Rejoining the world....

......after nearly a week of arguing with a very unpleasant respiratory infection.  In the end, I lost and am happily accepting my consolation prize of antibiotics.    Alas, we didn't see the river today; there were chores to be done after a week of not participating in the duties of life.   I believe I may have missed the bloodroot and trillium blooming in the woods along the bank and I think tomorrow afternoon a scouting mission is in order to survey what happened without me.

All the clouds turned into crows today; this is what they left behind to hold their places in the sky.

Making trades

I'm having motivational issues today.  This is the second day of rain, with a third still ahead of us.  Normal (a truly relative term here in Illinois) temps are 60 ° but today the weather people are calling for 50°.   That would be fine except that yesterday was cold and raining and tomorrow will be cold and raining as well.  This sucks all the joy of spring right out of me.   The world is definitely greening up though; the grass has picked up that weird glow which comes this time of year, and every tree (with the exception of the bur oak, which looks positively dead without closer inspection) has tiny green fingertips.  So things are happening, albeit slowly.   I forget every spring that one day of nice always leads to two days of miserable....it was over 70° on Saturday, but the price for that is what we have now.  By this weekend temps are supposed to be 80°, so maybe we've reached the tipping point.  Enough about the weather--weather is like the dream you had last night; interesting only to the one who experiences it.

I am grateful that I didn't waste a minute of the beautiful day on Saturday--I was up at 5:30 and at the river by 6:30.  I would have been there earlier but here in Illinois, public land is only public between 6:30 am and sunset.  This rule would have been ignored had there not been a gate barring my pre-6:30 am entrance.  We have so little public land here that what we do have must be marked, gated, bisected by gravel trails, signed, and have all manner of municipal buildings on site.   Our total land holdings add to about 836,000 acres, which amounts to 2.35% of the state and ranks us 44th in the nation.   I can't even find a map online of the holdings within the state, but I would bet my life at least half are located in the southern portion.  There are 26,000 acres in Lake County, which admittedly sounds like a lot of land, but looking at the county map reveals that the portions are tiny and really only pockets within the sprawl.  The largest local public land holding (2600 acres)  is close, only about 12 miles from here, but I cannot call it any kind of wilderness and don't bother visiting.  It is littered with picnic sites, trash cans, playgrounds, paved trails, and an interpretive center.    Apparently, the residents of Illinois need someone in a building to show them what is out in the woods.  I don't get it.

Rollins Savanna, just a mile from our house, has become a conundrum to me.  It is 1600 acres of  savanna, which technically speaking is a relatively flat grassland filled with native forbs and communities of White and Red Oak.  I think of it as amped-up prairie.   It is home to all the plants found on the prairie, but has the bonus of all those sprawling oaks providing some windbreak in the spring and winter and shade in the summer.  My love/hate relationship with this parcel results from this: when Mike and I discovered it not long after we moved here, there were no trails except those left by the deer, no little building with "naturalists" inside to tell me about what is outside, no sign announcing its name,  no bathrooms, no bike racks, and my Lord, there was no paved parking lot.  It was lovely.  It was the place we plowed through the snow together late in my pregnancy in an attempt to bring on the birth of our son, and later, the destination of our first hike with him, three weeks old and bundled into a backpack in February.  We walked there for years with our children and dogs, undisturbed by anyone and unbothered by the lack of facilities.  We parked along the side of the road and utilized the privacy of an oak tree when we drank too much tea.  There was a creek that ran through the property which, as our children grew, allowed them and the dogs to get good and wet, and there were apple and pear trees left over from the land's days as a farm.  We flushed woodcock in the spring and Mike once nearly stepped on a fawn, bedded down for the day and waiting for his mother.  We didn't have to stay on any trails and we rarely saw another human being.  In the event we did see another person, he was usually as intent on avoiding us an we were him.  It was our secret place.

Until the Lake County Forest Preserve District decided to "improve" the area.  They added the trails, native nursery, uniformed employees, countless signs, bathrooms, picnic tables, and ridiculous limestone overlook from which to see the birds on the wetland ---all the hallmarks of our county and state's municipally driven land ethic.  In Illinois, it can't be public land unless there is a sign proclaiming the fact or a parking lot providing an asphalt invitation.

