A Woods in November
I like walking through a woods—any woods—in late November. The trees are stripped naked. The architecture of nature is visible. In summer, leaves hide the understructure of trees, but in November, the intricate and varied manner in which a tree rises from its trunk and grows its limbs and branches is readily apparent. Nature has no secrets in November. The month guts the pretty illusions of spring and summer. The trees stand exposed, their imperfections apparent for all to see.
On this typical November day, in which the clouds hang over the forest like leaden scouring pads, I am hiking through Ryerson Woods in Riverwoods, Illinois, 30 miles north of Chicago. I am walking at an unhurried pace through the woods, which meander over 565 acres. The woods are part of the Forest Preserve District of Lake County. The preserve is named after Edward L. Ryerson, a wealthy Inland Steel executive who purchased the land in the mid-twentieth century and, in 1942, built a summer estate, which he named the Brushwood Farm. Mr. Ryerson was quite public-minded, and in 1966, the Ryerson family began to donate the property to the Lake County Preserve District. He eventually donated 257 acres. Neighbors also donated property, bringing the preserve to its current size. Ryerson’s donation belies my populist instinct that the wealthy are incapable of such generosity, but that is perhaps a subject for another essay. For now, I am perfectly happy to accept Mr. Ryerson’s magnanimity and hike on grounds on which he once lived and hunted.
The trail through the preserve heads west from the parking lot and meanders through a variety of ecosystems before ultimately reaching the Des Plaines River, which winds through the heart of the preserve. Leaving the parking lot, I wander first through a restored prairie that, in summer, glories in brilliant wildflowers and lush grasses. Now those flowers and grasses are dormant. The grasses lie brown and flattened against the soil, pressed down by the pelting rains of a recent thunderstorm. As I tramp through the dormant prairie, I see a kind of beauty in the very starkness of the brown flattened grasses and the withered stems of what were once colorful wildflowers.
I have been reading The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, selected and edited by Odell Shepard in the 1920s, and I’m learning things about Thoreau from the journal that are different from what I learn from reading Walden. The journal covers many years and seasons, and Thoreau teaches us to appreciate and study the seasons, to diagram the seasons. Soon, snow will blanket Ryerson Woods, bringing its own kind of beauty. But between the glories of summer and those of winter lurks the cloudy and cold month of November. My New Hampshire friend David Govatski calls it “stick season.” He’s absolutely right. I pass through the brown, dormant prairie and enter the edge of the woodland that will stretch west to the banks of the river.
The woodland consists primarily of oaks and hickories. Without leaves, each tree boasts an individuality that would not otherwise be visible. Here, this tree started as one trunk but at some point subdivided into two trunks. The tree is going in two different directions. Is it one tree or two? There, a mature oak rises majestically above me like royalty and shoots its denuded branches and limbs upward as if they will puncture the iron, low-hanging clouds.
The trail toward the river winds uncertainly. Footing can be tricky because the roots of the trees creep across the trail like black slithery snakes, and it is easy to trip on the roots. The soil in spots is nearly mud, which is easy to slip on. At one point, I almost lose my balance, but I recover by grasping the trunk of a sturdy oak. The trail winds west for nearly a mile, when I transition onto a boardwalk, built by the local Boy Scout troop, which crosses over small streams that have jutted out from the main course of the river. Surprisingly, in the distance, I see a few sprigs of green. I wonder what hardy plants these are, and I am grateful to see those splashes of color contrasting with the monotonous brown and gray that predominate on this overcast day.
November is not the most popular time for people to hike through Ryerson Woods. To embark on a November forest walk is to experience and invite and even dive into solitude. On July 26, 1852, Thoreau wrote in his journal, “By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.” There is a popular misconception that Thoreau was not sociable. That is not true. In his journals and in Walden, he recounts many conversations with local artisans and working people. He was friends with Emerson until they eventually drifted apart. But on his daily walks of five, ten, or twenty miles, he welcomed solitude. In the same entry in his journal, he continued, “The grandest picture in the world is the sunset sky. In your higher moods what man is there to meet? You are of necessity isolated.”
