Blufflands Escarpment
April 20, 2014
I got back from a three-hour hike around the blufflands escarpment and my boots were caked with mud and I didn’t care.
I started at Chris’ house and followed the escarpment north — the long ridge that runs above Green Bay, the Niagara Escarpment, the same geological shelf that holds up Niagara Falls a thousand miles east. Here it’s quieter. Limestone bluffs covered in cedar and birch, the land dropping off to farmland on one side and rolling up into hardwood forest on the other. I followed it until Van Lanen and then cut down along Wequiock Creek, the water running high with snowmelt, and followed the creek out to Church Road.
From there I crossed through the muddy cornfields to the back of the mausoleum. The fields were soft — not just muddy but the kind of spring-saturated where every step sinks three inches and the pull of the earth on your boots makes your calves burn. I didn’t care. I liked just walking where I wanted and not worrying about getting dirty. No trail. No path. Just me picking a line through the landscape the way I did as a boy, when every field and tree line was an invitation and the only rule was be home before dark.
That’s what it brought back. Being a boy on this same land. The escarpment hadn’t changed. The creeks still ran the same way. The cornfields were the same cornfields, just owned by someone new. Walking through them felt like walking through a transparency laid over my childhood — the same shapes, the same smells, the same mud, just thirty years later and with different knees.
I found a deer skull in beautiful condition. Eight points, clean, sitting in the brush like it had been placed there. I picked it up and turned it in my hands and thought about the animal that wore it — how long it had lived, how it had died, how the woods had cleaned it down to bone. I carried it home. It felt like the land had given me something for showing up.
The grass and shrubs weren’t too tall yet — early spring, everything still waking up — so I could go anywhere. By June the brush would be head-high and the ticks would be out and you’d stick to the trails. But in April, for a few weeks, the whole landscape is open. You can see the bones of it. The contours. The way the water shaped the land over thousands of years. It’s the best time to walk if you want to understand where you are.
I understood where I was. I’d always known.