Yet, I must admit that they did make one positive change at the Savanna.  The the drain tiles which had kept the land farmable for so many years were dug up and taken away.   This meant that the places which should have been filled with water became so again--and it happened within a single season.   The acres of sad, nutritionally depleted soil were covered by each year's  snowmelt and spring rain, resulting in bird paradise.   In the first year of the new landscape I saw a number of Yellow-Headed Blackbirds, which are endangered in Illinois, as well as countless waterfowl, shorebirds, Sandhill Cranes, warblers, and bird species I have yet to identify.

In the end a lot was given up, but the land and wildlife were healthier for it.   We relinquished the privacy and feeling of wildness but gained biodiversity.  As much as I detest the human imprint it was worth it to know there are creatures living there who would never have appeared otherwise.  It's very difficult to find a day or time when there aren't any cars, but as I have a strict policy of ignoring any and all  trails provided for me and follow those the deer made, I am usually able to hide from the runners and bicyclists, and disappear into the heart of the savanna.   Kola and I did just that yesterday, and were rewarded handsomely.  I was sure the rain, wind, and 40° temperatures would keep us safe from seeing any other cars in the lot but as usual, I was wrong.  In the end, it didn't matter.  Kola told me about a coyote I would have missed while fiddling with camera equipment and waited patiently while I took countless shots of the mist on the water.  We found a squirrel skull, abandoned Canada goose egg, a dismembered Garter snake, and an empty turtle shell.  We never did see any of those people, either. Maybe they were hiding as well, cursing my presence and praying they wouldn't have to abide the sight of another human being, if only for a few hours.

Moving forward

Today's two hour walk produced four decent pictures, one pair of destroyed pants, a wet person, tired dog, and an extremely frustrating and fruitless search for a (apparently lent and lost) book to ID the above right flower.  I think it is some kind of toothwort, but don't know which one.  Help would be appreciated.  Also seen above is the amputated pincer of a crayfish, the flower of a tree I don't know (working on that as well--Sugar or Silver maple??) and below is the bud of a trillium.   I need to get over the mania to name every flower, plant, tree, and bird I see.  Seeing them should be enough.  But I will continue the search for the missing book just the same.

"Their names didn't matter and if you knew their nature well enough, you'd know what they call themselves......Maybe the names we give them mean no more than the names we give ourselves, a fragile hedge against mortality."  --from The Road Home, by Jim Harrison

Illinois moon

Last The song of the blackbird is mighty loud

Through the evening mist

The moon is up and it looks so proud

Lookin' down on a night, a night like this

--from "Dry" by William Elliott Whitmore

Muninn speaks

I am confounded by the world.  Yesterday while driving home from the local wilderness I heard two very odd news tales.  Stories such as these two, which I will explain shortly, may be a regular occurrence on the radio news, but I don't know.  I do my best at the beginning of each day to take a vow of secession regarding worldly events, local events, and generally staying in touch with the man-made world..   This annoys my dad who is a shameless news junkie, but it is the only way I can function.  If I actually allow myself to acknowledge many aspects of modern life (the number of semi trucks on the roads delivering all manner of stuff to stores, the countless  number of people at the grocery store on a Saturday, the number and frequency of  land parcels  being vivisectioned for no greater good) I would be unable to take another step.  An overly dramatic response, I admit, but done in the name of self-preservation.

Anyway, the stories were these, and in this order:

1.  Canadian researchers have successfully wiped "fear memories" from the brains of mice. There is hope, the story reported, that at some future time it will be possible to remove "bad" memories in humans-- as some traumatic memories are so strong that they disable people from living "normal" lives.

2.  German authorities have identified a skeleton found hanging in a tree (by a hiker) as that of a man who disappeared 29 years ago.  The man, who supposedly shot himself after tying himself to the tree, was once a  soldier.

This is some serious mental fodder.  I mulled the implications of these news bits for the rest of the afternoon and I still can't seem to shake them.  The question my brain continues to ask me is this:  If the skeleton in the tree had been given the option, 30 years ago, to have his brain cleaned of all bad or fear -inducing memories, would he have done it?  And further, would doing so have changed his outcome?

___________________

When I was a kid we lived across the street from a lake.  It was probably a pond, but to us it was a lake.  It was nearly shoreless in its vastness and offered the kind of treasures, both real and perceived, only imagined by two kids recently moved from the edge of Chicago.  Lake Dartmoor was our personal, just-across-the-street, heaven.  We swam in it, fished in it, swung on willow branches over its depths, slung its mucky, silty bedding at each other, and hunted for frogs and crayfish in it. It was part of our home and roaming grounds, but we shared it with whatever wildlife was there long before us.

