Green Spots Among the Brown

It might be dry, but in some spots it's still green. It helps to have a pond handy. This is a view of the pond at the Ruth Macintyre Conservation Area in Schaumburg on Sunday.

Thirty-six acres, but if you didn't know it was tucked away among the houses, you'd miss it even from nearby side streets. Still green, as I said, but I did notice that the water level is down, exposing a few mud flats in places.

Fermilab Sights

We didn't get to go inside the Lederman Science Center at Fermilab a week and a half ago, but we did spend some time on the grounds outside. Clearly the architect was influenced by the Prairie School.

Much of Fermilab is undeveloped and -- I read, since we didn't see them -- there's a small herd of buffalo residing on the grounds. We took a short walk that took us past scenes such as these, taken from a small pedestrian bridge over a creek.

The rush to spring is all of a month early this year, including the throaty sounds of frogs looking for mates.

Fire & Wind

Besides the manmade items at the Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary detailed yesterday, there was also evidence of human intervention in the landscape. Such as acres of grassland, burned.

It's intentional burning, of course. It's well established that many ecosystems need a regular burn to stay healthy, and Spring Valley management burns different patches every year. This year we noticed that some of the land next to the Schaumburg Road parking lot had also been torched, right up to the asphalt.

There was also plenty of evidence of wind destruction. Maybe this tree cracked and fell during the blizzard in early February or because of the big blow last October.

But it's not really destruction. The fallen tree is merely on the way to becoming food for other creatures.

Manmade Objects at Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary

This group of figures resides just outside the Vera Meineke Nature Center at Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary in Schaumburg.

It wasn't cold at all yesterday afternoon, so Ann suggested we go to Spring Valley, and we did. The figures were still dressed for winter by unknown hands. I don't think I've ever seen them dressed, but then again we usually don't go to Spring Valley in the winter. They're a Rockwellesque trio. No plaque or other marker describes who made them, and for all I know they're something you can pick up at a garden superstore.

Follow one of the footpaths into Spring Valley's grassland and eventually you'll find some large wooden spools. Probably they had an industrial use once upon a time. Telephone line? Electric cable? Whatever their former purpose, now they sit in a clearing and add visual interest to the place.

About 10 minutes' walk from the nature center is the Merkle Cabin, formerly an office for the peony farm that was once on the site of the nature sanctuary. Among other items near the cabin is this bench.

It's made entirely of cast iron.

Dancing Goldenrod Afternoon

Recently I wrote the following two paragraphs for publication. Only one of them made into -- print isn't quite the word, since no ink and paper were involved -- the for-pay electronic publishing realm.

"Warren Buffet turned 80 on Monday, and still no word on who will eventually succeed the Oracle of Omaha at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., probably because he's publicly stated that he'd like to "work past 100." The Geico Gecko is considered a (very) long-shot as successor."

"What to do when you want to publicize a still-new technology? Put on a race, of course. It worked for the Great Leslie and Professor Fate, after all."

The second of them was cut. I pretty much knew it would be. The gecko is still highly visible, after all (and Geico is a Berkshire Hathaway company). But an allusion to a movie that came out in 1965?

Maybe The Great Race came to mind only because I saw it again a few months ago. This time with Ann, who was the only other person in the house that would sit through it with me. A month or so later, we watched Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and to continue the theme of long, highly kinetic comedies made in the 1960s, we watched It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on Saturday. I'd never gotten around to seeing it before, and marveled especially at the who's-who nature of the casting, plus the sheer amount of on-screen destruction: cars, planes, buildings and on and on.

Friday was a brilliant, mildly windy day with temps in the low- to mid-70s. "Chamber of Commerce weather," a former co-worker of mine used to call it. So I went out looking for goldenrod.

Actually, I didn't need to look for goldenrod. It's blooming in abundance here in northern Illinois and getting blamed for the kind of sneezing and runny noses going on at our house now. Until recently I also viewed the plant with suspicion. But according to the Iowa State University ag extension, a trustworthy source in these things: "[Goldenrod has] long suffered from an undeserved reputation as a common field weed that causes hay fever. In fact, ragweed is the primary hay fever culprit. Goldenrod is falsely accused because it flowers abundantly during the peak allergy season."

