walking a dog passes.  I enjoy seeing the different breeds, and they all look so happy, wagging their tails, sniffing the ground where other dogs have been.  But then a different kind of movement catches my eye:  a crow sauntering past along the curb, occasionally picking small items from the ground, presumably something edible, like seeds.  A hard life it must be to find a day’s sustenance from bits and pieces in the street, enduring the long winter nights on a tree branch through the cold, snow, and rain; and yet, anticipating the coming breeding season.  And thriving, at least so it appears.  Life going on as it always has.

^aFrom the song The Lonesome Friends of Science by John Prine.

 

Falling Ice

The other night, a red fox passed through our backyard.  It barked a few times, sounding a bit like a cat trying to sound like a dog. The next morning, I saw unmistakable fox tracks in the snow among numerous rabbit tracks.  And for the next two days, I often thought of the fox and of another, earlier time when my wife Julie and I saw a fox at our Quiver Lake cabin along the Illinois River valley. 

        We were relaxing on the cabin’s screened front porch on a late summer afternoon, quietly looking out over the bluff side and lake, getting ready to head back to our home in Macomb.  Reluctant to leave, our attention was unfocused, trying to absorb the scene one last time before packing up the car.  So when a fox ran across our view, quickly out of the brush and then back into it, we both looked at each other as if to ask, Is that really what we just saw?  The sighting made the entire day stand out against an already unusual year (2020):  warm memories to reflect upon during cold winter days.  The recollection made me want to visit the cabin again, even though it was shut down for the winter.

        So on the first good day following the weekend’s winter storms, I quickly dispensed with the few errands that demanded attention and headed for the Illinois River valley, nearly an hour away.  The town roads and rural highways were clear, but the surrounding countryside was blanketed in a continuous layer of snow and ice, and the exceptionally bright morning sun glared downward, reflecting off a glistening plain of white in every direction as far as I could see across the barren farm fields.  As I approached the Illinois River bluffs, the thickness and pervasiveness of the ice cover increased.  Tree branches drooped from the weight; fallen limbs lined the roads; and with temperatures just above freezing, ice and melt water literally rained from roadside trees, every now and again crashing down in great cascades upon the vehicle’s windshield as if I were traveling through a melting glacier.

        At the cabin, raccoon and squirrel tracks ran up and down our cement walkway leading to the sandy beach far below.  But fox tracks, I did not see.  So I focused my attentions on the blue sky, the half-frozen Quiver Lake, and distant floodplain forests, all covered in ice, across the lake and at Chautuaqua National Wildlife Refuge.  A group of Wilson’s snipe, which had been foraging in the seeps along the water’s edge, took flight as I emerged from beneath tall cottonwoods; across the lake, a bald eagle perched near the top of a tree; Canada geese and greater white-fronted geese lounged on the ice; and within minutes, a group of common mergansers executed flawless soft landings in the water near the geese.  I could have stayed there all day, reveling in this classic winter scene, but cold breezes off the lake were already beginning to penetrate my thin clothing.

 

Quiver Lake with trees glazed in ice, January 5, 2021

 

        With an extra jacket and hood, I ate a sandwich on the cabin’s front porch, much quicker than I normally would have.  My bare hands became colder by the minute, but I enjoyed listening to the honking geese, searching for an elusive fox, and watching ice fall from trees.  And with every crystal changing from solid to liquid, with every drip, it was one more step toward spring, still many weeks and winter storms away.

 

Birding to a Time and Place

 

“I remember everything, things I can’t forget…” – from the song I Remember Everything by John Prine

 

In our small Macomb backyard, under warm Indian Summer breezes and falling leaves, I looked beyond the overhead electrical wires into the unblemished blue sky, thinking about great egrets.  (Egrets are large [39 inches from bill tip to tail tip] long-legged, pure white birds usually seen only in wetlands or near lake shores or river banks.)  I was thinking about them because they seemed so remote from my urban surroundings; even a flyover would be unlikely; they also reminded me of some of my favorite wild places, from which, at that moment, I was far removed.  Comforting images among the sound of leaf blowers and mulching mowers.

 

Great egret at Shem Creek Park, South Carolina, 2019

 

          I saw my first great egret in 1984 at a small wetland near Chicago.  I was back at home in Berwyn, a Chicago suburb, after living two years in southern Illinois.  Never wanting to move back, I preferred the small university town of Carbondale near the forested Shawnee Hills; but this decision was forced by personal finances, of which there was not much, with only slight improvements on the horizon (the classic boomerang trajectory).  Living in the attic again, with its low, sloping ceiling and one small window, I missed the openness and abundant public lands of southern Illinois.  And so I was often drawn to the Cook County Forest Preserves, most of which were kept in a natural state with only minimal management focused on maintaining specific habitats such as prairie, open oak woodlands, or wetlands.  There were many official and unofficial trails, and I soon had a favored route. 

        Mostly I followed an unmarked game trail heavily used by the preserve’s abundant white-tailed deer population, and rarely did I encounter people, as most folks gathered near the picnic shelters or stayed on the marked trail system.  So I was rather startled early one morning, when I thought no one else was around, to hear a man, only a few feet away, say, “Did you see the crane?  I see him here all the time.”  “No,” I curtly replied.  I never saw the man until he spoke up, so I was immediately on my guard, much as I would be if similarly approached in a dark Chicago alley.  The “crane” stood in the shallows of a marsh, just on the edge of open water.  I took a quick look at the bird and then quickly continued on my way, thinking that in the future I would need to pay more attention to surroundings, even on a remote trail; this was Cook County, after all.

        Later on, I looked up the “crane” in a field guide and saw that it was, in fact, not a crane, but a great egret.  At the time, I was only beginning to learn how to identify birds, and I was quite excited at seeing what seemed like a rare species.  That excitement stayed with me throughout the summer as I encountered many other bird species for the first time, and I had a feeling that I was on the cusp of a major life change; I see now that there was my life before becoming a birder and another more fulfilling, questioning, and aware life thereafter.

        Yet simply keeping track of the birds that I saw (the very basic definition of a birder) would not have sustained my interest for very long.  The aesthetic aspect of birds is, of course, highly appealing; and many times, especially in recent years, I will watch birds simply because they are beautiful and they make me feel good.  But what has really kept my interest has been trying to understand each species’ relationship to its habitat, and this necessarily requires watching and interpreting behavior, sometimes in detail for long periods.      

        Our cabin along the Illinois River bluffs provides the perfect setting for serious birding; there is an expansive view of the three-mile-wide river valley and access to Quiver Lake, a large backwater connected to the river and adjacent to Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  From my perspective, once living in a big city and now in a small town, the river valley is a wilderness, and my access is through the cabin.  It’s where I can sit for hours on end to see the day unfold, to consider meanings. 

        From April to October, great egrets are fairly common at Quiver Lake, depending upon what the river is doing.  During floods, there is often little shallow water for them to slowly stalk prey (small fish), and the egrets must fly elsewhere in search of appropriate wetland habitats.  Sometimes even the forests are flooded.  But during other times, especially in August and September when the river is usually at its lowest levels, much of upper Quiver Lake, near the cabin and Chautauqua Refuge, is a series of mudflats with several shallow streams of water fed by Quiver Creek near the refuge boundary.  Fish are then easy to spot and catch in the shallow waters, and this attracts great egrets and many other large fish-eating birds such as great blue herons, snowy egrets, ring-billed gulls, Caspian terns, and American white pelicans in deeper water.  And, of course, the mud flats usually attract shorebirds from a variety of species.

