Photo essay: Milwaukee River Greenway in white

Riverside Park

Another gloomy winter day made lovely by gently falling snow. The landscapes of the Greenway look faded, like sepia-toned etchings discovered in a disused trunk. The starkness of the season, paradoxically, increases the sense of wildness while simultaneously making it hard to ignore the urban in the urban wilderness.

Shelter 1, Riverside Park

 

Winter tapestry, Rotary Centennial Arboretum

 

Renegade cyclist, Riverside Park

 

Shelter 2, Riverside Park

 

Gordon and Riverside Parks from Locust Street Bridge

 

Riverside Pumping Station

 

Shelter 3, Cambridge Woods

 

Tunnel to nowhere, Cambridge Woods

Bluff trail, Cambridge Woods

 

Grafitti, Cambridge Woods

 

The river, Cambridge Woods

 

Red sandstone cairn, Riverside Park

Riverside Park’s arboretum offers an enchanting array of wild herbs

Eager with anticipation, our group climbs to the hilltop and crowds into the small clearing around a circle of stones. Kyle Denton, our guide, plucks up the stalk of a large, broad-leafed plant near his feet. I recognize it immediately as the nemesis in my yard, ragweed. Each spring I spend an inordinate amount of time pulling sprouts in a futile effort to eradicate it. I am startled and amused that he chose this of all plants to begin with.

Denton tears off a leaf, crushes it with his fingers and holds it to his nose. He passes the stalk around so that everyone can do the same. Then he puts the leaf in his mouth and visibly mashes it with his teeth. Ragweed is both edible and medicinal, he tells us. Once cultivated as a crop by indigenous peoples, it is highly nutritious and an excellent source of protein. Sadly, he goes on, now it is known primarily as a leading cause of hay fever. Its chief medicinal use, he adds wryly, is to treat allergic reactions to…ragweed.

Kyle Denton calls himself an herbalist and forager, activities that may not suggest a contemporary urban lifestyle. Remarkably, however, the places he chooses to forage are in the City of Milwaukee. He shares his knowledge and love of plants in a variety of educational settings but his favorite classrooms, he told me in an email, are “the trails and wilds of this town.” I was already hooked when he then invited me to join one of his regular “herb walks.” 

This story was published at Milwaukee Magazine. Click here to continue reading.

Reverie: Riverside Park, Springfield, IL

Roughly patched macadam leads past vacant ball fields, broad and Illinois prairie flat. A tree line hides the river until I reach where the pavement ends and a sliver of concrete tilts, continues down into the brown water. The Sangamon River flows languidly. Rays of rising sun burst into the canyon between its tree-lined banks, illuminating exuberant spring greens in the overhanging crown of the forest.

I walk the length of the pocked dirt road, skirting puddles, river on my right. From the shadows ahead a squad car slowly approaches. The officer and I exchange waves through window glass as he rolls by. Soft crunching of gravel diminishes, leaving behind stillness, then birdsong. The only other sound is the distant rumble of early morning traffic, muffled by the trees. I walk between twin silences, river and forest.

A piercing mechanical roar disturbs the peace, tapers to a hiss, ceases. Where the road ends a railroad cuts through the forest, crosses the river on a trestle bridge. The source of the roar isn’t revealed. I head away from the still silent river into the deeper, darker silence of the forest. Black earth leads me, a trail cut precisely through luxuriant undergrowth. The soles of my shoes gather mud until I am an inch or two taller and ungainly. I stop to scrape on a log. This process is repeated again and again, though I’m careful to accumulate only mud and not any of the horse manure that occasionally blots the trail.

After a while the silence, punctuated with the cheerful warbling of unseen birds, suddenly gives way to an enormity of fervent amphibian utterances. The sound grows nearly deafening as I approach a woodland pond. Sunlight pours into the opening in the forest, glares off the murky surface of the pool as if to cast a spotlight on the cacophony. The pond is unapproachable, the frogs imperturbable, the din unwavering in its intensity. In my mind hear my wife’s voice penetrating the solitude: “That’s the sound of sound of sex,” she invariably comments with an impish grin, hoping to get a rise out of me.

I am not lost. One could not get lost on this wide path. But where it is taking me has become a mystery and a concern. I have passed numerous forks and alternative routes, always choosing one that leads towards the ever higher sun, which I’ve assumed would take me back to the road. Now, as my deferred breakfast beckons and the mosquitoes thicken, I wonder. At the next fork I cut north. A white tail deer plunges off the trail ahead. Before the rumbling in my stomach grows uncomfortable I see the bright line of the open field through the trees.

I’ve overstayed the early morning tranquility. Three mowing machines crisscross the fields, buzzing distantly like mechanical mosquitoes. The corral near the entrance, empty when I drove in, now holds a whole herd of horses. The sun blazes down on the wide-open playing fields, flat as the Illinois prairie.