Journal of Trees,

 A personal insight into learning the ways of the wind through the branches of life  

Special Trees

Fri Sep 22, 2000

I have thought my whole life that there would be just one special tree, never really seeing or realizing that they were there silently waiting and guiding my intuition home. Now I think that it would be lovely to have one I can call my own, some great oak perhaps to substitute the one that lies dying. But I think that the gods work in strange ways and sometimes the trees find us. Just think about it. I don't think there really has to be just one tree, instead of many. I had to find my roots before I saw my trees and really thanked them for being as sentinel guardians of my spirit. I am inclined to a few different types of trees but I asked my friend Adrianne one day one fall while among the splendor of a day cool and relaxing by waterfalls, not too far from the place where I spent my time in the mountains. A place filled with the scents I enjoy so much in this season, I asked her what kind of tree she would be. Not a druid herself or even pagan, but she answered a maple something that can give life and sweetness I believe, she wanted to give back to people. A good soul. I asked her what she had thought I was then if she was a maple. She replied an oak, strong and steadfast. An image alone often times in a large field plowed around and not touched by fires seed. She knows me well. For my birthday I had received an acorn necklace and a hand drawn picture of an oak. Perhaps a small gift but it meant a lot if you know the conversation I held with her that day. So perhaps its not exactly a special tree but a special gift or token of that tree that might bring the soothing gentle trees to your heart. I give thanks for this fall day, as snow seems to approach ever quickly as Autumn comes on this day. I wish you all a merry first day of Autumn and in it find the magick of her glorious trees turning in the beauty and the hand of the frost touched veins of green and golden beauties now reds and oranges.

Life Trees

Wed Sep 20, 2000 

In all my writings I see the common theme for the love of a particular tree or landscape. My trees all have staged me through some rough times in my life and have helped me grow to an understanding of my environment. When I was young it was the oak and the walnut that shaped my home, and down the road the grandfather tree a large red oak on the side of the road, always a long bike ride to go visit but worth it for the fall scenery. The summer of 2000 spurred my love of a few new trees. My maple that reached to the heavens in her wilderness cavern of deadfall and saplings, her girth only touched by two souls wrapped round, she was my friend pointing the way to the eagles nest beyond the river. I had a deer shelter by my home full of ash and birch taken in strips to reveal the stumps of a betrayed home, the deer walking among the ruin looking for a new bed a little further in. Bear grunting and eating their way through the brambles on either side of a mowed lawn. How out of place grass seems among the giants balsam, pine, and hemlock deeper in the mountains. I have taken a new shield from my home of the black ash perfectly grained with intrinsic circular life patterns. My trip to my first home in Wisconsin proved to be an interesting addition to the tree I well know and love, the oak had apparently been taken by the spirits of the lightning incising it with a bolt so deep that it was struck dead. During the summer a large limb fell, my sister saying it looked wrapped like a perfect dragon in twisted beauty horns sticking up to great the sky. As told to a friend before I went home I was unable to view this splendor as my father does not know the strength of the dragon and cannot feel what pain it would bring me to not see this gift. I did not see it but it is still clear in my mind as part of the cycle. A baby dragon lays at the foot of my summer cabin rooted in the ground and resting on her mother tree looking up to the great spirits of sky where this life tree reaches. There will be many more I hope to share with the world, to see the patterns in the life trees is simple for it is like the beating of your own heart. To connect with the the leaven spirits it is to but place a hand on the bark and release a primeval feeling of hope for the new generations they spring. Go well and think of your own trees. There will always be others, but as I left my place in the mountains that maple held my spirit captive as a place my mind will always return to as a stage in my life of great comfort and learning of the deepest roots manginable.  I left behind that perfect place so that I may finish a road I began on, but I still think of it, and the small little bundle held in the roots of my giant friend.  A token of my thanks and respect for sheltering me for just a short while.