 

Quiver Lake at low water, showing mud flats and seeps

 

        When conditions are just right and the river valley is teaming with birds, I’ll bring a folding chair down to the lakeside, which is lined with seeps of pure groundwater gently flowing into countless tiny channels from the sandy bluff side bottom into the muddy lake bed.  Through a spotting telescope, I’ll pick out a single bird to watch until my attention inevitably begins to dissipate or my eyes begin to strain.  There is always a reward, from the dramatic scene of an osprey diving into the water, emerging with a fish in its talons, to a small nugget of information on how an egret swallows a fish larger than its own head.  In my field notes on September 22, 2020, I wrote the following:  The egret struggled to position the fish (a gizzard shad about 6 to 8 inches long) correctly so that it could swallow, and even dropped it a few times in the water, but quickly retrieving it each time.  Eventually through sheer persistence, the egret flipped its head and neck in just the right way, and the fish moved right into its beak and down its throat.  Here the neck muscles took over, and I could see the bulge in the egret’s neck, caused by the fish, slowly move downward.  In doing this, it took frequent sips of water to help move the fish downward.  I fully expected the egret to give up, as the shad simply seemed too big to swallow; and then, after the fish had actually entered its throat, I expected the bird to choke.  But it never showed any sign of distress or impatience, obviously having successfully performed such an act many times before.

 

                                       *        *        *

        Soon after that warm November day in my urban backyard, when I was connecting to wild areas through thoughts of the great egret, I returned to the cabin, knowing that within a few days I would have to close it down for the winter.  But so far the warm weather had continued, and it truly felt like summer again; I was beginning to forget about the coming cold weather, even though fall colors reminded me otherwise.  The river had stayed low; mud flats were still there; and quite a few shorebirds were still around, but I could find no great egrets.  They had gone south for the year, and I probably would not see another one until April of the following year, which seemed so far away.  How would the world change between now and then?  I hoped that changes would be for the better, but for this year, at least, most trends were going in the other direction. 

        Later in the day, just after sundown, when the dark forest trees on the other side of Quiver Lake stood in contrast against the yellow-and-orange glare of the western sky, two great horned owls called.  One of the owls then flew to a nearby tree, and was soon followed by the other owl from across the lake.  I took this to be a positive sign for the future, and thought about my first great horned owl over thirty-five years ago, not far from that first great egret.  My mind became filled with images, as if I had forgotten not one detail over the years.  Powerful memories they were.  And I was transported in time and place.

 

Quiver Lake just after sundown, November 6, 2020
     

 

Jays in the Neighborhood

Over the last few days, while having morning coffee in the backyard, I’ve had the impression there were more blue jays in town.  Their calls seemed to be more frequent and from groups of two or more, unlike the summer months when long periods would pass with only scattered calls.  But at any season, when a hawk or owl is around, jays seem to come in from every direction to harass the patient raptor, who endures the bullying for quite a while before being chased off, usually followed by several jays and other species of birds.  After witnessing such activity, I am surprised by the actual number of birds around that until then remained hidden.  Soon, though, all of them melt back into the shadows, and all becomes relatively quiet and calm again.

 

Morning view from the back door

 

          On these late September days, there is a different feel in the air:  goldenrod is in full bloom; many trees show signs of fall colors; and there might be the occasional migrant bird from the boreal forest foraging nearby for only a short time before moving on.  On one such morning, I heard more than a few jays calling, and thought maybe they were after the local Cooper’s hawk.  As I looked upward, thirty to forty jays flew overhead in a loose formation moving toward the southwest.  They flew not in a serious energetic flight, but in a smooth almost coasting manner, flapping their wings like gentle fans rather than with high power thrusts.  It was a pace that could probably be kept up for a long time.  So from this behavior I determined that these were migrating jays—quite likely from faraway origins, maybe even southern Ontario—clearly on their way further south than my Macomb town.  Other migrant jays from the North might stay around Macomb and nearby woodlands all winter; at the same time, many of the local jays may have moved on, possibly out of Illinois entirely, or not.

          The reason why the jays engage in what might be termed “relay migration” is unclear.  If there were a lack of food resources in the area, then all of the jays should move on.  If some local jays traveled south to avoid cold Macomb winters, why would others tolerate that same winter?  If the motivation to migrate is not food availability or habitat suitability, what other factors might indicate to a jay that it has gone far enough or that it does not even need to leave its breeding area?  (Banding studies have provided some insight, but there are still many unknowns.)   

        Migrating is a risky adventure, but clearly worth the effort; otherwise, the behavior would not have been favored by natural selection.  At Hawk Ridge in Duluth Minnesota, I recall watching a constant stream of blue jays in flight around the southwestern edge of Lake Superior, clearly heading for a destination that was not northern Minnesota.  These birds were in serious power flights, warily sprinting over open areas from cover to cover.  They used caution because great numbers of migrating sharp-shinned hawks that prey on small birds also used the same flight strategy of going around the lake, rather than across, to avoid being caught in weather with no place to land.  I remember thinking of the jays as sharp-shinned hawk food, although I had not actually seen a hawk capture a jay in full flight.

 

Lake Superior at Hawk Ridge, Duluth, MN

 

          In terms of bird activity, there is always something happening in the neighborhood, especially when overwintering flocks of blue jays patrol the streets.  But to see most of it usually requires some attention, noticing small movements and sounds that are necessarily ignored or downplayed because of the myriad small demands of daily life.  If I had not taken the time during morning coffee to simply sit and observe, I would have missed the migrating jays.  Much later on that same day, I happened to look up from reading a book just as a small kettle of broad-winged hawks soared among the clouds in a patch of sky only visible between the canopies of several backyard trees; the hawks slowly circled and drifted to the southwest and out of sight in the same direction as the earlier jays.  Two important memories on the same day, and each lasted less than a minute.

 

References

Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  2020.  All about birds, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Blue_Jay, referenced 24 September 2020.

DeVore, S., S.D. Bailey, and G. Kennedy.  2004.  Birds of Illinois.  Lone Pine Publishing, Auburn, Washington.

Stewart, P.A.  1982.  Migration of blue jays in eastern North America.   North American Bird Bander 7(3): 107-112.

 

Wilderness Symbols Remain

“Country is what you make it; country is all in your mind.” — Tom T. Hall

 

Earlier this summer, a Wisconsin black bear wandered through western Illinois, making his way close to Saint Louis before being sedated and safely transported by authorities to wild areas with other bears.  Though I never saw the bear, he captured my attention, and for a while he was daily in my thoughts as a symbol of the wilderness that once was Illinois.  In my mind, I clearly saw open savannas covering a rolling landscape, closed canopy forests of tall bottomland oaks and hickories along the major rivers, and treeless prairies without end.  He also caused me to recall that in my life, domesticated though it may be, there has always been a need for some type of connection to “wildness.”

 

As the bear traveled through Illinois, he attracted crowds and media attention.

(Photo credit:  Screen grab from FOX 2 News St. Louis 2 July 2020)

 

          This year, my wife, Julie, and I moved from a rural area along the Illinois River valley to the small town of Macomb in McDonough County.  Our new home is on a quiet, shaded lane with carefully mowed lawns and manicured gardens.  To move was not an easy decision; we thought about it for several years, examining the pluses and minuses of leaving the country life.  Having both been raised in urban areas, we knew what town life would mean:  being closer to neighbors, the usual commotions and noises of even a small town, placing a distance between ourselves and the cycles of nature that we had long taken for granted, replacing nature’s randomness with orderly city blocks and streets in a well-behaved landscape.  When speaking of our former home, I grew fond of telling visitors, “There are no laws out here.”  In town, there are laws with plenty of enforcers.  I also expected that a special effort would be necessary to continue to connect with nature on a daily basis.

