Earth Day, 2020 - Shining Light on the Prairie

In praise of remnants...

Mid-20^th Century, the city of my birth still featured a few empty lots out near where during our parent's day the street car ended and suburbia, born not so long before us, began.

We called these lots prairies. Grasshoppers lived there.

The quiet presumption this might be the same ground Indians walked was patently false. Instead these lots were the ragged face of abandonment, pending future development.

We couldn't have guessed that between us and native landscape lay a century of brick yards, gravel pits, pickle factories, truck farms and other such. Critical midwives to a city that in short order grew to eat them all, memory of their existence included.

Happily, we'd also ready access to county Forest Preserves. Commonly called the woods.

As in, Of course I didn't ditch church and go to the woods. Why?

Neither were those what we thought. Shot through with invasive species, floodplain re-engineered and oak savanna ravaged, they were indeed woods. But never forest preserves.

The city's namesake river flowing through them reeked. The riparian ribbon along it was perennially mud-caked and grey. It too stank beneath the summer sun. Most everything off trail raged with buckthorn.

Still, for us the place was Wonderland.

Notably, that's where I first met turtles. In the dictionary under "indomitable", there ought to be a picture of a turtle.

An hour's drive outside the city, we later found remnants of authentic tallgrass prairie interspersed with oak savanna and wetlands, everything squeezed between family farms and summer cottages. Red-winged Blackbirds sang only there.

Yet again, little was at it seemed.

Redirected, otherwise restricted and rich in agricultural runoff, my boyhood creek was long corrupted. Year after year, the remaining oak with gnarled skins, widespread crowns and marble-sized babies snug in little caps waiting for rapid fire to birth them, were sacrificed to the housing gods.

After the human population reached recreational mass, one summer they'd the bright idea to poison the local lake and rid it of 'rough fish'. That was a memorable season, when heaps of stinking carp littered the shores and even the remaining farmers refused more free fertilizer, which resulted in uncountable dead fish left rotting under the sun.

This wholesale destruction of life in the lake made no lasting difference to it, we'd not rescinded our standing invitation to the carp. Corralled by the dam that made the lake, out of my crippled creek that kept it filled, the carp simply moved back in.

Tough neighborhood, rough fish.

Take that same hour's drive from the city today and the farms have fallen to development, save those left catering to tourists. Towns and villages that once dotted the way are grown so fat at the waist they run together like a snake swallowing a succession of rats, with little breaks taken for breath in between.

But then...

For the first time in living memory my boyhood creek is more or less restored to its historical meander. Satellite imagery guided the way. Smallmouth Bass and Walleye live in it.

Now the creek runs fairly clear and of its own free will through rediscovered wetlands. There, complex life that until recently could only be imagined thrives on late protected then fiercely encouraged remnants of original, natural world.

Closer in and the county's revered Forest Preserves are being incrementally transformed into a reasonable facsimile of native landscape. Genuine yeoman's work. The long friggin' haul. We'd be thirty years farther in, except ignorance refused to see the native woods for all the foreign trees, then tore its hair and shrieked like hell at first sign of cleansing fire.

Truth is, sometimes to be rid of false notions and bad habits you've just got to get out the torches, gather together with collective purpose, then burn the living hell right out of them. All the way down to the roots.

But don't salt the earth. Never do that.

As it turns out, the earth remembers.

Near what used to be the city's boundary, in my old neighborhood is a singular chunk of greenish space that's pretty much always been 'empty'. At least as close as you'll ever again get to original ground, anywhere around there.

Beneath some of the ground might be bodies, since that's the far reaches of a barely remembered potter's field, subsequently eaten by what the County then called an insane asylum. No coincidence I think, that one followed the other.

A small creek rises from beneath the city.

It trickles over a concave stretch of concrete cut through invasive bull thistle and native Indian Grass, near a small patch of what might someday again be oak savanna. Then the creek disappears back beneath the city.

In the space between, coyotes live.

When first responders race down adjacent streets with sirens wailing, coyotes answer in song.

Across one of those streets, a new High School complex is nearly complete. There's presently no rush to finish. #Covid-19 sweeping the land, kids aren't flocked to fill it.

But in time, they will be. There's little real doubt that then those children and their teachers will adopt this hardscrabble remnant at their doorstep and -- generation upon generation -- make the place as authentic as imagination coupled to knowledge and fueled by the fire of overarching purpose can manage.

In my youth, I imagined little pieces of remaining real world to be what they aren't. Then knowledge disabused me of innocence and though I still took them for sacred, the remnants were also inescapable markers along our long trail of cumulative error.

Now hurtling toward my dotage, I've come to recognize these prairie remnants as wholly appropriate to our times.

Often terribly fraught yet frequently glorious, they're in fact articles of good and enduring faith, these days increasingly well met.

#earthday #savetheplanet