THE MIDDLE OF MARCH—NOT yet officially spring, but closing in on it. A few weeks of warmer weather has melted the snow that four months of winter mounded across the view from my study window. The river behind us has been open for weeks, and the rising waters from the snowmelt have defrosted its banks and submerged the shoreline exposed below the ragged, bending mop of autumn grass. The current runs more quickly, more purposefully.
A paved bike path leads from our street back around our complex, edges close to the river, and circles through and around a park of woods and fields. In winter, the parks department keeps it plowed. I barely turn the corner of my building before my view is filled with the open wetlands of the river’s floodplain. The long sedges the snow has matted down for a third of a year are clumped and flattened, a shag carpet of dry beige and pale brown interrupted only by the blue glint of the river meandering through it.
People seldom venture onto the wetlands, mostly avid fishermen with more optimism than skill. The bikers and hikers and joggers and dog walkers in the neighborhood stick to the bike path and quickly find their sight of the river disrupted by the trees lining the wetlands and by the rise that separates the bike path from the lowlands farther on. To the east of the path a substantial forest flourishes, and where the river wanders away from it, the forest spreads toward the riverbank. A wooden overlook deck stands at the point where river and path nudge one another, a place where several times a year the path is made impassable by high water. The overlook is a pleasant spot, right at the bend in the river, open across the floodplain in one direction and shadowed by forest in the other.
The forest is well canopied in verdant seasons, the path more dappled than illuminated, but in winter, when the ground is white with snow and the bare trees are stark shapes of brown and gray competing for attention with their shadows on the snow, the forest is a monochromatic still life shapeshifting with every step the walker takes. The faster you go the more you feel like a figure in the center of a zoetrope.
Snow will linger longest here, on the north-facing slopes and in the deep kettles between high ridges. The path circles the forest, affording views from every angle, and in a mere couple of miles the land rises and falls and rises again. Off the paved path a network of trails cuts through the forest, fit for winter snowshoeing and summer hiking. The trees are mostly red oak, bur oak, shagbark hickory, and other species that do well in hilly glacial soil; red pine and white oak grow here too, more sparsely. The trees are tall and the forest floor is mostly open.
It’s not a very big forest and it’s not a very long stretch of river. I can see houses in the distance across the wetlands and often glimpse the neighborhood in which I live on the borders of the park. It takes an hour to walk the circuit, and if we stay on the pavement, we cross broad open spaces, always aware of what surrounds the park. But when we take the forest trails, I’m calmed by the sense of enclosure and isolation curling around me. I take comfort in the constancy of the river, in the persistence of the forest, and find some momentary sense of renewal here, but it’s taken me a while to realize that these woods and wetlands have been urging me to reconnect to the land.
I came to Wisconsin a few years ago almost without anticipation. I am after all, I told myself, a Great Lakes boy. My youth was spent in an escarpment town in western New York, overlooking the lake plain of Lake Ontario. For nearly three decades I lived in the center of Michigan, a state bounded by Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. My wife, Sue, grew up on the Lake Michigan coastline, and we returned often to her parents’ house above nearby dunes and beach. I felt the Great Lakes states so deeply in my bones that Wisconsin inspired no need for expectations.
After leaving Michigan, we lived for four years in Colorado, close to the Front Range where the atmosphere, the altitude, the terrain were so alien it took all my energy and intellect to understand where I was. By going often to the mountains I eventually began to feel a connection to the land, a growing sense of belonging there. It was a lesson in how to adapt to new ground.
When we decided to leave Colorado, for reasons of employment and to live near one of our three children scattered on three coasts, we had no sense of venturing forth but rather of settling in. The turmoil of finding what would likely be our final dwelling, of moving in and determining the course of our days, preoccupied me. We settled in Wisconsin twenty miles inland from Lake Michigan, about the same distance I’d lived from Lake Ontario growing up. I felt like a Great Lakes boy back on home turf; I thought I didn’t need to develop a sense of place here because I was back in the place I’d been most of my life.
I was wrong.
The seasons have cycled through several times since we came here, and we have repeated our circuit along the river and through the park in every one of them. We’ve hiked or snowshoed most of the woodland trails. I look for the trees I’ve become familiar with: the stand of red pines at the northern entrance to the park, the straight bare trunks lifting a crown so high as to almost go unnoticed; the gnarly, sprawling white oak sometimes shielded by low bushes just outside the entrance; the solitary white cedar standing almost demurely just within; the shagbark hickory near the observation deck. I look for the small marsh at the bottom of the kettle near the northern border of the woods. I glance at the red pine we heard something scuffling up as we passed in the dusk one evening. I gaze out across the wetlands to a bend in the river where we saw sandhill cranes standing on dry riverbed in a summer when the water was low. I peer above me whenever I hear Canada geese flying to or from the river, sometimes a few at a time, sometimes in squadrons. We hear the geese in every season, as they fly above our neighborhood on their way to and from nearby farmlands.
The bottomlands along the river and the ridges and hollows of the forest have made me alert to similar terrain wherever we drive in Wisconsin. In the middle of an unfamiliar subdivision, a dip in the road will open up into a long patch of wetlands; a sharp rise will make the steep slope of a moraine apparent; oaks will loom above the shoulders. These brief echoes of my local terrain remind me that, for all my walking in the park, I haven’t left the path enough, reached the river across the wetlands, descended slopes into kettles where no trails lead, climbed pathless slopes where the summit is obscured by trees. I haven’t paid enough attention; I haven’t applied what I’ve learned about adapting and connecting to the land.
It’s time to immerse myself more deeply where I am.
Whether I really knew this time would come, I’ve been circumspectly preparing for it by reading Wisconsin writers who have centered on place. A few, like Frederika Bremer and Reuben Gold Thwaites, date back to the nineteenth century; others, like Michael Perry and Laurie Lawlor, are alive and kicking and still writing at the beginning of the twenty-first. But as I more and more feel the urge to walk my new home ground more conscientiously, I realize that three writers in particular attract me as literary walking companions: John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Two of them transplanted themselves into the terrain they wrote about, and only one was native to his; but for all three, the connection to home ground was vital, integral to who they were, essential. I’ve been walking their home grounds with them through their writing. Now I want to walk their landscapes on my own to see what remains of what they witnessed. I think I might learn where we are in Wisconsin by learning where we were.
I’ve also been walking the Ice Age Trail through the county where my wife and I transplanted ourselves; I’ve been walking along my own stretch of river and through my own patch of woods. “When humans make themselves at home in a new landscape,” Robert Moor writes in On Trails, like deer they learn the lay of the land, its resources and routes, and “over time that field acquires an additional layer of significance . . . not just resources, but stories, spirits, sacred nodes. . . . Over time, more thoughts accrete, like footprints, and new layers of significance form.” With the examples of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth to inspire me, I’ll hope to discover layers of significance forming on my own home ground. By this roundabout journey across time and place, I might be able to end up certain of where I am now.