Old Oak Tree

October 2000

My parents moved to the small town of Black Hawk a week before I was born. I can trace the years of my childhood by the marks on the walls and by the flowers that exist in the over grown foundations of an old barn right behind the house. Black Hawk has a rich history even for a township. Most people can drive right through it without ever realizing that it is a township and that at one time it was a place with much more potential for development. Today the old mill up the road has been torn down; sheds and buildings still stand as an old remnant of the community that once welcomed new neighbors.  The small school named after the township hosts kindergarten through third grade, where I had once attended all the way into sixth. Things change very subtly around the quiet neighborhood. Dogs bark and tractors continue to plow up the fields behind the house on a seasonal basis. Not much ever seems to happen, but gradually, as I grow older, the patterns of my childhood home emerge and the changes become apparent in retrospect. In my opinion the changes are not bad. 

I sit and watch the gentle breezes sway the empty limbs of the old oak tree. How did this come to be? It is a landmark that is an older than myself and most likely an elder to the house that was built on this property, in which it borders. An old barbwire fence leans against the tree, marring the land with boundaries to a seemingly endless field. I waited all summer for the first buds to appear, but no such luck. The first ice storm of the Wisconsin winter will tell if it is yet hollowed out, as I suspect.  But it has stood hollow and inviting with mushrooms dotting its bark, cracked lines and holes left by woodpeckers like some unwritten language. It has stood empty of leaves watching seeds around it grow up fast and strong.

It saddens me to see the disappearance of oak leaves and acorns. I used to rake them up as a child and run dashing into them with all the enthusiasm that I could muster. The acorns, too, were playthings. The caps were perfect for finger puppets and little cups. Gradually as I got older, the tree remained a friend but became more noticeably affected by storms and heat. It was not until the summers’ heat brought that cool place to mind that I discovered the truth of my old friend’s demise. My father has not yet gotten up the strength or the heart to cut it down. My family will be sad to see it go. It was only a few years ago that the other big tree, the black walnut, in our front yard had to be cut down.

To my father it was much easier to see the walnut tree go because of the large nuts that fell plentifully every year. A bolt of lightning had struck the tree and we were afraid that it would fall to the road if we let it go too much longer. There had been a large creaking noise deep within the trunk and branches every time a gust of wind blew through it. I was saddened by that experience too, we tried to sell the wood but no one wants a tree out of someone’s yard, for fear there are spikes in it. Although this was not the case, and the fine black walnut was more beautiful that any other wood on the market. My dad made fire wood out of most of it, and planked the rest to become our deck on the front porch and other various pieces of furniture. That tree was about 150 years old from the ring marks, really amazing in its girth and knots of hardwood splendor. It too was there when the house was built in the 1860’s. This too, was a plaything of my childhood. My younger sister used to have a tire swing hanging from its branches, in which we pushed her a little too high sometimes. We raked those leaves and jumped into the nutty mixture. My mom would yell at us every time because, as an experienced child knows, black walnuts leave this yellowish brown stain behind on all of you’re clothing. We also used the walnuts that fell off the tree on occasion. We would dry them in old windows laid out in the garage, and pick off the wrinkly skins to get to the nutshell and at the nut. My mom would sort through them every Christmas for deserts like her famous pumpkin roll. But you can only collect so many nuts, and mowing over them is another matter. They are like shrapnel shooting out of the mower blade, so it is advisable to rake them up whenever possible. 

After the old walnut was cut down, a few seedlings sprouted here and there around the yard. My dad has let me keep about five of her progeny in various parts of the yard, despite the labor. Three of them have now grown tall enough to begin their own cycle of birth, though my father has clearly stated “no more”, it is hard to tell a tree that and I wouldn't have it any other way. One of them is tenderly near the dead oak tree. It is much older than many of the other walnuts that were started, but is still very small due to a neighbor’s intolerance towards it. I have nurtured its growth though, because I felt in some ways this was the right thing to do. Some nurture their gardens, as I do for trees. My mother’s garden, planted with corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and other delights rests besides another nut tree and box-elder. I remember them as saplings one summer when our mower broke down. It was a jungle of plants, not just quack grass and other varieties. It took on the nature of an overgrown field into which I could disappear. Dandelions and thistles among nameless other plants, spurned my imagination. Tag was at an all time high with my two sisters. 