The extension's web site continues: "Goldenrods are easy to grow when planted in good garden soil in full sun. They are extremely hardy, drought tolerant, long-lived perennials. They also have few insect or disease problems and require minimal maintenance... Convincing some gardeners of the landscape value of goldenrods (Solidago species and hybrids) is difficult."

Why do some gardeners dislike them? Because they're too easy to grow, perhaps. Dandelions get the same rap.

I went to the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve on Friday afternoon and found an unpaved trail to walk on. Namely, the "orange" one that more-or-less parallels Poplar Creek itself. The trail looked something like this.

Plenty of goldenrod, and sunflowers too, danced in the wind.

Pitcher Plants, Terror of Things That Go Buzz

The Volo Bog is called a quaking bog by those who know wetland subclassifications, but it was the Volo Bog Interpretive Trail that did most of the quaking -- or at least wobbling -- when we walked on it. "It's moving," I heard either Lilly or Rachel say ahead of me, since they were first to reach the trail, which is a boardwalk over the bog. The boardwalk's wobble is a little unnerving at first, but before long you get used to it. For anyone over about three years old, anyone who is sober anyway, the danger of pitching into the bog is pretty low.

The first section of the trail crossed "open" water, though of course it's no such thing. There's a lot of boggy things going on in that water.

Soon the trail passes through more dense growth, including trees. But since it's still in the bog, it should be noted that everything, including the trees, is floating.

Just as the trail entered the dense growth, we encountered a woman with binoculars who was watching a sandhill crane on the ground -- on the surface of the bog, that is -- not far away. She pointed it out to us and let us look at the thing through her binoculars. I don't think I've seen one before, but then again I don't usually go out of my way to look for birds. It was big and gray. That's the trouble I have with learning natural history. I can't remember much more than that about the creatures I see, and I'm especially good at forgetting their names.

The woman on the Volo Bog Interpretive Trail doesn't have that problem. She briefly became our guide because she was enthusiastic about pointing out bog flora and fauna. A large muskrat, for instance. Actually she didn't need to point it out; we all saw it as it parked itself just a few feet away from the boardwalk, rapidly eating leaves. But she was able to tell us that it was eating blue flag iris, adding that the leaves would be poisonous to us, but not the muskrat.

She also pointed out other plants I'd never heard of it -- pitcher plants. Carnivorous pitcher plants. What former boy doesn't thrill at the thought of a meat-eating plant? Even if they aren't large enough to swallow unwary members of safaris, as those of us who watched enough movies on Saturday afternoons years ago learned happened from time to time.

Only a few days ago, one Adrian Higgins wrote in the Washington Post: "Among meat-eating bog plants, the Venus' flytrap gets all the fuss. Okay, so its leaf snaps shut like a monster's mouth. Hold my coffee while I clap. My vote is for another native carnivore, the pitcher plant.

"There are a handful of species, some tall and pale, others short and squat, and all producing decorative hooded tubes with a lacelike pattern that gives them a reptilian quality. In short, they are beautiful, and they have made the leap from the sour and soggy peat bog into the garden..."

Since he's a garden writer, he doesn't really detail how the pitchers lure and trap hapless flies and other insects. A fellow named Mike Baker, on a web site devoted to New Jersey Pine Barrens plants, does: "The inside of the tubular shaped leaf is lined with downward pointing hairs. These hairs block an insect from climbing up the tube and escaping. The fluid in the bottom of the tube contains digestive juices that will consume the insect prey."

The Volo Bog

It was overcast on Saturday but at least the unpleasant chill was gone. It was a fine day for being outside, so Lilly, Ann, Lilly's friend Rachel and my old friend Kevin Deany and I drove into the heart of Lake County via U.S. 12, another of those unsung transcontinental routes (Detroit to the Pacific in Washington state). Near Volo, Illinois, is the Volo Bog State Natural Area. It's a fine place for a walk. Just look:

Missing from that picture is any evidence of the boardwalk trail -- the half-mile Volo Bog Interpretive Trail -- that snakes through the bog. Without the trail the bog would be a difficult place to visit up close. A sign at the beginning of the trail is clear about that, warning hikers not to fall in ("please stay on the trail" it says) because of hazardous soils and poisonous plants.

