[Katie Shapiro, Wisconsin Historical Museum]

Today we are pleased to introduce Robert Root as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum’s employees.

Robert Root has long been immersed in the nonfiction of place, editor of the anthologies Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place and The Island Within Us: Isle Royale Artists in Residence, 1991-1998 and the author of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale, Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado – Colorado Then and Now, and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place. He has been an artist in residence at Isle Royale, Rocky Mountain and Acadia National Parks, his writing for public radio is collected in Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves, and he is an occasional contributor to Wisconsin Life. Robert is a nonfiction consultant and writing teacher who teaches online for the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and he and his wife live in Waukesha. Walking Home Ground is his 20th book. So, please join me in welcoming Robert Root.

[applause]

[Robert Root, author, Walking Home Ground – In The Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth]

Thank you. I forgot that line about the 20th book was in there.

Yeah, obviously I’ve led an indoor life for a very long time, except for writing some books like this. And I’m – Im glad Katie mentioned the cover because I love this cover.

[slide featuring the cover of the book Walking Home Ground and a description of his talk – A Tour of Fountain Lake Farm, The Shack, Sac Prairie, the Ice Age Trail, and the Fox River]

Of the 20 books, this is the best cover. And it also sort of explains what the book is about with the subtitle, In the footsteps of – of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth.

What – what has happened to me over the course of my life is I read an awful lot of books about people walking in place. That’s the kind of stuff that I read. Other writers writing about other writers. Here’s a great book – H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald. It’s a wonderful book, but – but it also talks a lot about The Goshawk, by T.H. White. And again and again in that list of books you will find writers who have been inspired by other writers. And some of those writers who have been inspired by other writers inspired me to do the same thing.

I can’t seem to go anywhere that – that someone hasn’t written about. I – I feel lost when I get there. And- and, actually, the writers that I’ll talk about today, Muir, Derleth, and – and Leopold, are all people influenced by other writers. And – and that influence creeps up into their work or – or is displayed loudly in their work.

The other thing I’ll say about this is when I came to Wisconsin, I wanted to learn how to live here. I’m not native to Wisconsin. Like John Muir, who was an immigrant, like Aldo Leopold, who was an immigrant, I’m an immigrant. And I’m an immigrant at a rather late stage. I came here in 2008. I have grandchildren in Wauwatosa.

The – the history of – of home ground in Wisconsin is covered pretty well in the books I’m going to talk about today. I – I think Muir, Leopold, and Derleth cover pretty well what Wisconsin is like cause they overlap in the time frames from 1849 to 1971. But I come along too. I’m in this book. And I’m the guy who brings it into the 21st century. And I’ll say something more about that as – as time goes on.

So, the other thing I want to explain about those writers is how interconnected they are. And – and I’m – Im fortunately someone who just can’t pass up an opportunity to talk about synchronicity and coincidence. And I’ll mention a couple of them. I won’t go on and on. But I – youll – I hope you’ll find that interesting, too.

This is the – the first quote I want to give you. Mostly I’ll have pictures. I’ll start with a writer whose ideas about connecting to home ground have influenced everyone I’ll talk about, myself included. In his essay, Walking, Henry David Thoreau expressed an essential idea for all of us who walk in nature.

“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would feign forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But sometimes it happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is. I am out of my senses. In my walks, I would feign return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”

Every nature writer that I know and every nature writer that I’ve read would agree with Thoreau. I’m – Im friends with a guy named David Gessner, and one of the things he has told me is he won’t let his wife walk with him because they’ll talk to each other. And so, he’s got something like seven nature books by now cause he walks alone with a tape recorder.

So, let me talk about some of these writers and – and what their influences are.

[slide titled, John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, featuring a photo of the cover of the book on the left and the quote – When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe – from The Yosemite]

The one book I want to focus on is The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, which is his Wisconsin book, and I’ll point out that he – he wrote this 60 years after he lived in Wisconsin, at the – toward the end of his life. But everything about Muir is paying attention. When he goes into the woods, he’s in the woods. He doesn’t think about things out of the woods.

