| Day
#4 - Part #1 |
Robert
Leverett |
| Aug
18, 2006 12:23 PDT |
Day #4 – Part 1:
ENTS,
Day #4 began with Monica and I hitting the road with our
intention of
making our first stop for breakfast at a restaurant associated
with the
famous Amana Colonies of Iowa. The colonies were established as
a
utopian society back in 1855 by German immigrants and the
colonies
lasted until 1932. They ceased to exist as an
economic-social-religious
experiment in 1932 and then became a center for manufacturing
kitchen
appliances. I’m sure many of us remember Amana freezers.
Freezers and
other appliances came from the manufacturing outgrowth of the
colonies.
It is a very different place now. I visited it back in the
1980s. There
are vestiges of the early culture in the form of local products,
but in
this age of globalization, I can’t attest to what actually
survives as
local crafts.
After a very conventional breakfast but accented with a superb
locally
made strawberry jam, we hit the road. But before describing our
stops in
Iowa, I would like to describe what was before 1980 my notion of
Iowa.
It can be summed up in a single one word – corn. I have always
associated Iowa as the center of the nation’s corn growing
country. That
is basically correct, but only slightly. Three states are active
competitors. The 2001 list of states producing 400,000,000 or
more
bushels of corn follows:
Iowa 1,664,000,000
Illinois 1,649,200,000
Nebraska 1,139,300,000
Indiana 884,500,000
Minnesota 806,000,000
Ohio 437,500,000
So from these figures, my early notion of Iowa being the corn
center was
right on, especially considering that Illinois is the next state
to the
east and Nebraska is next state to the west. Thinking more on
the
matter, my concept of Iowans was probably influenced by the
movie the
“Music Man”, which bolstered my vision of a staunch,
God-fearing, no
nonsense people. And taking it back even further
chronologically, that
vision was probably fed by the famous painting by Norman
Rockwell that
showed an Iowa farmer standing with pitchfork in hand and wife
at his
side.
Beginning in 1982, my late wife Jani and I did 6 trips across
Iowa,
mostly on I80. We did 3 more during the period of 1998 to 2001.
Since
then I’ve added 3 more trips included the just concluded one
with
Monica. All but the last of these trips reinforced my belief
that
whatever Iowa had been before it was cleared and cultivated had
been
irretrievably lost in an ocean of corn. Yes, in my head,
Iowa’s soul had
been dispersed through countless millions of kernels of corn
that have
been grown over the years. One can sense this whole scale
conversion by
driving the 312 miles across the state on I80 with the emerald
green of
the cornfields providing a pacifying foreground and background
to
Interstate travel. Was there anything to mitigate the impact of
verdant
cornfields from horizon to horizon?
While at Midewin, Monica had bought a book on the tallgrass
prairies by
author John Madson titled “where the sky began – land of the
tallgrass
prairie”. Madson passed away in 1996, but his writing
accomplishments
are legendary. He has been called the Aldo Leapold of the
grasslands and
I soon came to understand why. Monica periodically read aloud
from the
book as we drove westward and the more she read the more I
thirsted to
see the remaining spots of preserved prairie. I also want to
read the
works of other chroniclers of the prairie. Despite my southern
Appalachian roots and current life as a New Englander, I believe
the
denizens of the prairies and plains to be kindred spirits.
What is it that I find so compelling about the writings of John
Madson?
For one thing he was a consummate master of description. One
recognizes
that he had an encyclopedic understanding of the prairie
ecosystems, but
you are never overwhelmed by his descriptions. He also had a
fine sense
of humor that he invoked in his superb descriptions of
grasslands and
their impact on the human spirit. One passage Monica read to me
had me
alternately amazed and in stitches, but it captured the essence
of the
impact of those great grasslands. I quote:
“Thoughts while loafing:
Not even Rip Van winkle could have slept for twenty years on a
prairie.
The place for that is a deep glen that encloses a man in a snug
vessel
of trees and hills, insulating him from the sky and the wind. A
grassland crackles and flows with stimuli charging a man to get
on with
something. A prairie never rests for long, nor does it permit
anything
else to rest. It has barriers to neither men nor wind and
encourages
them to run together, which may be why grasslands men are
notorious
travelers and hard-goers, driven by wind and running with it,
fierce and
free.
Forests have surely housed many free and fierce people, but I
somehow
imagine them as preoccupied with laying ambushes in thickets,
worshiping
oak trees, and painting their bellies blue. I could never take
Druids
seriously. They’re not in the same class as Cossacks, Zulus,
Masai,
Mongols, Comanches, Sioux, the highland clans of treeless moors,
and
trail drovers tearing up Front Street. Grasslanders, all.
