The price of gas was $3.96 a gallon at the pump up the street, and the inevitable question to be asked before I turned the key in the ignition was, “is this trip really necessary?”
The sun was shining and my good binoculars and weathered field guide to the birds east of the Rockies were in the passenger seat beside me. There was no shortage of stuff to do in and around the house on my day “off.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had sorted laundry. Papers—for work, for amusement, for health, for the kids, for taxes—kept multiplying in stacks every time I turned around and refused to file themselves. There were buttons to be sewn, dishes to be washed, socks to be sorted, dust bunnies to hunt down and exterminate.
And instead, I was heading out to the Horicon Marsh forty miles away to watch birds. Was this trip really necessary? Damn straight! Once in a while you just need to take a "mental health" day from routine. I eased the car down the driveway, and headed west, satisfaction and anticipation and guilty pleasure jostling for supremacy in my mind.
The first time I saw this extraordinary place, I was in a suit, and in a hurry. I was driving about a hundred miles from the office after work to Madison, Wisconsin, where my daughter had a scholarship dinner. A bailiff at the courthouse, well versed in both travel and transporting prisoners, gave me directions for the scenic route that would also help me avoid traffic delays. I drove along, already exhausted from a day that had started with opening pasture gates and measuring horse feed at 5:30 a.m., and thought agreeably that the road less traveled was indeed scenic. And repetitive. There’s a lot of Wisconsin that looks alike. Red barns, green grass, black and white cows, wooden board fences weathered to a three-dimensional silver sheen.
And then all of a sudden I rounded a curve on a downward hill, and the marsh spread out before me, shimmering in the afternoon sun, water and vegetation as far as the eye could see. Highway 49 cuts straight through the marsh from east to west, a two-lane ribbon of road bisecting the marsh just above water level, giving the feel of following Moses through the Red Sea. I took a ten minute detour to do the "auto loop" and then got back on track. I promised myself right then that I’d come back when I had more time to spend, and I have, making the pilgrimage a couple of times a year.
On this particular morning, I was still seeing plenty of the same barns, and grass, and cows, and fences. But a bumper crop of spring dandelions cheerfully accented the greenery like party favors. When I finally hit that straight stretch of Highway 49 flanked by water and big sky, the last leg before my cherished turn off, pairs of geese casually herded their broods of olive-yellow goslings along the road shoulders. They must have it down to a science, I thought, since the only roadkill around looked like dead deer. Red-winged blackbirds perched on last season's cattails and flashed their scarlet epaulets, resembling unregenerate escapees from a military academy.
Driving into the marsh (which fortunately has restrooms, parking lots, and hiking trails) is like stepping out of time and into the meadow and forest primeval. From the time the car door opens you’re enveloped by a symphony of bird calls in surround sound, walls of joyous noise in a language we can’t understand, but which communicate volumes anyway. Profusion is the key element, surrender the only path. Traffic noise falls far behind the deeper you drive and hike, until finally you are left with only the sound of branches bending, leaves rustling, and the occasional flutter and splash of wings on water, mysterious takeoffs and landings far different from ours.
Passing one side channel, I slowed to watch a sextet of painted turtles basking in the sunlight on a half-submerged log. Nearby, a blue-winged teal balanced motionless on one leg on another snag, his beak buried under his wing and his head almost hidden by his spotted chest.
I parked and took the boardwalk into the marsh, an experience impossible to forget. I left my cell phone in the car, slipped a camera into my jacket pocket instead. A Canada goose stood up from her mounded nest in the middle of the water, rearranged her eggs among the fluff surrounding them, and settled back down, her outstretched wings sealing in her warmth. Barn swallows and tree swallows swooped and dived, Mother Nature’s versions of the F-15. A couple of American coots bobbed their way down another side channel, with a slow, measured cadence like elderly beachcombers passing the morning with metal detectors at the shore.
The boardwalk gave way to a trail cut through the woods, and watching for birds gave way to a different kind of discovery. On this particular day, the forest floor was carpeted in white trilliums and purple and yellow violets, with a few wild geraniums in the mix. Fallen trees and branches, covered with moss, made for structural mystery in the distance.