I find that I embrace the solitude. When I first discovered Ryerson Woods in the 1990s and started hiking through them, I was still working as an editor for a local textbook publisher. In contrast to the pressures and constant interaction with people, I welcomed and found renewal in my sylvan retreats to the woods. In his sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us,” William Wordsworth expresses my feelings well:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
I often feel that the world is too much with me. Like everyone else, I am bombarded by messages by do this and buy that and take advantage of this sale and that bargain. When I retreat to the woods, I find that it takes a while for my mind to empty the garbage, to silence the alien voices screaming like banshees in my head. After an hour or so, though, the external voices begin to hush, and I can begin to observe things: the tree that starts out as one and then splits into two, the tall and majestic oak, the occasional tree that has been bent by the decades of weather and has grown not upward but outward.
I come to the Des Plaines River. It is iron gray, reflecting the steely tenor of the November sky. Along the banks, branches and even entire trees have collapsed into the river, belying the instability and ever-changing life along the river. At this point, the river is perhaps fifty feet wide. In the distance upstream, trees bow over the banks of the river and are reflected in the water. I see a great blue heron, about to spread its wings and ascend toward the metallic clouds.
The river has its origins in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. It flows through the Chicago area and was, in fact, an important water highway for the Odawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi people who inhabited this region. South of Lockport and Joliet, the river converges with the Kankakee River to form the Illinois River. Nowadays, people canoe, kayak, and fish in the river. That’s a pretty new thing. When I was a kid, the Des Plaines River was filthy. Cities and corporations dumped raw sewage into it, but when Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, the direct dumping of sewage into the river gradually came to a halt. The river still has problems, though. It carries large amounts of the nutrients phosphorous and nitrogen, which enter the Illinois River and the Mississippi and end up in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a 70-square-mile dead zone in which there is not enough oxygen for fish to exist. In fact, Lake County is currently writing a Nutrient Assessment Reduction Plan to lower the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous entering the river. Illinois has established the goal of reducing nutrient pollution in all of the state’s waterways by 45 percent.
I start walking north on the trail that parallels the river. Here, the trail is straightforward, and the tree roots that tripped me up on the winding trail to the river are less prominent. A glimmer of sun appears overhead, and it sends its rays plunging into the river and lighting up the water. I imagine what it must have been like here before we Europeans came, when the indigenous people plied the waters with their canoes and engaged in trade and in the travel that transformed the Des Plaines River into a human highway.
After a mile or so, a small trail splits west from the main trail and leads to Mr. Ryerson’s hunting cabin, situated but a few yards from the river. The cabin is dilapidated, and in fact, the Lake County Forest Preserve District has plans to refurbish it. But the refurbishment has not yet begun. The cabin is constructed of stone and wood painted a dark brown, and it is topped by a chimney also made of stone. The cabin is locked, but one can wander into the adjoining patio, which was once screened in. Now those screens are in tatters. An empty beer can or two lie in the corner of the patio.
There is something romantic to me about this worn-down cabin. It is a kind of small Tintern Abbey reminder of a long-gone time when Mr. Ryerson gathered his friends here in good fellowship. Suddenly my sense of solitude veers into loneliness as I contemplate the friendship that filled this cabin when Ryerson and friends gathered for hunting and drinking and grilling. I imagine that the ghosts of Mr. Ryerson and his friends still secretly inhabit the quiet corners of the cabin, and I wonder whether the rehabilitators will encounter those ghosts once the reconstruction of the cabin begins.
It is only a few steps from the cabin to the banks of the river. Here is visible—or not visible--one of the most remarkable and important changes that have recently occurred at Ryerson Woods. Until recently, a dam spanned this width of the waterway. In the past ten years, though, the Forest Preserve Districts of both Cook County and Lake County have systematically removed all of the dams that once populated the upper Des Plaines River. Those dams were built in the early 20th century, ostensibly to ameliorate flooding. They were simple dams—tubular encumbrances over which the water flowed.
Dam removal is part of ongoing efforts to improve the ecological health of the river. With the dams gone, fish like smallmouth bass, suckers, and catfish can now swim upstream to spawn, and mussels hitchhike on the fish and implant themselves along the banks of the river. The result has been a boom in the population of fish and mussels. Ecologists have found that because of dam removal on both the Fox River, west of Chicago, and the Des Plaines River, fish populations increased by six percent in just one year.
In addition, removing dams has made recreation on the river safer. Running those dams in a canoe or a kayak was dangerous. If a canoe tipped, canoeists ran the danger of being pulled underwater by the suction created by the dam. Now, in spring, when the water runs high, canoeists and kayakers can more safely run the spans of whitewater without having to negotiate those dangerous dams.
