Cattail Journal

"In Wisconsin 'man bites dog' is stale news compared with 'farmer plants tamarack." – Leopold, from "Natural History"








9-11

The long and winding isthmus that is Arboretum Drive, from Vilas to the Nature Center, is as easy a way to enter into natural history as there is in the city.  The Wisconsin mind collectively knows the cattail marsh and its thousands of living symbols that can take over a bog at any disturbance. Leopold wanted more tamarack in through these edges for the sake of enhancing a wild game habitat, including, of course, birds of any feather that might like to sail across the natural blinds of six foot tall cattails.  We park at one of the very small and remaining lots across from an access point to Gardener Marsh then walk across the narrow two-board walk that offers up two decks, both inside the cattail explosion, if you will.  Red-wings are known to lay claim to a particular acreage of these watchtowers, built by a sinewy and durable fiber that can withstand the poundage of the bird and also any wind that our northern state can muster.  Native Americans used the rhizomes to eat and turned the stalks to papooses, or to bolster moccasins. Ancients used to pound out the cattail for the starch to heat and use as rudimentary flat bread.  If you needed a medium for paper, here also was a promising source.  The tamarack at the edge of the bog in unison with the cattail work to create sphagnum moss or what is here called peat. The boardwalk serves a clean means to walk through a waterlogged marsh but also a good way to keep feet off the slimy and very product peat soil.  There's water out in the pond, shade under tamarack, black and nutritious dirt for growth below; in its whole a wild filtering machine where biota works stalk in beak to propel thousands of cattail seeds. Cover no doubt makes small frye fish feel a little more safe. A bufflehead might work around the island out off the main channel seeking the frye if the crane doesn't get to it first.  These are merely the functioning and the livelihoods. What do we know of humans' ability to perceive and understand natural symbols? If Wisconsin is known as the drift less area, it might also be known as one part of the most vast marshland stretches in the world as part of the Mississippi River Watershed.  The twenty minute walk across the convenient spans of two by fours is a short tunnel through 20,000 thousands of years.  To replant a tamarack on the farm is worth a good bit more than the two hundred dollars it costs to buy the tree.