          But to my pleasant surprise, making that connection was only slightly difficult.  For the many bird species residing in our neighborhood or passing through town on their migrations made their presence known in a myriad of ways each day.  Early on during our move, a barred owl sounded off in the middle of the afternoon, almost like a welcome, helping to make us feel our decision had been right.  I thought, If owls are common here in town, what else could be here?  And I tried to establish a tradition of beginning most mornings sitting in the backyard with a cup of coffee, listening and watching.  There were the reliable species—such as the American robin, northern cardinal, Carolina wren, mourning dove, American goldfinch, European starling—that I would see or hear nearly every day; but there was always something else to cause excitement, if I waited long enough:  the rare Cooper’s hawk flying overhead for only a few seconds of observation; a ruby-throated hummingbird visiting our newly planted flower beds; a turkey vulture flapping its long wings low over the treetops, not yet able to catch air thermals for soaring.  One day as I sat reading in the shade, I noticed a slight movement just beyond our lilac thicket:  a doe with two fawns.  I stayed perfectly still, while they calmly walked past, about twenty feet away, to rest beneath our neighbor’s redbud tree.  Such a close encounter had never happened during nearly thirty years living in the country, where deer hunting is quite an integral part of the local culture.  It was another welcome to town.

 

Doe and fawn under neighbor's redbud tree, Macomb.

 

          When I first heard about the bear (eventually named Bruno in the media), he was near the Quad Cities in Iowa, and before too long he swam across the Mississippi River into Illinois.  He was traveling in a distinctly southern direction, almost as if by an unwavering compass heading.  “Where do you think he’s going?”  Julie asked, anxiety behind and in front of every word.  “Looks like he’s heading to our house,” I calmly replied, even knowing full well that meeting up with a bear in the wild—let alone near home—was one of her long-time fears.  At a much earlier time, I might have said that a densely populated town would be the last place a wild bear would go.  But I remembered that it was only twelve years earlier when a wandering cougar, presumably from suitable habitats hundreds of miles away, showed up deep within the city of Chicago, but also not far from a narrow habitat corridor along the North Branch of the Chicago River.  Frantic residents phoned the police, who shot the poor creature dead.  So a black bear leisurely passing through Macomb on his way elsewhere did not seem so farfetched.  Fortunately for Julie, the bear only came within ten miles of Macomb.

          It makes me feel good to know that these symbols of the wilderness stand poised just beyond civilization, which they sometimes easily enter, like the timber wolf that was photographed in Marshall County along the Illinois River valley in 2009.  I associate timber wolves with some of the wildest country I’ve known:  Isle Royale in Lake Superior, Michigan’s upper Peninsula, and northeastern Minnesota.  Simply seeing these place names on the page brings back a lifetime of good wilderness memories, giving me a small jolt of the wanderlust I so strongly felt in my younger days.  And the connection to wildness is made; that’s all it takes.  Wilderness is as much a type of place as it is a perception of the land, a feeling; in a way, all in one’s mind.  I know it when I see; and I don’t require official parameters or a legal definition, as the federal Wilderness Act of 1964 provides^a, or to have someone explain it to me.  My focus is on the connection between what I see or envisage and its meaning, which may be easy to make in a place like Isle Royale, a federally designated “wilderness,” but more difficult, yet not impossible, in, for example, a small stand of forgotten timber just off an obscure Illinois back road.

 

Timber wolf in Marshall County, Illinois, in 2009.

(Photo credit:  Natural Resources Conservation Service)

 

          I may be able to think of an undeveloped island in the Mississippi River as a wilderness, but it is important for me to know that the big wilderness areas are still there, even though I may not visit them very often, and some I may never visit.  Because the day will surely come when age wins out (still many years away, I hope), when carrying a backpack full of gear to a remote campsite is no longer an option (even though I have not actually exercised that option for quite a few years), and thinking about wildness may one day be all I can do to maintain a connection with nature, notwithstanding the birds outside my home office window or in the back yard.  But more significant, those large, intact habitats keep the possibility alive for a cougar, timber wolf, or black bear to once again venture into Illinois…and again and again.

 

Isle Royale (572,000 acres) in Lake Superior.

 

A shallow interior slough at Long Island (7.4 miles long by

2.0 miles at its widest point) on the Mississippi River,

near Quincy, Illinois.  This wild island is part of the 

Great River National Wildlife Refuge.

 

 

^aThe Wilderness Act of 1964 (PUBLIC LAW 88-577-SEPT. 3, 1964) states the following:  A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.  An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.

 

References

Barnum, S.  2020.  Black bear spotted in McDonough County.  Saturday, June 27, 2020, pages A1 and A2.  The McDonough County Voice, Macomb, Illinois. 

Gorner, J, J. Manier, and T. Shah.  2008.  Cops kill cougar on North Side.  Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2008-04-15-0804140895-story.html referenced 27 August 2020.

 

Prairie to the Horizon

On a recent afternoon, far from any chores at home, I found myself at the tallgrass prairie’s edge at Lakeview Nature Area in McDonough County.  There were several trails to choose from, but a distant, singing sedge wren soon decided my direction, for a better look at the bird.  And it wasn’t long before I saw it perching about five feet above the ground at the top of a dead shrub, surrounded by a dense mixture of wildflowers and prairie grasses. 

        While focusing on the wren, I heard the undulating song of an American goldfinch in flight, common yellowthroats from several directions, and a song sparrow from a patch of shrubs.  But as long as the wren was singing I found it difficult to look at anything else, as I rarely encounter this strictly grassland species on a day-to-day basis.  After a few minutes, the small bird flew off, and I continued the hike, freer to notice other things.  Big bluestem grass had recently begun to bolt throughout the prairie, sending its multi-pronged panicles high above the other prairie plants, perhaps five or six feet tall, commanding attention by their movements with every gust.  Common milkweed was still in bloom in places, and occasionally a whiff of its fragrant scent, like a natural air freshener, floated past on warm breezes.  And beyond the prairie and across the county road to the east, agricultural fields stretched as far as I could see below highly dynamic cloud formations reaching to great heights, possibly a sign of developing thunderstorms.  It was a timeless scene, one that might have repeated any number of times in the Illinois landscape for thousands of years—over tallgrass prairie, though, not corn fields.

 

The Lakeview Nature Area prairie, August 8, 2020.

 

[Listen to a singing sedge wren at Lakeview Nature Area by clicking the link

Download Sedge wren at Lakeview Prairie 8-Aug-2020.]

 

        The Lakeview prairie that I walked through in search of the sedge wrens was very special, especially because large patches of prairie in Illinois are few and far between.  Prior to the 1800s, just over half the land cover of Illinois was prairie of various types, but by the end of that century, most of it had been developed into agriculture or other uses.  In fact, an inventory of prairie remnants completed in the late 1970s found that only 0.013 percent of the original Illinois prairie remained, and most of this was scattered over the state in small fragments along railroad lines, at old cemeteries, on land poor for agriculture, and on steep southwestern-facing hillsides.  Donald Culross Peattie wrote about this transformation in his classic 1938 novel, A Prairie Grove:  “But we have come to subdue the grasses, to conquer the empire of locked roots.  The furrows lie even and open now, in spring and fall.  The geometry of fields rules the landscape.  It is a land turned to use, and I do not say it is not a good use, but some purity is gone.  For the fallowed field does not grow up again into prairie…nothing wholly wild is left.” 