Waterfowl of all kind made the lake their foraging ground three seasons of the year.  It was a particular thrill to see a Mallard on eggs in the spring and even more exciting when the eggs were spared by the local raccoons and actually hatched.  We nervously scanned the shore of the lake each morning for a sign of the hen and her ducklings...had they been discovered by the local 'coons and eaten up in the night?  More years than not they were there, waiting for the day they would be big enough to float the lake with their mother.  Once they were ready to be on the water we thought we would be able to watch them morph from fuzzy beige balls into replicas of their parents--for once they were able to get out of harm's way and into the water, what could happen?  As soon as they were swimming, we felt they were safe for the season--no need to fuss any more over the fate of the Mallard ducklings.

But soon-- within days-- the ducklings disappeared. One by one,  sometimes two or three in rapid succession.  A brood of thirteen was neatly whittled to seven, then three, and eventually the hen swam alone with no trailing, jabbering young behind.    Where had they gone?  In the morning we saw everyone together but by afternoon there seemed to be one or two missing.  We took to counting every morning and again each time we saw them throughout the day.  No raccoons to be seen in the light of day, no marauding cats.

My dad, ever and still the storyteller, provided the answer.  Deep at the bottom of the lake, coddled by the same sludge and  muck we used as ammunition, lived a snapping turtle.  He prowled the cloudy waters by evening, hunting frogs and small fish, but by day....he yanked our Mallard ducklings under the surface and snapped them up.  He could take off one of our fingers or toes, we were told, in one clean bite.  He was the carnivorous thief, dad said, responsible for carving up the population of new ducks every spring.  And you could never know when he would pop up; he could be on the shoreline at one moment and at the middle of the lake the next, drawn by the promise of child-toes or tasty ducklings.

Immediately the safety of the swimming across the street was greatly diminished.  I don't know about my brother, but I did not ever treat the waters there the same way.  Swimming the  50 feet from the beach to the first raft was an exercise in terror and going beyond the first raft, all the way out to the center of the lake was gut wrenching.   I no longer swam, but thrashed my way to wherever I was headed in the water.  Noise, commotion, and churning limbs were all that stood between me and instantaneous digit amputation.   Fear of the roving, submerged, carnivorous monster changed the way I behaved.

At a month shy of forty, the memory of swimming at Dartmoor is still wrought with apprehension, to say the least.  Any lake I now swim is tainted by those thirty-year old memories--irrational, unwarranted, but now hard-wired and not going anywhere.  Snappers still strike fear into my heart, even though I understand their natural history and more importantly, the fact that the old man was telling us one of his yarns.  No matter.   Snapping turtles are fascinating creatures, genetically designed and thus theoretically capable of living hundreds of years.  They possess lightning speed when needed, attempt a return to their nesting grounds every spring no matter the obstacle, and are a vital spoke of any watershed--essentially, they are creatures to marvel at, not fear.   Yet when it comes to snappers, I am always eight years old, my entire being is nothing but fingers and toes.

This memory, though a great deal of it is the child of legend, myth, and a healthy dose of parental exaggeration, is close to me.   Even if it now, 30 years later, prevented me from swimming I don't think I would relinquish it.  Fear and memory, primeval companions which I am reluctant to put asunder, can be dangerous indeed.  Fear leads to memory, and memory back to fear--the duality of the two is where legend and myth were born, long before language ruled us.   Without them, the memories we carry and the fears we harbor, how would we conceive the stories we tell each other?

.

Now, far too many words later, having finally having finished the explanation of how the news puzzled me, something else occurs to me.....up until now I thought the connections between the two news bits and  the memory I unraveled here were so obvious.  Those connecting points  seem less  clear now, and I question the purity of my motives.  Maybe 

they were just an excuse I made to tell a story of my own.

Finally...

Spent the last two days (extremely unpleasant weather) either working on the blog or thinking about the blog. It is now as complete as it's going to get for the time being....spending three days staring at a screen has made me a little weird and disconnected.
The weather has changed from last week's sort of Springlike to decidedly not so.  Temps are about 35 degrees and last night we had snow and 35 mph winds.   The gales have died down now and no matter how chilly it is, I need a dose of outside.  Kola and I are off to check on the doings of the crows at the Savanna.