The sky looked like rain would be moving in soon, but I set out on another hiking trail, this one running through a meadow and some more woods. My favorite seat has always been a solitary wood plank bench with trees and lilacs behind it. Judging by the number of cars in the parking lot—two, if you counted mine—I was the lone human for at least a half mile in any direction. I exercised my prerogative of solitude and stretched out on the bench flat on my back. Took off my glasses, shut my eyes, and just listened. I was surrounded, I knew, by a cacophony of warblers, sparrows, wrens, juncos, who knows?
Can I identify birds by the sounds that they make? Absolutely almost never. I have a tin ear when it comes to bird calls. Can I even tell what I’m looking at without opening the field guide? Not too often, unless it’s something I’ve seen a dozen times before. But I can still marvel at just how much sound can some from such tiny instruments…and still get a kick out of the fact that one of my feathered troubadours today sounded a lot like R2-D2 in “Star Wars.”
Picking up the pace as the clouds rolled in, I entered the woods again. Surprised a doe as I was coming uphill around a turn in the forest. We both startled, but a few graceful leaps, her white tail upright like a flag, and she was invisible in her element once again.
I reentered the car, and the modern world of technology, just as the raindrops started to fall. Still, I stopped often on the road to the exit, turned off the engine, and just watched through the open window. A female summer tanager, brilliant yellow and pale green, flew to and from her nest in the fork of a tree branch. Pairs of geese floated along with their goslings between them, disappearing into the forest of cattails standing in the water when they felt too much attention was being paid.
Four and a half hours had passed from the time I left the house until the time I got back, more than three of them “on the ground” at the marsh. The laundry still sat in the baskets, the dinner plates still hadn’t walked themselves into the dish washer, the cat had shed a half dozen more balls of fluff the size of small tarantulas around the living room, and the dog still looked at me with those sad eyes, telepathically communicating his reproach, “you don’t spend enough time with me!” Never mind that “enough time” for this dog would be upwards of twenty four hours a day.
But still, in the grand scheme of how to spend four hours if you don’t have a gun to your head or a wolf at the door…was this trip really necessary?
You bet your ass.
The sun was shining and my good binoculars and weathered field guide to the birds east of the Rockies were in the passenger seat beside me. There was no shortage of stuff to do in and around the house on my day “off.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had sorted laundry. Papers—for work, for amusement, for health, for the kids, for taxes—kept multiplying in stacks every time I turned around and refused to file themselves. There were buttons to be sewn, dishes to be washed, socks to be sorted, dust bunnies to hunt down and exterminate.
And instead, I was heading out to the Horicon Marsh forty miles away to watch birds. Was this trip really necessary? Damn straight! Once in a while you just need to take a "mental health" day from routine. I eased the car down the driveway, and headed west, satisfaction and anticipation and guilty pleasure jostling for supremacy in my mind.
The first time I saw this extraordinary place, I was in a suit, and in a hurry. I was driving about a hundred miles from the office after work to Madison, Wisconsin, where my daughter had a scholarship dinner. A bailiff at the courthouse, well versed in both travel and transporting prisoners, gave me directions for the scenic route that would also help me avoid traffic delays. I drove along, already exhausted from a day that had started with opening pasture gates and measuring horse feed at 5:30 a.m., and thought agreeably that the road less traveled was indeed scenic. And repetitive. There’s a lot of Wisconsin that looks alike. Red barns, green grass, black and white cows, wooden board fences weathered to a three-dimensional silver sheen.
And then all of a sudden I rounded a curve on a downward hill, and the marsh spread out before me, shimmering in the afternoon sun, water and vegetation as far as the eye could see. Highway 49 cuts straight through the marsh from east to west, a two-lane ribbon of road bisecting the marsh just above water level, giving the feel of following Moses through the Red Sea. I took a ten minute detour to do the "auto loop" and then got back on track. I promised myself right then that I’d come back when I had more time to spend, and I have, making the pilgrimage a couple of times a year.