The influence on John Muir of what he chose to read began in boyhood in Scotland. There he read Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology and John James Audubon’s Birds of America,

[Robert Root]

– and they made a big influence – impact on him. He tells the story, and I’ll – Ill butcher the Scots accent, but he tells the story of his – his father coming in to – to him and his brother and sister Sarah and saying, [fake Scottish accent] “We’re goin to America in the morn.” And he was beside himself with joy, “Oh, good, I get to go see those places that Wilson and Audubon wrote about.” And when he got here, it took him a while, but they made it to Marquette County. His father had gone ahead, had built a bur oak shanty above a place that they called Fountain Lake, the neighbors called Muir Lake, and is now called Ennis Lake or the – or the Muir Park Nature Area or Natural Area. And John and his brother leapt off the wagon, went running, climbing up a tree because they saw a bird going up to its nest and they wanted to see what the bird was, and they wanted to see what was in the nest. And then they jumped down and ran over to another tree looking for another nest and another bird.

All through The Boyhood – The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, chapter after chapter has catalogs of the birds, the fishes, the mammals, the plants that he saw in – in Wisconsin. And it just overwhelmed him. He was completely thrilled. He wrote at one point, a famous passage, “The sudden plash into pure wilderness, baptism in nature’s warm heart, how happy, utterly happy it made us. Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful, glowing lessons.

[slide titled, Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! – John Muir, featuring two photos, one of placid Ennis Lake and one of a marshy area]

Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of spring when nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together.

Muir’s exuberance is a common thread in his writing, and his journals are full of close observation of – of this kind and –

[Robert Root]

– enthusiastic recording. But, and one of the things I want to point out is he’s talking about a Wisconsin that hasn’t been settled yet. There are – there are – there is nothing going on there. I can’t remember the exact miles between his farm and the next farm, but it was mostly open prairie, open savanna, in 1848, and it was pretty exciting.

Here’s one of – of his most – and that, incidentally, is Ennis Lake.

[return to the Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! slide]

These are my pictures, I have to say. That’s Ennis Lake on the left, and that little stream leads up to, and you can see a little house up there, that’s where their house was. The house eventually was destroyed, burned down, another house built – built on top of where it was, and Erik Brynildsen, a Muir scholar, now lives there.

So, here’s one of my favorite passages –

[new slide titled, John Muir on the Passenger Pigeon, with an Audubon illustration of passenger pigeons on the left and the below passage on the right]

– from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. The picture, of course, is from John James Audubon that he had read and seen in Scotland.

“It was a great, memorable day when the first flock of passenger pigeons came to the farm, calling to mind the story we had read about them when we were in school at Scotland. Of all God’s feathered people that scaled the Wisconsin sky, no other bird seemed to us so wonderful. The beautiful wanderers flew like the winds in flocks of millions from climate to climate in accord with the weather, finding their food, acorns, beechnuts, pine nuts, cranberries, strawberries, huckleberries, juniper berries, hackberries, buckwheat, rice, wheat, oat, corn, in fields and forests thousands of miles apart. I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, like a mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls and cataracts, and rising suddenly here and there in huge, ragged masses like high plashing spray.”

This, in the book, is followed by a quote from –

[Robert Root]

– Audubon, of course. And also, stories about the killing of the passenger pigeons, and someone saying, “Oh, yeah, you’re right, They’re really beautiful. It’s – its – its – its really a shame, but we got to. And sure – sure enough, the passenger pigeons are shipped off by the – by the millions.

So, one of the things that Muir does is record for us how things work. For him, of course, he’s trying to record how they are wherever he goes. And Wisconsin was a big influence on that.

This is my picture of Ennis Lake today –

[slide featuring a contemporary photo of Ennis Lake]

– and the perspective is, more or less, where the – where the bur oak shanty was, looking out towards the lake. This gives – you can still walk around Muir Park State Natural Area. Yeah, it’s – its – its good to walk there, and there are signs that will tell you what’s going on there, which is really interesting.

Muir wrote, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 60 years after he came to Wisconsin –

[Robert Root]

– and he was conscious of the changes that had been wrought in – in the landscape. He tells us in one chapter towards – later on in the book of the kind of labor that turned the prairie and savanna into farmland and its consequences. And I particularly want to quote this section for a reason.

[clears his throat]

Excuse me.

The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live on it. But as soon as the oak openings were settled and farmers had prevented running grass fires, the grubs grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through them, and every trace of the sunny oak openings vanished.

Muir was aware the misuse of the land because he had helped his father destroy what was there in order to have a farm. And then the farm got used up and they moved to another farm, Hickory Hill rather than Fountain Lake Farm.

One of the things that was interesting to me, I’d sort of overlooked that passage, but I’d found it again in A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold, who quotes it to make his own point. There’s where this influence is starting to – to fade over.

