Family Nature Journal
Option 9: Nature Story

"Next, I ask the students to go outdoors, but in silence. We walk across their schoolyard to a spot where we can all gather in a standing circle. I ask them to listen and write down three sounds, under the heading 'I Hear...' These might be cars, people's feet on the grass, birds, crickets, airplanes or whatever. I then ask them to write a brief stream-of-consciousness sentence or poem, such as, 'I feel the cold wind under the dark green tree but the sun brightens me.' – Clare Walker Leslie, from "Teaching Nature Journaling and Observation"





Clare Walker Leslie, in the introduction to her short chapter contribution to the book Into the Field: A Guide to Locally Focused Teaching, talks about the enormous popularity of everyday naturalists keeping nature journals in various periods in the past. "Historically, nature journals were part of the curricula in schools throughout Europe and America, especially in the nineteenth century and the first half of this one." Since then, we know that tools for observation have no doubt changed -- it's possible to say that the iPhone camera has taken over the recorder's sketching pencil -- but of course nature is still there, the prospect for curiosity is still there, and an ability to observe and wonder, we hope, is still there. Knowing this ratio of what has stayed constant versus what has changed, really leaves us to realize that anybody can still create a nature journal, it simply takes more effort than in the past to set aside time and follow through.

Drawing for the casual nature journal might very well be the easiest way to get things started – as she says, to go into the field and sketch its parts has always been a spontaneous and low pressure exercise. Even the great illustrators Linnaeus and Audubon created very primitive drawings when in the field for the sake of taking down information that they could then bring back for more formal reproduction. Anybody can walk outside, draw, and ponder. Just as anybody can write, the next component in nature journaling.  Leslie further talks about getting the young journaler outside in local places. "Everyday places desperately need our attention – partly because they are changing so fast, and not always for the better, but also because tremendous benefit is to be gained from personal involvement with your own locality."  To find a a favorite regular hiking spot, or sit spot creates some continuity with the project. One great way to get writers back in the same spot is writing your own nature story.

While the journal style writing reaction, or the poem, or the sketch, are perfect for taking down impressions, the story is a great way to provide a cycle of continuity, rhythm, and expectation for any writer.  Great writers of the past have mentioned the importance of anticipating what is to be written the next day, or in the case of the journaler, the next time at one's favorite place.  To continue the tradition of keeping this nature experience low pressure, it is very important to write the nature story without any major concerns for plotting or perfect continuity of character. This is a story that will be written spontaneously and hopefully kept that way.  The key is that it draws you back into the field and provides a creative connection to your place, the people, the locality itself.  No need to re-read, edit, or even necessarily ask for immediate feedback. The point is for the writer to lose oneself in the process of observation and expression ... based outside.

Option 9: Kathi Appelt's wonderfully imaginative book Keeper, begins with this sentence, "Keeper leaned over the edge of the boat. In the darkness of the night, she glared at the black surface of the water. 'You stupid crabs!' She sputtered as she said it."  The writer of the nature story will need a

couple of things in place to start: 1) a specific outside scene, in this case on the water in a boat, and 2) at least one character thinking and talking, in this case Keeper leaning over the boat and yelling out "You stupid crabs."  With these two things in mind, the sky is now the limit. Quickly come up with a good name and a good place, then infuse a little humor if possible by allowing for some joking or some kind of complaint. Create some action and let your character meander around the scene in conversation with someone, or something. Write for at least 10 minutes! When finished, quickly think about what might happen next but instead of writing that next thing, just let it simmer until the next day or the next time you are out in the same spot. Write at least 10 chapters with the same characters and place. See where it leads you.

Frautschi Point

"He comes out of a tuft of grass where he'd taken refuge from the heat. He's rippling over the sandy path, taking care not to stop and, for a moment, thinks he's got lost: he's landed in a footmark made by the gardener's clogs." – Jules Renard, "The Caterpillar"