I return to the main trail, which continues north but then veers west through a wetland. During the spring, this trail is often flooded. Today, though, the path is passable, even if muddy. Clumps of mud stick like leeches to the soles of my boot, and I grab a stick and lean against a tree and laboriously remove the sticky, thick mud. It’s a chore, but finally the soles of the boots are reasonably clean.
As I proceed westward, the trail grows a bit drier. I have returned to the river, which at this point is divided in two by a small island. The sun, which had peeked out earlier, has been smothered once again by the omnipresent iron clouds. The air is growing more chill, and I zip my coat all the way to the top. I have left behind the raggedy ghosts in Mr. Ryerson’s hunting cabin and feel completely, utterly on my own, stranded in stark solitude. Friends and family seem distant to me right now. There is no sound of traffic, no sound of airplanes taking off or landing at O’Hare Airport. The busy everyday world seems a world away. I am completely on my own. The realization is both exhilarating and frightening. In this media-saturated world, it is disconcerting to be surrounded by the profound November silence. This is not a dangerous hike by any stretch of the imagination, but even so, the silence and the solitude are intimidating. I have no one to communicate with but myself. I have no one to turn to but myself. My senses are sharpened, but my mind is empty. My best friend at this point is my hiking boots. It’s all up to me. To my left, two great blue herons ascend from the water. With their wings spread five or six feet wide, they remind me of the pterodactyls that I read about when I was a kid. The birds are majestic, beautiful. They are leftovers from the lost world of dinosaurs. At the same time, they somehow ameliorate my sense of solitude. All I can hear is the sound of my own breathing. The herons disappear over the woodland on the opposite side of the river. The silence is in my head. The workaday worries of my regular life seem like the echo of a distant past.
The trail now veers through a kind of bower, where tall bushes on either side of me bend over the trail, forming a tunnel of naked branches. To my left, the river flows softly and silently and peacefully. I come to a spot that I recognize. Here, a few years ago, I volunteered to help remove buckthorn from the banks of the river. Buckthorn is an invasive hedge, originally imported from Asia; it is the bane of woodlands throughout the Chicago area. The hedge grows voraciously and crowds out native species of plants. Removing it is hard work. That day, we used handsaws to cut the buckthorn at the base of the trunks, and then a trained specialist applied herbicide to prevent the buckthorn from revivifying. For three hours, I was bending over and cutting and sawing. God, my back hurt at the end of that day.
The next Saturday, we planted native vegetation along the banks of the river, where we had cut the buckthorn. Wildflowers, grasses, and forbs. Doing so was important in helping to cleanse the Des Plaines River. The vegetation helps filter the run-off that trips into the river during thunderstorms—run-off that carries chemical fertilizes and other detritus—run-off that helps to create the nutrient pollution in the river.
Years ago, I interviewed Stephen McCracken, a scientist who is the Director of Watershed Protection for The Conservation Foundation. He has done considerable work in restoring the DuPage River and the Salt Creek, west of Chicago. He explained that in the work on those waterways, “We improved the buffer areas—the vegetation alongside the rivers. This turned out to be statistically very important. We were trying to get a hundred feet on either side of the river with vegetation. The adult forms of macro invertebrates, such as dragonflies, live the first couple years of life as infants in the river, and then in their adult stage, they live in the upland area, where they lay their eggs. You need to give the adults somewhere to lay their eggs. [The vegetation] ends up looking very beautiful. It is popular. There’s a public aesthetic advantage.”
This was a project during which I finally understood what ecologists talk about when they delineate the connections between different parts of an ecosystem. The health of the land affects the health of the river, and vice versa. A river that promotes and nurtures biodiversity benefits us humans, who after all are part of the ecosystem. The work we had done in cutting buckthorn and planting native vegetation constituted more than beautifying the river, though that was important. It helped life thrive in the river, as did the dam removal that had been completed earlier. The health of the river and the surrounding woodland has inherent value. It is important in itself. In helping to restore the river and the surrounding land, we renewed our connection to the earth that nurtures us.
I continue for another quarter of a mile and complete my loop at the barn that Mr. Ryerson built in the 1940s and that still houses chickens, sheep, and goats. I pause to rest and finish my canteen of water. During this hour and a half, I have been able to sort out and hear the voice of my heart, to remember in solitude who I am, to put pressures at my work into perspective, to hear my authentic voice unimpeded by commercials and sports announcers and news broadcasters, to absorb the subtle beauties of nature that we observe in November, to hear the sound of my own heart beating, to formulate a simple poem in my head, to hear the silence of the woods. To see beauty in the stark emptiness of November. To create metaphors that guide my way forward.