The DNR web site tells us that Volo is the "only 'quaking' bog in Illinois to have an open-water center," which seems like stretching for a distinction, but never mind. It's a "quaking" bog because of its unstable surface, and there probably aren't that many in Illinois, open-water center or not.

"Volo Bog was originally a deep 50-acre lake, with steep banks and poor drainage," notes the DNR. "Research on pollen grains preserved in the bog indicates that the lake began filling with vegetation approximately 6,000 years ago. A floating mat, consisting primarily of sphagnum moss, formed around the outside edges among the cattails and sedges. As these plants died and decomposed, the peat mat thickened, forming a support material for rooted plants. Because of the lack of drainage and the presence of sphagnum moss, the water in the bog became acidic. This limited the types of plants that could survive and thus created the unique plant communities found in the bog." (More on the bog is here.)

Item From the Past: Death Valley Day

In May Death Valley National Park sees an average daytime high of 99° F. (37° C.), according to an easily accessible climate chart, and I believe it. We piggybacked an afternoon excursion to Death Valley onto a trip mainly involving my attendance at a convention in Las Vegas in May nine years ago. I would have picked February or March for Death Valley, maybe, but the convention organizers didn't ask me.

I'm pretty sure this is the Elevation Sea Level sign on California 190, just inside the park.

It's hard to see, but the white sign fixed to the top of the green sign says Park Off Pavement. Maybe there'd been a persistent problem with people taking pictures like this one without bothering to pull all the way off the road, a safety hazard even on a desert road.

Near Furnace Creek inside the park is the Harmony Borax Works Interpretive Trail. Outdoor.com tells us that "the... trail takes visitors around the ruins of a borax processing plant that was active during the 1880s. This historic site is approached by an easy 1/4 mile paved path from the Harmony Borax Works parking lot located one mile north of Furnace Creek on Highway 190. The trail loops around the ruins of the 1800s processing plant."

At near 100°, the trail would not be so easy, especially with a three-year-old in tow, so we didn't walk it. I did take pictures, though.

At Badwater Basin, the water does look pretty bad, though Wiki claims that the pool supports pickleweed, aquatic insects and the Badwater snail. The parking lot next to the pool isn't actually the lowest elevation in North America; some slightly lower spot is off on the salt flats somewhere. But it's close enough for me.

Badwater Basin also one of the termini of an annual race by lunatics. According to Badwater.com: "AdventureCORPS Inc.... hosts the Badwater™ Ultramarathon annually in July of each year. Recognized globally as 'the world's toughest foot race,' this legendary event pits up to 90 of the world's toughest athletes [those would be the lunatics] against one another and the elements. Covering 135 miles (217km) non-stop from Death Valley to Mt. Whitney in temperatures up to 130F (55C), it is the most demanding and extreme running race offered anywhere on the planet."

Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, Interrupted

The things you learn after you visit a new place. Just today I read, on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service web site, that the "124,511-acre [Sabine National Wildlife Refuge] coastal marsh... is currently closed to all public uses because of damages sustained during Hurricane Rita."

Two weeks ago Monday, I drove from San Antonio to Lafayette, Louisiana, as the first leg of my return home from Texas. Naturally, the drive was more than just about getting home, so I took a few detours of my own devising. But not as many as I'd dreamed of. When I look at a road map, I see more than points that designate cities and towns or lines that designate roads. I see a candy shop.

Like candy, I can only take so many destinations, but it's still a fair amount. Just west of Lake Charles, Louisiana, I left I-10 and headed south on Louisiana 27, also called the "Creole Nature Trail." It cuts down the eastern edge of the Sabine NWR in extreme southwest Louisiana (Cameron Parish) and then eastward along the Gulf coast.