There's a beach shoreline along the way to Frautschi Point in October that is hidden, ancient and rocky. The sunshine has only reached the wobbling water in patches so that the rocks in the shallows look ghostly and gray, long patches of bottom grass, dark patches that from a distance seem to be the size of a large fish wading, waiting, still. Out in the middle of the lake the sailboats ride like hung clean sheets gracefully across the sunlit blue. In the distance the horizon line of timber and shorn cliffs. Closer, there is an autumn bee at our feet. It has been prowling the torn lake grass for some sustenance. No doubt confused by changing of the seasons, the numbing cool water, it has flipped over, its wings now a nuisance, and tiny legs spiraling desperately to get right side up. We jump back, the bee, the stinging bee, so close to our cold ankles and toes. Then we see that it is in no position to chase and watch for a moment the underside complexity of this biological jewel. We offer it a thin twig. It considers it with legs and mandible. It knows nothing of us. Are we more cold waves? Are we mere fixtures of warmth? We slide the twig onto the cool sand. As the bee becomes reoriented with the steadiness of earth we see that it immediately moves back onto the untethered lakeweed seeking morsels. A small cold wave rises up and laps the bee back five inches into cool water and it flips, legs punching at the breeze. Out along the farthest point at Frautschi we see a sail scoot past the thick line of trees. It disappears as if it had never been.

Songs from Devil's Lake

October 1

Sunny. A mild breeze over lake


A ragged old pine has found
a perch at the top of a ridge rock column,
not waving anymore to the mild breeze
that we see dip then scallop the surface
of the blue lake below like pounded metal –
too stiff, too old at the hips, –
its needles have all scattered
to blanket the mammoth rockfall
underneath now for its hundredth year,
where the mice surely huddle
in their creased homes scooting
these warm perfect sticks to cozy beds.

Family Nature Journal
Option 8

february 25
     

Sunny. The snow melting back

     The long, slanting light of midwinter
     shines back at itself
     from the tinned-over door of an old barn
     among dead trees.
     How many millions of miles has it travelled
     only to find this dented mirror,
     and then to have to pay these cottonwoods in silver.
                –Ted Kooser, from Winter Morning Walks

Writing a poem can be intimidating without some guidance. With guidance, it can be one of easiest ways we have to get outside and write about it.  Ted Kooser wrote a wonderful book of 'walking' poems some years ago as a means to recovering from illness. He set himself on a project to wake in the morning, despite the cold, take a walk, then write a sort of in the moment response to the impressions that he observed.  With thoughtful skill, in these short poems, he captures nature in new light, often capturing very specific and local details with the use of description and metaphor.  Every poem begins with the same kind of simple description as a journal entry might. He begins with the date, then briefly describes the weather outside, and then moves onto some scene with natural players that catches his eye and offers up some dynamic for drama.  In the poem above, a drama is created between the slanting light, a dented mirror, and the cottonwoods, with a fresh insight and straightforward language that any reader can gain some sense of experiencing the scene.

Poetry can be difficult write if we feel we have to do too much, or if we feel we too have write at a higher level, like the masters, than we are ready for capable for. To write a simple journal-style reaction to the landscape by placing oneself immediately into the scene and referring to a series of images is something everybody can do, and relatively quickly!  The first piece of guidance is to make sure and relieve all the self-pressure that goes with trying to come up with a poem. Release from that, and let the language fly, as short as you want, and something will come out, you just have to have an object or two that you have observed to get it started.  The first stanza above is nothing more than an image of light shining and reflecting outside. Light is always a great quality to start with – it is often the power in nature that turns a standard scene into art. Consider the bunch of leaves piled at the front of your house right now. Do those yellows and brows and fading greens look more like treasure on a dark and gloomy day or under a crisp October sunshine? Always follow the light and good things will happen in poetry. What does it reveal? In this case it finds a dented mirror. Even household (barn hold) objects become recognized by the sun. Kooser gives the light some character by asking how long has it travelled to find this object, as though it were seeking a place to land, a beginning of a relationship maybe, or securing its purpose. The cottonwoods, another natural object, finds its place in the poem as the last image. At this point, there is no reason to poke and prod at your metaphors to make sure that they make complete sense -- that is the labor of the professional poet -- but find an 

image splashes out in the end and leaves a strong impression. Maybe we see the spreading of the reflected light onto the cottonwoods which now glitters in silver? Whatever the logic, the guide throughout is nothing more than the action and color and the generosity of light, what we come to feel as a force for good and illuminating things. The image connections have come to reflect a kind of sentiment of good tidings, a kind of gratitude by the poet for such things of the land, the earth, and the sun itself.  Whenever you may be stuck in finding purpose in a poem, provide nature with attributes of the kind of positive values you have come to know. These could be called journal poem of appreciation, and serve as a very powerful practice.