The yard I speak of is part of the NE ¼ SW ¼ of Section 8-9-5 (Sauk County) to the state of Wisconsin. It was first purchased by John Bear in 1857, a Native American who wished to keep the land in his family. Through the various centuries, our backyard has been a field as well.  I also remember stories of Black Hawk even further back. It was named so because in the War of 1812, Chief Black Hawk had led his followers in a battle to regain native cornfields. It ended in defeat at the Battle of Bad Axe on August 2, 1832 in southern Wisconsin, near Prairie du Sac. There is a legend that his followers marched through this area on retreat burying their dead and trying to recuperate from their losses. During the Black Hawk War, these were the conditions of his stay in the surrounding county; “During our encampment at the Four Lakes, we were hard put to, to obtain enough to eat to support nature. Situated in a swampy, marshy country, … there was but little game of any sort to be found – and fish were equally scarce… We were forced to dig roots and bark tree, to obtain something to satisfy hunger and keep us alive! Several of our people became so much reduced, as actually to die with hunger! …I concluded to remove my women and children across the Mississippi, that they might return to the Sac nation again.” 

As long as I can remember I have seen other signs of human impact around the Honey Creek area, native as well as non-native. All of southern Wisconsin is dotted with Indian Mounds of circles, animals, and most importantly, the thunderbirds. There was a mound kitty-corner to another neighbor’s yard. It was easy to steal away from the fences that bordered our property to climb atop the mound for a little sledding area. I did not know what it was then, and had I, my actions may have been different. But the mound is no longer there. In the early eighties it was plowed over and no longer remains intact. You can find arrowheads all over, I know people who are farmers that collect such tokens of the past with great reverence.  The land here is clay; not much like my grandmother’s who lives near the prairie reserves in Sauk. There it is all sand and grows things much differently. In 1870 Charles Harlacker bought our property for the price of $6000 dollars. He wished to farm sugar beats and the property then totaled 10 acres (it is about 2 ¼ now.) There were specific instructions to him that in no way was it to be used for a brewery or distillery for liqueur. I can imagine it occurred in a time close to prohibition. The First Sauk County Sugar Beet Company association was based out of the North W. Manufacturing Co. of Chicago and exchanged hands several times.  This was part of the connection between the rural landscape of this small town and the larger market in which farmers sold their goods. In 1876 the sugar beet farm was sold and quartered up into new property divisions. New houses were built and sold often. And as of May 17, 1927 the first telephone and electric wires were put into the house. After that, a couple moved in and lived there, until they eventually passed away in 1959. Where upon the family failed to pay taxes on the house and land was revoked and sold by the state. It seemed to be the case many times over after that, until my parents bought the house. The deed, not being released until my twentieth birthday. 

I do not really know what the native vegetation was like in this area but I have several suspicions. First of all, the house sits near a marshy area in which Honey Creek runs through. It is a hundred-year flood plain, and as such we frequently get water in our basement. The walls in the house were made out of wood platting and plaster. Horsehair can be found in the mortar to add strength. When my family had done some remodeling, this proved to be quite tricky to take out, but it was necessary. The basement used to have an old cellar, which had not been discovered until I was about 8. It was full of pickled sugar beats and other interesting jars of non-distinguishable items. I was told the house was actually a motel somewhere along the line as well, but I have no proof other than the actual layout of the house. Many dividers in the rooms were put up in the six-bedroom house, prior to remodeling for modern convenience. When Black Hawk went into a remote decline, the old town stores all left. The mill is gone and many people have moved in and out, but very few actually stay for long. I wonder if Black Hawk will become a “Dudleytown” someday? I can feel the haunting words of Michael Pollen writings about this place, “I had stumbled upon Dudleytown, an abandoned nineteenth-century settlement that I’d often heard was nearby but had never been able to locate. Traces of former habitation were everywhere, like shadows on the landscape, even though the forest had completely colonized the area. Oaks, hickories, ash, and sycamores had spread out evenly over the village like a blanket, rising up in the former yards and fields and even in the middle of the cellar pits, jutting heedlessly through spaces that once had been organized into kitchens and bedrooms, warm spaces that had vibrated with human sounds.” Some people are making an effort to remodel their homes but most of the fringe building has already stopped.