Also, according to the National Scenic Byways Program, a division of the Federal Highway Administration, the road is an "All-American Road," which is the program's term for a major-league scenic route. (But don't expect a reasonable description of Louisiana 27 from byways.org. It's just as bad as a hack travel brochure: "... when you travel the Creole Nature Trail, you will get an up-close and personal view of Louisiana's unique environment. The trail travels through thousands of acres of untouched wetlands, which reflect an area blessed with some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable.")

That isn't to say it wasn't one fine drive, through intensely flat, intensely grassy, intensely wet territory in June. A sublime green all around. This is a view from a platform at a place called Blue Goose Trail, which didn't seem to be closed. At least the parking lot was open. So was the trail, which winds through the background of the picture.

So I took a walk, with a hat and water. It was just as hot as in Texas. I'm not sure if these posts used to be part of something that blew down four years ago or not, but they were trailside.

"Untouched" isn't quite the way I'd describe the Sabine NWR. Again, from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: "Refuge recreational areas along Highway 27 received varying amounts of damage to bridges, piers, observation towers, boardwalks, restroom facilities, fences, and parking lots. These facilities need to be repaired before the areas can be re-opened for public use."

The bridges I saw connected Louisiana 27 with side roads, crossing the large canal that often ran next to the highway. Most of them looked intact, but one not far from Blue Goose Trail had been completely wrecked and not restored yet.

In case I had any ideas about heading down one of the Sabine NWR's canals to gig some alligators, "West of Highway 27, Sabine refuge canals and marshes were severely impacted by storm wind and water.... Canals and marshes are clogged with seven million cubic meters of debris from off shore rigs and coastal communities.... Tanks and barrels containing hazardous liquids and gases have the potential to explode or break down and release toxins into the environment. Over 1,400 hazardous material containers have been identified and are estimated to contain between 115,000 and 350,000 gallons of hazardous liquids and gases."

Lest we forget, Hurricane Rita was stronger than Katrina. But it didn't hit New Orleans. Instead it washed large parts of the oil industry into a wildlife refuge. It also thumped a lot of places in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas, and destroyed the the town of Holly Beach, Louisiana, on the Gulf, which I passed through after walking on the Blue Goose Trail. I can't compare what I saw to the pre-2005 town, but the place did look ragged and improvised. At least the new buildings were far up on stilts.

My plan had been to cross the Calcasieu Ship Channel by ferry and continue along Louisiana 27 and loop back to near Lake Charles. Or maybe even follow Louisiana 82 to Abbeville, though it was getting late in the day. But after waiting in line a while, I decided to retrace my route back to I-10, especially after a truck driver came by telling everyone, "the ferry's broke."

Item From the Past: Arizona Days

May 17-19, 1997.

Saturday: The big event of the day was going to Boyce Thompson Arboretum [photo below], about an hour’s drive southeast of Phoenix (Ed drove). It was hot as we walked through it, looking at the multitude of desert plants, plus lizards and other small fauna, but there was a fair amount of shade. After we returned to Phoenix, we had a late lunch at an inexpensive steak/Mexican/Southwestern restaurant built on the site of a hacienda and flour mill on the Salt River, which was bone dry.

Sunday: In the early afternoon we picked up Mama at Sky Harbor Airport — I think it’s a funny name — and soon embarked on a drive northward. We took the Interstate to Flagstaff, passing through but not stopping there, and then took Arizona 89 to Cameron, about 25 miles from the eastern entrance of Grand Canyon Nat’l Park and just inside the Navajo Reservation. Along the way we stopped at Montezuma Castle National Monument, a cliff dwelling built and inhabited by the Sinagua Indians around A.D. 1100, and having naught to do with the emperor of the Aztecs. Nothing like a desolate ruin to enlarge your day, as it whispers memento mori in modern man's ear.

We checked into the Cameron Trading Post Lodge, a complex of very comfortable and well-appointed rooms, a lovely garden, an enormous gift shop and a restaurant. The rest of Cameron seemed to be mostly small trailers spread out on the arid landscape. Since we’d arrived late in the evening, we had dinner at the restaurant. Three of us had a thing called a Navajo taco, which was much like a taco except that “Navajo frybread” was used to hold the ingredients. A regular one of these was enormous. The frybread was the best ingredient.