On this typical November day, in which the clouds hang over the forest like leaden scouring pads, I am hiking through Ryerson Woods in Riverwoods, Illinois, 30 miles north of Chicago. I am walking at an unhurried pace through the woods, which meander over 565 acres. The woods are part of the Forest Preserve District of Lake County. The preserve is named after Edward L. Ryerson, a wealthy Inland Steel executive who purchased the land in the mid-twentieth century and, in 1942, built a summer estate, which he named the Brushwood Farm. Mr. Ryerson was quite public-minded, and in 1966, the Ryerson family began to donate the property to the Lake County Preserve District. He eventually donated 257 acres. Neighbors also donated property, bringing the preserve to its current size. Ryerson’s donation belies my populist instinct that the wealthy are incapable of such generosity, but that is perhaps a subject for another essay. For now, I am perfectly happy to accept Mr. Ryerson’s magnanimity and hike on grounds on which he once lived and hunted.
The trail through the preserve heads west from the parking lot and meanders through a variety of ecosystems before ultimately reaching the Des Plaines River, which winds through the heart of the preserve. Leaving the parking lot, I wander first through a restored prairie that, in summer, glories in brilliant wildflowers and lush grasses. Now those flowers and grasses are dormant. The grasses lie brown and flattened against the soil, pressed down by the pelting rains of a recent thunderstorm. As I tramp through the dormant prairie, I see a kind of beauty in the very starkness of the brown flattened grasses and the withered stems of what were once colorful wildflowers.
I have been reading The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, selected and edited by Odell Shepard in the 1920s, and I’m learning things about Thoreau from the journal that are different from what I learn from reading Walden. The journal covers many years and seasons, and Thoreau teaches us to appreciate and study the seasons, to diagram the seasons. Soon, snow will blanket Ryerson Woods, bringing its own kind of beauty. But between the glories of summer and those of winter lurks the cloudy and cold month of November. My New Hampshire friend David Govatski calls it “stick season.” He’s absolutely right. I pass through the brown, dormant prairie and enter the edge of the woodland that will stretch west to the banks of the river.
The woodland consists primarily of oaks and hickories. Without leaves, each tree boasts an individuality that would not otherwise be visible. Here, this tree started as one trunk but at some point subdivided into two trunks. The tree is going in two different directions. Is it one tree or two? There, a mature oak rises majestically above me like royalty and shoots its denuded branches and limbs upward as if they will puncture the iron, low-hanging clouds.
The trail toward the river winds uncertainly. Footing can be tricky because the roots of the trees creep across the trail like black slithery snakes, and it is easy to trip on the roots. The soil in spots is nearly mud, which is easy to slip on. At one point, I almost lose my balance, but I recover by grasping the trunk of a sturdy oak. The trail winds west for nearly a mile, when I transition onto a boardwalk, built by the local Boy Scout troop, which crosses over small streams that have jutted out from the main course of the river. Surprisingly, in the distance, I see a few sprigs of green. I wonder what hardy plants these are, and I am grateful to see those splashes of color contrasting with the monotonous brown and gray that predominate on this overcast day.
November is not the most popular time for people to hike through Ryerson Woods. To embark on a November forest walk is to experience and invite and even dive into solitude. On July 26, 1852, Thoreau wrote in his journal, “By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.” There is a popular misconception that Thoreau was not sociable. That is not true. In his journals and in Walden, he recounts many conversations with local artisans and working people. He was friends with Emerson until they eventually drifted apart. But on his daily walks of five, ten, or twenty miles, he welcomed solitude. In the same entry in his journal, he continued, “The grandest picture in the world is the sunset sky. In your higher moods what man is there to meet? You are of necessity isolated.”
I find that I embrace the solitude. When I first discovered Ryerson Woods in the 1990s and started hiking through them, I was still working as an editor for a local textbook publisher. In contrast to the pressures and constant interaction with people, I welcomed and found renewal in my sylvan retreats to the woods. In his sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us,” William Wordsworth expresses my feelings well:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
I often feel that the world is too much with me. Like everyone else, I am bombarded by messages by do this and buy that and take advantage of this sale and that bargain. When I retreat to the woods, I find that it takes a while for my mind to empty the garbage, to silence the alien voices screaming like banshees in my head. After an hour or so, though, the external voices begin to hush, and I can begin to observe things: the tree that starts out as one and then splits into two, the tall and majestic oak, the occasional tree that has been bent by the decades of weather and has grown not upward but outward.
