Month: February 2026

I bike to work this morning across the bridge over I-88 as I have done several times a week over the past 16 years. I am on the sidewalk facing traffic, the interstate stretching out over my left shoulder. It is the hour before sunrise. An endless line of headlights trundles toward me in fog.

I enter the Arboretum by the service gate. Fog sputters against the power lines overhead. Electricity for what seems to me the entirety of the western suburbs veers northward here at the tops of enormous towers, growling toward coffee makers, electric lights, and servers that stayed on all night processing our ceaseless questions (“What should I have learned about Napolean in high school?” “Can spinach give you kidney stones?”). I think, the hour is entirely mine, and I am sharing the thought with hundreds on this road alone.

Fog droplets scratch fine, parallel lines in the beam from my bike light, inscribed diagonal to my direction of travel. I lock up my bike and walk. The forest is backlit by the gray-white glow of the city. Trails generally seem longer in the dark than they do during the day, but I have never had that experience in these woods. A burl on a red oak is so like a hunched raccoon that I watch it uncertainly for a few seconds before I approach it, and then I touch it only after I am sure it’s not alive. Even then I’m nervous until my palm has registered “bark” instead of “fur” and my mind has been able to process it. The process is surprisingly slow.

I cross the bridge over the ditch frozen in its route to Lacey Creek. I take the corner around a divot in the moraine. The ravine down toward the wet prairie and the power lines opens up in front of me, and the car noise recedes. The sky is lit up in the northeast, a blend of the muted sunrise to come and light from the suburbs that surround us, plus the city further off. I walk through the planted spruces that rise like pilings beneath a skyscraper.

Just beyond the spruces, I hear the first natural sound of the walk: rain drops striking the dead leaves beneath the oaks. I put my hood up to watch the rain come in, but I realize after 30 seconds or so that I am not getting wet. I step off the trail, out beneath the bare canopy where I hear the raindrops falling, but I still feel nothing. I put my hands out and stand for a few seconds. Nothing. Yet all around me, I can hear the sound of water drops hitting the leaves. I spit to hear if it is the same sound, and yes, it sounds the same. For several minutes I walk with my palms outstretched and wait to feel rain. I stamp my foot to see if these are worms, which should withdraw into the ground at the vibration. Nope. I walk around, and the tapping stops as I approach and picks up as I depart, forming a roving mantle of stillness that extends away from me about 6 feet in all directions.

I reach Parking Lot 8 and walk east, parallel to I-88. The pattering in the leaves has let up. The noise of the interstate is as loud as it will be on this walk. The robins are as well. There are lights all along the highway. Likely they give the robins a signal to get going a bit earlier in the day. A red oak has broken off about one-third of the way up. It hit the ground when it fell and tipped backward. The crown and much of the trunk came to rest in the crotch of the still-standing trunk. A remaining branch is pasted from base to tip with marcescent leaves, and all is silhouetted against the glow of street lights.

The tapping on the leaves starts up again near the top of the hill. I sweep aside a handful of leaves, and springtails jump off. I sweep aside another, and there are more springtails plus a drowsy pill bug. The soil is cool, damp, and friable. I don’t see anything big enough to make the tapping sound that I continue to hear on the leaves, unless it is the springtails jumping in unison when I’m not looking. I disrupt a web and a spider dangles from my glove, a couple of millimeters long with a bright white abdomen. It flails in slow motion.

I return to my bike 45 minutes after I left it. The sky is bright enough now to counterbalance the noises of combustion engines and rubber on pavement. Will the world be that much quieter when the cars all go electric? I think of a night in the northwoods, out on my skis, when a meteor cracked overhead. That is the only sound I remember from that night. I think of many nights in the middle of Lake Monona in Madison in midwinter. Surely there was noise there from the surrounding roads, but if so, I cannot remember it. I wish for a quiet morning right here in this beautiful suburban forest.

“Listen,” W.S. Merwin writes. “With the night falling we are saying thank you / we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings / we are running out of the glass rooms / with our mouths full of food to look at the sky / and say thank you / we are standing by the water thanking it / standing by the windows looking out / in our directions… back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging / after funerals we are saying thank you / after the news of the dead / whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you… we go on saying thank you thank you.” And then species are going extinct in his poem and in our world, “forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives,” the world becoming a metropolis. And still we are saying, “thank you”.

I unlock my bike, and the interstate embraces the southeast corner of this 10,000 year-old patch of forest that I would like to have hiked 200 years ago, or 400 years ago, or even just a couple of decades before we all decided what the country really needed was an interstate system. All around me is the crackling of creatures in the leaves, jumping worms wreaking havoc, Collembola high-jumping over dried petioles of fallen red oak leaves, spring beauty shoots under the litter like a forest within the forest that keeps going and going. These things will outlast us all. Thank you, thank you.

I bike to work the wrong way down the road with my helmet dangling from my handlebars. I pass one of the security staff walking the road, and we greet each other. The robins are singing in the oak collection. As write these notes the next morning, I won’t be able to hear the interstate at all, just as I can’t hear the cars roaring past Lake Mendota in the middle of the night 35 years ago.