Monday: A day at the Grand Canyon. After breakfast at the motel restaurant (not bad) we headed west to the canyon, stopping first to see it from Desert View [pictured below]. It was the first of many views we stopped at.

Later, after arriving at the park headquarters, Mama and I hooked up with a tour of the town of Grand Canyon’s cemetery, which has a number of pioneers and miscreants of early canyon times within, as well as a memorial to the two airplanes that collided over the canyon in 1956. Yuriko wasn’t feeling so well then, and doesn’t care for cemeteries anyway, so she sat it out. After the tour, we started to look for a place to have a picnic (we’d brought food), and it started to rain while we were at a shopping complex near the headquarters. Yuriko says that that complex didn’t exist when she was there before, in 1990. So we ate at a picnic table facing the parking lot, under an extension of the roof of the stores.

But it was a short rain, and soon we were walking the South Rim trail, taking in some more views. After about a mile of this, we wanted to take a shuttle back from near the Teddy Roosevelt-era hotel whose name I forget, but couldn’t find the stop, so we walked back. But that time we were plenty hungry, and discovered a cafeteria across the parking lot from where we’d had lunch. It was reasonably good and not too expensive — a marked change, Yuriko said, from the last time she was there, when buying food at the canyon meant getting gouged. We didn’t finish dinner that evening till after dark, which meant driving back to Cameron on the narrow and reflector-less park roads. It was a long few miles.

Organic Dog Walkers

Clouds threatened rain on Saturday morning, but they didn't deliver any, so I was able to add another mile or so in my minor ambition this spring to walk all of the Busse Woods Trail System at one time or another (see April 19). More serious rain clouds, along with angry growling thunder, had nixed my attempt on May 1. The threat of rain on the 8th seemed to have scared off a lot of cyclists, but not walkers and joggers, from the path. That made for a more pleasant walk.

At one point, I walked past a group of women, one of whom was pushing stroller, while a couple of others walked dogs. As we passed, I caught exactly one sentence of their conversation: "So we decided to buy only organic dog food..."

That gave me something to think about. Of course it's a whole subset of the pet-food industry. I spent time wondering what might go into organic dog food. Would that mean something similar to what wild African dogs eat? Ungulates, in other words. But somehow I doubt there's much impala in Newman's Own. In fact, Newman's Own FAQs says, "the food is 95% USDA Certified Organic and contain[es] free-range beef from Uruguay," which sounds like it might make some good burgers for the grill.

Domestic dogs haven't eaten a wild-dog diet in millennia, anyway. As camp followers, they must have spent a lot of time eating scraps, which would be arguably be "organic" in a pre-industrial context, if not always healthful. Mainly, though, it meant eating whatever people didn't want. But progress has been made since then, at least for First World dogs. What with all the opportunities for people to project their food insecurities on dogs, you might even call now the golden age of dog food, with varieties unimaginable even to the most aristocratic dogs of yore, say Henry VIII's hounds. Good stuff, too, seemingly fit for chic cocktail parties of the human variety.

Molly Pitcher and the Nukes of Monmouth

One more pic from last weekend, to convey just how much things are greening up around here. Where I grew up, down around 30° N., spring came earlier in the year and mostly served as a backdrop for thunderstorms and a prelude to hot summers. Spring up here is a slower affair after a much deeper winter, marked by halts and cold backsliding. I can see why it's greeted with a bit more enthusiasm once it's finally here. Which is now.

Lilly's giving some kind of presentation about Molly Pitcher in school tomorrow, and was miffed this evening at discovering contradictory information on various web sites about that semi-historical, semi-mythic figure. "Which one is it?" she asked about a certain point of fact. I told her that it's hard to nail down facts about people who lived more than 200 years ago. That's true enough, but I skipped a more nuanced discussion of how good stories trump known facts often enough, and how it's even easier for good stories to trump ill-known and uncertain facts.

She'll get to that, eventually. But fifth grade isn't quite the time. Call it parental discretion.

In any case, Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth is a good story, and it ought to be taught in schools. While thinking about her, I took a look at the Battle of Monmouth page on Wiki, and came across this delightful revision. It might already be gone, so I'm going to paste it here: "Then, on June 18, the British began to evacuate Philadelphia, crossing New Jersey to go to New York City. They had 11,000 Nukes, a thousand loyalists and a baggage train 12 miles (19 km) long."