The natural land division according the Wisconsin D.N.R. says that the Honey Creek area is naturally a southwestern Mesic Forest, Oak Savanna and Prairie Upland.  Here the topography ranges from creek bottoms and boggy areas through steep slopes and rock escarpments to upland ridges. There are twenty-five different soil types within the Honey Creek range, making the flora and fauna very versatile. Most of the low areas have been pasteurized and the uplands logged here. The cliffs, steep hillsides, and alder thickets have been left relatively undisturbed and the creek itself, which runs through Black Hawk, suffers from severe sand point pollution and waste. There are many places where open cattle grazing and run off from local farms causes water pollution. It has been this way for a very long time around this area. The intense agriculture on this particular piece of land was only possible through the wash of sediment by the old creek beds and hardy prairie plants that are now only evident in the cemetery up on Church Hill and along the fence rows where they cannot get plowed under. But they get pushed away there too, by invaders like the dandelion and thistle varieties. So the only place that remains in Black Hawk for them to hide is on the marshy edges, where cattle may perchance take their life. 

Where I used to fish along the swelling bank of the Honey Creek, there is now a pheasant reserve. The ring-necked pheasant is not a native of Wisconsin either, but it is exciting to see them feeding at my mother’s birdfeeders in her rock garden made out of the old barns’ foundation. There, wild roses bloom with an intense furry over taking iris and marigolds. It was a dangerous place for a little girl to pick flowers. I tended to stick to the lilacs that bloom along another property division and shade the graves of a few family pets.

When I say that the change in the landscape is not necessarily bad, I mean by the terms unto which I came here. Not the industrial hope that the sugar beat farm had or the various other methods of farming and subsequently pesticides that were used; that may have been the cause to the death of the large oak tree. Time has caught up with Black Hawk and the subtlety of the damage has been rendered onto a scale I can comprehend. On this scale, I develop my own Leopoldian Land Ethic. As Cronon said in, Changes In The Land: “All these things -- the limited areas visited by Europeans, their tendency to view the landscape in terms of their own cultural concepts, their selective emphasis on commodities, the ecological changes they themselves wrought – meant that their record of pre-colonial New England ecosystem was inevitably incomplete.”  I suspect my own record is incomplete as well, and I view it on much the same terms even though I try not to. I can make little sense of the history that I have but glimpsed in these few years at Black Hawk, and can only guess at its natural history through the buildings and the plants that now remain.

My home has various layers of history, which have shaped my life in differing ways. The old oak tree is just another layer upon the history of my home. The decline in its health still seems tragic to me. I am reminded of a section in A Sand County Almanac, where Leopold says: “We sensed that these two piles of sawdust were something more than wood; that they were integrated transect of a century; that our saw was biting its way, stoke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.” I felt this very way when the black walnut fell one day when I was at school. Perhaps it is the good teachings of my grandfather who lived through the time of the dustbowl and saved his farm from the shifting winds, or maybe it is my mother instilling in me the value of a garden. The respect that I have for this tree is something that I will keep with me as I continue to evolve in my environmental consciousness. 

The coyotes are back in the town of Black Hawk. I drifted off to sleep each night this past summer listening to their sweet songs serenade. The backfield over grown with weeds and wildflowers, but it is a home for butterflies. I can remember the wonder of hooking a crappie in Honey Creek, and chasing lightning bugs of warm summer nights. Did the Native Americans feel the same way about it? One can only guess, but perhaps the returning wildlife is a good sign. I am excited to hear sandhill cranes fly over with their trumpeting voices, where I did not in my younger years. Maybe I can look back in another few years and be pleasantly surprised by nature’s wondrous hand and take anther look at my homeland and the patterns that surround it.

Although it is hard for me to write about my grandfather, it is also necessary for me to share a little part of my history with those who have read and understand Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac. Since his death in 1986, my grandfather’s legacy has not been a large one to live up to, nor has it been a hard one. This man, my mentor, left me with a foundation to place my principles of life upon and a better understanding of what nature really is. In my Sand County, Aldo Leopold actual contains many of these learning lessons and portrays a very clear representation of the life my grandpa lived in the sand counties of Wisconsin. This is, in a way, the telling of the history of the land, as I know it. 

