Little Golden Flower-Room: On Wild Places and Intimacy
This February, on the first day barely warm enough for it, I took off my shoes and set out on the cold, hard mud of a trail through the loess hills in Iowa. I was helping plan my April wedding, sometimes losing sight of the celebration and seeing only tasks to be done. And as excited as I was for the wedding, I knew that there was a good chance my wife and I would become temporarily long-distance in the fall while I finished my master’s program and she began working. That afternoon, I wanted to be transported for a while, to be ensconced in a place that felt elsewhere. The park, called Hitchcock Nature Center, isn’t quite out of reach of the Omaha skyline across the river. It’s bordered by pastureland, hayfields that spend half the year as short as a lawn, and by cornfields. Jets headed for Eppley Airport howl at low altitude overhead. In other words, human development encroaches on Hitchcock from every side.
But once you’re in the borders of the park, like passing through the gate of a besieged city out of Tolkien, you’re in a sanctuary, a in western Iowa and China: steep, whimsical ridges built of loose, wind-blown silt – loess means in German. Loose hills are places of constant change. The eroding, nearly vertical slopes make it hard for trees to hang on, and historically fires dealt the coup de grace in favor of a community of grass and fire-resistant bur oak. At Hitchcock, conservationists have restarted the wildfires in controlled form, coaxing them and reigning them in. The loess hills therefore shift, from spot to spot and through time, passing from small groups of trees, to open-grown bur oaks with wildflowers below, to the rugged bunchgrasses of the eastern prairie—big bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass. You might have a favorite tree and come back next week and find it with a corkscrew lightning scar, burnt to a crisp. You might have a favorite flower—get out while it’s in having its week in bloom. The expanses of grass are sweet summery green one day, deer-hide tan another, and blackened from fire the next.