And though I do not know it as I unlock the door to work, the male red-winged blackbirds will gather in the marsh while I am sitting at my desk today, and a coyote will kill something in the prairie and stand eating it, watching the cars drive by. I’ll pass them both on my bike ride home tonight before I let myself back out through the gate.

9:45 a.m., 32F, overcast

To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method… Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter.
– Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

I enter by the hospital. Robins are chuckling. The snow has been alternately subliming, melting, refreezing. Squirrel and raccoon tracks have hardened into the crust. Rabbit pellets warmed by the sun have settled into craters. Fallen red oak leaves curled by the alternate forces of moisture and drought have carved silhouettes in the snow as they melt into it.

House sparrows are chirruping from the brush between the forest and the hospital parking lot. Buds on a gooseberry have started to expand. They form tight rolls a few millimeters long, bases sheathed in brown scales, their distal halves green, their young leaf-tips loose, making the edges look a bit frayed. This gooseberry is the first shrub I’ve seen breaking bud this year.

Tree bark contrasts starkly with the snow. Imbricated plates of bark on a black cherry, each curled at the margins, on a tree that died years ago and has rotted almost to nothing. Deep furrows on a black walnut, broken up into blocks. Smooth tracks running the length of a red oak. Hackberry cork split into deep ridges, layered like dolomite cliffs turned on edge. White oak bark salted with desiccated fruiting bodies of smooth patch fungus, cups extruded from the tree when the days were warmer and wetter, now clamped shut. Two trunks of a basswood arched over in parallel, striped, shoots sprouting from their backs and heading for the canopy, branch tips still hanging on to pale floral bracts and a few seeds.

A cottonwood less than a foot in diameter with corky furrows has crumpled about ten feet up, given up in a wind that bent it until it couldn’t go any further. Thousands of vessels and phloem fibers and sieve tubes snapped, leaving the inner bark to hang like crepe. Thousands more did not. So as the tree tipped downward, unbroken wood that folded as the tree went down layered against the wood that cracked, until the tip of the tree hit the ground and, 15 feet closer to the canopy, snapped backward, severing the crown from its base.

A red-bellied woodpecker is barking at the juncture between the forest and the marsh. It moves upward in short jumps, which seems a risky move to me, jumping with both feet and then landing. How does it not tumble backwards? The bird probes the trunk with its stiletto of a bill. It stops and drums against the tree, six or a dozen rapid strikes. It looks with its left eye, it looks with its right. Ed Yong writes that the left side of a bird’s brain, which controls the right eye, is specialized for focus and categorization. This bird, however, isn’t displaying any obvious eye preference.

After getting to about 20 feet up, the woodpecker drops to the base of a nearby black walnut and flies back up with a walnut in its beak. It lodges the nut in a crevice of a bent-over elm. The bird probes it, dipping in and out, seeming to find something in there. It flies off to another elm, where it pounds vigorously at the crotch of a branch and appears to find a few more insects. It pulls them out and scans its environment as it ingests one, then two more.

The woodpecker flies off. I watch it go, and my eyes come to rest at the broken top of a tree where two white-throated sparrows are hopping around.

I walk to the edge of frozen Lacey Creek. I follow other people’s footprints off the edge of the pier and out through the cattails to the open marsh. Joel Greenberg writes that before European settlement, most rivers in the Chicago Region were like this: broad, slow-flowing wetlands that might dry down in summer but rarely flashed into anything. Many today are ditches that swell within minutes to hours of a rainfall, sweeping soil and trash downstream in every storm.

The snow is creased parallel to the flow of the river. A crack not much wider than a crack in a plaster wall runs as far as I can see up- and downstream. I have left the people tracks behind. Two lines of cottonwoods grow towards each other at the south end of the marsh. There are cattails in all directions. The hillside ahead is a mound of bur oak savanna edged with a ruff of black walnut. I follow deer trails through the marsh and pass a squirrel excavation in the grasses at the boundary of the wetland. I walk upslope, take a minute to get the view from the bench on the hillside, and begin my walk toward home, clockwise around the open water.

There are more fallen red oak than I remember, hulks lying on top of the snow, their bases offset from the point where they broke off if they were long enough to scrape the ground when they struck, or right at the base of the tree where they fell if they are shorter. A hairy woodpecker calls. A rock dove flies over the forest toward the southwest. Someone is striking a metal pipe with a hammer behind the houses that line the back of the preserve. I watch for a minute but cannot figure out what this is about.

I follow the barking trill of a red-headed woodpecker for about ten minutes and find it climbing a dead ash tree. It noses its way into an excavation, moves to the broken top of the tree, and head-pumps and squawks noisily for a minute until it flies off to a red oak and is gone.

As I near the hospital, a gray squirrel crosses my path, running full speed on the ground and then detouring up along the side of a white oak as casually as I might run along the top of a curb. His head stays upright, his body sideways, cantilevered out over the forest floor. I imagine running down the hallway and, on a lark, taking to the wall for a few steps, because why not? You can see just a little better from up here, and besides: what fun is it to keep your feet on the ground all the time?