Arboretum Diary

"July. Though all the windows are wide open and the blinds rattle in a breeze the heat is terrific. The inside of the trailer is like the inside of a kiln, a fierce dry heat that warps the loose linoleum on the floor, turns an exposed slice of bread into something like toast within half an hour, makes my paper crackle like parchment." Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire







5/13

First day out on the trail for Art Nature Journaling and couldn't be a bit more tickled that as I find my sitting spot out on a Curtis boardwalk, nestled down among the bunchgrass, that it becomes so hot a sweat forms doing nothing.  This is the moment we've been waiting for since around this same time last year – that sort of Utopian page off the yearly calendar when the sun begins to daily outwrestle sagging clouds and nightly thunderstorms and we can hear a little bit clearer the batting of the mallards wings as they cross overhead and the white moths flit as if by a state of giddiness across the coming shoots of everything green.  I'll take the heat.  The spot here, at a little crossroads of old wood boardwalks, is at the two hundred year old markers of what is listed as 'fence oaks.' If you stand at trails B1 and B3 and look down the gravel path, you can see that the old stand of oaks form a line which would have been planted on purpose along a farm fence – although no longer a fence, this is

one of those scenes that have the peculiar powers of transporting the hiker along the contours of years past, when the land would have been raw, still full of Native mounds, the savannah not yet filled in, and oaks, for better or worse, taken for granted.  Old farmer here walking his and her fence line, perhaps digging a new hole, sturdying another post, calculating the vulnerability where the herd might lazily lean as they graze across the open lowlands.  There's history in that old wood, as imperfect as it is, and partially why these ragged boardwalks seem to offer little portals back in time
as you find them out on the prairies or along the marshlines at Wingra or Gardener.  To sit on the edge of one for the better part of an hour, hidden by the spring fountains of prairie grass, there's no one there to tell you which direction the imagination is supposed to roam: does it look forward, to the recent spring burn, the restoration...the experiment? Or does it wander on backwards, slowly, to the when there was no belt line and most assuredly the territorial chortle of the red-wing swung from oak limb to oak limb without much competition in between?