On this particular morning, I was still seeing plenty of the same barns, and grass, and cows, and fences. But a bumper crop of spring dandelions cheerfully accented the greenery like party favors. When I finally hit that straight stretch of Highway 49 flanked by water and big sky, the last leg before my cherished turn off, pairs of geese casually herded their broods of olive-yellow goslings along the road shoulders. They must have it down to a science, I thought, since the only roadkill around looked like dead deer. Red-winged blackbirds perched on last season's cattails and flashed their scarlet epaulets, resembling unregenerate escapees from a military academy.
Driving into the marsh (which fortunately has restrooms, parking lots, and hiking trails) is like stepping out of time and into the meadow and forest primeval. From the time the car door opens you’re enveloped by a symphony of bird calls in surround sound, walls of joyous noise in a language we can’t understand, but which communicate volumes anyway. Profusion is the key element, surrender the only path. Traffic noise falls far behind the deeper you drive and hike, until finally you are left with only the sound of branches bending, leaves rustling, and the occasional flutter and splash of wings on water, mysterious takeoffs and landings far different from ours.
Passing one side channel, I slowed to watch a sextet of painted turtles basking in the sunlight on a half-submerged log. Nearby, a blue-winged teal balanced motionless on one leg on another snag, his beak buried under his wing and his head almost hidden by his spotted chest.
I parked and took the boardwalk into the marsh, an experience impossible to forget. I left my cell phone in the car, slipped a camera into my jacket pocket instead. A Canada goose stood up from her mounded nest in the middle of the water, rearranged her eggs among the fluff surrounding them, and settled back down, her outstretched wings sealing in her warmth. Barn swallows and tree swallows swooped and dived, Mother Nature’s versions of the F-15. A couple of American coots bobbed their way down another side channel, with a slow, measured cadence like elderly beachcombers passing the morning with metal detectors at the shore.
The boardwalk gave way to a trail cut through the woods, and watching for birds gave way to a different kind of discovery. On this particular day, the forest floor was carpeted in white trilliums and purple and yellow violets, with a few wild geraniums in the mix. Fallen trees and branches, covered with moss, made for structural mystery in the distance.
The sky looked like rain would be moving in soon, but I set out on another hiking trail, this one running through a meadow and some more woods. My favorite seat has always been a solitary wood plank bench with trees and lilacs behind it. Judging by the number of cars in the parking lot—two, if you counted mine—I was the lone human for at least a half mile in any direction. I exercised my prerogative of solitude and stretched out on the bench flat on my back. Took off my glasses, shut my eyes, and just listened. I was surrounded, I knew, by a cacophony of warblers, sparrows, wrens, juncos, who knows?
Can I identify birds by the sounds that they make? Absolutely almost never. I have a tin ear when it comes to bird calls. Can I even tell what I’m looking at without opening the field guide? Not too often, unless it’s something I’ve seen a dozen times before. But I can still marvel at just how much sound can some from such tiny instruments…and still get a kick out of the fact that one of my feathered troubadours today sounded a lot like R2-D2 in “Star Wars.”
Picking up the pace as the clouds rolled in, I entered the woods again. Surprised a doe as I was coming uphill around a turn in the forest. We both startled, but a few graceful leaps, her white tail upright like a flag, and she was invisible in her element once again.
I reentered the car, and the modern world of technology, just as the raindrops started to fall. Still, I stopped often on the road to the exit, turned off the engine, and just watched through the open window. A female summer tanager, brilliant yellow and pale green, flew to and from her nest in the fork of a tree branch. Pairs of geese floated along with their goslings between them, disappearing into the forest of cattails standing in the water when they felt too much attention was being paid.
Four and a half hours had passed from the time I left the house until the time I got back, more than three of them “on the ground” at the marsh. The laundry still sat in the baskets, the dinner plates still hadn’t walked themselves into the dish washer, the cat had shed a half dozen more balls of fluff the size of small tarantulas around the living room, and the dog still looked at me with those sad eyes, telepathically communicating his reproach, “you don’t spend enough time with me!” Never mind that “enough time” for this dog would be upwards of twenty four hours a day.
But still, in the grand scheme of how to spend four hours if you don’t have a gun to your head or a wolf at the door…was this trip really necessary?
You bet your ass.
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