A PRAIRIE RESTORATION
By Kevin Koch
 
            Daryl guided the prairie burn like a sheepdog nudging the flock around the bend and tucking it into the valley.  He dribbled out the first flames from his drop torch along an edge of winter-browned tallgrass, forcing a line of fire to crawl against the wind for 20 feet until it petered out.  Then he circled back across the prairie and drop-torched bits of flame along another line.  This flame roared to life and rode the wind with soaring abandon till it reached the previous burn line and sank away.
          Dave Cushman, the owner of this private patch of prairie, had hired Daryl Parker of Tri-State Habitat Specialists, to conduct a safe burn on the 453-acre property. Dave had invited a few friends to help out, which mostly consisted of walking along the burn line and tamping down any flames that threatened to go rogue.
          This was Dave’s second annual prairie burn on his Jackson county property.  Along with restoring natural tallgrasses and wildflowers, he has constructed ponds for wildlife, built berms to minimize erosion, and revitalized the health of acreage’s forests.  Managing a prairie woodland ecosystem in the absence of the full range of natural inputs is a bit like a sheepdog’s task: nudging here, tucking there. 
           Dave and his wife purchased the property in 2001.  The previous owner had put much of the hilly, erodible land that that had been farmed continuously since the 1840s into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).  But, having retired the land, the former owner was ready to retire himself. 
          Dave’s intentions for the property developed gradually.  The CRP lands at the time of purchase were planted in bromegrass, a non-native shallow-rooted grass that holds the soil but can be easily reconverted to agriculture. Bromegrass does little to attract wildlife.  But Dave was increasingly drawn to the land’s original survey from the 1840s that recorded elk, deer, and wild turkey in an oak savanna landscape.
          Dave and I toured the property in late fall, bouncing along mowed paths in a pickup truck, winding among the prairie, ponds, and edgewoods.  A rooster pheasant waddled out into the path in front of us, strutting down the lane, reluctant to fly off, though he finally did.  “He must have someone interesting back in the grass,” chuckled Dave. 
            The 196 acres that have been restored to prairie are divided into three sections, one of which is scheduled for burning each spring.  As we circled the prairie, the three sections were easily distinguishable.  This year’s burned acres were vibrant with big bluestem, side oats grama, switchgrass, goldenrod, coneflowers, blackeyed susans, prairie dropseed, and other prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Last year’s burn was healthy as well, just a bit more unkempt.  The third parcel, never yet burned but scheduled for next spring, was in definite need of a haircut.
           Dave hired local forester and grassland expert Kevin Oetken to help with the conversion to native prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Dave doesn’t like using chemicals on the land, so the first step pained him, but was necessary.  First, the bromegrass had to be mowed low and killed off with herbicide in the fall and following spring.  Once the bromegrass had been removed, the next step was to plant a 39-seed variety mixture of native grasses and wildflowers in the late fall.
          Around the same time, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) approached Dave about building berms and ponds to reduce runoff from the steep-sloped property as part of a plan to reduce erosion throughout the region and limiting runoff.  Over the last few years Dave has constructed four ponds and 10-12 berms and basins for erosion control. 
          The ponds, Dave says, “are wildlife magnets.”  As we drove past we noted a ring of beaten-down grasses around each pond resulting from the wildlife drawn to the water.
          Next, Dave turned his attention to improving the timber stands of oak, hickory, and walnut by removing scrub trees so that the hardwoods can flourish and replenish. He has recently planted some American chestnut trees.
          Dave’s father was a forester, and he and his brothers grew up with a love of the outdoors.  “I probably spent 30 weekends a year from the time I was 5 or 6  hunting, fishing, and hiking while growing up.”
          Dave and his family—across three generations—enjoy hunting on the property, but also enjoy watching the re-established wildlife. “Before the restoration,” Dave says, “we really only saw red-winged blackbirds out here.  Now we see orioles, wrens, red-tailed hawks, tanagers.  There are deer, pheasants, lots of butterflies.”
          One hundred fifty years of farming on the steep-sloped acres depleted much of the topsoil, but over time, the prairie will restore the soil.  Deep native roots aerate the soil, providing places for organisms to grow, which feed insects, which in turn feed birds and butterflies and draws back a wider array of wildlife.
         “I don’t think that this property should ever be put back into production,” Dave says, contemplating future plans to assure this.
          Dave is proud of what has been accomplished on the farm, but insists the story of his prairie farm is not about himself, but about the land.  In addition, he points out that his prairie is an isolated plot.  “Corridors of native plants are needed,” he explains, in order to attract migrating and nesting birds, butterflies, and more.  
          A month before Dave and I bounced along the grassy lanes in his pickup, I had come out to the acreage on my own.  It was the first I had seen the property since Daryl had managed the fire and the straggling band of helpers.
          That April I had seen a scorched, black earth unfolding behind a sweeping orange and golden prairie fire.  Now, in early fall, the golds and oranges were back—in brown-eyed susans and compass plants and golden rod, and in the monarch butterflies that flitted about like so many prairie plants with wings.
 
-- Kevin Koch
December 2017
 
 