        To be sure, I can’t really blame those first nineteenth century farmers in Illinois who broke the prairie and converted it into sustenance and profit.  Few at the time could have been thinking about preserving the prairie for its scientific value as a unique, complex system of interacting plants, animals, soil, and climate—an ecosystem, in other words.  Even fewer may have thought about preserving the prairie for its intrinsic or aesthetic values.  For reasons of survival and the practice of business, putting all of the land to work would have been the only perspective that could have made sense at the time.  What business owner, for example, would decide at some point that he has made enough profit?  Who would say:  Well, it’s eleven o’clock already, and I guess we’ve made enough money today.  Everyone go home and relax.  Indeed, I suspect most were glad to see the prairie gone, as such open land could be a dangerous place to get caught traveling on foot or by animal power during a freak winter storm or while a wind-driven autumn fire rolled across the land—the famed “red buffalo.”  And crossing the prairie in summer must also have been a challenge, as described by one W. Oliver in 1843, as quoted in The Prairie of the Illinois Country by Robert F. Betz:  “Among the novel discomforts of the West, that of insects is one of no trifling character.  The whole earth and air seems teeming with them, and mosquitos, gallinippers, bugs, ticks, sand-flies, sweat-flies, house-flies, ants, cockroaches, etc., join in one continued attack against one’s ease.”  Christiana Holmes Tillson, traveling through the Illinois prairie in 1822 further illustrates what might have been a typical perspective concerning the prairies, as she wrote that “…I could not succeed in finding anything to admire in the prospect around….”  And later in the same book:  “ …to those who have seen western prairies after the autumnal fires have passed over, leaving them in all their blackness, with an occasional strip of coarse grass or a scrubby bush, it will be needless to describe, and I think hard to gather beauties from it.”  At the same time, a notable exception to the foregoing view is that of Eliza W. Farnham in her book Life in Prairie Land, published in 1846, concerning the Illinois prairie:  “We crossed a little stream at some distance from the town, and our road thence onward, for more than a mile, wound among beautiful heights, thinly wooded and covered with the clean brown grass.  As we mounted one of these the country opened before us, and swept away to the eastern horizon, a distance of many miles—a smooth, open plain, undotted by a tree or other familiar object.  I can never forget the thrill which this first unbounded view on a prairie gave me.  I afterwards saw many more magnificent—many richer in all elements of beauty….”  One wonders how different Illinois would look today if more at the time had shared Farnham’s sense of aesthetics in nature.

        The largest and perhaps best example of a tallgrass prairie that has survived throughout all the turmoil of a continually growing Illinois is at Goose Lake Prairie State Park (2,537 acres) in northeastern Illinois, which I first visited in 1980, at a time when trees from surrounding lands had been gradually gaining a foothold over the natural prairie for many years.  Since that time, resource managers have been more consistent at conducting controlled fires to maintain the prairie and discourage tree invasion.  So that particular prairie, at least, is now in better shape than when I first saw it.

 

Goose Lake Prairie State Park, Grundy County, 1980.

 

        Prairies have also been restored on a widespread basis throughout the state, though still only in comparatively small fragments.  The 55-acre prairie at Lakeview Nature Area, in fact, is a restoration, planted over fallow agricultural fields, which were likely, in turn, once prairie or a mix of open timber and prairie, commonly referred to as “savanna.” 

        Still, the overall feeling when walking over the Lakeview prairie is the same as at Goose Lake Prairie, this sense of existing outside of the present time.  Big bluestem, being a dominant grass at both sites and a signature tallgrass prairie species, confirms that notion; because even though a prairie consists of wildflowers, shrubs, and grasses, it is the grass that truly defines a grassland.  The big sky, unobstructed winds, and the sounds of insects and prairie birds, such as the sedge wren, complete the landscape.  So there is little reason to lament that it may never be possible to restore prairie to the horizon as it once was.  For Illinois, those days are long gone (carefully staged and manipulated photographs, though, may hint at such a view).  More satisfying it is to defer chores, and to celebrate and improve what we still have.

 

Goose Lake Prairie Natural Area (photo courtesy of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources). 

 

Guzy Pothole Wetlands, Shelby County, with monarchs feeding on swamp milkweed.
  

 

References

Betz, R.F.  2011.  The prairie of the Illinois Country.  DPM Ink, Westmont, Illinois.

Farnham, E.W.  1988.  Life in prairie land.  Originally published in 1846.  University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

Peattie, D.C. 1938.  A prairie grove.  The Literary Guild of America, Inc.,  New York.

Taylor, C.A., J.B. Taft, and C.E. 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.  Champaign.

Tillson, C.H.  1995.  A woman’s story of pioneer Illinois.  Originally published in 1919.  Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville.

 

If a Tree Falls

The sun had already been up for a couple of hours when I finally ventured out on the morning of July 17^th, coffee in hand, to check on the neighborhood bird life.  But the birds were not so active or vocal.  Even the robins, whose songs usually were the most dominating throughout the day, barely made a few calls.  Of course, the breeding season was winding down, and many bird species were beginning to prepare for fall migrations.  I had barely gotten used to the summer bird community of my new town, having moved to Macomb only in late February, and I now regretted not spending time outside just after sunrise listening to the morning chorus.

          The strange quiet reminded me of a time three years ago, waking up one winter morning to find the hearing in my right ear muffled and down to only about thirty percent capacity.  After a few days with no improvement, I feared permanent hearing loss.  Months thereafter followed, trying every solution in the general practitioner’s tool box, before being referred to a specialist (Dr. Gary Shaw of Graham Hospital in Canton) who suggested that nasal surgery with a tube placed into my eardrum was the only viable option to restore my hearing. 

            I was fully conscious during the tube placement, which involved drilling a hole through my eardrum; the pain was at a scale unlike anything I have ever experienced, and it sounded like ten 747 jet engines screaming at full throttle.  I tried to remain as stoic and still as I could manage; my wife Julie could not watch without crying.  And less than a year later when the tube needed to be reinstalled, she could not be in the same room.  As if that were not bad enough, soon after the initial tube placement I would find myself on a hospital cart saying farewell to Julie (there are certainly cases of patients not waking up from anesthesia), then being wheeled into an operating room full of strangers in masks; I watched the anesthetic flow into my veins, and then…blackness.  My nasal passages would be excavated and widened using surgical tools inserted through the nostril.  Recovery took weeks; and in the end, my hearing returned and I could breathe better.  I felt thankful for the expertise and knowledge of Dr. Shaw, the many years he spent learning his craft, and to live at a time and in a country where such a complex surgery could be available, attainable, and successfully completed; because it was not so long ago that a simple ailment such as a toothache might have meant an agonizing, prolonged death from infection.  So I looked forward to the following spring, when I would fully hear bird songs again, and appreciate those songs as never before. 

          And yet, it still was not long before I once again began to slip back into the old pattern of taking life’s simple pleasures and comforts for granted.  To ease my conscience, I decided that such a state of mind must be a natural tendency and necessary for a relaxed life.  Is the better alternative to live as if each moment were the last, as if everything familiar and loved could vanish without warning in mere seconds, living life always at a high state of anxiety?  And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has descended upon the world, being a grim reminder once again, like the 9/11 attacks in 2001, not to take anything for granted, not even something as simple as a reliable supply of bathroom tissue.

          So at the very least, as I lie in bed each morning, hearing the first northern cardinal of the day singing as if it knew that that song would be its last ever, I’ll take a moment to really listen.  For if I did not acknowledge this bird’s efforts, would it then be completely ignored?  I am reminded of the age-old question:  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?  Imagine a continuous bird song chorus each morning tracking the sunrise the world over, moving from east to west across the continents, shifting each year between hemispheres;  and, wildlife notwithstanding, much of it not heard by anyone.  But the songs are still there.

