this little building on the highway between janesville and edgerton in wisconsin is said to be an old tavern. an ancestor who lived west of here is rumored to have had a few too many in the old establishment one night before going off down hurd road and throwing ties on a track to derail train no. 143 from madison to chicago. the latter part is not rumor but documented. the record says no one was hurt, but he did some time.
the sandstone structure is beyond dilapidation now.
kessler railroad prairie is just what it sounds like. an old rail line was ripped up and prairie restored out between hanover and afton in rock county. it’s a fun 13-acre strip of land along massive power lines, and how great that the corridor was made back into a place that could shelter so many species of native plants, rodents, and voles. bass creek runs thru. a welcome, windy visit to the grasslands this afternoon.
fair meadows is a delightful patch of land with savanna, wet prairie, shrub-carr, and marsh communities. the land is well tended, especially with an eye toward increasing an endangered plant’s population. a fabulous walk, complete with getting “marshed” in ankle-deep water—completely worth it!
a special ‘thank you’ to the private owners of this sna for welcoming us onto their earthy treasure.
koshkonong corners is a 62-acre stretch of land contiguous with the lake koshkonong flood plain. a wonderful area, it has oak savanna, hard-wood swamp, sedge meadow, and wet-mesic prairie. restoration has been underway and continues to preserve a rare plant species and expand its population.
a very gracious ‘thank you’ to the private owner of koshkonong corners for allowing me to walk the land and take it all in on a gorgeous december morning.
lima bog is a four-acre hard water bog lake surrounded by forest. tamarack and muskrat lodges greeted us as we came out of the wood to the open wetland area. early morning in the bog with the lowing of cows in the distance: can’t beat it.
the johnstown terminal moraine is the edge where the green bay lobe of the last glaciation left the final heap of rock and sediment of glacial till. it’s out near johnstown in rock county (my home county), and continues up to northern wisconsin. yet another example of how my and my family’s lives have been shaped by glaciation, the road we took to go see it is the road my wife used to drive up as a young girl to get her dad’s paychecks! here’re views of the approach and the moraine itself (and work) from inside the van.
mckinley park is a lakefront park in milwaukee with a marina, beach, and other things going on. part of the shore has a long pile of rip-rap (tumbled rock and concrete) that my kids love to climb on. it’s a bit more treacherous these days, with lake michigan’s spray slicking the rocks in ways unexpected, beautiful, and (at times) dangerous. i was particularly taken by the ice display on driftwood last night.
The language that led me to fall in love with old literature for real and to finally go to university (because you couldn’t just Google how to read it back then!) is Old English. And lots of my work over the last decade has been on this medieval Germanic language. But I was only in my first Old English class at UW-Madison in 2005 because I wasn’t able to take the Old Norse class that term. After experiencing Old English in the classroom, I went that route and rarely looked back.
Every once in awhile I did look back, though, and remember wanting to devote my life to the study, translation, and (yes) performance of Old Norse verse. Well, that train left the station, but over the summer I started reading the Old Norse Elder Edda again, and felt compelled to finally try my hand at translating something.
Given my recent fixation on burial mounds and effigy mounds and mounds of all sorts, I decided to translate the final scene of the second “kviða” (or “lay”) of Helgi Hundingsbane, a member of the Volsung line. It’s a long, knotty story, but all you need to know is that Helgi marries Sigrun and is then killed. In the scene I translate, Helgi has been buried in a mound and Sigrun can’t let his memory go, so she meets him at the mound for a little talk—no big deal.
Well: the original project of visiting all 28 State Natural Areas in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha, and Racine Counties that I imagined when COVID-shutdown commenced is complete as of this morning with a visit to Fairy Chasm SNA. The original idea (visit each area, take one picture, write one three-line poem) blossomed out into many more pictures and poems, and two sub-series.
A HUGE thank you to my wife and kids (who’ve visited almost all of them with me), and to everyone who’s stopped here to read one, two, or all of them!
So: the original projection is done. But of course there are hundreds more SNAs, and I will press on visiting them and keep this project going as I’m able, since it has helped me to learn so much about the geology, natural history, and plant, animal, moss, lichen, and fungal communities of the world around me here in southeastern Wisconsin. But most of all, to forge connections with the earth itself (with all its various systems) and all these creatures who share our common home. So stay tuned if you like. 🙂
Here’s more:
a.
owls and kinglets at dawn
the chickadees keep us company—
rivulets into streams into seas
b.
we march along ridges
sky-jewel burning thru birches
logs thru translucent ice
c.
limestone my childhood’s rock
tumbled off unarticulated till—
death is worth this sedimentary brotherhood
d.
a downy woodpecker ensouls the sky
frost feathers leaf and moss
glaciers give bountiful gifts
e.
nature’s an abstraction. rock
and sand, water, bark and bird—
these touch the hand, creature the heart.
fairy chasm state natural area is a 22-acre plot of land surrounding—you guessed it—fairy chasm, a gorge thru which runs fish creek. the creek has worn thru unconsolidated glacial till and drains directly into lake michigan. the north side of the gorge has a micro-climate amenable to more northerly species, and a wood of white pine, white cedar, birches, and beech. the south side is gentler with juniper ground cover.
no wood-meres, water-elves, or other fairy-folk were spotted.
(i also took a detour into donges bay gorge natural area, since i parked there to get to fairy chasm…)
peat lake is a very shallow lake with a mucky bottom, with sedge meadow and cattail marsh stretches. lots of birds, not many fish. a delightful walk all around. and the lichen growing on the iron bar of the gate near the wildlife refuge area was stunning.
this site and the chiwaukee prairie were our first s.n.a.’s in kenosha county—two more to go! thanks to the wisconsin dnr for preserving this site.
Jacob Riyeff 