 THE  PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS
By Kevin Koch
 
     Growling thunder and a darkening sky to the west put a quick retreat to our second day’s hike on the Escarpment Trail in the Porcupine Mountains.  The rush lay in contrast to the leisurely lunch my wife and I had enjoyed on an outcrop 500 feet above the Lake of the Clouds a few minutes earlier. 
     The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park offers a dose of both urgency and calm as it stretches 60,000 acres along the south shore of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan.  The primacy of the present moment quickly dissipates into the eons here.
       Known colloquially as the Porkies, the range rises 1000 to 1600 feet above Lake Superior, forming parallel ridges a mile or so inland.  The parallel ridges are separated by glacial lakes, marshes, and old-growth, virgin forest.  From a fire tower at the crest of the Summit Trail, the highest point in the Porkies, the ridges undulate from peak to peak, forming a silhouette against the horizon that supposedly reminded early inhabitants of the hunched-up back of a porcupine.
     Dianne and I spent most of our hiking time on the Escarpment Trail, whose sheer basalt cliffs drop precipitously into the Lake of the Clouds.  It was a clear day on our first hike, so the lake reflected the deep blue of the seemingly-near sky instead.
     The escarpment—the term meaning a long, steep-sloped ridge—was formed a billion years ago when the earth’s crust began to pull apart in this region, forming the Midcontinent Rift. Volcanic magma rushed in to fill the void.  Uplifted 40,000 million years ago, the escarpment layers were later scoured by glaciers.  As we hiked along the ridge, we could still see scratch marks left on the exposed bedrock by the grinding glaciers.
     The Porkies are home to over 30,000 acres of old growth virgin forest, including the largest stand of hardwood west of the Adirondacks.  Towering eastern hemlocks—100-foot-tall, short-needled pines—shade large sections of the forest floor, preventing other trees from getting established and resulting in a “clean” understory from which the hemlock trunks arise like cathedral columns.
     Human habitation came early to the Porkies, with archaeological evidence dating back 8000 years.  The Ojibwe were the last indigenous peoples of the region.  The initial Euro-American appearance was quick, furious, and destructive.  Large swaths along Lake Superior were logged until the remaining old-growth forest was preserved when the Porkies were declared a wilderness park in 1945.
     Copper mining blew through the region like a wildfire as well.  Although intermittent mining dates back thousands of years, the mid-1840s saw a short-lived copper mining rush.  We hiked the Union Mine Trail through the bottomlands where interpretive signs point out the eroding evidence of an 1846 company mining community.  In October 1846 a miner named William Spaulding wrote home that “everything seems to prosper at this location; we are not only turning out copper, but children.  Mrs. Shin gave birth to a whopping baby boy today.” 
            The boom ended quickly.  The tone of Spaulding’s February 1847 message home foreshadowed the gloom that would soon overtake the mining community: “A man by the name of Baily was found frozen to death 4 miles from the mouth of the Iron River.”  The Union Mine was abandoned later in 1847 due to slumping copper prices.  It was reopened briefly in the 1860s and early 1900s, but each time closed quickly due to the vagaries of the market and limited ore deposits.
            The Union Mine trail led us past several mostly disappeared shafts as well some small waterfalls. Indeed, one of the biggest draws to the Porcupine Mountains—and to the Upper Peninsula in general—are the innumerable cascades.  The topography of the region creates a small “continental divide,” with waters south of the park embarking on a leisurely 2300-mile path to the Gulf of Mexico while waters from the Porkies plummet the few short miles to Lake Superior with great urgency.
            Our campsite was near the Presque Isle River.  Here the wooded Presque River Trail edges alongside numerous jagged waterfalls and bouldered rapids.  Further downstream, the river tumbles through a basalt valley, pounding through narrow draws and doubling back on itself to carve out “potholes” in the black rock. 
            Finally the Presque Isle River eases out into Lake Superior.  Our introduction to the mouth of the river came at sunset.  We caught the lake in summer calm as it drew the sun down into its belly.
            Lake Superior is, of course, the largest of the Great Lakes, but with depths reaching to 1330 feet, it could hold the waters of the four other lakes combined.  The most northerly of the lakes as well, its waters are bone-aching cold.  I swam briefly along the shoreline, hugging the top six inches as much as possible to float along a thin, sun-warmed layer. 
            The deep, clear Superior waters can turn urgent quickly, though, with November gales notoriously welling up to pull down yet another forlorn shipwreck.
          Both urgency and calm vie for the upper hand in the Porcupine Mountains.  Adrenaline pumps in proximity to a rushing waterfall while a quiet lunch on a basalt cliff outcrop above the Lake of the Clouds soberly reminds you of the power of the ages.
            But in a small corner of the Porkies—in a section added later and not subject to the park’s environmental protections—new exploratory drillings for copper mining erupted in the winter of 2017, accompanied by the usual voices pitting jobs against preservation. 
            Is there an urgency here?  Is there a long view?
 

           
 
 

            Christie is trying to disentangle the call of the Bobolink from the web of bird song at the Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary. “Hear that beep-boop-beep?  It sounds like R2-D2!” she laughs, likening it to the whirrings of the lovable Star Wars robot.
            My wife Dianne and I are guests of Christie Trifone-Simon, Director of Development for the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation (JDCF), hiking a one-mile loop of the organization’s newly acquired 410-acre property located southwest of Stockton, IL. The rich range of habitat at Valley of Eden—tall and short grass restored prairie, brome grass, hardwood and orchard forest, wetlands and intermittent streams, and Rush Creek—are home to over 70 as-yet-identified bird species, including 15 species listed in “need of conservation” and/or “state-endangered.” 
            The result on this mid-June morning walk is a symphony of bird song.
            JDCF is a private non-profit organization in northwest Illinois’ Jo Daviess County that protects and restores environmentally significant lands based on the support of members, donors, and volunteers.  JDCF currently owns over 1,100 acres of woods, prairie, marsh, and archaeologically significant lands throughout the county available to public access, and they help other owners establish conservation easements on private lands as well.  
            Christie, who has led us on hikes before, is her usual enthusiastic self.  She points out a pair of bobolinks perched on a prairie bush swaying in the breeze.  The Bobolink is a migrant bird that spends part of its year in Panama, Christie explains.  A grassland bird, it has been in decline in recent years as more land is cultivated and developed.
            We also spook up a Meadowlark and several Red-Winged Blackbirds as we walk.  The blackbirds’ nests in the grass “look like a woven piece of art,” Christie says.
            As we turn a bend along the trail, we encounter the forest edge and a whole new set of birds.  An oriole is swooping among the orchard trees and a woodpecker is drumming a deadwood tree stump somewhere out of sight.  
            The list of rare or threatened species also includes Henslow’s Sparrow and Dickcissel on the prairie grasslands, the Great Egret in the marshes, the American Woodcock and Yellow-Billed and Black-Billed Cuckoo from the forest, and the Brown Thrasher and Savanna Sparrow in the edgewood.
Future plans for the property include bird watching and photography blinds. The bird sanctuary has drawn the interest of organizations like the Audubon Society.  It could well become a destination site for birders, says Christie.
            “It’s like a symphony of bird calls out here,” Dianne says, and suddenly the conversation turns to the aesthetics and psychological benefits of nature. 
            “The experience of nature is about sight, sound, texture, and colors,” Christie responds.  She tries to get kids, especially, to see nature up close.  Her sentences sometimes stop mid-stream as she points out swallowtail, monarch, wood nymph, and skipper butterflies that have fluttered across her train of thought, calling out to be noticed.
            The Monarch, Christie says, has a special relationship to the milkweed, and she takes us off the trail midsentence to show us the plant.  Monarchs feed off its milky sap, ingesting cardenolids, which in turn make the monarchs toxic to potential predators.  The loss of grassland milkweeds has contributed to the steep decline of monarchs.
            Everything in nature is woven together, and Christie leads our attention next to the underside of the milkweed leaves where ants, she explains, are “farming” aphids. The ants herd the nearly microscopic insects, protecting them from predators and feeding off the aphid excretion called honeydew.  “Look at the size of those ants’ mandibles,” Christie says with delight and amazement as she unfurls the milkweed leaf and examines the ants up close.
            We trade the microscopic view for a broad sweeping vista from the upland forest edge down through the valley grassland and across to the woods and farm fields that rim the horizon.  From here the wide range of habitat and land use is apparent.
From beyond the trail but still within the sanctuary grounds rises the lowing of cattle.  Another unusual feature of the Valley of Eden sanctuary is that cattle will continue to graze certain areas to keep the forest from encroaching on the short grass habitat that some birds require for nesting.  A farmhouse and cattle shed will also continue to grace the sanctuary entrance to help visitors “appreciate the history of our farming heritage,” Christie adds.
            Indeed, the Valley of Eden takes its name not from the Biblical garden but from the family name of its past owners who farmed the land.  But the bird sanctuary will be donated anonymously to the JDCF by its current owner who has been actively restoring the land the past 25 years, including planting prairie and new stands of hardwood forest.  Having seen habitat disappear elsewhere in the country, the owner has worked to preserve and improve the grasslands and woods that sweep across this sun-drenched valley and uplands.
            “The intention of the donor,” says Christie, “was to create a sanctuary for birds of many habitats.  We intend to carry on that dream forever.”
The Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary will be open to the public sometime in 2018.
            There is plenty of work to do in the meantime.  A new road and gravel parking lot had just been laid down the week before our visit.  Volunteers can get a sneak preview by offering to pull weeds, manage a bluebird trail, take part in birding inventories, help with wildlife interpretation, and more.
            A symphony of bird calls trill across the grassland at the Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary.  Bird interweaves with butterfly, ant with aphid, cow with grassland, and grassland with forest. 
And as with any good orchestra, each instrument is part of the song.

