THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2009. Wind chill seems to be a constant factor of every day. The temperature means very little when the wind can make it feel twenty degrees colder than you expect when you step outside, and even on a sunny day the sunshine brings no warmth. By the time we attempt a short walk on the Fox River Pathway, the wind has picked up, the air is bright with snow flurries, and the sky is the dirty white of winter. We don’t get far before Sue’s cell phone rings and she returns to the condo to take a business call; I keep on a little farther. The path has been plowed and in places a thin sheet of ice coats the pavement. I watch my footing, while I try to observe my surroundings.
The path immediately behind our condo gives an open view of the floodplain. In winter, with the foliage gone and the sedges pressed down from the snow, the wetlands have a vast uneven surface, like a thick, lumpy white bed quilt; we gain only a hint of the river’s meandering course midway across, remembering its presence rather than seeing it. In the distance, where the terrain rises again, is a jumbled cluster of houses and the campus of West High School. On nights in autumn, the lights of the football field glare across the horizon.
By the time I reach the edge of our complex, low trees along the sides of the path obscure the view and tall trees begin to tower before me. A single bird, likely a chickadee, makes a quick looping flight across the path from one set of trees to another. The path weaves through the western edge of the woods, and the forest rises thickly up a slope to the east. I push on toward a point where meandering river and meandering path meet up near the wooden overlook above a sweeping bend of the river. In the sharp wind I bundle up and hope the destination is not too far.
The Fox River that flows near my home in southeast Wisconsin is not the Fox River of history and literature, the one farther north that flows near John Muir’s boyhood home, the one that explorers and voyageurs portaged from to reach the Wisconsin River. My Fox River flows south from around Menomonee Falls, in the northeast corner of Waukesha County, through Waukesha, which treats it like a big deal, down through Racine and Kenosha Counties, and finally across the border with Illinois. It wanders west of Chicago, meets a branch flowing entirely within Illinois, and empties into the Illinois River at Ottawa. From there the Illinois River carries its waters into the Mississippi.
I’m attracted to my Fox River because it’s so immediately accessible to me and because the forest that makes up much of the Fox River Park we so often walk in (or did before winter set in), though small, is so dense and isolating. Trails wander through it, short but engaging, and though the paved path is quickly plowed after a snowfall, the trails stay snow covered and are good prospects for snowshoeing.
This morning, as I walk on well-cleared asphalt among leafless trees and snow-covered ground, I become aware that I’ve entered a study in grayscale. Color has drained from the world: gray sky, gray-brown trees, white ground, gray-black path. My sleeves and gloves and the fringes of my parka hood are faded brown. I blend in with the landscape I’m passing through, and I like the thought. The forest canopy is high and dense enough in the warmer months to discourage much undergrowth. The thick layers of fallen oak leaves keep the ground shades of moldering brown before the snows come, and only thin young shade-resistant saplings rise among the older trees. Against the backdrop of white the upright shafts of brown and gray make an abstract landscape painting of the open forest floor. The curves in the path lead you through and toward continually changing studies in vertical stark shapes.
The overlook and a few yards of riverbank beyond it are the only places where the forest gives way to the floodplain. The planks of the overlook are icy, snow-packed, and uncleared, and I step carefully out to the end, to make a slow, sweeping survey of the river and its banks. Flurries dance and swirl lightly before my eyes, too light to obscure my vision.
With gray sky for a backdrop and the unblemished snow of the banks lining its course, the Fox River here swings east from the center of the wetlands and flows toward the overlook, then bends south to flow away from it. In the distance I see four small shapes on the water, mallards drifting with the current. The river seems to be barely moving, only occasionally disturbed, looking like gleaming smoked glass, shades and tints of black and gray, its surface impenetrable to the eye.
I listen and hear nothing but the insistent wind, and after a few moments’ gazing, to lock the landscape in memory, I turn back. Near the edge of the forest I hear the honking of geese and through the trees discern in the distance a wedge of twenty or so hurling themselves across the gray sky. They too are studies in black, white, and gray, but at this moment they are only dark silhouettes against a sky filling with snow.