Nature Journal

"Early in the morning I tied my notebook and some bread to my belt, and strode away full of eager hope, feeling that I was going to have a glorious revel.  The glacier meadows that lay along my way served to soothe my morning speed, for the sod was full of blue gentians and daisies, kalmia and dwarf vaccinium, calling for recognition as old friends...." John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra






March 9


Living now across from the Yahara River opens many new worlds of water.  The bridges that cross the man-made canal connecting Mendota to Monona Lakes are themselves part of the rocky art of water scene.

Because it is early March and the gentians and daisies have not yet risen, it is the power of the rocky bridges and the quarried stone landings along the mile or so path of the Yahara that stands out most.  A variety of ducks and other feathered divers gather at the point where the river meets Monona and the ice has finally retreated here to nothing more than thin sheets out in the middle of the lake.  As the ice recedes the potential of all the water trails begin to shape up in the mind: the boater, the kayaker, the paddle boarder can begin to see the long water path from as far south as Lake Waubesa, up along the southern portion of the Yahara, north across Monona to the canal, entry through the lock and dam at Tenney Park and out onto the grandaddy Mendota.

Mendota, larger, more northerly, still holds a potholed mass of ice and a heavy fog, stirred from a warming wind but cooled from below – thickens in along the contours of the shoreline.  Fewer diving birds here, deeper water, colder, and less visible.  Soon this will be the scene of a boat line-up readying for the locks; kayakers, able to skip the locks altogether, put-in around the edges and color the lake in shining fragments.   As you turn around and look inward to the city, the normally shining dome at the top of the skyline is nearly buried by fog, just one more reminder of things to come.