           To the relief of some and the disappointment of others, a midwinter storm had skirted north of Dubuque, leaving us with just an inch of snow atop a gritty layer of ice.  So when the weekend arrived, my wife Dianne and I drove an hour and a half northeast to cross-country ski at Blue Mound State Park near Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. There, the storm had muffled the woods with a fresh nine inches of snow.
           Muffled, I say, because every tree from the fattest oak to the slenderest sapling had been slathered in a snow-spray that dampened sound across the 1,150-acre park.  The snow still clung to the trunks and limbs three days after the storm.  Spruce and pines on the hill-top ridges bowed under the weight.
          The cross-country skiing was ideal on the newly groomed paths.  We started early, with the parking lot nearly empty.  Our skis made only a slight slicing sound.  Our breaths came quick and light. A woodpecker throbbed in the distance.
          At Blue Mound, ten miles of cross-country ski trails wind through forests of oak, maple, hickory, walnut, willow, and pine.  Limestone boulders toppled from the mound litter the forest floor, mottled by green and brown lichen and striped with bands of white chert.  The trails offer occasional heart-quickening downhills as antidotes to some long uphill climbs.  A patch of prairie along the way bares the sky beyond the woods.  Then, in the distance, the trail disappears again into the dark mouth of another stand of pine.
          Due to alternating layers of limestone and shale, Blue Mound is awash in four-season springs.  The pausing skier can listen to the gurgling of fresh water springs trickling through the snow.
          Two observation towers at the crest of the mound offer wordless vistas taking in Madison 25 miles to the east and Baraboo 50 miles north.
Quiet pervades the woods, allowing the slightest of sounds to eke through.
                                                   *                      *                      *
          Blue Mound looms silently in the southwest Wisconsin landscape.  It takes its name from the atmospheric conditions of winter cloud and summer haze that give it a slight bluish hue visible for up to 50 miles. 
          The highest point in southern Wisconsin at 1,716 feet, Blue Mound is one in a series of tall knolls that dot the landscape in a general northeast to southwest line, including the Belmont Platteville, and Sinsinawa mounds in southwest Wisconsin, and Balltown and Sherrill mounds in northeast Iowa.  The domes are remnants of a hard Niagara dolomite limestone surface bedrock that once sat atop successive layers of shale, sandstone, and older limestone in a slanted plane reaching 1,000 miles back to its namesake, Niagara Falls. 
          Although the landscape may be mute, it still manages to whisper its past.  A “tree marker” on one of the trails is a centuries-old white oak shaped as a sapling by Native Americans to point toward the summer solstice sunrise.  Burial mounds in the surrounding landscape harken back to an even more-distant human presence.
         The first Euro-American settlers arrived in 1828, first to mine lead, then to farm. Although the park was not established until 1959, the mound gained an early reputation as a peaceful refuge.  An 1870s Dane County guidebook said, “Persons desiring absolute quiet, pure air, and water cannot find a more suitable spot wherein to pitch their tent.”
         But Blue Mound hasn’t always been so quiet. The Military Ridge Bicycle Trail that passes near the foot of Blue Mound is a faint echo of the 1881 railroad that once whistled through the nearby town of Mount Horeb.  In the 1890s, visitors took the train to watch horse races at the top of the mound.  The racetrack imprint is now an oval road at the top of the mound connecting the watchtowers.
         Blue Mound continued as a bustling place for decades.  In the 1940s and 50s it sported a ski hill on one of the mound slopes.  Snowmobiles used the park up through the early 1980s.  The machines were never banned as such, but eventually private sledding trails leading to the park were closed off by local landowners, and without enough trail routes within the park to make it worth the while, snowmobiling disappeared from Blue Mound altogether.
          In recent decades, with over 20 miles of hiking, mountain biking, snowshoeing, and cross-country ski trails, Blue Mounds State Park has developed a reputation as a silent sports sanctuary across the seasons.  Birders come for a glimpse of the 75 nesting bird species or the 150 species that migrate through spring and fall. Hunting is restricted to tracking the annual succession of spring, summer, and fall wildflowers.
          It remains to be seen—or heard—whether the silent sanctuary will survive the return of snowmobile trails to the park in the near future.  Opposed by the Friends of Blue Mounds who raised over $500,000 for the park in recent years, but supported by snowmobile enthusiasts who lamented a lack of public snowmobiling opportunities in the Madison vicinity, the reintroduction of snowmobile trails was recently approved by the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board after the decades-long hiatus.
                                                    *                      *                      *
          After two and a half hours of cross-country skiing, Dianne and I were surprised to find the parking lot had filled as we completed our loop by noon-time.  We had not noticed an influx skiers on the trail as the morning had worn on. 
         And there was still a hush over Blue Mound.    -- February 2017

