The sound of chainsaws split the calm morning today in our
neighborhood. At least one other neighbor had a tree across his
driveway from last night's storm, which raged through Ozaukee and
Sheboygan counties around 6:00 p.m. WE Energies reported one of the
largest power outages in history. When I called my insurance agent this
morning, his power was still out and he was hoping he wouldn't lose all
the steaks he had just bought last night.
I made that call because when I got done cutting up the three trees
that fell in my yard and driveway, I noticed what looked like a chimney
sticking out of the roof of an unheated storage shed that, of course,
has no chimney. It was the top two feet of a seven-foot widowmaker
beech stub.
Our woods is about half beech, many of which were damaged years ago in
an ice storm. As a result, there are a lot of beech trees with dead
tops that provide homes for carpenter ants, woodpeckers, starlings,
wood ducks and, based on the singing I hear on some calm evenings and
early mornings, even a screech owl or two. Problem is, beech are
brittle trees, and some of those dead stubs break off every time we
have a high wind. One of these storms is gonna topple a beech on my
boat, but that hasn't happened yet. This time, it was just a messy
yard, more firewood and that stub in the shed. It made about an 8-inch
hole and drove itself clear through the roof, stopping only when it hit
a Rinehart archery target that just happened to be in the right spot.
Good thing no one was standing in the shed.
When the storm hit, I was in Milwaukee, on my way to hear Carl Leopold
speak at the Urban Ecology Center. He is the youngest son of Aldo
Leopold, who needs no introduction. Carl is a retired botanist from
Cornell, who was in the state for an Aldo Leopold Foundation board
meeting and this talk.
Carl told an audience of about 60 people that two major impacts of his
father's work were the development of the concept of an ethical
relationship to the land and the concept of land restoration. In
Leopold's day, conservation meant primarily preserving the remnants of
a natural area that had been partially destroyed. Aldo Leopold, his son
said, introduced and popularized the idea of restoring depleted and
abused land to its former natural state, or as close to it as possible.
Using slides of vintage photos he himself took of his father and other
family members, Carl gave us a quick tour of the run-down farm his
father bought in 1935 and documented the restoration effort the family
mounted for 15 years until his father's death. Carl also pointed out
that his father sought peace and quiet on the farm, which became a
refuge from the busy academic world of Madison. Photos of his father
taken at the time the family acquired the farm in 1935 showed a
harried, formal Aldo Leopold. Those taken a decade later showed a man
tranformed. In his earlier years, his father had been a tense man and a
fastidious dresser, but the farm and its restoration transformed him
into a more relaxed person, and a very casual dresser. The Aldo Leopold
of the late 1940s was the khakis-and-workshirt person we have come to
recognize in the few photos that have been published.
"He became a 'studied hick,'" Carl said.
Carl also pointed out that his father was one of the first scientists
to write of a love and affection for the land. Until he did so, Carl
said, you never saw such language in scientific journals. Now, it is
common.
In answer to a question about how Leopold came to write the essay
"Thinking like a Mountain," Carl said his father had been challenged by
a friend to write about how he had changed, how he had become the
"icon" so many saw him as in his own lifetime. "At first, he was
probably hurt by his friend's suggestion," Carl said. "But he got over
it and wrote that essay, probably the second-most-read essay in the
collection."
Another listener asked how integral Carl and his siblings were in the
generation of their father's ideas. "We didn't even know he was doing
it!" Carl said, "Until he had already written something and shared it
with us."
An hour with one of the children of Aldo Leopold gives one the
opportunity to peel back the layers of time between now and the man who
was largely responsible for the development of the modern conservation
ethic. It was a treat, to say the least, to listen to Carl Leopold talk
about life at the shack and wonder what it might have been like to hear
his father read a fresh-penned essay, or to walk a newly planted row of
pines with him and hear him talk about the future woodlot they would
become.
When I returned home last night, a beech blocked the driveway, so I
parked by it and walked to the house in the dark. The storm had passed,
and it would be morning before we saw the limited extent of the damage.
As Shivani has come to say in the last year or so, "At least the bombs
aren't falling." To which I have been adding, "And the attic isn't
flooded."
In light of the horrendous destruction wrought by Katrina in Louisiana
and Mississippi, a hole in a shed roof is negligeable indeed. In
another time, I might have been quite upset by the damage and
inconvenience. This morning, I barely shrugged as I marveled at how the
stub had falled end-first and pierced the roof as neatly as one might
spear an olive with a toothpick.
Later...
10:39:45 PM 
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