I come to the Des Plaines River. It is iron gray, reflecting the steely tenor of the November sky. Along the banks, branches and even entire trees have collapsed into the river, belying the instability and ever-changing life along the river. At this point, the river is perhaps fifty feet wide. In the distance upstream, trees bow over the banks of the river and are reflected in the water. I see a great blue heron, about to spread its wings and ascend toward the metallic clouds.
The river has its origins in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. It flows through the Chicago area and was, in fact, an important water highway for the Odawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi people who inhabited this region. South of Lockport and Joliet, the river converges with the Kankakee River to form the Illinois River. Nowadays, people canoe, kayak, and fish in the river. That’s a pretty new thing. When I was a kid, the Des Plaines River was filthy. Cities and corporations dumped raw sewage into it, but when Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, the direct dumping of sewage into the river gradually came to a halt. The river still has problems, though. It carries large amounts of the nutrients phosphorous and nitrogen, which enter the Illinois River and the Mississippi and end up in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a 70-square-mile dead zone in which there is not enough oxygen for fish to exist. In fact, Lake County is currently writing a Nutrient Assessment Reduction Plan to lower the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous entering the river. Illinois has established the goal of reducing nutrient pollution in all of the state’s waterways by 45 percent.
I start walking north on the trail that parallels the river. Here, the trail is straightforward, and the tree roots that tripped me up on the winding trail to the river are less prominent. A glimmer of sun appears overhead, and it sends its rays plunging into the river and lighting up the water. I imagine what it must have been like here before we Europeans came, when the indigenous people plied the waters with their canoes and engaged in trade and in the travel that transformed the Des Plaines River into a human highway.
After a mile or so, a small trail splits west from the main trail and leads to Mr. Ryerson’s hunting cabin, situated but a few yards from the river. The cabin is dilapidated, and in fact, the Lake County Forest Preserve District has plans to refurbish it. But the refurbishment has not yet begun. The cabin is constructed of stone and wood painted a dark brown, and it is topped by a chimney also made of stone. The cabin is locked, but one can wander into the adjoining patio, which was once screened in. Now those screens are in tatters. An empty beer can or two lie in the corner of the patio.
There is something romantic to me about this worn-down cabin. It is a kind of small Tintern Abbey reminder of a long-gone time when Mr. Ryerson gathered his friends here in good fellowship. Suddenly my sense of solitude veers into loneliness as I contemplate the friendship that filled this cabin when Ryerson and friends gathered for hunting and drinking and grilling. I imagine that the ghosts of Mr. Ryerson and his friends still secretly inhabit the quiet corners of the cabin, and I wonder whether the rehabilitators will encounter those ghosts once the reconstruction of the cabin begins.
It is only a few steps from the cabin to the banks of the river. Here is visible—or not visible--one of the most remarkable and important changes that have recently occurred at Ryerson Woods. Until recently, a dam spanned this width of the waterway. In the past ten years, though, the Forest Preserve Districts of both Cook County and Lake County have systematically removed all of the dams that once populated the upper Des Plaines River. Those dams were built in the early 20th century, ostensibly to ameliorate flooding. They were simple dams—tubular encumbrances over which the water flowed.
Dam removal is part of ongoing efforts to improve the ecological health of the river. With the dams gone, fish like smallmouth bass, suckers, and catfish can now swim upstream to spawn, and mussels hitchhike on the fish and implant themselves along the banks of the river. The result has been a boom in the population of fish and mussels. Ecologists have found that because of dam removal on both the Fox River, west of Chicago, and the Des Plaines River, fish populations increased by six percent in just one year.
In addition, removing dams has made recreation on the river safer. Running those dams in a canoe or a kayak was dangerous. If a canoe tipped, canoeists ran the danger of being pulled underwater by the suction created by the dam. Now, in spring, when the water runs high, canoeists and kayakers can more safely run the spans of whitewater without having to negotiate those dangerous dams.
I return to the main trail, which continues north but then veers west through a wetland. During the spring, this trail is often flooded. Today, though, the path is passable, even if muddy. Clumps of mud stick like leeches to the soles of my boot, and I grab a stick and lean against a tree and laboriously remove the sticky, thick mud. It’s a chore, but finally the soles of the boots are reasonably clean.
