April 17, 1997
I have dreamed of the Indiana Dunes -- the burgeoning spring -- for weeks. Last night I dreamed I was walking along the river trail near my old home, seeing the ephemeral wildflowers, hearing the recently arrived migrant birds, smelling the sandy clay.
I awoke from bliss into pain -- sensing, knowing I now live amidst cornfields, no longer a part of the wild Dunes. I awoke with soul hunger, knowing that I could not go to the Dunes now.
Dawson Lake sits atop a moraine about fifteen miles from LeRoy. The moraine formed thousands of years ago as a glacier grew at the same rate it retreated. At this moment frozen in time and space, the glacier dumped silt, pebbles, boulders that rose into a moraine here in the flatlands.
Dawson Lake in Moraine View State Park is an impoundment -- a large stream was dammed. I do not like unwild landscapes -- a snob, an elitist when it comes to wild places. But soul hunger drove me.
Friends told me the trail below the dam was showy with flowers and birds in the spring. I put a quart of water, a couple field guides, a compass, a magnifying glass, binoculars in a day pack.
It was forty-degrees with a twenty-degree windchill. An inner tee-shirt and sweatshirt covered by a hooded, dark-blue sweatshirt. Jeans and waterproof boots. A cammo hat with earflaps. Medium-weight blue knit gloves.
Birds and other wildlife are scared off by gaudy colors.
I stopped at Casey's on the way out of town. A huge travel mug of coffee, donuts, and a lunch sandwich -- three bucks. You can buy gas, groceries, pizza, ice cream sundaes and shotgun shells -- slug or shot depending on the season. Gossip and small talk are free.
An oldtimer looked at my cammo cap, cackled and asked, "Not going hunting are ya, Buddy?"The cornfields, stubble turned under and awaiting planting, rose toward the moraine. I did not belong here. This place was not my place. This land was not my land.
I parked by the trailhead below the dam. Two breeding plumaged loons dove and courted just twenty-yards out on the lake. Thousands of tree swallows -- with iridescent blue-green backs -- hawked for small insects inches above the water.
A great-horned owl filled the woods behind me: A resonant, "Who, Who, Who Cooks For You?"The trail led down to a swamp -- a forested wetland flooded for only portions of the year. The water stains rose to two-feet on some trees. Both moisture-loving plants and their cousins that prefer drier soil grow there. Were the forest to stay flooded, the trees and other vegetation would die.
Spongy, fecund, dank dirt -- I like the smell of soil better than that of homemade bread. Spring wildflowers that bloom early until shaded out by the canopy -- ephemerals -- wove themselves into a many-hued carpet at my feet.
How I loved their scientific names: Order embedded in beauty. Sanguinaria canadensis, hepatica acutiloba, dicentra cucullaria, dentaria lacianata, claytonia virginica.
How I loved their common names: Beauty embedded in order. Bloodroot, sharp-lobed hepatica, Dutchman's breeches, cut-leaved toothwort, spring beauty.
Windflowers -- migrating wood warblers and other birds darted in the treetops or hopped on the ground. Dozens of yellow-rumped warblers sang a sweet song from high in the trees. If ever there were a misnamed bird, it would be the yellow-rumped warbler -- like calling a rose, "a reddish-thorny-thingie." The yellow-rumped warblers also had yellow caps, a white chin and throat, a black eyepatch, a white eyebrow, a black vest set off by yellow patches, dark wings and back.
I do believe were God to come to Earth and deliver His message in birdsong, He would be a wood thrush. Three to five-note phrases -- each note a different pitch -- punctuated by complex, liquid trills. Reddish-brown above, white below with large black spots. I saw several. I heard one sing -- bamboo flute in the forest.
Self-chatter -- the ceaseless babbling of the brain -- stopped during my four hours in the forest. I saw about twenty species of birds and even more wildflowers, shrubs, and trees.
But the magic lay not in the naming of things.