After he left Wisconsin, Muir tried to buy this lake, tried to get his brother-in-law, who at the – first of all owned it, to save it so that he could come back to it whenever he wanted, and it would be the same lake that it was. He – that was where his idea of preservation, of not – of not despoiling the land that you have, came from. And the rest – for the rest of his life he went to places looking for the way they were, the way they are, not the way they had been developed into. A thousand mile walk to the Gulf, the Sierras, the Yosemite, Alaska, and so on.

[clears his throat]

Excuse me.

He also found intellectual companionship in other writers. He went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And one of his teachers was James Davie Butler, who was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And Butler introduced him to the writing of Emerson and to the writing of Henry David Thoreau, and that had a big effect on him. It – he never got over it, in fact. Later in his life, later in Emerson’s life, Emerson made a trip out west and – and – and Muir tried to get him to wander around with him. I think he was only able to get him to do it for a day. He was kind of disappointed with that. But he knew Emerson. He corresponded with Emerson. And Emerson said later in life that he thought if anyone were to – to edit the writing of Henry David Thoreau, it should be John Muir, who could quote whole passages from Walden from memory and often in his wandering would carry a pocket – a – a copy of Walden in his pocket.

And so, since I’ve mentioned Leopold, let me turn to him. This is the famous quote from The Land Ethic.

[slide titled, Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with the cover of the book on the left and the following quote on the right]

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. And out of this the whole concept of land ethic grows.

Leopold was also familiar with Thoreau in his essay, Thinking Like a Mountain. About watching the green fire die in a wolf’s eyes –

[Robert Root]

– he wonders perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum, In wildness is the preservation of the world. Muir’s writing too had an influence on Aldo Leopold. Shortly before his death, Leopold wrote a letter to the director of the Wisconsin conservation department urging purchase of a Muir farm to create a site that might, that quote, might fall halfway between a state park, in the ordinary sense, and a – a natural area. The objective being to restore the flora to something approaching the original. He encouraged anyone who’d be involved to read, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth as a necessary background. Leopold would be a figure of Thoreauvian stature in regard to establishing a land ethic, but he knew who came before him and – and that influence was important.

Leopold had been educated in the northeast and worked in the southwest in – in the Forest Service and eventually ended up teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And in 1935, he bought a farm along – near – or on the Wisconsin River in Sauk County. And one of the things he says about it –

[slide featuring the quote from Aldo Leopold – On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger and better society, we try to rebuild, by shovel and ax, what we are losing elsewhere. – and featuring two photos – a black and white photo of the farm as it had been when they bought it and a second photo on the right of the area as it is today with two benches next to a tree stump]

– alludes to the damage that had been – been done to it by the people who had been there before him.

Not far from the chicken coop stable that he and his family would purge and fashion into this shack was the burned ruin of the farmhouse that had been there. And there was not much of anything growing on that patch of ground. Early in Sand County Almanac he writes, “On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger and better society, we try to rebuild by shovel and ax, what we are losing elsewhere.

Muir got to see things as they were, and he tried to preserve them.

[Robert Root]

Leopold saw things as they had become, and he tried to restore them. And that’s a lot of what happens in – in applying his land ethic. That picture on the right, the picture on the left is a picture by his, a photograph by his son Carl early in the days –

[return to the slide with the Leopold quote and two photos]

– that they moved to that shack. There’s not much going on there. I mean, granted, it’s black and white, but it was – it didn’t look good anyway. And all those trees that you see in front of those benches or beyond those benches, those are things that grew by the planting of Leopold and his family over the – over the course of the years.

One of the earliest essays in Sand County Almanac is this – is Marshland Elegy. He – he wrote it several years before he ended up writing Sand County Almanac. And it was inspired by a visit to Endeavor Marsh, across the Fox River of the north from Fountain Lake Farm where Muir had lived. And what I’d like you to notice in this passage, this is just another wonderful passage, but notice –

[slide titled, Aldo Leopold, Marshland Elegy, A Sand County Almanac, featuring an illustration of a crane on the left-hand side and the quote below on the right-hand side]

– the breadth of what Derleth or Leopold does with what he sees. He doesn’t just see it. He’s not just recording what he sees. He’s thinking about the whole context for it.

And he writes, “A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog – bog meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.

A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the Ice Age it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet.

Time and change are a constant awareness in Leopold’s writing.