Option 8: Take a winter (fall?) walk and be sure to observe at least 2 or 3 specific things in nature. These things (leaf pile, twig, rock in the lake) might serve as nothing more than an image to describe. When back home, begin describing the image most memorable. If a relationship to some other thing comes to mind, go ahead and begin to transition into that thought: "the river today under the bridge is clear and you can see to the bottom, except where the river grass floats up sideways like a hundred fish tails waving from the bottom. Stationary, they must be sunning, unlikely to leave soon."  This is very simple and the quick visual connection between river grass weaving and fish tails might not work on every single logical level, but the writer has done several things that makes the connection worthwhile. In the end, for the observer, the walker outside, this bright and fluid scene seems something like a gift. We could certainly take a picture of it and send that along to someone else, or we can become part of it, by offering it a place in language, what humans are so good at doing. Finish with another image or another observation of some kind: "Tomorrow, at the same, time, I will come back fishing for sunlight." Now the relationship between sunshine, river grass, and observer has been secured, and all will be back again to offer another poem.

Songs from Devil's Lake

"Still their glittering lodge is seen there,
On the tranquil Summer evenings,
And upon the shore the fisher
Sometimes hears their happy voices,
Sees them dancing in the starlight"
    – Longfellow, from The Song of Hiawatha







Songs from the great pillared rocks
rise up as if out of nowhere
rise up as if from ghosts still living
as the friendly visitors come walking
along the path of tumbled rock
along the shoreline where the soft
blue water laps up against the bluffs.

Songs from the great pillared rocks
windswept and swirling singing
the same voices forever wrapping
around the curves of the lake
and diving deep into the water
like long lost guides of the invisible.

Here is where the Ho Chunk thrived,
where bark canoes daily used to glide
and people held pouches of dried trout
as the hawk then still cried out loud
and the wings the same as they do
to this day rose up warm columns
of cool air above the pine cathedrals.

Family Nature Journal
Option 7: Finding your Formation

"Three billion years was too long a time to contemplate with wisdom and perspective. All I could do was be aware of the beauty around me. I could look at the rose quartz in its vein and delight in its color and the perfection of its crystals. I could explore the surrounding hills and find it in all its infinite variations as I did not long ago at the site of an abandoned mine shaft of the Vermillion gold rush of almost a century ago."
 – Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point, "Rose Quartz"







Growing up for many years as a boy in the small, near alpine lake city of Coeur 'd Alene Idaho, there are a few natural images that I carry with me as though they were captured photographs and available in a back pocket: one is the mountainous pine needle floors of the forest, and the warm and earthy smells that rise up from the soft soil surrounding the trees, how they felt safe, secluded, and welcoming. Another is the grand lake itself, a true emerald wonder with seemingly infinite styles of rock promontories that jutted out at the shoreline and collected bobbing driftwood.  But it was the rocks themselves that lined the hiking trails of Canfield Mountain, an often attended city hiking trail system, that offered the child's imagination a sort naturally occurring playground – rocks formations that erupted out of the earth like wide flat sea ships that were safe and easy to climb.  To try to climb these ancient playgrounds took virtually all of the combined skill and imagination that a young person could muster.  Once you make it a part of the way up a particular rock climb, something begins to take over, an innate desire to 'summit' for the sake of not only accomplishing a feat that a shy young person might not ever attempt otherwise in other facets of life, but to gain a new view on things, maybe twenty feet higher up, at the top of the ship where the air is a little different, and the landscape along the veins of the rock, mysterious and magical. The mind, without thinking about it much, drifts off to not only years past, as it wonders what native or pioneer had seen and climbed this very rock, but forward, wondering if other would get such a chance in the future. In a nutshell, it is the very essential kind of experience that forms the narrative of natural images of mind. And unlike the other, electronic, side of experience, which tends to pass by as continual stream of non-creative acts, finding one's 'formation' is a binding act with the living world, a state and stage of the process of defining character and coming to understand a connection with the landscape.