As I proceed westward, the trail grows a bit drier. I have returned to the river, which at this point is divided in two by a small island. The sun, which had peeked out earlier, has been smothered once again by the omnipresent iron clouds. The air is growing more chill, and I zip my coat all the way to the top. I have left behind the raggedy ghosts in Mr. Ryerson’s hunting cabin and feel completely, utterly on my own, stranded in stark solitude. Friends and family seem distant to me right now. There is no sound of traffic, no sound of airplanes taking off or landing at O’Hare Airport. The busy everyday world seems a world away. I am completely on my own. The realization is both exhilarating and frightening. In this media-saturated world, it is disconcerting to be surrounded by the profound November silence. This is not a dangerous hike by any stretch of the imagination, but even so, the silence and the solitude are intimidating. I have no one to communicate with but myself. I have no one to turn to but myself. My senses are sharpened, but my mind is empty. My best friend at this point is my hiking boots. It’s all up to me. To my left, two great blue herons ascend from the water. With their wings spread five or six feet wide, they remind me of the pterodactyls that I read about when I was a kid. The birds are majestic, beautiful. They are leftovers from the lost world of dinosaurs. At the same time, they somehow ameliorate my sense of solitude. All I can hear is the sound of my own breathing. The herons disappear over the woodland on the opposite side of the river. The silence is in my head. The workaday worries of my regular life seem like the echo of a distant past.
The trail now veers through a kind of bower, where tall bushes on either side of me bend over the trail, forming a tunnel of naked branches. To my left, the river flows softly and silently and peacefully. I come to a spot that I recognize. Here, a few years ago, I volunteered to help remove buckthorn from the banks of the river. Buckthorn is an invasive hedge, originally imported from Asia; it is the bane of woodlands throughout the Chicago area. The hedge grows voraciously and crowds out native species of plants. Removing it is hard work. That day, we used handsaws to cut the buckthorn at the base of the trunks, and then a trained specialist applied herbicide to prevent the buckthorn from revivifying. For three hours, I was bending over and cutting and sawing. God, my back hurt at the end of that day.
The next Saturday, we planted native vegetation along the banks of the river, where we had cut the buckthorn. Wildflowers, grasses, and forbs. Doing so was important in helping to cleanse the Des Plaines River. The vegetation helps filter the run-off that trips into the river during thunderstorms—run-off that carries chemical fertilizes and other detritus—run-off that helps to create the nutrient pollution in the river.
Years ago, I interviewed Stephen McCracken, a scientist who is the Director of Watershed Protection for The Conservation Foundation. He has done considerable work in restoring the DuPage River and the Salt Creek, west of Chicago. He explained that in the work on those waterways, “We improved the buffer areas—the vegetation alongside the rivers. This turned out to be statistically very important. We were trying to get a hundred feet on either side of the river with vegetation. The adult forms of macro invertebrates, such as dragonflies, live the first couple years of life as infants in the river, and then in their adult stage, they live in the upland area, where they lay their eggs. You need to give the adults somewhere to lay their eggs. [The vegetation] ends up looking very beautiful. It is popular. There’s a public aesthetic advantage.”
This was a project during which I finally understood what ecologists talk about when they delineate the connections between different parts of an ecosystem. The health of the land affects the health of the river, and vice versa. A river that promotes and nurtures biodiversity benefits us humans, who after all are part of the ecosystem. The work we had done in cutting buckthorn and planting native vegetation constituted more than beautifying the river, though that was important. It helped life thrive in the river, as did the dam removal that had been completed earlier. The health of the river and the surrounding woodland has inherent value. It is important in itself. In helping to restore the river and the surrounding land, we renewed our connection to the earth that nurtures us.
I continue for another quarter of a mile and complete my loop at the barn that Mr. Ryerson built in the 1940s and that still houses chickens, sheep, and goats. I pause to rest and finish my canteen of water. During this hour and a half, I have been able to sort out and hear the voice of my heart, to remember in solitude who I am, to put pressures at my work into perspective, to hear my authentic voice unimpeded by commercials and sports announcers and news broadcasters, to absorb the subtle beauties of nature that we observe in November, to hear the sound of my own heart beating, to formulate a simple poem in my head, to hear the silence of the woods. To see beauty in the stark emptiness of November. To create metaphors that guide my way forward.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s done a lot of different stuff in his life. He has been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.