[Robert Root]

The elegiac is always an undercurrent in what he writes, as well as a sharp, observant presence. We see that in Thinking Like a Mountain, of course, and in Good Oak, about tracing a tree’s existence throughout cultural and natural history through its rings as he’s cutting through them.

We also see another connection to Muir in his essay on the passenger pigeon about the monument erected by the Wisconsin Ornithological Society and Wyalusing State Park in 1947.

Coincidence. Martha, the last passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati, it – it wasn’t because she was in Cincinnati –

[laughter]

– in 1914, the same year that John Muir died. And – and, by the way, Aldo Leopold died on John Muir’s birthday.

It has no meaning whatever –

[laughter]

– but it’s just fascinating to me.

And here’s what – heres what – there’s the shack –

[slide featuring a photo of the Leopolds shack]

– and here’s what Leopold had to say about that pigeon monument.

We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin. Men still live, he’s writing this in 1947, Men still live who –

[Robert Root]

– in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will – will know. To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

Leopold insists that we see where we are in light of what came before and what might come after.

The third writer I’d like to talk about is August Derleth.

I should have asked, anybody been to the shack?

[wide shot of the audience with a few hands raised]

Okay.

Any-anybody been to Sauk City?

[wide shot of the audience with most hands raised]

Okay. Good. Sometimes I ask this and they say, Where’s that?

How many have read Derleth?

[wide shot of audience with no hands raised]

Okay.

Well, Derleth’s writing was varied. He wrote everything. He was probably the most prolific of our Wisconsin writers. Science fiction, fantasy, historical novels, poetry, regional history, children’s books. And because he was not exclusively a nature writer, we might tend to overlook Derleth as a significant feature – figure among Wisconsin nature writers. But, in fact, Derleth was highly influenced by the greatest of them and contributed a sizable body of writing on Wisconsin nature.

One of his greatest influences was Thoreau. I happened to blunder onto a copy of Walden West in a used bookstore, and it turned out to have been signed by Derleth. First edition. A little beat up. But in it, he wrote, “A memoir of my interior life,” which tells us something. And in it, he writes, or in the printed edition, “Sometimes in evenings there is in the air a quality which makes for the temporary illusion of timelessness.” I think Thoreau would recognize that impulse.

On Derleth’s gravestone in the Sauk City Cemetery, he quotes from Thoreau.

[slide featuring a photo of August Derleths gravestone and the inscription by Thoreau on the top of his grave, spoken below]

I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when – when I came to die, discovered that I had not lived.

One of the things I’ll point out is that he deletes part of that quote. The quote originally begins, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately. And he dropped it because he grew up in Sauk City.

[Robert Root]

He calls the area Sac Prairie. Prairie du Sac and Sauk City. And he was a fourth-generation occupant of that area. He’d spent six months in Minneapolis, hated it, and came back and lived in Sauk City for the rest of his life. Occasionally he would take a few trips, like going to Walden Pond three times in – in Massachusetts.

He ended up writing and – and all of his nonfiction focuses on community, on interactions between people as well as his walks in the woods, his connection to – to nature. One of his, in – in both Walden West books, the epitaph, one of the epitaphs, is the the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation, a quote from Thoreau. And he included himself among them.

He wrote a biography of Thoreau, two books of poetry centered on him, and a book of three essays about visits to Walden Pond. He named his son Walden and claimed that Sac Prairie was a sort of Walden West in which I have traveled no less widely than Thoreau and conquered. Learning what goes on, not only in the woods, but also in the hearts of men. Of the three writers that I’m talking about here, Derleth is the one who most connects to community as well as nature and reminds us, oh, there are people there, as well as the woods.

Derleth also knew and admired Aldo Leopold. Leopold had read Derleth’s book, The Wisconsin: River of a Thousand Isles, a pretty good river book, and – and wrote to him saying how much he liked it. But he also asked for help because a man named Lewis Class had – had offered a parcel of land on the Wisconsin River to the University of Wisconsin, and the university had asked Leopold to figure out whether they should accept it or not. So, Leopold asked Derleth, can – would you walk out with me and take a look at it? And Derleth did.

So, that’s the somewhat limited connection that they have, but the letters, the exchanges between Derleth and Leopold are in the Wisconsin Historical archives.

The university turned him down, by the way.

Shortly after that, Leopold died and shortly, a year after that Sand County Almanac was published. And Derleth reviewed it in The Capital Times. He called it a minor nature classic. I think it’s a major nature classic, but that was 1949. And comparing it to work by Thoreau and to John Burroughs, who was a contemporary and friend of John Muir.