We were reminded of this one more time on a few hour visit to Devil's Lake, Wisconsin. Descending here on an early October day in mid afternoon sunshine is a little bit like being transported back to childhood, or to a magical island, where the rocky quartzite shores rise up out of the robin's egg blue water, itself a deep curve that looks like the cauldron of a long dormant volcano. Along the west shore path, we passed a hundred people offering up to their own children the prospects of landscape memories. The tumble rock trails is exactly what it sounds like – a view up along enormous rockfalls of quartzite boulders, many of which are perfect little sea ships to climb, and warm up on if they

happen to face the sun.  Many of the boulders – much in the same way that Olson's memories of quart were a rose color – showed a faded green pattern and glow faintly against a crisp October sun. The trail moves past the entire shoreline then wraps up along the backside of the bluff so get another view of these rocks but from above this time.  Formations beyond anything that the imagination could create from scratch, often stand seemingly teetering out beyond which the tops of old pines and beyond that the blue of Devil's Lake.  By the time you reach back to the bottom at the shoreline beach at the visitor's center, something has just happened – you have just experienced millions of years of geologic history and placed your own foot trodden stamp on monuments of time itself.  As Olson says, there is too much here to ponder with pure wisdom or perspective. Instead it is a kind of absorption of something sustaining, a knowing of one's surroundings, and that positive emotion that comes along with it is only a stone's throw away at any moment.

Option 6: Find your favorite formation and promise to continue to return as often as possible.  Much of the drift less area of Wisconsin offers, at the least, limestone bluffs or the dropped rocks from ancient glaciation.  Everyone should have a place to go to be by rocks.  A temptation no doubt will come to turn these rock ventures into events, activities, experiments, yes, even writing assignments. Rocks, however, are literally 'awe' some and need nothing more than to be experienced.  We used to live at bottom of bluff and could easily take a trail up into ridges where the limestone was exposed.  One day we began to walk off trail and found, at the very edge of the ridge, one line limestone rock which had, over the eons, lost much of its base to wind erosion but the bulbous top was wide and easy to climb up and safe and flat at the top.  There was no need for anything else in this moment. A kind of kindred wisdom seeps up and takes hold, a quiet zone where history sits without a lesson or a plan.

"We skirted the edge of the bluff into the Allison canyons and I noticed a freshly dug den in the hillside. A few yards farther, as I rounded the point of a hogback, a big fiery-red fox darted out of the cover of a fallen limb in the bottom of the draw and started up the opposite side." - Leopold, from Round River, "Red Fox Day"





30 September

Oktoberfest festivities are in the air, along the streets of the city of La Crosse, the traffic thick, as a hundred thousand might descend along the downtown streets for a bounding parade, thick drumbeats, raised glasses of beer, and here and there, pounding in the grounds at the far end of the route, a fine polka under big tents.  All this can mean only one thing for the outdoorsman: head in the opposite direction, light up for the limestone bluff and see what small dances and sweet songs we might flush out there.  La Crosse might be well known for three things: the bluffs, the Mighty Mississippi, and Oktoberfest.  All can be had in a mere one mile drive, if desired, for the eventual platform that you find at the top shelf those bluffs, looks out over the rest of the list, and you can just about make out the meandering parade that runs parallel to the main channel of the river below.  We found a trail head at the far south side of Hixon Forest, and made our way up a steep and recently heavily eroded trail, with divers and channels that run right through the center which one would imagine becomes their own version of river virtually every rain.  The valley that runs here holds some man made works, long flumes of dirt and rock and an occasional square corner of some cement block.  In the old days, when La Crosse had not yet wooded and was called by the Native Americans Prairie La Crosse, the quarry works used to connect top to bottom along some of these routes and you can find remnants here as well as directly below the famous Grandad's portion maybe a quarter a mile south.  Walnuts so abundant they look like a thousand miniature versions of lime green tennis balls.  We stop to examine one, rip off the husk which leaves our fingers yellow and slimy and smelling something like nothing else we have ever encountered.  We set one down on a rock and give it a few solid shots with another rock to reveal the pretty white segments of nut inside and consider that these would have been quite a harvest for subsistence in times past.  We continue up to the flat castles of sheer limestone cliffs at the top and marvel not only their structure, popping up in such random contours, but the unfortunate graffiti lit across each one as if revealing a competition we'd prefer to know less about.  Just below some of the cliffs wild and untended prairies, dry, drifting, and a beautiful snapshot of just what the landscape was a hundred and fifty years ago. Seen in contrast to the scene below, the La Crosse River Marsh, green and alluvial, cross hatched by trails and cattails, we breath in a strong sense of the city as a train makes its way through across its tracks along the edge.  Far off in the distance, a near mirror along the Minnesota side, bluffs the exact shape and height, revealing a similar pattern of emerald green and limestone pewter, and we wonder if there, too, there stands the avid hiker listening for the drums of the parade in the distance, while at their fingertips the soft whish of a September breeze across the field grass.