            From a distance I know it must be the ice cave.  The upper lip of its limestone maw is encrusted in frost, the result of the cave puffing its warm breath into the valley. The snow is too deep for skiing through Jones County’s Lost Canyon, so I’ve donned snow shoes and plunged down into the woods to find the annual drip-ice shapes.
            I am fascinated by water in its frozen form.  Etched into frost, swirled into snowdrifts, clinging like garland to trees, or polished into ice formations, winter’s frozen water is like time stopped. It may be months before last week’s snowfall will melt from the hillsides.
            When I reach the cave opening, about three feet tall and six feet wide, I drop to my knees to peer inside. Before me stand dozens of crystal clear, haunting shapes encased in ice.  On the left must be a miniature Merlin captured in a spell. In the back, a see-through hound sits on its haunches.  I could start a pilgrimage rush, as the drip figures right in front of me are none other than the Holy Family in a manger. 
            And from the dark corners of the cave I hear water plinking, plinking, plinking in the warmer recesses of the earth’s lungs.
            Iced-over waterfalls offer another wonder, and for that I take a quick drive to Wisconsin’s Governor Dodge State Park to view Stephens Falls.  In summer its plunge-mist cools the valley.  Here in winter the waterfall is preserved mid-tumble, a moment of flow hardened and stilled like a photograph.  Water still trickles behind the thinner panes, catching and dispersing slight shards of light, reminding me that stopped time is just an illusion.
            At the Mines of Spain I’m headed off-trail on snow shoes again.  Just beyond the cliff face the slope softens slightly into a steep wooded hillside.  Even with my snow shoe crampons I’ll still need to latch onto tree trunks to hoist myself up the bluff.  The payoff is a few more ravine climbs ahead: a pockmarked field of hundreds of lead mine pits on a river cliff.  The unbroken snow proves that no one has been in this thick forest for some time, here where miners labored in the 1830s.  When they left, the forest regenerated, but otherwise time has stood still amid the abandoned mines.  The oldest oaks date to the end of lead mining.
            Cross-country skiing across the farthermost bridge at the Swiss Valley Nature Preserve, I stop to watch the tussle between time frozen and time flowing as rounded snow mounds hold out against the quick-running trout stream.  I wonder how clear water can look so dark against the snow.  Higher up in a hillside woods, a recent wet snow still laces the burr oak limbs stretched laterally across the forest. Heavy white clumps weigh down bushes and brambles in the understory.  Slight breezes puff away the accumulations until, in a day or two, the woods will be just another sea of brown in a weary, rotting snow.
            I’m not an ice-fisherman, but if it’s not too cold I’ll tip my cap to those whiling away the hours in shanties splayed out across the river.  Me, I’ll wander down to the Mississippi on the lookout for bald eagles with their snow-capped heads perched as still as branches in the upper reaches of the river forest.  They, too, have fishing on their minds.  Instead of poles they’ll use their talons to snare a reckless bass come lumbering up to sip the air from an ice-free pool.
            From above the river, at Eagle Point Park, I’ll contemplate the jammed ice floes interlocked and solid across the wide expanse above the dam.  I’m reminded of a sleepless night on a jet across the North Atlantic.  While everyone else slept, I gazed down across a sweep of icebergs backlit by a dusky orange hint of sunrise and thought, this is the loneliest place in the world.  Sometimes a winter’s glimpse of the Mississippi River can feel the same.
            To ski or snowshoe at night is more enchanted than lonely.  Once I skied among some blue spruces on the hillside near my home under a moon-lit sky.  It was warm inside the clump of trees, so warm that I thought about kicking off my skis, molding the snow into a back rest, and stretching out to watch the moon-clouds pass.  I didn’t, though.  The spruces on the outer edges were buffeted by an increasing wind, and their branches, heavy with snow, pawed and bobbed like nervous steads.  They were warning me of a changing weather.
*                      *                      *
            Snow and ice are water held in place, a stymied flow, like stilled time.  Maybe this is why some people think that winter is long. 
            I’m writing today from the warmth of my kitchen. The evergreens along the driveway are heaped in powder, and the snow-piles between them are deep and still fresh-looking.  I leave the dried-out husks of flower heads on the hydrangeas all winter long to trap the snow and bow in the wind. Sunny winter days like this are rare, but usually crisp and cold. 
            I am writing a few days before the winter solstice when the sunrise halts its winterly southward trek.  For five days the sunrise will hold still against the horizon, and then begin inching northward again. 
            The shadows across the snowy lawn are lengthening.  The snow’s not going anywhere, for now, in the deep freeze.  But the sun will dip, the weeks will pass, the season will warm, and the frozen water will let loose and flow again, all in due time.
            It’s happened before and before and before.  I know it.  Maybe as I grow older that is why I marvel that for a short while each year, water freezes in place, time stops, and even the sun comes to a momentary halt.

--Published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, 1 January 2017

          So what, then, is a spiritual landscape?  Quite often when I use the term, whether in Ireland or in the Driftless, people look at me quizzically and try to send me to the nearest outdoor shrine.  And while I have been moved by many such a place—such as the Mass Rock located a half-hour’s uphill hike from the nearest road in the Maumturk Mountains to provide safe worship in the penal times—such places only scratch the surface of what I mean, or think I mean, by a spiritual landscape. 
          The following principles have been guiding my thinking about sacred place—in Ireland, the Driftless, anywhere.  They are related to Ireland’s Celtic past, although they are not exclusively Celtic.  Nonetheless, they give me a new lens through which to view my own landscape.