 Aldo Leopold introduced many new conservation theories that were unique to his time, but unfortunately current conservation ethics
seem to bombard him with criticisms rather than credit. The ecological trends ignore the first steps of “Natural History” and substitute it with the popular sayings like “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” But one must never forget where they came from.

My family in is unique in this way: I remember Grandpa Kelter teaching how to fish in just the right spot so that we were sure to catch something. He taught me how to listen with my heart as well as my ears. Like Leopold says, “There are degrees and kinds of solitude. An island in the lake has on kind; but lakes have boats, and there is always the chance that on might land to pay you a visit. A peak in the clouds has another kind; but most peaks have trails, and trails have tourists. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds of degrees of aloneness as I have.” Lazy Saturday afternoons were spent watching could after cloud role by, talking to each other in the most worldly ways. I was a troubled child, stuck like the lake in my own solitude. Sometimes that lake would have a comforting fisherman with a boat who would try to show me my world was not as lonely as I had thought it was.

When my grandpa and I talked, a different picture seemed to open up right before my eyes. He knew about many different thing, and always seemed to have a new joke that would make me bust out in rounds of laughter. He could answer any question that only a child could think to ask. I could name a topic about framing on the sandy soil, hunting a wild grouse, or even how to make certain plants to grow. I did not know until he died in July of ’86 how influential he had really been on me. I now know that I had a firsthand account of the old conservation ethics and that by telling me all that he had learned working with the land, his history lives on in mine. What he now represents to me is much like that of the wild Silphiums to Aldo Leopold, ‘Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event.”

Perhaps it was the final realization of who my grandfather was, but I now get a feeling that he is more than just the retired farmer I knew hew was as a kid. I knew he was in the gun club, but I thought killing a defenseless animal scared me, and the fact that he only shot out of mercy and in the name of game conservation never entered my mind at the time. About ten years later, I now see that he held a lot of esteem for living creatures, and never liked to see them in pain. He was also on a lot of committees that were important to conservation, as Leopold knew it. In fact, he was on some of the same ones as Leopold, and may have met him a time or two.

During the great Dustbowl, my grandfather started a movement to plant young seedlings in the sandy soils of the Wisconsin farmland to keep the soil from blowing away. It worked, and years later many of them are stills standing. But unfortunately, many of the stands have been cut down to make way for new housing projects and for more farming land. This angers me. Seeing a legacy of my own dying in the mists of the need for more conservation and for fewer housing developments.

 Like the old oak tree, the trees of our family have also been cut to the quick, revealing our heritage. It all started a few months ago when my grandma discovered an article from an old Wisconsin State Journal, about my grandpa Kelter and his work to save the land from blowing away. I had known all along that these trees were planted by my grandfather. In fact he had stood in the very field showing me the trees with pride, just like the picture in the paper with my uncle Kenny and aunt Pat before my mother was even born.

When the time came to my childhood family tree (the black walnut), my feelings flashed back to the times I had shared with it. I think everyone has a tree that means something to them, or at least try to remember a time of significance where there was a tree. I have more than one, the stands of trees between the fields that my grandpa planted, the pine tree that grows over the cemetery plot where my grandpa is buried, a big red oak down the road my sisters and I used to race to, and of course the walnut tree that stands no longer. Trees tie us to the land by providing places for people to enjoy, if not for anything but shade. They are symbols for the earth that we all must endure grow up around, digging roots into the past. When I think of my grandpa, I think of trees, because of all of them that surrounded his life.

In many ways my history has changed a lot since the days of grandpa. There is very little prairie left, the river is not as clean as it used to be trees are fewer than before, and all of the state parks are tourist destinations. But it comforts me to think not all things have changed, since I can still recognize many of the sights written about in A Sand County Almanac, like Devil’s Lake. It makes me feel a little closer to home.

Just a little more history, Hubert Kelter received the book A Sand County Almanac after a number of years had past since the first publication. The printing was done by Litho Productions; Madison WI where both my Grandpa Keele, my father, myself and my younger sister and mother have all worked. He loved it. And now so do I. Hubie would be proud, as I know he watches over me, I see him shine when the fish splash on the water. I don’t fish anymore but I know he is there and I remember all that he taught me.

An Environmental Conscious: Nature Essays For Good Stewardship