Nature Journal

"Even in the wilderness one must wait until all evidence of civilization is erased.  I felt it not long ago while sitting at the end of a long glaciated spit of rock in the Quetico-Superior country.  It was perfectly calm, the lake glassy and mirrored with the deeply colored sunset, loons calling as though possessed, and because it was spring the hermit thrushes were singing.  I was alone with a sense of such completeness, I desired nothing more."


– Sigurd Olson, from Reflections from the North Country
                




There are pockets of pure silence you can still find even up above the great suburban tracts of Greens Coulee homes.  On a good two hour hike up along the MVC land conservation, old gnarled oak and thorn patches litter an upward lifting bluffside trail which leads, as almost all of them do, to a wild rocky-spined ridge

where you can straddle at once two coulees and where homes have yet to find enough hospitality to build.  It was a fine sunny winter day.  A warmish breeze at 40 degrees.  All of Onalaska was under our eye level as we moved to the top where the birches do find hospitality inside the icy rocky nooks of limestone shared by rough pine.

Although we could see boot tracks on the path, there were no other people not so astonishingly.  On such days, and there are many, you are left to wonder if folks below have ever really found that quiet of the ridgeline, that quiet of the rock, that Olson speaks of eloquently above.

One of the things that Olson spoke of so often, even back in his own day, was that what people crave now most is to experience mystery in a world that is thought to be all too known; now, more than then, a world thought to be created by the touch of one kind of screen or another.  To look down onto the vista of the entire coulee region, over the dual valley blufflines which seem to guard the great river can't be replicated by the two dimensions of any screen. The glaciated pile of stone you stumble across by accident can't be replicated either by a screen, not really.  To climb onto its icy top, hold tight to its rigid creases for security, and breath in the snow mist can't be outdone by the press of a  pinky and thumb.