Mallard Lake, DuPage County, Illinois

I don't need to visit Mallard Lake to see mallards. Occasionally, they come visit my back yard, invariably a pair, including the drake with his signature green head and the less colorful female. Such pairs can be seen just about anywhere there's water around here, which still includes the nether reaches of my yard, on account of the many rains of April.

But on Saturday I wanted a new walk. It was a good day for it, partly cloudy and in the upper 60s F. Mallard Lake, which is a unit of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, is only a few miles away, but somehow or other I'd never been there. The rest of my family declined to come, so I went by myself, and discovered that places around the lake were a pretty good simulation of being in the middle of nowhere.

It's an illusion. Millions of people live just beyond the range of my camera. Even the lake was popular on Saturday. The parking lot at the entrance was half full with cars, mostly belonging to the numerous recreational fishermen and -women lining Mallard Lake. According to the forest preserve district leaflet, "The 85-acre namesake Mallard Lake is the District's largest recreational lake. It features largemouth bass, channel and flathead catfish, bluegill, crappie, northern pike, and two wheelchair-accessible piers." (Never heard of that last kind of fish; sounds like a tough business to haul them in.)

So many fish. Either you have the soul of a fisherman or you don't, and I don't, so I walked the length of the trail around one of the two lobes of the lake, about a mile and a half all together, including two bridges connecting small islands in the lake with each other and the shore.

The land is making the transition from the browns of winter.

To the greens of summer.

Late Saturday Morning at Busse Woods

Saturday: Model spring day, clear and in the 70s. Sunday: Rain and drizzle all day, with about 30 of the previous day's degrees shaved off. But at least I made it to the 3,700-acre Ned Brown Forest Preserve, also known as the Busse Woods, on Saturday to walk another length of the "bicycle" trail. "Bicycle, runner, rollerblader, walker, equestrian, cross-country skier and possibly unicyclist" trail would be a fuller description, but wouldn't fit so well on trail-side signs. (One of these days, I'm bound to see a unicyclist.)

So far, I've walked about five miles of the 7.7-mile Red Trail Loop at one time or another, half of the two-mile Black Trail and none of the 1.1-mile Purple Trail. Mostly I only have time for two miles or so at one go, one mile away from wherever I parked and one back. I've been on the trails in all seasons, with a preference for warm months, naturally. It isn't quite a rustic experience -- jets fly over regularly, headed to O'Hare -- but it's definitely apart from the surrounding suburbs.

On Saturday I went from Groves 26 & 27 to Grove 32, crossing over the small dam on Salt Creek that creates the fair-sized Busse Lake. Anglers were thick on the pedestrian bridge over the dam, with more on the edge of Salt Creek below. Happy anglers, these fellows, standing among their gear and coolers and night-crawler buckets, minding their poles and likely nursing secret beers.

Few trees have sprouted leaves just yet, but they're aching to. Here and there bushes have taken the lead in greening up, and the grass blades and clover and other underfoot plants are already there. I spotted a grass snake and heard frogs. All kinds of birds are out and about, making all kinds of noises, all part of making baby birds, I figure. Bugs are few in number, but there must be some, to feed all the sex-crazed birds. Luckily, none of them are mosquitoes just yet.

Black Holes & September Flowers

Shucks, we weren't pulled into a black hole generated by the Large Hadron Collider. Then again, the thing won't really be racing particles until next month. How do you prepare for a journey into a singularity? What do you pack for a one-way trip past the event horizon? Even experienced travelers don't have a clue.

Meanwhile, back in the human-sized world, summer flowers are still with us in the northwestern suburbs:



Visiting a new cemetery wasn't enough for last weekend. I also had to stop and see the Ruth Macintyre Conservation Area, a 36-acre patch of wetlands and fields, along with a five-acre pond, that I'd also driven by many times, but never walked through. It's ablaze with yellow flowers now, of a kind I couldn't name. But naming is optional when appreciating such an array.