Enter the Driftless

"Both agree that human mechanisms of perception, stunted as they are by screens of social training that close out all but the practical elements in the sensory barrage, give a very limited picture of existence, which certainly transcends mere physical evidence." – Mathiessen, from The Snow Leopard









March 23

Sometimes you can follow along your handheld weather predictions so closely as to lay wasted a tomorrow's trip – as you see the symbol for clouds and rain, you might decide that is that and cancel before the day has even begun. I had already written yesterday off as another in a long line of cloudy and mercurial days; it is old winter now, only a couple of days ago from the official day of spring and as anyone who has lived in the heart of the upper drift less, weather here does not spoil you. That utterly lush growing ability of the midsummer breadbasket at this time of year is one long extended blanket of beige of fields of either corn cob or weighed down field grasses. The golden rod has still held its shape but it too blends in with the blandest of coloration. And so the surprise to wake to the luxury of vast sunshine borders on the truly religious. I, like others I presume, work relatively hard at maintaining the spiritual commitment to life-as-gift, but that most certainly comes easier when a fresh and thin snow has covered the surfaces of all things late night and now the sun turns it to a blaze. You wish, as always, that you could simply save this screen of life, hold it forever, and watch the eagles do their methodical dives down onto the edge of a sparkling patch of ice on the bay and call it up for whenever we need.

This has been a lonely and long old winter. The virus has indeed taken much of our recreation away from us. Not just the bars and restaurants and the retail outlets, but moreso, an attitude of the days a gifts. We endure them now at home; I regularly think of those who have not the outdoors to keep them company and have to say I wish every person in the drift less would take these hours on a sunday to dress up, take a hike up any one of these bluffs, and enjoy this blaze of the drift less. It doesn't take much. I sense that we have relegated this spirit of a love affair with creation to some very small venues and portions of our lives. If we were trending in the direction to adore creation, this earth, the nature that it is, and ourselves as part of it and in it, our news ways and media ways would be singing right now with the voices of the exalted participants of the world. I usually get to my trails here in the coulee region only to find the spare footprints before me. Yesterday I arrived at my quarry trail head and found three cars parked in the lot already! By the end, as I returned back to my car, the lot was full; the sound of children happily screaming in the back ground. They might not articulate it as such, but that walk they just took up this steep hill up through the ridge lines to either side, was of the spiritual; the scenes, perhaps not entirely accounted for and registered on any sheet or app, would carry the imagination through for days. Nothing out here is of one dimension; no pixels; no fingers across small and reduced screens. But here is the rub: you, and others, have to be willing to place the proper clothes on your back, set aside a few hours, park at an enjoyable spot, and then walk up that hill despite any vocal backlash. Now repeat and repeat and repeat and you will have yourself a spiritual practice, what our ancestors would have only partially taken for granted. To be outside would have been understood day to day; but that doesn't mean they would have taken for granted the gift of the growth alongside them.  Does anyone truly spend much of their time in such a domain of gratitude for our various live-in screens. You see, they have become nature of old; but their case, they do not grow, live, flap in the wind, snow or bless with sunshine.

The first steps are steep along this old quarry road. This would have been a steady stream of traffic in the old days – quarry equipment, bulldozers, conveyors and of course the heavy rock dump trucks. The road is considerably well built with its own curb along the edge side and built to last. You can't tell just how much they had to dig out of the side of the bluff to get the flat road, but this is truly a primary quarry within the region and no doubt helped build thousands of roads over the years. When you begin to see the results of years of digging away at the sandstone left and right, all around you, you have to take your own spiritual inventory for such things, such extraction. You look back down to your own car and you have to make a little argument with yourself: if you want to give up your car and not worry anymore about the nice smooth roads that you drive on, then it is time decry the quarries. Until then, it is still worth while to think of rock memories; any devastation of such an enormous resource will have some effect on the memory of stone. It is a perfect an example of the anthropocine as you can get, really, for what we are talking about is the human transformation of entire ecostructures and yes, this one could be seen from space. Ironically, what the digging and the transformation of the ecostructures have given in its place are some sheer sandstone cliffs rarely if ever seen on a standard bluff hike. Most ridges rise up at the top by only a small number of feet, but because much of the ridgeline in place has been dug up to its edge, it has left the bluff looking something more like mountain, and I want badly to do some climbing.