1. The landscape is spiritual.  I speak with a woman who has witnessed the winter solstice sunrise as it lit up the interior of Newgrange, a Neolithic tomb near Dublin.  A no-nonsense historian who had previously viewed the structure simply as an astronomical site, she says, “But when you get in there and it actually happens…you begin to see the power of the sun and your connection to it.  You realize this is your moment with the sun, individual and personal.”  -  In the Driftless I walk about the Effigy Mounds near Marquette, IA, with bear and bird-shaped ceremonial and burial mounds above the Mississippi, and I feel the earth nearly bursting with meaning, even if the precise intent of the mound builders has been lost to time.
   
2. The Creation is good.  While many a theologian has tried to drive a wedge between the spiritual and the physical universe, the Judeo-Christian tradition begins, unequivocally, with the Genesis story of God acknowledging each day that the creation is “good.”  So in the River Shannon the salmon bring both knowledge and sustenance.  -  The Mississippi River knows no salmon, but it is the most important migratory flyway of North America.  We have polluted and strapped down both rivers, but they retain a wildness despite our vain attempts at controlling them.  (But if the creation is “good,” how then to explain natural disasters?  While the creation is often good to us and for us, it is nonetheless a good unto itself and to its creator.  The good of creation is not defined solely in human terms.)
3. The Holy may be found in ordinary, bountiful places.  The most peaceful place on earth (I have decided) is the monastic ruin of Glendalough, set in a lush, beautiful valley in the Wicklow mountains, whose twin lakes no doubt presented the 6th century monks with plenty of fish and whose mountain flanks offered deer and wild boars.  -  Sticking with religious houses for the moment, the Driftless offers similarly peaceful and holy sites at Sinsinawa, Mississippi Abbey, and New Melleray Abbey, each set amid land of plenty and ordinary beauty.  But other landscapes are holy as well.  The prairie, too, is an ordinary place of holiness, where beauty and the sacred is found in a tiny patch of ground as opposed to the grand and overwhelming.
4. The Holy may be found in austere, remote places.  But sometimes one must go to the ends of the earth and to the rocky outpost to encounter the Holy.  The Aran Islands combine the rocky barrenness of the Burren with the remoteness of islands just visible from the mainland.  To these islands flocked Ireland’s early Christian monastics, particularly as they began their spiritual journeys.  They needed to find themselves before they could found monasteries.  The remote places include the personal interior encountered in stark silence.  -  Trempealeau, Wisconsin, with its deep summer green along the Upper Mississippi may seem neither austere nor remote, but imagine it in winter as an outpost colony of the Cahokian civilization near present-day St. Louis in 1100 A.D.  What compelled these people to travel 500 miles upstream and establish a village, and to build huge ceremonial platform mounds on the river bluffs? What austerity did these people find in their first Driftless winters?
5. Animals are Fellow Companions.  In the Celtic tradition, animals were messengers from the gods and even from the Christian God.  People could shape-shift into animals and then return to human form.  Even a St. Patrick legend tells of the missionary and his band appearing as a herd of deer as they pass by the army of a local king opposed to Patrick’s Christian evangelizing.  Pope Francis in Laudato Sí, writes, “Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things.”  And so I wander about Connemara, Ireland, in the National Park that is plentiful with living things—butterflies, birds, sheep, cattle, rabbits, foxes—no snakes! But there are carnivorous plants!—even in places like the bog that at first glance appear lifeless.  -  In the Driftless I accompany ornithologist Jon Stravers as he studies red-shouldered hawks and cerulean warblers, and builds his own stone effigy of a hawk on a Yellow River State Forest cliff overlook.
6. Time is elastic and cyclical in the Thin Places.  “Thin Places” is the name for those places in Celtic mythology where the veil between our world and the otherworld is thin and transparent, and may even be crossed.  In such places our usual sense of time is distorted.  In the Thin Places we may see time from nature’s viewpoint, not from the human’s.  So in the rocky Burren time stretches out across the stony limestone pavements, and lakes (turloughs) disappear overnight like magic when the water table drops.  In between the barren limestone blocks grow a vast assortment of wildflowers.  Everything seems “off” and timeless—abundant life amid the barren rocks; marine fossils exposed to the present-day sun; Neolithic tombs amid this April’s most tender wildflowers. – At the Kickapoo Valley Reserve in the Driftless another kind of timelessness prevails in a bluff-surrounded valley of rare plant and animal species and Native American artifacts that were intended to be flooded by an ill-fated plan to dam the valley.  The past and present continue simultaneously, having dodged the dam construction that would have reduced all to no-time.
7. The landscape is storied.  In certain places, one can’t help but feel the story of what has transpired at that location.  In the Wicklow Mountains on a solitary bike ride I encounter—at some distance from the road—a memorial to a civil war victim murdered at that place, and I likewise think of the long tradition of Irish rebels hiding from the British in the Wicklow Mountains.  At the Doo Lough Pass in Connemara, the story of famine victims dying alongside the beautiful Doo Lough (Lake) haunts the path if you get out of your car long enough to feel its presence.  -  In the Driftless the concluding massacre of the Black Hawk War hangs in the air at the battle site between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse.  From the battle bluff and the river shore and even from a steamboat, the U.S. Army and militia mowed down Sauk warrior and civilian alike, with accounts of women with children on their backs being shot as they attempted to swim the Mississippi to safety.  You cannot visit this place without feeling the weight of its past.
8. Poets summon the stories from the land.  The land may be storied, but it requires humans to give shape to its tales.  At the top of Knocknarea sits a Neolithic passage tomb that Celtic tradition transformed into the legendary Queen Maeve’s grave, giving a home in the landscape to the colorful if problematic queen of the Tain, Celtic Ireland’s key epic story.  Poets occupied one of the key positions of respect in Celtic Ireland, and writers are still held in high esteem there.  – At the edge of the Driftless (just beyond its technical boundaries) lies the Leopold Shack, the humble summer and weekend dwelling of America’s most influential nature writer, Aldo Leopold, and his family.  Leopold interpreted the earth’s story, sounded warning against the abuse of the landscape, and called upon us to develop a “land ethic.”