 

[Audio extra:  On June 13, 2020, from a canoe I recorded the morning songbird chorus in a flooded forest along the Illinois River at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  To hear the recording, click this link: 

Download Sounds of a flooded forest at Quiver Lake-Chautauqua NWR 13-June-2020 ]

   

 

From a Gathering of Blackbirds

Even though the air temperature was 93 degrees F, where I sat, under the shade of a large cottonwood tree, it was pleasant, especially when the wind gusted off Quiver Lake.  There I could sit for hours watching the white caps roll, with swallows foraging for insects just above the water and turkey vultures soaring beneath billowy clouds.  But it was late in the day, and I needed to return home, an hour away in Macomb, for dinner with my wife, Julie.

 

Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, at the cabin

 

          Just when I was about to slowly stand up, several red-winged blackbirds and common grackles flew across my view, then landed in a silver maple tree just above the water’s edge.  More calling blackbirds then arrived from further up the shoreline toward Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge to join with those perching in the maple tree, but some of the original birds flew onward to other trees down the lakeshore.  This loosely knit flock was the first gathering of blackbirds that I had seen this summer.  The flocks often include brown-headed cowbirds, rusty blackbirds, and European starlings (this species, though, is not in the blackbird family), and they usually begin coalescing every year sometime in the middle of July just after the breeding season is completed.  It is a benchmark in the year, an event that I use to mark the seasonal progression, a moment when I begin to think of the fall and coming winter—though summer’s heat and humidity may be extreme—and what surprises the following year may bring, both good and bad.

          But it’s obviously easier to look backward than attempt to predict what may come to pass.  For example, one year ago, I could not have anticipated how abruptly we would move from our primary residence in the rural countryside of Mason County to the small western Illinois town of Macomb.  Such thoughts were, of course, in our minds as a distinct possibility for several years; but the fact of the move, and that it happened so quickly after the process had begun in October, shocked and transformed our placid lives in a way that has yet to return to an equilibrium.  When we return to Mason County to manage our remaining affairs or to visit the cabin at Quiver Lake, we still cannot help but feel, even after six months, that we are back home.

          Last July we had not yet even talked about taking a trip of a lifetime in the coming November to visit several southeastern states, waters with wild manatees and alligators, and to spend a late afternoon drinking wine and watching hang gliders above northwestern Georgia’s Lookout Mountain.  The thought had never entered my mind at any time in the past, let alone last July, that in recent weeks a black bear from Wisconsin would swim across the Mississippi River twice, into and out of Iowa, before entering western Illinois, all the while traveling quickly in a purposeful southern direction, passing around ten miles west of our new home in town, then swim across the river again to Missouri north of St. Louis, and all the while be tracked by the media and thousands of people concerned about the bear’s welfare (Bruno the bear he would be dubbed); in October, I would discover through an internet search that a good childhood friend, Sigi Bigelis, had been dead from cancer for five years, sadly answering a nagging question in my mind of why we had lost touch; I’m sure that few last year would have predicted the world would soon be in an upheaval from the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) and plunged into a self-inflicted, deep economic recession from governmental mandates attempting to control the virus’s spread, perhaps permanently changing the way people interact in public, from wearing face masks to social distancing to relegating handshaking as a thing of the past; and I never expected to be witness to widespread civil unrest, racial tensions, and domestic violence at scales and intensities not recalled in my memory since the late 1960s. 

        The prosperity of last summer seems more than a lifetime ago.  But from those good times, well before everything had collapsed amid the virus and social anarchy, NASA—ever optimistic about the future—announced concrete plans to not only return to the Moon by 2024, but to use the new Moon missions to establish a gateway toward sending astronauts to Mars, hopefully still within my lifetime (effects from the COVID-19 pandemic apparently have not significantly altered those plans).

          And so, the next year will unfold as it will, no matter what I do, say, or think, just as the case has always been.  But with so many negative arrows hitting their targets, it’s a struggle to remain upright and positive, even with NASA in my corner, especially with multiple daily reminders of life-threatening dangers ready to strike by merely breathing the air at a supermarket checkout line, while at the same moment attempting and often failing to stay at least six feet away from others, reminding myself not to think of them as walking contagions, and keeping my hands away from my face. 

        Under my cottonwood tree at Quiver Lake with its floodplain forest wilderness along the Illinois River, I feel safe from threats, finding solace in nature as I always have.  Surrounded by such peace, I am always reluctant to leave; but leave I must, in order to live, just as I must confront the world outside and all that it may hurl in my direction.

 

Bird Expectations

At our new home in an older section of Macomb, Illinois, I’ve taken to beginning most days sitting quietly with a cup of coffee just outside our back door, listening and watching for birds. I fully expected there to be differences in the breeding bird communities between our new urban location and our former home in rural Mason County along the Illinois River valley. In the more manicured setting of Macomb, with less habitat diversity than the country, I knew there would be less species, but I also expected some overlap. Species such as the house sparrow, European starling, northern cardinal, and American robin are simply a given for any Illinois town. So I could not help from mentally making lists of those species seen and those that I eventually expected. 

        But now that the spring migration was over, where almost any species is at least possible, I was not exactly sure which species I definitely should not expect to see. By the middle of June, I had still not logged a rose-breasted grosbeak or a Baltimore oriole, which I found surprising. So I started thinking more about habitats. I would not, of course, expect true grassland species, such as a Henslow’s sparrow or dickcissel, in town, nor would I expect wetland species like a black-necked stilt. On the other hand, Killjordan Creek, less than a block from my home, could be a wild card. I had already seen, for example, a great blue heron flying high overhead apparently following the creek through town. With that thought, a belted kingfisher is high on my list of expectations. When a flash of yellow in a nearby spruce tree caught my attention, I immediately knew it as an American goldfinch, but the deep yellow made me think of the prothonotary warbler. That was certainly a bird I would not expect in my neat little neighborhood, because if any bird can be considered the quintessential floodplain forest songbird, that species is it. I should also not expect forest songbirds that require large expanses of unbroken mature forest, such as the cerulean warbler or veery. But what about shrubland species? I had already checked off the brown thrasher, gray catbird, and eastern towhee; so more shrubland birds might be expected. Blue grosebeak? Common yellowthroat? Not yet.

        From a bird’s perspective, the in-town environment must seem like a simplified type of savanna: large scattered trees within a mosaic of grasses, shrubs, and large open areas. If that is, indeed, the case, then I should be looking for birds that can also be found in savannas and habitat edges. The key word, however, is “simplified”: much of the open area is pavement; the short-clipped lawns and trimmed shrubbery in town are a far cry from a prairie grass-forb mixture with hazelnut thickets; and the standing dead timber found in natural areas, so useful to species such as the red-headed woodpecker, does not last long in an urban environment, especially when a fall would likely be over a house, road, or overhead wires.

 

Do birds perceieve this environment as a simplified savanna?

 

        Birding in town is a challenge not just because there are less bird habitats than in the country, but because one cannot simply roam around at will pointing a pair of powerful binoculars toward wherever an interesting bird might be. I can just imagine the reaction if a not-quite-recognizable bird song made its way over from the smokebush across the street, which also happens to be in front of a neighbor’s living room window. “Officer…seriously, you’ve never heard of a white-eyed vireo?” So I’ll continue to adjust my expectations to town life, and perhaps have a nice surprise once in a while near the back door—like the hermit thrush during migration or the Cooper’s hawk that I had a glimpse of for about two seconds.

