On Saturday, Sept. 20, Prairie Garden Trust hosted a guided walking tour in partnership with DBRL as part of One Read programming. I wrote about my memory of this
enchanting visit, in conversation with the voices of Daniel Mason’s “North Woods.”
It’s a beautiful morning for a walk in the prairie: soft sun, blooming asters, a feeling of quiet wakefulness that widens the gaze. The guide tells us a story about a cluster of ticks falling into his boot. We laugh, and some of us tuck our pants into our socks. I heed his warning, spray my sneakers until they glisten with repellent, but it’s hard to imagine anything truly bad happening out here.
We start out slow, there’s so much to notice. A tall white ash with bark like rough rivulets running down its length. The guide explains how quickly these trees are dying across the region, inhabited by emerald ash borers. I know better than to question the force of tiny beetles against populations of ancient trees—I’ve read about the kind that killed millions of Dutch elms a century ago, how eagerly they carved, nested, and bred.
“Creamy little baubles, each as plump and pampered as an emperor’s favorite child, they turned from the central chamber and began to chew in parallel ranks. By the time they reached their fill and stopped to pupate, they’d carved that Viking maze of such sublime design.”
I am boring a hole through the bark with my eyes when I realize the group is moving again. My attention finds the white oak up ahead — a witness tree, the guide explains, meaning it marks the corner of a property. I know from Nora’s chapter that this term is now also used for those that stood at important moments in history: the trees that witnessed us. As we move on, I tread gently, hoping to leave no evidence at all.
I develop a fixation on my footsteps. The world eye level and above starts to overwhelm. Something tiny with wings orbits my right ear, and I cannot make sense of the thickets. So I focus on the sound of the earth under my shoes and try not to step on anything that moves. Someone spots a wolf spider, and I slow down to avoid crushing this creature I cannot see, much less name. I feel unmoored from land and language. But then, isn’t it a gift to be so lost?
“The world had closed over them. Gone was England, gone the Colony. They were Nature’s wards now, he told her, they had crossed into a Realm.”
The guide continues to name. Here is a false aster. Here is a cardinal flower, red wisps perched prettily atop stems. These tall, browning perennials with the prickly flowerheads are called rattlesnake masters. And these are not blueberries growing in glossy clusters; they are chokeberries and you would need loads of sugar to make them sweet. The more time you spend out here the more species you recognize, the guide explains, though the scene changes all the time, sometimes in a matter of days. I can only guess at the reels in his mind, how rich and layered their memory.
“The task, of course, was infinitely more complex than simple naming. In the brief, exalted moments when she could picture the grand cinema of the forest’s passage, she felt like nothing less than a clairvoyant with a crystal ball.”
Finally, something I can name on my own: one last lotus blossom glows white in the sun.
Slowly the path inclines, we pull deeply on the air. I have been so focused on walking that I forget we are going somewhere. When the view breaks open to reveal clouds and treetops, I cannot believe my feet have taken me here. (But that’s not the whole story, is it? First you crossed counties in your friend’s car; they navigated gravel roads while the friend in the backseat spotted birds. Then you walked here together, you and two friends and six other curious souls. All led patiently by the guide who lent words with which to see this world, only to leave you speechless again at the top of the bluff.)
“It was then that the winter forest underwent a transformation. As if something she had thought was dull and monotone had revealed itself to be a place of secrets and discoveries. As if the world were restored to what it was meant to be, a place much greater than herself.”
I am gleeful coming down; I almost forget to mind the path. Thankfully the watchful friend spots something small at our feet.
A faint rhythm of warning underlies our walk: a species is noticed, then we find that it is being eaten up, or its habitat is shrinking (or, the thing that it eats is being eaten up, or the habitat of the thing that it eats is shrinking; or, there’s nothing left to eat it, so it’s eating up everything else). It becomes difficult to separate the wonder of this world from its scarcity. When we make it back to the witness tree, I am thoroughly grounded again.
In the last chapters of “North Woods,” we are brought to an art exhibit featuring paintings of the forest, culminating in a virtual reality (VR) installation designed to simulate the exploration of a lush, thriving ecosystem. Similar projects exist — we can now soar through the canopies of the Amazon Rainforest with 360-degree vision or swim through Valen’s Reef. Of such conservation-related projects, there is also a more insistent variety, like VR headsets that turn your eyes toward young animals as they struggle to survive.
“Once, the forest would have been deafening. In the recording they had layered the songs of hundreds of birds, not only those she knew, but others now displaced to distant forests — blackpoll warblers, Bicknell’s thrushes — or lost forever, like the passenger pigeons whose melodies were re-created from musical notations that had been set down before they went extinct.
And it was then, looking up at the canopy, feeling the birdsong in her spine, that it had all come crashing down.”
Maybe someday I will visit an installation or wear an accessory designed to strike me with such wonder and fear. But for now I am at the prairie. For now there is the sparrow, the wolf spider, the frog. The white ash, more alone than it knows; the old oak keeping watch. And already I am filled with more wonder and fear than I can bear.
Goodbye, One Read month. 
Until next September,
Karena