There was a vein of wild exultation in such men. It wasn’t
just the
high-protein diet, nor even that some of those men were mounted
–
although the horse people were among the wildest of all. I have
a hunch
that it was the mood of the land, stimulating its people with
openness,
hyperventilating them with freedom in a world of open skylines
and few
secrets. Such grasslanders never seemed to harbor the nasty
little
superstitions that flourish in the fetid jungles and dank
forests. Their
superstitions were taller, their sagas and legends more airy and
broad,
and running through their cultures was a level conviction that
they were
the elite. While some forest people retreated into the
shadowlands, men
of the open had no choice but to breast the fuller world – and
often
came to do so with pride and even arrogance. It was a sense that
was
transferred almost intact when men left the land and took to the
open
seas, or learned to fly. They were all part of the same –
wanderers
beyond horizons, children of the wind who belonged more to sky
than to
earth, conscious of being under the Great Eye……”
Well, after that sharing of Madson’s thoughts, I knew why it
was the
Native American plains cultures that had always captured my
imagination
over those of the eastern woodland Indians. Throughout the
remaining
installments, I’ll frequently quote from the Madson book. He
gives us
one jewel after another. But to continue with our own
adventures, we
made a stop in western Iowa outside of the little down of Adair,
which
is about 75 miles east of the Iowa-Nebraska border. Adair is
named for
the 6th governor of Iowa and a veteran of the War of 1812. In
terms of
climate, Adair gets a fair amount of precipitation, about 33
inches per
year, but the annual snowfall is a modest 27 inches. Most of
Iowa gets
between 32 and 38 inches of moisture annually with the gradient
running
from wet to drier going westward. By the time the Iowa-Nebraska
border
is reached, moisture has dropped to around 30 inches and less in
some
places.
Adair is the site of the first train robbery in the West - a
Jesse James
special that is recorded in the annals of western lore. The site
of the
historic robbery is not far off I80 on a secondary road that is
also a
small prairie restoration site. The location has a wagon wheel,
and
believe it or not, a small section of track, purportedly the
actual
section that Jesse James separated to cause the derailment on
July 21,
1873. I have my suspicions. I’ve seen many post-derailment
tracks. And
the little segment of track wasn’t anything like them. It had
to be a
good reconstruction. More to my immediate interest were the
cottonwood
trees that gave us shade as we picnicked on a grassy spot just a
few
feet from the track and wagon wheel. The prairie breezes kept us
cool
and the nearby grasses reminded us of our quest for the tall
grasses.
Although I didn’t mention it to Monica at the time, a feeling
passed
through me while sitting under those little cottonwood trees. I
suddenly
felt like I belonged to the prairie country, at least more so
than I had
previously. I felt as close to the grasslands as to the
woodlands.
Maybe the feeling would pass, but for the moment I was no longer
a
transient. I was as much a denizen of the grasslands as the
forests. I
knew that I would periodically need to experience the grasslands
in a
deeper way than in previous years when I satisfied myself by
looking at
the passing landscape from my car. I knew that Monica would be
my full,
enthusiastic partner in visiting the grasslands. After all, it
had been
her interest in revisiting them that had rekindled my interest.
In
thinking about the spot we were in, I also recalled an incident
from the
summer of 2004 when I had last visited Adair.
On my prior visit, I had rolled into the historic location.
Another
gentleman was standing near the wagon wheel. His van blocked
further
progress. He was watching me approach the wagon wheel, his body
language
indicated that he wanted to talk. I think I initiated the
conversation
and in so doing apparently made a statement that was incorrect.
As I
recall, he quickly set me straight and then he launched into an
exhaustive explanation into what was known and not known about
Jesse
James at the time and about the actual wreck. The gentleman was
a
railroader and obviously knew his stuff. My father was a
railroader and
I was exposed to railroads enough to allow me to separate the
amateurs
from the professionals. I tried to ask questions, but he would
sense
that I was about to say something and would immediately burst
into
rapid-fire talk, pumping out more information. His grown son
stood by
quietly, slightly back of his father, with a knowing look on his
face
that communicated that he’d been there before many times and
it was
useless to resist. There was almost a look of satisfaction that
someone
else had to suffer. All I could do was manage an uh huh, a
positive nod,
and then brace for the next deluge of information. The
loquacious fellow
seemed to go on for an hour, though it was actually only 20
minutes –
possibly the longest 20 minutes of my life. When I finally
managed to
disengage, I left with my head spinning. Thinking back now, I
think I
had managed to attentively absorb information for the first 10
minutes,
but the second 10 erased everything that had previously sunk in.