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

The Page Turning

Looking back along the road I've traveled, the miles can tell a million tales. – from Starlight on the Rails by Utah Phillips

August 2019

Across Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, near the top of a large dead tree, is an active bald eagle nest that I’ve kept track of since late February. I’ve enjoyed watching the nestling grow, but I worry on windy days when the tree seems to sway a bit much. It wasn’t so long ago that bald eagle nests were highly scarce in Illinois. So the recovery of this species to a healthy population is cause for optimism, quite appropriate for the spring season…especially spring 2019.
        For last summer I entered that phase of life known as “retirement.” The word evokes many emotions and expectations, undoubtedly different for every individual. For me, it is a time for rest and reflection, for pursuing new adventures with my wife, and for tried and true personal interests unhindered by work-a-day demands (no timekeeping).
        This is the first spring that I’ve had the time and wherewithal to observe seasonal changes in minute detail, from the shortest days of winter, buried in cold and ice. As the calendar advanced, I looked for those changes along the home trails, but sometimes beyond. The spring bird migration, for instance, is heralded in my mind with the first red-winged blackbird song, this year on February 19th. The first turkey vulture of the year is another sign (February 28th). But I’ve followed such changes in bird communities for many years. And even on my busiest of working days, I always took the time to glance around and listen for birds, though it might have only been moments while walking from the office to my parked vehicle.
        Changes in plant growth from day to day are much more subtle. In central Illinois, one might not think to search for the first spring flowering in February; but with a mild winter, that is when I’ll start closely looking at hazelnut shrubs. This year, I was able to watch their buds swell just slightly more each day, but with plenty of cold weather setbacks. Then as February passed, I became anxious; until on March 14th, several tiny, fully formed petals finally emerged. A similar story I could tell for all of the other plants along the home trails. Of course, I’ve watched all of these developments for many years, but never before with enough time.

                                            * * *
Always remember: The longer you live, the sooner you'll bloody-well die. – from Isn’t it Grand Boys - Traditional Irish Folk Song

It has been said that life in general occurs in four phases, and at age 61, I’ve found that concept to resonate. The following is simply my interpretation. The first phase, of course, begins at infancy and continues to young adulthood, when everything is new, learning is effortless and swift, and time passes the slowest, with the future open ended. The transition to the second life phase is rather abrupt, at the arbitrary age of eighteen. Thereafter we are considered adults; from this point onward, life inevitably becomes more complicated. Time still plods along, and sometimes progress is slow. But it’s a time for fearlessness, adventure and taking risks, blending new experiences with old and new knowledge; taking wrongs paths, making mistakes; backing up and correcting course while hopefully making progress.
        As the second phase begins to show wear and adolescent ideas of fun begin to be not so amusing, one gradually enters the third and perhaps longest phase of life, middle and late-middle adulthood: a time of serious dedication, accomplishment, increasing responsibility, and means. Time begins to move noticeably faster, and this shocking reality is frequently a topic of conversation among contemporaries; ten years no longer seems to be such a long time. One may begin to look backward, hopefully with satisfaction, as much as forward, still with much anticipation.
        So when does the fourth phase begin? In my view, the fourth phase begins as abruptly as adulthood: with retirement from the working, wage-earning world. But that point does not necessarily equate with being elderly, especially for those retiring well before the usual age of sixty-five. An elderly individual, however, certainly is within the final life phase, working or not. Knowing it is the final phase, some attempt to delay entry, but time eventually wins out, and drags everyone through. The fourth life phase is for taking stock; one tends to look backward more often simply because there are more years behind than in front. Time gallops along, and that is usually a source of sadness. One likely has acquired a certain degree of wisdom and skills, such as playing a musical instrument, that can sweeten these years, even though younger generations will probably be dismissive—just as it has always been. Living in the moment provides security; the future is contemplated with an optimism that comes with being in control, but it is also viewed with increasing trepidation.
        It is in this frame of mind that I opened our three-season Quiver Lake cabin in early April. But where I once unlocked the cabin with open-armed enthusiasm as soon as winter weather was barely over, I have begun to approach the event with a certain degree of apprehension. Why? There was the year when turning on the water pump blew out the connectors on the old toilet; the year water pressure in the old toilet pulled the tank’s worn rubber stopper into its drain, and allowed water to run continuously (we purchased a new toilet); the year I delayed shutting down the cabin for the winter, so the pipes froze and all had to be replaced; the year the water pump malfunctioned and had to be replaced; the year we finally discovered the leaking roof, but not before dripping water ruined a piece of artwork (we re-roofed the cabin); the year the kitchen faucet leaked from a crack created by a tiny residue of water not drained in the fall; the year the new roof began leaking (“That’s not possible!”); the year of the carpenter ant invasion; and the year the new siding let rain in through the wall at every nail, as if the siding were not even there. What will it be this year, I thought, just before I flipped the power switch to the water pump? At first, air in the pipes caused an uneven flow of water, which gave me a scare. So I shut everything down, and then re-started the system. After a little coughing, it worked! But then I saw the leaking kitchen sink sprayer. Again, a small residue of water left behind over the winter had frozen and cracked the housing. But that was easily replaced without calling a plumber. And with good health so far, I let my guard down and was ready to enjoy a new season at the cabin.
        As my wife and I plan ahead for the coming years, there are days when anything seems possible: European trips, Alaska, northern Canada, New England, driving a rented RV across the country, Florida manatees, a new home in a culturally diverse university town, gardening, beekeeping, a published novel.
        Are we running out of time? Of course, but the passage of time is not constant, as life and Einstein have shown; time can be slowed. By watching plants grow, tracking cloud formations across the sky as they imperceptibly change shape, listening to wind in the trees, watching hawks soar on rising air thermals, and taking afternoon naps, time can be seized and then slowed down. At the Quiver Lake cabin, I will give this idea further thought, perhaps while watching a pair of bald eagles raise the next generation. In the end, time will remain the master, but not without at least some opposition.

 

                                              * * *
Oh, I don’t know how I got this old, how the winter got so cold, now the morning’s turning gold, and I should stop my dreaming. – from Mind to Think, by John Gorka