 
          These principles no doubt raise the question of just what kind of spirituality am I engaging in here. My Christian friends may see me as consorting a little too closely with indigenous and New Age beliefs.  New Agers may find my fascination with Christian monks hopelessly dated and irrelevant to the current times. Non-believers may not get much beyond my discussions of geology and the glacial periods.
          But I tend to see more similarity than difference among all of these.
          Understand, I am not saying they are all the same.  I am a Christian, an active Catholic.  My personal beliefs are more idiosyncratic than dogmatic, but I’m not important enough for anyone to have held my feet to the fire (so to speak, in the modern era at least). But the knowledge and curiosity about  pre-, non-, and-post Christians hasn’t made me any less fond of the Jesus who told his followers that if his Father so loved the lilies and the sparrows, is not his love for us even greater.
          But spirituality is not dogma.  Spirituality of the landscape across all of these traditions invokes a sense of awe, wonder, and sense of something both deeper and greater than the physical universe (itself a marvel and a great, good thing). 
          Neolithic man marking the solstices and equinoxes for practicality’s sake but most likely with something grander in mind—otherwise why not just line up two rocks with the sunrise and call it a day?  Pre-Christian Celts—and their indigenous brothers and sisters everywhere—assigning the powers of nature to the gods and goddesses.  The early Christian Celts interpreting these beliefs in ways consistent with Christianity (rather than denouncing, forbidding, and denigrating indigenous beliefs, as has been all too often the custom of Christian evangelizers).  The geologist, who looks at a landscape and imagines (and theorizes) what succession of natural forces created it.  The New Ager, who splices an eclectic contemporary belief out of ribbons of ancient and world-wide faiths.  The nonbeliever standing in awe and wonder at the forces of nature and the deep tradition of humans who have walked upon the earth.
          Awe and wonder.  That’s the spirituality that links all of these.  Just how was this world—no, this particular hilltop on which I stand—shaped?  What is the nature of nature? Who are our forebears who stood on this plot of land and perhaps died here, and what does it mean that I can almost feel their story in the rocks and trees and bog?
           The rest is dogma: polytheism, monotheism, atheism. You go your way and I’ll go mine.
           Perhaps it’s best to remember the etymological roots of three words related to spirituality: 1) Regardless of how the word is commonly used today, “agnostic” originally meant “not knowing.”  May we all remain a little agnostic within our beliefs, so that we don’t lose our sense of awe and wonder due to our unfailing certainty. Saying this is nothing more (or less) radical than what the Christian mystics have told us all along.  2) “Religion” etymologically means to “bind together again.” Let this be a bonding that unites us rather than enslaves us or others.  “Religion” is also related to the word “ligament,” which allows movement even as it binds bone to bone.  And 3) speaking of bone, the word “sacred” is linked to the word “sacrum,” the bone at the base of the spinal cord.  The sacred arises amid the earthy physicality of the earth.  If you don’t also seek the sacred in the earth you will find only its shadow in the heavens.
 
           Just prior to Christianization, the Irish Celts developed their own version of the Roman alphabet, called Ogham, in response to their interaction with the Romans entrenched in Britain (the Romans never attempted to enter Ireland, but traded with the Irish).  Each letter of the Ogham alphabet was named for a particular tree: A was called Ailm, or Fir; B, Beithe, or Birch; C, Coll, or Hazel; D, Dair, or Oak.  And so forth, with Alder, Hawthorn, Yew, Ash, and Willow standing as names for Ogham alphabet letters.
          Christianization of the Celts soon followed, and the Ogham alphabet remained in use for yet a few centuries.  “In the beginning was the Word,” the Christian evangelists surely told the Irish Celts, “and the Word was God.” 
          But for the ancient Celts, the alphabet was the trees. 

​Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
-- Seamus Heaney, “Bogland”
 
            A shovel slicing into the bog is luscious to hear and feel, like biting into an overripe pear.   A shovel-slice into the bog that strikes a buried stone, however, end-caps with a muted ‘thunk.’
            The ‘thunk’ is both heard and felt, travelling up the shovel’s spine and disseminating through the bog itself.  Ears, hands, and feet all register this first strike upon a Bronze-Age stone wall fence buried beneath the Achill Island bog.  Each turn of the spade exposes a section of wall to daylight for the first time in 3000 years.
 
            Achill Island quickly called out to me during my two-month stay in western Ireland.  Located in the thinly-populated westerly reaches of County Mayo, the island—accessible by bridge across the narrow Achill Sound—offers stunning Atlantic cliff-face views, a landscape with a layered, ancient past, and bog, plenty of bog.
            My first Achill hike was at the Minaun Cliffs on the southwest flank of the island overlooking the long, sandy Keel Strand with surfboarders braving the icy Atlantic waves.  Up through a cut in the lower cliff face, through the bog and among the scattered sheep, we ascended to the Coffin Trail, along which islanders in the more remote villages in earlier centuries carried their dead to the Catholic cemetery seven miles away, occasionally resting the caskets on leachtai, or stone cairns, still present on the landscape.  Not so the dead unbaptized infants, banned in earlier times from consecrated ground and buried in unmarked graves on the lower reaches of the cliff.  Today a memorial at the site offers belated recognition of their presence.
            The Deserted Village digs another layer into the past.  Eighty stone cottage ruins stretch out over a mile in one- or two-lane rows.  Their roofs gone, many of their walls tumbled in, the cottages offer no explanation for their en mass abandonment. Perhaps many of the inhabitants died off in the Famine and the survivors emigrated in the following decades.  Flowing down from the cottages are furrowed rows, the remains of the residents’ potato lazy beds, un-tilled since the mid-1800s and now reverting to bog.  Perhaps a landlord evicted everyone, with plans for the land that never materialized.  No actual records remain to tell the story, just the stone walls.
            Stones and other artifacts, that is.  An archaeological study of three cottage sites suggests happier times as well.  Shards of cheap but colorful imported dinnerware—plates and saucers and tea cups—suggest some gaiety to everyday life as well as contact with the outside world. The sheer number of cottages suggests an active and lively village.  And the small size of the one- or two-room cabins offered a cozy warmth against winter rain squalls. 
            Achill Island and all of Ireland once enjoyed a warmer, dryer climate.  About 4000 years ago the region underwent a climate change, leading to today’s cool, wet weather. Neolitihic farming practices had already felled much of Ireland’s forests, and the combination of climate change and deforestation led to the widespread formation of bog—reeds and sedges and mosses that could survive in the wet landscape and which acidified the soil and water so that other plants could not re-establish.  Bog plants layer upon their prior years’ partial decay, and in doing so literally swallowed up the stone remnants of ancient people’s lives after they moved to more hospitable grounds.  Bog covers 87% of the modern Achill landscape.
           