I left
with the barest recollection of what I had heard, only a general
outline
of the original route, the wreck, and the aftermath. I just
wanted my
suddenly pounding headache to stop.
Moving westward, as one approaches the Missouri River that
separates
Iowa from Nebraska, one enters a narrow, but fascinating new
nature
kingdom. One encounters the loess hills. I’m sure Lee Frelich
knows much
about ecosystems associated with loess formations and hope that
he will
provide some insights. Lee can say in a few dozen words what I
can’t
communicate in hundreds. But, the loess hills are utterly
fascinating, a
world unto themselves.
I think I should stop part #1 of day #4 at this point. I’ll
leave
everyone with a website to peruse:
http://www.nfinity.com/~exile/loesspg.htm.
It has information about the
loess hills. I’ll also confess that prior to my 2001 trip
across Iowa, I
knew next to nothing about this fascinating landscape of extreme
western
Iowa. I don’t hold myself accountable for the information gap
in my
knowledge of the natural environment of Iowa, but I do intend to
correct
the deficiency in the coming years.
Coming up in remainder of Day #4 is the Desoto National Wildlife
Refuge
and Albion, gateway to Nebraska’s incomparable Sand Hills.
Bob
Robert T. Leverett
Cofounder, Eastern Native Tree Society
|
| Re:
Loess hills |
Lee
Frelich |
| Aug
19, 2006 12:46 PDT |
Bob:
While you were in the corn belt, I hope you sampled the corn.
This year's
sweet corn, grown in 100 degree heat, is the best in years. When
you cook
it, it fills the house with the smell of loess soils after a
heavy
rainfall, and it has great depth and complexity of earthy
flavors. It's so
much better than the bland stuff from Florida that we get during
the winter.
Regarding loess hills, since it seems that my posting yesterday
didn't get
through:
The loess hills are giant drifts of silt and clay particles
incised with a
dendritic network of erosional ravines.
Loess occurs throughout much of the Midwest, but gets thinner
with distance
from the Loess Hills. In Rock County, WI, where I grew up, it is
perhaps
5-10 feet deep, and very silty and black, supporting 10-15 foot
tall corn.
In the rugged driftless area of southwestern WI, this loess lies
many feet
deep on top of limestone and sandstone, supporting lush forests
of oak,
maple, hickory, walnut, and cherry. In the Minneapolis area it
is a loess
cap, about 1-2 feet of loess on top of glacial sand and gravel.
This soil
supports the old growth maple, oak and basswood forest at
Wood-Rill, on top
of gravelly kames. If this loess cap should erode away, as has
happened in
a few places, then one is left with a depauperate ecosystem of
stunted
grasses and 20 foot tall bur oak trees.
Lee
|
| RE:
Loess hills |
Don
Bragg |
| Aug
21, 2006 06:12 PDT |
ENTS--
The subject of "loess hills" got me remembering our
eastern Arkansas day
trip. We stopped along a unique geological feature called
"Crowley's
Ridge" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowley's_Ridge),
which is in part
an erosional remnant left after the major rivers in the central
US
shifted their paths (especially following the last glaciation),
and the
deposition of significant quantities of loess on the hills
adjacent to
the ancestral riverways. While the loess along Crowley's ridge
is not
remarkably deep, there are accumulations along the eastern side
of the
Mississippi Delta (especially in Tennessee and Mississippi) that
are
very deep. The "bluff hills" near Vicksburg, MS are
many feet deep, and
they provided shelter for residents who burrowed into them to
avoid the
Union bombardment during the Civil War.
As we headed towards Village Creek State Park, we stopped along
the
highway to view a gully that had formed following poor
agricultural
practices on the top of the ridge. One of the unique features
about the
silty soils of loess is how they erode--they can erode easily,
but they
can also retain their vertical integrity well (hence, their use
for
excavated shelters during the Civil War). The gully we observed
had
very steep (virtually vertical) walls perhaps 50 or more feet
deep.
The gully had a weird green color to it because it was covered
in
another enigma of the South--kudzu. This is actually an example
of
exactly why kudzu was introduced to the South--it excels at
covering and
stabilizing eroding soils. This gully has probably not changed
markedly in many years to perhaps decades because of its kudzu
covering.
Unfortunately, kudzu doesn't know that it was supposed to stay
only in
the eroding areas, and now large blankets of kudzu cover many
areas. I
will send Ed a picture of this gully (which reminds me in some
ways of
the canyons I saw out west).
Don Bragg
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