Although the middle of July might seem early to expect the start of the fall bird migration, indicators abound, even in the unyielding summer heat and humidity. The pattern repeats yearly; it is something to be counted upon. So when I looked down the country road west of home, I was gladdened to see a small group of bank swallows perching on the telephone wires. They had left their breeding colonies along some stream or hillside and were beginning to stage for their upcoming flights to South American overwintering territories. At the same time, it was a slightly bittersweet moment, because the sight of those swallows also meant the first year of my retirement was over.
        One year before, I stood at the same location, viewing the same scene with swallows on the wires, pondering how the rest of my life might unfold, still somewhat in shock at having arrived at that point. In this phase of life, the discovery of one more year passing provides little comfort. But my attention was quickly diverted from a path toward darker thoughts by a singing blue grosbeak and calling dickcissels; from the timber I heard a yellow-billed cuckoo, two excited red-headed woodpeckers, and an eastern towhee. It was still the middle of summer after all; I had just walked through the backyard prairie, where blooming partridge pea, gray-headed coneflower, and Monarda dominated the view. And this scene anticipated the next stage in the seasonal progression: tall prairie grasses with showy panicles, blue asters, and yellow goldenrods brightly shining in the late summer sunlight. But I would not think about those coming days too much, as doing so tends to rush the season, and rushing through the year is what I least wish to do, just as I prefer to take my time reading a good book.
        Life, in fact, has been compared to a book—each day, month, year, or season like turning a page—with a definite beginning, middle, and final end. Life also has been compared to a river like the Mississippi, with narrow, energetic, swift-moving headwaters; a long, drawn-out middle section that forms the majority of the river’s length; and the aged, languorous, massive final segment before its end, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Either over worn analogy has merit. But I think life is more like a cloud: it forms out of nowhere, grows, changes unpredictably until it no longer resembles what it once was, and finally dissipates back into nothingness once again.
        Productive thoughts or pointless day dreaming? Before deciding, my attention was again diverted by a bird. This time a soaring turkey vulture. The mid-day sun created strong rising air thermals, so the vulture gradually circled higher and higher with no obvious effort except subtly adjusting its wings or tail one way or another to maintain stability or to change direction or altitude. The bird flew against a backdrop of blue sky and changing cloud patterns, reminding me of when I first saw a turkey vulture forty-one years earlier along the upper Mississippi River bluffs.
        The vulture, of course, is a bird of death, feeding on dead, decaying animals. Its message is the mortality of all life. Yet I find this not a depressing thought. For the bird causes me to recall many beautiful locations where I have watched soaring turkey vultures, from Arizona to Maryland, and what a joy it must be to sail effortlessly upon the winds, among the clouds.
        When I looked again at the telephone wires along the road, the bank swallows were gone. Perhaps they were bound for the nearby Illinois River and its backwaters, which undoubtedly offer a richer invertebrate life—fuel for their travels southward—than the insecticide-sprayed corn and soybean fields in the vicinity of my home. They might even share the same air space for a time with the young eagle at Quiver Lake that I am confident fledged only a few weeks before. So I turned back toward the house and prairie, which seemed more of an oasis than ever, and left my mind blank for a while.

 

 

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.]

 

 

 

 

The Shrinking Comfort Zone

 

I’m longing to ride on a freight trail, and be a good old American guest. – from Good Old American Guest by Merle Haggard

 

On a late afternoon in mid-September, I sat at the timber’s edge, watching our two highly active honey bee hives: so many bees every few seconds flying out of the hives, out over the prairie and beyond; and just as many returning. Except for gusty winds blowing through the tree canopy, all was quiet, with not much else going on. I was well within the comfort zone, and there was no reason to upset the apple cart, as the old saying goes. And yet, something gently pulled at me, a vague notion that I was missing an opportunity; the pull was not strong like it was when I was young, but it was definitely there.
        Despite occasionally feeling that I should be doing something else, I remained sitting for a long while. And with my wife running errands, I then spent the rest of the afternoon reading, playing the guitar, and walking the home trails. I was at peace, enjoying my surroundings, feeling calm and secure. In the outside world, there were many potentially harmful unknowns; but not here. So at sixty-one and retired, I may have finally understood some of what my seventy-six-year-old grandmother may have felt so many decades ago: Frustrated with a mere week’s worth of vacation from work each year, I once approached her and asked, “Since you’ve got the time, why don’t you travel?” “Not for me,” she answered. For her, whose first language was still Czech after being a U.S. citizen for over half a century, the increasingly complex environment beyond her small brick bungalow must have seemed overwhelmingly daunting, full of dangerous risks. The outside world may have been pulling at her, but she was strong willed and quite firmly rooted.
        Throughout life, the comfort zone develops for a reason; of course, there is a fear of the unknown involved, but I think the boundaries develop more as a result of experience, finding out what works and what doesn’t as a reflection of one’s unique personality, abilities, desires, and knowledge. At some point, what is “not for me” becomes clear. At the same time, it is important to test or redefine the boundaries, gently pushing the envelope with an open heart and mind. If I had not done so, I may never have taken that first trip to Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, ridden a motorcycle across the northern Great Plains, taken a solo canoe-camping trip on Missouri’s Current River, sung and played my guitar before a large gathering, left a good job to pursue a degree, given a lecture on ecology to a room full of college students, or felt comfortable with a smartphone. While safe at home, the outside world pulling at me is a prompt to ask, What else am I capable of?
        Whenever I’m at our Quiver Lake cabin, I’ll always take at least a few minutes to simply sit and look out across the 3.5-mile-wide Illinois River valley to the distant bluffs of Fulton County. It’s a beautiful view of forests, bluffs, wetlands, and open water that I can never have enough of. But it also makes me want to grab my canoe, cross the lake, and head to the Illinois River beyond, just to see what is there that is different from the last trip. Most of the time, just thinking about it is enough, and I’ll go back to reading my book. But then there is the rare occasion when a seed has been planted, and I may begin thinking of longer trips. Most of them never happen, but for those that do, the actual planning, especially with my wife, can be like a shot of adrenalin and my enthusiasm soars. A few weeks later, after going over numerous maps and reading a stack of background materials, I sometimes feel as if I’ve experienced a journey weeks before even leaving the driveway.

                                               * * *
For most of her life, my grandmother was never really much of a traveler, although she did sail across the Atlantic Ocean in rough seas and pass through New York’s Ellis Island at age 22 to begin her new life in the United States at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties. And she did return twice, as I recall, to her native Czechoslovakia with my grandfather, where he, in fact, died on their last trip in 1973. Upon returning to Chicago alone in a 747 jet, with her cremated husband in an urn, she never traveled again. (I now realize that I was insensitive when asking her about why she no longer traveled, by not taking that experience into account.)
        But I suppose a shrinking comfort zone is a natural tendency with advanced age, even without any great tragedies (for example, these days I would never consider traveling cross country on a motorcycle). It may not be possible to stop this gradual process, especially if health issues become a complication. But I am convinced that it can and must be resisted, lest one becomes too constrained and maybe even immobilized in an inescapable and perhaps uncomfortable safely net. 

 

                                Grandmother with Miska, 1980s

 

 

Sandpiper at Twenty-three Degrees

 

"The Earth from here [the Moon] is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space." – Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 Astronaut

 