            Today I am tagging along with the Achill Archaeology Field School as we attempt to unearth part of that ancient layer from the bog.
            Field Director Stuart Rathbone is explaining to the students and me why he thinks there may be a 3000-year-old stone wall buried beneath the bog where we stood.  To the right as we face up the mountainside lies a Neolithic court tomb dating to 3500 B.C., its support stones collapsed but its capstone clearly intact.  About 80 meters to the left sits the stone foundations of Bronze Age huts, the dwelling places of ordinary folks from 1000 B.C.  In between, Stuart reads the landscape.  A slight leveling of the mountain slope runs in a straight line between the two sites, with the slope resuming below the line.  Clumps of grasses amid the prevailing bog mosses likewise run along this line.  “Stones beneath the bog can change the chemical composition,” Stuart says, resulting in vegetation differences.
            So we haul our equipment up the mountainside and stake out a rectangle for digging.
If we find something, we’ll prove Stuart’s hypothesis.  If all we find is bog, then Stuart’s prediction is false.
            We commence digging.  The two younger students work uphill from me, struggling to breach the tangled surface of the bog with their shovels.
            With a sharp step onto the edge of the shovel I slice down into the bog.  After a few more slices and twists with the shovel, the first wet, matted layer of bog works free, and I carry the black prism to the spoil mat.  Then a second matted chunk.
            The next slice ends in a dull ‘thunk.’  Stuart brightens, but realizes it could be a random buried stone.  Till the next ‘thunk,’ and the next and the next.
            Soon I have unearthed a three-foot section of wall hidden away beneath two feet of bog. 
            Later, Stuart instructs me to begin cleaning off the buried stone wall, sweeping and removing bits of bog to expose the stonework to the sun.
            Bog and glittery flakes of schist stone are under my fingernails.  Cleaning the site, I scrape my knuckles on stones that have gone untouched for 3000 years.
 
             We are about to call it a day in the late afternoon.  In one tiny rectangle hidden away on the mountainside, the bog has offered up a small slice of the Achill story, layered upon and swallowed by successive years’ growth of bog, and sunning itself for the first time in 3000 years.
            Other lives have passed over this ground before, lives replete with tragedy and joy.  As for me, I am grinning ear to ear, kneeling in the bog as if it were a sandbox, scraping the years off the stones and nursing them back among the living. 

            Not enough water to drown a man, not enough wood to hang him, and not enough soil to bury him.  So claimed a henchman of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, describing the Burren region of western Ireland as British troops scoured the land searching for rebels to the Crown.
           Lesser known is the rest of the Cromwellian’s observation:  “And yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth…that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing."
           Barren and bleak, bustling with life, the Burren is a place of contradictions.
           The Burren is a 150 square mile region in County Clare, Ireland, famous for endless stretches of flat, rectangular limestone surface bedrock reaching to the horizon in all directions, tumbling into draws and scaling the low-lying mountains.  Its name, appropriately, derives from an Irish word, "Boíreann," meaning “a rocky place.”
           But from the crevices (called grykes) between the slabs (called glints) grow a wealth of spring and summer wildflowers.  The flora includes arctic species hearty enough to withstand the cool, wet, wind-beaten winters as well as Mediterranean varieties that flourish in the rarely freezing Gulf-Stream-tempered climate.  In mid-April the yellow primrose and cobalt-blue spring gentium were beginning to make their appearance alongside the endless gray slabs.
           Bleak and treeless, the Burren holds an austere beauty.  A rain-soaked region, its water disappears quickly underground, channeled through the porous limestone, so that the surface itself is dry (in contrast to the bogs), except for seasonal valley pools called turloughs that disappear back into the ground in summer when the water table drops.  
           The Burren began to take its present shape during the last ice age, ending 12,000 years ago, when glacial sheets stripped away much of the overlying soil. Stone-age farmers further depleted the topsoil with erosional farming practices, clearing forests from marginal lands.  The limestone bedrock, now exposed at the surface, began to weather and crack in rectangular patterns. Since limestone is soluble over time, the cracks grew into crevices, and the remaining topsoil filtered into the spaces between the limestone blocks. 
           Remnants of stone-age (Neolithic) civilization still abound.  Nearly a hundred portal tombs dot the Burren landscape.  These tombs typically consist of two or three 6-8 foot tall limestone slab-walls set vertically, supporting a roof slab, giving the appearance of a tottering house of cards, although they have remained stable through 5,000 years of weathering.
           Likewise, the ruins of medieval Celtic Christian monasteries abound, both in the Burren proper and in its topographical extension onto the nearby Aran Islands.  While many Celtic monasteries found the Holy in bountiful surroundings like Glendalough beside a mountain lake or Clonmacnoise along the River Shannon, other monasteries—or monks at the start of their journeys—sought the Holy in remote, austere places.  As modern-day self-proclaimed Celtic monk Dara Molloy explains, monks would often wander before they settled down, “looking for their ‘place of resurrection’.”  They were inspired by the desert monks of ancient Egypt and gave place names like Disert and Dysart to the most austere localities. In the Burren and Aran Islands, there was little to distract them from their inward journeys.
           While Neolithic tombs and monastic ruins are tucked away in corners of the wandering back roads, the Burren owes its modern look to grazing cattle. If early farmers had destroyed their own nest, the lush grasses that grew in pockets and clumps among the stony slabs nourished the cattle that Celtic kings—and later Norman and British landowners—boasted as the essence of Irish wealth.  In turn, cattle kept the underbrush trimmed back which, left unchecked, might in time have covered the rocky expanse and perhaps built up a new soil.
           Even so, farmers didn’t give up the fight against the expanse of rock. Where the Burren meets the coast and on the nearby islands, Irish peasants scooped up handfuls of soil that had built up in the crevices, blended it with sand and seaweed, and carted the mixture to their small parcels of land amid the British landlords’ grazing estates.  Here, from the rocky, barren place, they built, inch by inch, the garden parcels that sustained them through centuries of indentured poverty. 
           But when the potato blight hit in the 1840s, disease destroyed away their main crop.  The British continued exporting the cattle while starvation and immigration carried away the population.  Today, the Burren’s population is still less than 60% of its pre-Famine level.
            The Burren is popular with tourists, although much of its traffic is en route to the Cliffs of Moher, one of Ireland’s most famous attractions.  The curious will stop to examine the Poulnabrone portal tomb. For a taste and smell of the old ways, many will stop in the peat-warmed pubs of nearby Doolin and Listoovarna for a pint and a bowl of Irish stew, staking out a nook amid meandering rooms. The evenings are filled with traditional music.
           But driving on the one-lane back roads in the off-season, you will encounter the day’s only traffic, a local tractor that will require you to back up 100 feet before one or the other of you can pull slightly off the road to let the other pass.  A guided hike across the stony uplands will reveal the first of the season’s wildflowers taking hold against the limestone pavement.  Your eye will sweep toward the turloughs that will disappear in summer like so much mist. Away from the touring buses, sheep and cattle guard the less-visited stony ruins of the ages.          
           The Burren is a study in contrasts.  Barren yet bustling with life, ancient and depopulated yet alive with Irish heritage, it doesn’t quickly reveal the full depth of its contradictions.  For that, you must look between the rocks.
 