Derleth had written a number of books drawing on his journals. All of these guys were journal keepers. Thoreau eventually stopped writing books just to write journals of what he was doing daily, and usually what he was doing outdoors daily and some of his political things. Muir kept journals all of his life. Leopold was fanatical about keeping journals and keeping records of what was going on around the shack. And Derleth did the same thing. And his – again, in the archives, you can find all of his journals, almost all of his journals, from 1935 to 1970. He died in 1971.

[slide titled, Ferry Bluff, Wisconsin River, featuring two photos – one of a nature trail on Ferry Bluff and another featuring the view of the Wisconsin River from Ferry Bluff]

Before then, he – he – his journals would record his walks along the river, into the woods, up Ferry Bluff, which is above the Wisconsin River. And this is a view from Ferry Bluff –

[new slide featuring another view of the Wisconsin river from Ferry Bluff]

– looking north on the Wisconsin River.

And – and he – those journal entries were the basis of – of essays and articles in places like Trails, Outdoors, Country Book, Passenger Pigeon –

[Robert Root]

– Prairie Schooner. He drew upon his journals and articles in books that intermingled cultural narrative with nature narrative. These books, Village Year, Village Daybook, Countryman’s Journal, Wisconsin Country, were all part of what he called his Sac Prairie Saga. Each book following a journal format. But after reading and reviewing A Sand County Almanac, Derleth raised the level of his nonfiction game. He worked on Walden West for 10 years, trying to get it right. And it is his most observant and lyrical book, using nature interludes in between commentary on community interactions in individual histories. It will not be a surprise to anybody that I use interludes all through Walking Home Ground. I couldn’t get away from it.

Toward the end of Walden West he writes, These long walks into the countryside around Sac Prairie disclosed it as nothing else could have done. I learned where the whippoorwills nested. I chanced upon woodcocks and their young. I found where lady’s slippers grew and Indian pipes spectral in the dark woods and showy orchids. I discovered badger digs no longer common in south central Wisconsin and knew where the red-tails nested. I saw blue racers in the ecstasy of mating, unmindful of me. And now and then a gyrfalcon floating high in the blue or hunting the woods. Rare birds and rarer still a great gray owl down from the north. I knew where the brook was at its most amiable, from what heights the countryside was most gracious to the eye in its sweep over fields and mounds, past farms and hamlets, to the hills along the horizon.

Each of the nature interludes in Walden West is that lyrical and that observant and that reminiscent of the observation that Muir and Leopold constantly make in their work.

Derleth’s final book, Return to Walden West, attempts to continue the format and the feeling of Walden West. But by the time it was written, Derleth was often ill, and he was more conscious of the changes that occurred in his beloved landscape over the years. He wrote at the end of his book this passage, –

[slide titled, August Derleth, Return To Walden West, featuring a photo of the view of the Wisconsin river from Ferry Bluff on the left and the following quote on the right]

– I never found that nature failed me in the continuity of time and place so essential to my wellbeing. While the condition of man on this planet slowly worsens, the pattern of the seasons changes not at all, however much nature’s aspects reflect the damage wrought by man and his avarice and his devotion to false, unnatural values.

I think he sounds like an environmentalist for our own times. Particularly our own times, the way things are going.

Later he celebrates the continuity of the natural world –

[Robert Root]

– and laments the unceasing change of the social world and the scores of men and women who may never see the beauty of the Earth they live in, who many never see themselves as integral to nature. He ends his Sac Prairie nonfiction with a mixture of resignation and acceptance, letting him come to terms with his experience walking his home ground.

One of the things that I did for this book was not simply to read their books but to walk everywhere that I could that they walked. Theres – theres – it’s a kind of experiencing a form of time travel, existing temporarily in their times and simultaneously in my own, aware of what had been as well as what was. I tried to apply my experience – that experience to my walks on my own home ground, including the Ice Age Trail in Waukesha County. I’m a member the Ice Age Trail in the Waukesha and Milwaukee chapter. And – and we have a thing called Walk the Walk, 45 miles through our county. And my wife and I did that. And I’ll go over this somewhat quickly.

The – the top picture is called – is a place called the Aldo Leopold Overlook.