Following months of flooding, the Illinois River was finally approaching what might be termed its normal, low-water level for the summer. The sandy beach and seeps at Quiver Lake were once again exposed. Great egrets, great blue herons, and killdeer could now find appropriate foraging areas in the shallows. And Caspian terns and ring-billed gulls gathered on exposed mud flats further from shore. I sat on the bluff side just above the beach and tried to avoid thinking about the daunting task before me: clearing the beach of the massive tangles of twigs, branches, and large logs left behind from the floodwaters.
        Then a slight movement at the water’s edge caught my attention: a lone shorebird called a pectoral sandpiper, walking along in the wet sand and occasionally grabbing minute food items from the ground. It was early August, and the fall shorebird migration had begun; many other species would follow and perhaps thousands of individuals. I stood still and thought about this small bird, traveling from its high Arctic nesting area to South American overwintering habitats, stopping briefly at this particular location in Illinois to gather enough food energy to continue its journey. It’s easy to feel insignificant when faced with a small bird capable of such a great feat, recognizing no international boundaries, local authorities, or governments. An authentic being of the world that illustrates how truly connected and one this world really is.
        And yet my thoughts immediately veered in the opposite direction. And I was struck by the fact that although the earth may be an interconnected whole from a sandpiper’s perspective, from the standpoint of geopolitics, it may never have been more fragmented…and, of course, dangerous. I feel safe at my home and lakeside cabin in a quiet rural atmosphere far from any major city, and most of the time, life is relatively carefree. But it is really the privilege of living in the United States that allows this life, just one result of all who have sacrificed and fought for such a country to exist. The daily news helps keep me in touch with the rest of the world, but most of it is not good, reminding me of murderous ideologies, corruption, oppression, and, what seem to be, insurmountable obstacles to progress. I want to know what is happening; but the newspaper is not an inducement for international travel.
        Unlike me, though, the sandpipers that I watch along the beach have no choice. They must make the yearly journeys across the globe to complete breeding cycles and survive to the next season, immersed in their own world of continual danger; high alertness and wariness are quite obvious as the sandpipers frequently check surroundings for predators, who are themselves highly attuned to any gap in the sandpipers’ defense strategies. To these creatures, danger is ever present as an accepted fact of life.
        In any case, it is the long summer days on the northern tundra combined with a superabundance of insect life make the migration worth the risk and effort. At the other extreme of each year are nights equally as long as the summer daylight hours but with brutal, freezing weather. And, of course, it is these extreme seasonal changes that shaped bird migration in the beginning, a direct result of the Earth’s axial tilt of 23.5 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane, defined as a baseline by the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. What if the tilt angle were zero? Then equal hours of daylight and night time would occur on each day at all latitudes, not just on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, which would no longer exist. It’s the tilt, in fact, that causes the seasons—during summer, the Earth’s axis is tilted toward the Sun; and during winter, the tilt is away from the Sun—so with zero tilt, there would be no seasons. In that situation, for example, what is now Arctic tundra in northern Canada would probably be a perpetual winter. Without pronounced seasonal cycles, how differently evolved would be the planet’s biological communities (tundra, boreal forest, tropical rain forest, desert, grassland, etc.) and how would they be distributed across the globe? What would bird migration patterns be like?
        An interesting aspect of this thought experiment is that there is nothing special about 23.5 degrees. Billions of years ago, a chance collision of the Earth with a planet-sized object is thought to have caused the tilt (i.e., pushed the Earth over), which happened to settle out at 23.5 degrees, plus or minus a certain amount of variation on a 40,000-year cycle. (Although I write this in a rather matter-of-fact manner, the unimaginable violence of such an event has not escaped me.) Other planets in the Solar System have different axial tilts; for example, Jupiter is only 3 degrees, while Uranus is at 98 degrees (so Uranus, in effect, rolls around the Sun on its side).

 

Photo from Apollo 8, downloaded from NASA.

        Following such thoughts, the images meandering through my mind are far removed from the Illinois River backwaters and pectoral sandpipers. Then as my consciousness returns closer to home, I recall the iconic image of Earth from 1968, captured by the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon. In that photograph, the Earth appears as an interconnected whole. The sandpiper’s perspective! But, with its thin wisp of an atmosphere, our one and only home planet, shining against the dead blackness of space, also seems fragile, vulnerable, and…quite improbable.

 

References

Kutter, G.S. 1987. The universe and life. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. Boston/Portola Valley.

All About Birds. www.allaboutbirds.org referenced 14 August 2019.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. www.nasa.gov referenced 14 August 2019.

Universe Today. www.universetoday.com referenced 14 August 2019.

 

Fireflies of an Evening

Because the daytime buffalo gnats (blackflies) have been so bad here in central Illinois, I have lately been taking my slow walks on the home trails during late evening, just after sunset. With clear skies, there is just enough light to find the way. Over the vegetable garden and one-acre prairie, the sky opens up from the surrounding timber, and sometimes a bat flies overhead. Owls and nighthawks may occasionally call, but not every evening. Then as darkness gradually takes over, flashes of light from numerous fireflies grab my attention.

        The fireflies have a curious effect: that of transporting me back to the mid-1960s to a little neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. It was my childhood home. Large shade trees lined the city blocks of closely packed modest homes, separated from each other by gangways, with small back yards and even smaller front lawns. Unless it was raining, my brother Bob and I spent most summer evenings outside. For amusement, we caught fireflies in our hands and held them until they flashed. Sometimes we would play tag with two or three neighbor kids, running as fast as possible over the sidewalks and across front lawns. At that point, it was not unusual to hear, from inside an adjacent home, an old person yelling, “Get off the grass!” But my recollection is that many neighbors spent at least part of the evening on their front porches; so in this way, certain individuals became familiar by sight, if not name. In my mind’s eye, I see my grandmother watering her garden; and with her keeping watch, I was smart enough to stay off our own grass.

        A special part of each evening was when the ice cream truck arrived. The truck played a string of bell-like melodies from a loudspeaker to announce its presence, which we heard from blocks away. When it finally arrived near our home, scores of children of all ages would somehow materialize from every shadow and converge at the truck’s side window for a few precious moments to place an order in a very serious, business-like manner. There was definitely a fear that if the order was not placed with the proper respect, it would be rejected, followed by public humiliation.

        During those formative years, my world consisted of only a few city blocks that included home, school, and a park. I knew every crack in the sidewalk on my block. We walked or rode our bicycles nearly everywhere; ran errands on Saturday evenings to a nearby newsstand for the Times and Tribune newspapers; and collected discarded soda bottles from all over the neighborhood, bringing them to the corner mom-and-pop grocery store to exchange for candy or caps for our toy guns.

 

                                            * * *
        Since becoming a serious birder over thirty-five years ago, I have been highly attuned to the natural world. So I often wonder what birds were around in my old Chicago neighborhood, birds that I missed completely, simply from having my attention diverted elsewhere. My grandmother pointed out European starlings, house sparrows, American robins, and once a downy woodpecker that nested in a tree cavity outside the kitchen window. All of the other species were unnoticed. Yet certainly there must have been abundant nighthawks on those warm summer evenings, as this species is very common in city landscapes where it nests on flat rooftops. Chimney swifts must also have been highly numerous. Blue jays, black-capped chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, and mourning doves must have been part of the local bird community. Of course, these days I could travel to that very neighborhood at any time to see what birds are there, but that would reveal little about what might have been there fifty years ago; there would be no certainty, only conjecture.

        I regret not paying more attention to the natural world when I was young. But as an urban child, there were many influences pulling me in different directions, not the least of which was television, which brought the outside world daily intruding upon, what seemed to me, our peaceful little neighborhood. Most vividly, I recall news footage from the Vietnam War and discussions of Soviet nuclear missiles. I was often reminded of this at school during air raid drills, when all of the students would be directed to calmly file into the hallways, then quietly stand against the wall to await the bombs that never came. In 1968, on the day of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the skies over Chicago were black with smoke from race riots. Soon our television screen brought us scenes of the National Guard being deployed, with nightly curfews. The hippy counterculture was simply bizarre. So the adult world at that time appeared as a scary place, on the verge of self-destruction. However, news of manned space flight, though difficult to relate to on a personal level, suggested otherwise.

        To a child today, the world must seem equally unhinged, with politicians daily contradicting each other wielding alternative facts and trading coarse insults, threats from a nuclear-armed North Korea with Iran not far behind, exported terrorism from the Middle East, growing numbers of refugees clamoring for entry into western nations, school shootings, out-of-control drug trafficking, flash mobs organized through social media, virtual reality on tablets and smart phones, the hypocrisy and fear-mongering of doomsayers, and the confusion of non-judgementalism and political correctness placing society’s moral compass on a soggy foundation without a reliable true north. It must be even harder for today’s urban youth to notice nature than it was for me.

 

                                             * * *
        Flashes of light from the fireflies are like a game added to a summer evening’s walk, trying to predict where and when the next flash might occur. And this sometimes fills my thoughts with memories, triggered by the same game I played as a child; at this phase of life, with over six decades behind, there are few observations that do not remind me of something out of the past. Yet I prefer to focus on the present and the future. So maybe it is time to learn more about the fireflies. How many species are there? What causes the flash of light? What messages, if any, are being communicated? What roles do fireflies play in the ecosystem?