           My first time through the Doo Lough Pass was by car, as I was still exploring the winding, ill-marked Irish roads.  The scenery was heavy.  An olive-colored bog draped off the twisted cliffs of the Mweelrea Mountains, whose peaks were obscured by mist. Patches of scree marked the steepest faces, or corries. 
          Doo Lough itself, by contrast, was lovely, a clear, cold glacial lake nesting between the mountains. [Lough, roughly pronounced as ‘lock,’ is the Irish word for ‘lake.’]
          And when I emerged past the southern end of the lake, a sign at the Delphi Lodge announced, innocently enough, “Fresh salmon for sale.”
          Which was somewhat ironic, given that the Delphi Lodge and Doo Lough Pass were the setting of one of the most horrific incidents of the Irish Famine.
 
          Nineteenth-century Irish rural life was precarious even before the Famine.  Absentee British landlords exacted a “pig for the rent” from Irish tenants who tended the landowners’ cattle and sheep.  In return, Irish families coaxed potatoes from small plots for their own subsistence.  The potato was the staple diet for 90% of rural Irish tenant farmers.
          The land required coaxing.  Naturally bogland, certain fields could be converted to small-scale farmland by digging deep drainage furrows and applying a fertilizing mixture of lime, seaweed, and manure to the raised soil mounds between the furrows.  Called lazy beds, these potato fields required back-breaking care.
          In 1845, a potato blight swept quickly through the Irish countryside, turning potatoes to mush in the fields overnight.  It was followed by another blight in 1846, and several more through 1851. 
          A million people in Ireland died of starvation and another million emigrated.  Western Ireland—the province of Connacht—was hardest hit with a 28% population loss during the Famine years.   
          (Heavy emigration continued through the following decades until the population of pre-Famine Ireland was nearly halved. Most of the potato beds since then have reverted to bog. You can tell which fields once nursed potatoes, though, where faint outlines of the lazy beds still run through the bog.)
          In March 1849, a crowd of 600 starving men, women, and children descended upon the new relief station at the town of Louisburgh, hoping for food or admission to the Westport Workhouse.  The officer in command said he could provide neither, and instructed them to walk instead the 11 miles through the Doo Lough Pass to the Delphi Lodge in hopes of relief. 
          As the time was late, the crowd slept on the streets of Louisburgh, and when a wintry night set in, 200 were dead by morning.  The rest began their walk to the Delphi Lodge.  No road existed yet, just sheep paths through the bog.
          When they arrived at Delphi the next day, the relief officers couldn’t be bothered from their lunch, and the crowd was told to wait.  Lunch completed, the officers then told them that no food was available, and they should return to Louisburgh.  Desperate, some turned to eating grasses from the bog, and died because human stomachs can’t eat what sheep do.
           The weather worsened again overnight as the people hunkered down in the Doo Lough Pass.  Sleet and heavy winds entailed, and 200 more of the ill-clad, starving people perished on the second night.
          The relief officer from Louisburgh could now feed some of the survivors, as there was work to hire out: the dead needed to be buried.  But there were so many dead and so little soil that most were buried in unmarked mass graves in the glens of the Doo Lough Pass.
 
          When I returned to Doo Lough, my plan was to walk a portion of the road from Louisbourgh to Delphi. I had considered fasting before I walked, but I didn’t. 
          In this second day’s light the Mweelrea peaks didn’t seem quite so threatening.  Sheep on the road, at the side of the road, off in the bog made the day feel lighter.
          I went off the road a couple of times myself, sluicing through the bog in my thoroughly water-proof boots, watching the water squelch with each step.  I wandered down to the pebble-shored lough.  So clear, slightly tannin-tinted.  When I stuck my hand into the lake I found it shockingly cold, and imagined a winter rain pelting down on the physically weakened.
          Two memorials mark either end of the Doo Lough Pass, one dedicated to victims of the Irish famine, and one to famine victims everywhere.
          The story of the Doo Lough Pass tragedy reached American ears, but especially those of the Choctaw tribe, who raised funds for Irish Famine relief in 1849, as the incident reminded them of their own Trail of Tears two decades earlier. In 1992, the Irish returned the favor, with a group walking the 500-mile Trail of Tears and raising $750 million for world-wide famine relief.  Each May a famine walk winds its way through the Doo Lough Pass.
 
          The first road through the pass was laid down in 1896, and today the road is handsomely black-topped.
There’s no news here that the roads we walk on were built by the labors and even the starvation of our forebears.  The least we owe the past is to get out of our cars.
          I don’t know whether today’s Delphi Lodge has any direct connection to the one of the same name from 1847.  Today’s lodge is part of the Delphi Adventure Resort, with bicycling, kayaking, and zip-wire opportunities.  It sounds like a lot of fun, and why shouldn’t it be?  We can’t live forever in yesterday’s tragedies. 
          But an odd observation stuck with me as re-entered my car and drove away.  When I was walking, the sheep hooves clattering on the road and the nearby rock outcrops sounded curiously like taps on my keyboard.  All those silent faces, munching on bog grasses, tapping, tapping out a story not their own but somehow written into their bodies.