[slide featuring three photos, one taken from the Aldo Leopold Overlook, one of the fire tower at Lapham Peak, and one of Bradys Rocks]

I love the spot. It’s nowhere near anyplace that Aldo Leopold ever was but I like it because when I look down, I think of the Marshland Elegy every time. Those geese up there I had seen the month before on the Bark River in Merton, and I was pretty sure they followed me down so they would be there when – when I got there.

[laughter]

Lapham Peak, that’s the tower at Lapham Peak, named for Increase Lapham, who was important to me in the Ice Age Trail chapter and the Fox River chapter because he had – he had been there very early on. Here’s the – heres the other thing about coincidence and synchronicity.

Increase Lapham, as a young man, worked, his first job was working on the Erie Canal –

[Robert Root]

– digging through the Niagara Escarpment in what became Lockport, New York, where I was born. Had Increase Lapham and the Niagara Escarpment not been there, I wouldn’t be here. That’s that whole chain of time and timelessness that goes on. I’m very grateful to Increase and to the Niagara Escarpment. And one of the things he then did as a grown up is come to Wisconsin, and in a letter to his right – wife at one point, say – write to her and say, “I found this spot where the Niagara Escarpment ends. And he would know because he worked on it at the other end. And as turns out, it’s in Waukesha County, 20 miles from where I live. I’m going to go there tomorrow with somebody to show her the place. It’s a place called Brady’s Rocks.

Synchronicity.

[return to the slides with the three photos including Bradys Rocks]

And that’s a picture in the lower right corner, is Brady’s Rocks, this outcropping of the Niagara Escarpment, 1,000 miles from where Increase Lapham and I first saw it.

And I live in Waukesha, as – as was said.

[new slide titled, The Fox River, Waukesha, featuring two photos of the Fox River]

And this is a view of the Fox River. And I had to include, on the right, the picture of cranes in the mist. That’s because the whole time I was writing this book and doing the research and wandering around, everywhere I went, to Muir Park, to the shack of Leopold, to Ferry Bluff, I kept running into cranes. And I was so glad they showed up near my – where I live. This is right behind our condo. It was really inspiring.

[Robert Root]

I live along the wetlands at the point where the Fox River leaves Waukesha. This is the place I walk, as Derleth walked Sac Prairie and Leopold walked the land around his shack. There are woods close by and I try to make sure I have business being in the woods. Like those writers, I have come to live on my home ground. In my epilogue, I suggest the theme running through my book, and perhaps those by Leopold, Muir, and Derleth, time to rein transition. Words that have underlain my efforts to connect with my home ground. I seem to be someone for whom walking any sort of terrain is virtually a form of time travel, and if you travel through time, you can’t avoid awareness of transition.

I compare myself and my situation to those of my literary guides. Muir’s sense of loss over what he couldn’t preserve stayed with him throughout his life. My experience of where I am is more immediate and limited than his, more vicarious than visceral. And yet, Muir’s experience transmits to me an alertness to what was here before.

I will never have the sense of place that August Derleth had. I am closer to the Derleth of his interludes, the one whose solitary or companionable walks took him into the woods and over the river. By his final book about his own Walden, he had grown elegiac about loss and transformation in the natural world. His sense of time’s effect on terrain reverberates in me because all the more deeply for my closeness to my landscape and my distance from the society that occupies it.

It is fair to say that Aldo Leopold’s spirit hovers above all who work to restore and conserve natural areas. Certainly, those of us who serve as volunteers for the Ice Age Trail Alliance have the hope that opening up the forests and grassland and bringing back native plants and removing invasive and exotic ones will bring anyone who walks any portion of the trail closer to the land, not simply as a site for recreation, but also as an opportunity for communion.

There will be a transition over time, as anyone who considers the ecological history of Wisconsin can confirm, and our only question is whether we will be able to do what’s right for our biotic community and how much we are willing to do what’s right during our short time within it. Only time will tell and someone else will have to write that book.

And so, it seems appropriate to leave you with just a couple more thoughts. This is John Muir again. In every walk with nature –

[slide featuring the quote by John Muirs, Steep Trails, which he is currently reading]

– one receives far more than he seeks.

This is being in the woods, not out of it.

[new slide titled, To Think of Time, by Walt Whitman, featuring the quote below]

And Walt Whitman. This is from a poem called To Think of Time. Just a few lines. He’s looking at all of time in this poem. He says, “To think of time – of all that retrospection, To think of to-day and the ages continued henceforward. To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part, To think that we are now here and bear our part.

[Robert Root]

And I wish you good fortune bearing your part. Thank you.

[applause]