Seeking hope
You can’t miss the anniversary discussions about a year of COVID: the lockdown, the losses, the old life still yearned for, but the new routines becoming more familiar.
This week, both COVID immunized, Reed and I took a trip to watch an ancient spring event in northern Indiana: the migration of the Sandhill cranes toward their nesting sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota and further north. We were seeking a change of pace and the magic of taping into nature’s majesty, the promise of eternal return.
Thankfully, the migration continues despite the loss of wetlands. Northern Indiana was flattened by a glacial action in the last ice age. The melting glacier created has several rivers that the cranes and other waterfowl follow north. A large glacial lake nearly 36,000 acres (28,000 football fields) Beaver Lake, once served as an important resting place. In the 1800s it was drained by ingenious entrepreneurs who dug a ditch between the lake and one of the rivers. When drained, the lake bed was offered to thousands of sharecroppers, a town was built as well as railroad tracks to transport the products to Chicago. In the draining process an island in the middle of the lake where bandits and horse thieves hung out and counterfeiters minted fake coins was destroyed. [There is always some silver lining.] The Nature Conservancy has been restoring the area to natural habitat: a grassland prairie where bison roam, oak savannahs, fields of milkweed for migrating Monarch butterflies, and wetlands for migrating birds.
Taping into the magic, we arrived just before dawn at one of the wetland sites in the crisp morning air to watch from a distance the cranes wake up. They start hopping, stretching their wings in the gray morning light. If you listen closely you can hear the clack of their beaks. They call back and forth—a primitive call that stirs some ancient cord. Then a few flutter up into the air and others follow. They leave in groups of several dozen, their long legs pulled up behind them. We watched four groups head north.
In the distant tree line was an eagle’s nest. The eagle pair visible in different trees over the 24 hours that we returned to the site.
Being outdoors and in nature has nurtured me during the pandemic.
We drove past expansive fields plowed and promising soybeans or corn, old corn fields yet to be plowed, others still promising winter wheat. Miles and miles of crop land, with humongous tractors and seemingly mile-long irrigation equipment in the fields. Evidence of big Ag. However, a pair of eagles perched on one the arms of the expansive irrigation beam surveying America’s breadbasket. The eagles are here again. That is progress during my lifetime. Thank you, Rachel Carson!
The well maintained ranch style brick and classic 2-story painted farm homes surrounded by a windbreak of pines stand in sharp contrast to the abject poverty on some of the back roads of Indiana. It is a poverty much worse than what I remember as a kid. Rundown trailer homes with old vehicles. RVs turned into homes with shredded tarps creating additional shelter. Piles of wood, the likely the source of heat. Clapboard structures missing windows or parts of the siding but clearly inhabited. Abandon vehicles. Lots of yard "art" or kitsch--gnomes, dairy maids, angels, and metallic globes. The nearest town was a ghost town, evidence of the community that once was: a barber, a café, a library. And several miles away a dollar store with vehicles pulling in and out of the parking lot.
PHOTO: Reed Pike, Perryville, IN
This is the America that elected President #45. Signs and flags show their support—the promise of a return to a past that is impossible. But he offered hope.