Sunday, August 7, 2005

Aldo Leopold slept here It's been nearly two weeks since my visit to the Leopold Shack. Here, finally, are my impressions... As she finished our orientation before leaving us in Aldo Leopold's shack for the night, Jennifer Kobylecky said, "Oh, and there's a bat that lives in this window. He's out now, but don't be surprised if he shows up later." Indeed, there was a brownish smudge about the size of a little brown bat in the corner of one of the shack's front windows. Jennifer gave us her cell phone number and said to call if we had any questions or problems. If lightning hit the shack, for instance. She had already pointed out where lightning had splintered the corner beams on the west side of the shack's bunkhouse addition. That lightning hit a tree several hundred yards away, then traveled on the ground to the shack. No one was sleeping there that night, fortunately. Jen is the education coordinator for the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Les Booth and I saw her out to her car and said good-night, then watched the northwest sky light up with the promise of an approaching storm. We hustled back to the shack with bedding, overnight bags and lanterns [^] at least as much gear as the Leopold family of six probably brought on the average weekend. Then the sky opened up and we were stuck. If you are going to be marooned someplace with no electricity, no running water and no landline phone, the Leopold Shack is probably as good as they come. Here, Aldo Leopold and his family enjoyed their rustic weekend getaways from "too much modernity." Leopold bought the run-down 80-acre farm in 1935, and he and his family spent the next decade restoring it to its former natural productivity. You can read all about the history of the shack, if you don't know it already, in many books and on the Aldo Leopold Foundation Web site. I had just spoken that evening in the Shack Seminar Series, and the chance to spend the night there is one of the perks offered to seminar speakers. I don't know how many others have taken the offer, but it was one I was not going to refuse. I invited Les to join me, as he had made a pilgrimmage of his own, driving several hundred miles from Indiana for the evening. Even though some nasty storms had moved through Wisconsin's central sand plains that day and the day before, harbingers of a cold front that would eventually wipe the heat and humidity away for a few days at least, it was evident this night would not end before we felt the fury of another storm, close-up and personal. It wasn't until the next morning that I discovered Jen's message on the mobile phone in my truck. She was checking up on us and was probably worried that we were not sitting in our vehicles. I wouldn't have missed a storm at the shack for the world. Les and I poked around the shack, checking out the historic photos that had been mounted on foam board for an event announcing the Leopold Foundation's Land Ethic Campaign back in May. I had been to the shack for the first time to attend that event. It only took me 30 years after discovering Leopold's work to make it to the source of his inspiration. No sense in rushing things. I probably appreciated the visit more now than I would have back then anyway. I have admired Leopold's writing since I first discovered it, used it in teaching college courses, quoted from it now and then in my own writing and seminars, and subtly imbibed some of its key messages, making his thoughts my own, as writers who are influenced by greater writers often do. And now here we were, two friends, great fans of the last century's greatest conservationist, together in his shack with a summer thunderstorm flexing its muscles just above us. And sometimes down upon us, as we discovered several leaks in the roof. The ORIGINAL roof of this former livestock shed that Leopold and his family had rescued from destruction, using lumber they scavenged from the banks of the Wisconsin River, a scant hundred yards distant. The shack also holds some of the simple tools the Leopolds used: a hand auger, a fireplace poker and ash shovel, the two-man saw used to buck up the "good oak" into firewood sticks. The stone fireplace and brick chimney where the good oak burned still stands, as do the benches of salvaged planks, with their hand-hewn hickory legs. And Leopold's shaving mirror still hangs on the wall at the foot of his bed, an enamel wash basin beneath it. Beside the fireplace are enameled plates, pots and pans and a pair of Dutch ovens, Leopold's favorite cooking system. A fish spear, no doubt used to gig carp when the river overflowed its banks in spring, hangs on the wall nearest the river, still attached to a hickory pole Aldo or one of the boys must have cut and fit to it. Les and I marveled at all this history just sitting here. And the walls and beams, likely wearing their original coat of whitewash. "I'll bet if you scraped a fingernail in the right place, you'd come up with some of Aldo's DNA," I mused. Perhaps not enough to clone him, although the world could use his clone about now. I wonder what he would say about some of the huge problems we face today: water shortages, famine, global warming, overpopulation. Man has manhandled the Earth in ways even Leopold might not have imagined, and still we keep muddling along. Les and I stayed up most of the night, sharing stories of other adventures, recollections of passages from A Sand County Almanac, and mainly just marveling at the fact that we were here, where modern environmental consciousness got its start. "In one way or another," writes William Cronon, in Wilderness 1998, the annual publication of The Wilderness Society, "virtually every argument that has been used to defend wild land in the United States over the past half century is developed or at least anticipated somewhere in the pages of A Sand County Almanac. It remains a veritable handbook of the wilderness-preservation movement." Somewhere around minight, whether full of mosquitoes or tired of dodging raindrops, the bat returned. Les spotted it tiptoeing across the window shutter. Reaching the upper west corner of the window, it snuggled into the brownish smudge, like a spoon settling into its cut-out space in a silverware drawer, and promptly went to sleep. About 2:00 a.m., the rain finally subsided enough to let us step outside without an umbrella. We grabbed our towels and toothbrushes, stretched our legs and breathed in the cooler, cleansed air before performing a minimal bedtime ablution. The rain started up again, and we hustled back inside. I wish I could say that sleeping in Aldo Leopold's bed gave me marvelous dreams that revealed fresh ideas for saving wild places and turning around a hell-bent world, but alas, it did not. Once I got over the amazing fact that Aldo Leopold had spent the last few weekends of his life sleeping on this very mattress (His daughter, Nina, had told us earlier that evening that they had bought the mattress just a few weeks before her father's death in 1948.), I drifted off to a sound sleep. I was awakened just after dawn by a trumpeting troop of sandhill cranes, probably heading out from the marsh across the road to some nearby farm field for a breakfast of frogs and grasshoppers. I fell back asleep, though, and awoke hours later, probably later than anyone has ever risen at the shack! Les and I spent the next several hours walking around the property and down to the river, photographing everything in sight and testing the still-functional outhouse the family had built back in the 1930s and dubbed "The Parthenon." Too soon, it was time to leave. We said our good-byes to the shack and its web-winged resident, shuttered its windows and snapped the padlock on its front door, and reluctantly headed back to our own "too much modernity." Later... 9:31:52 PM    comment []