Enter the Driftless

"The tempest being over, I waited till the floods of rain had run off the ground, then took leave of my friends, and departed. The air was now cool and salubrious, and riding seven or eight miles, through a pine forest, I came to Sapello bridge, to which the salt tide flows."
– from Bartram's Living Legacy









The little local side trips of life can mean the difference between sulking boredom and an immediate spiritual lift. Watch how you nearly, sometimes, have to drag yourself up and into a coat, hat and gloves, pack the dog, and get in the car for even the shortest of drives during the dreary, post white winter months. We all know time itself stands a little stiller in February, March, April and at least the TV is still showing us sharp images of things. Indeed, I just last night finished a contemporary documentary movie following a mother and daughter who decided to walk and ski back country from Vancouver Canada to Skagway Alaskay over a series of several months. The footage was, of course, distinct, raw and exhilarating from right there at the couch. This morning is so bland and gray that I have already begun to devise my plan for yanking myself out into it, run the dog along Picnic Point, listen for incoming birds of any color, and watch water from afar. The domestic traveler has to do many many things to recreate in the smallest ways that which we watch on our screens. Who doesn't wrestle with the mismatch of abundance offered on screen versus the seeming dirth of a midwestern spring. Nonetheless, as I know, only twenty minutes out on trail, head phones off, even the gray world will come alive and a certain spirring of the spirit will invariably come.

Only two weeks ago I did some of this initial self-dragging. I was in Onalaska visiting; this is smaller city set right along the Mississippi and surrounded by the great chain of bluffs. It takes very little time to get onto one of these bluff sides and start your way up relatively mild climbs through nearly always accommodating forests, really some of the most hospitable countryside one could possibly imagine. There has always been a favorite rock that we liked to hike up to for years. Access can be fairly easy as a new conservancy allows for parking half way up a bluff at a cul de sac, a great route for a very quick nature dose. The trail immediately begins as an invitation; it is an old farm log road and winds through a remnant oak opening – those that would have virtually defined this entire area two hundred years ago; and in fact the LaCrosse area used to be called Prairie La Crosse, and if you had sidled up to the downtown shoreline hundreds of years ago, by most accounts, you would have not seen a tree for miles, all sand and prairie. Now to find prairie you have to find the little remaining pockets left, very few natural occurring without maintained tractor trimming or burning. As quickly as I can I turn on the old farmer persona and wonder what it might have been like to push cattle up this higher road for grazing or storage. These particular set of bluffs at Greens Coulee would have been empty except for a smattering of homesteads; they are now suburbs, lined at every amenable slot by large houses, but the rolling contours still visible, beautiful, and full of life above the building ground. A short walk takes you up to the always diverse ridge lines of these bluffs where a new semi-micro climate of growth often begins – the standard basswood, maple, elm forest transforms some to birch and scrub pines as well as juniper low lying along the ground. The crown jewel of the bluff works though is always the sandstone. Small cairns or quarries might appear, as it does just one lobe away from here at a primary quarry of old, which now looks like a cut out dome with park table and fire pit for the casual visitor.

My rock is a windswept head with neck. It's the only of its kind in the area the I know of. How it has maintained itself over all this time is hard to know, but it stands out as foreign to the landscape, not by coloration, but that it looks like its directly out of somewhere at Arches National Park, a fairly slender base that then forms to an eight by eight rock head. You can climb it with ease and sit on its titled but flat surface and watch the entirety of the valley. I give myself five minutes to sit and breath it in, watch my breath, remember the snapshot, and realize at that very moment that this could serve as its own footage of the drift less region, the scenes dramatic enough to capture anyone's attention. It took me approximately twenty minutes to get here. I have the bluff to myself. I see the roads below at the food of the neighborhoods. One or two people walking past the last red barn in the area. Cars to and fro.