Summer peace, back home
In early June, already sweltering with the humidity of the Mississippi River’s rural Midwestern stretch through southern Illinois, I dropped my junior high son off at band camp at the local university. He was overwhelmed by the roar of overnight campers lined up beneath the portico of the castle-like, yellow brick building dating back to 1896. So was I. I felt a little uneasy leaving him, knowing his low tolerance for the youthful chaos of his peers, unfamiliar peers since we recently moved “back home” to Illinois after six years in sultry South Carolina. I told myself at least he gets to retreat to the peace of home at dinnertime.
His older brother, even less tolerant of cacophony in general and therefore allergic to band, happily agreed to go on a hike with me to overcome our collective anxiety. We drove fifteen minutes into the Shawnee Forest and surrendered to the dappled light shifting under the tree canopy, the mossy cool, and the sandstone fern rocks.
The forests in the southernmost quarter of Illinois are a surprise to people who have not ventured into our Kentucky-adjacent parts, it being the prairie state, mostly flat and full of soybeans. The hulking sandstone structures, stories tall, begging to be climbed beneath massive oaks and hickories, are evidence of climate change. Not today’s climate change for which humans are mostly responsible, the climate change lots of people want to pretend doesn’t exist. But ancient climate change, part of Earth’s pre-human history, the one caused by catastrophic events like “volcanic activity” and “galactic dust storms.” Both are climate change, of course. However, the ancient, natural disaster climate change is not proof that human climate change is inevitable and irreversible. That said, this is a tale of seeking tranquility in nature, leaving intrusive thoughts about reckless humanity behind in the parked car.
We arrived early and were rewarded with being the only two people on a somewhat rugged two-mile trail, one that would see many more hikers as the day wore on. Occasional strings of water dripped down the sides of the fern rock from fresh rainwater pools hundreds of feet above. The forest sweats cool and it’s the only sweat I’d willingly wipe on the back of my neck or chest. Giant City Creek, down below, called my son, as it does. He navigated a steep, muddy path to the piddling waterway. I did not remind him to look out for water moccasins because the chances of a deadly encounter are slim but expressing my concern would have certainly killed his joy. How many times have I lingered in this waterway, despite having seen a venomous snake swimming in it on a school field trip eons ago? I worried and I continued wandering, as I do.
A stretch of the trail runs along the paved road through the park, a reminder that American forests require protection by humans from humans. To pay for that protection, we make the forests accessible so people can see what’s at stake. Some see and some don’t—that is one of the more frightening things about humans, our limited comprehension. Shortly after a car steered past this trail toward another one, we encountered the short, steep assent to the top of the sandstone bluffs. Illinois is flat thanks to glaciers, which also deposited the fertile soil that makes us famous for our soybeans. For tens of thousands of years, landforms in the path of the glaciers were pushed to the glacier’s edges. In the Shawnee Forest, the ancient glacial movement is made visible by the towering rock deposits, reminding the mindful that science is real. The sandstone says so, and unlike humans, sandstone doesn’t lie.
I can’t count all those rings, my son remarked about a behemoth tree, completely uprooted by the previous season’s ice storms. A section of the old oak had been sawed out to clear the trail. I counted sixty rings before giving up. It was closer to ninety-something, like my grandmother who recently passed. We walked through the ghost of its trunk. Ninety years living, and then dead, just like that, ancient for a human, premature for an oak tree. Another oak, fully uprooted, fell in such a way that we easily walked under it. The same ice storm encapsulated individual blades of grass in our yard, still green, inside transparent capsules, crunching and snapping when we stepped on them. I tried to avoid stepping in the yard during the week it was frozen, to avoid casually breaking precious crystal grass. When I did have to step in the yard, the pleasure I experienced at the feel of those blades snapping under my boots brought on some guilt as well. Which is pretty silly, considering how much I love mowing grass (sorry, Earth, but I love mowing grass). As we continued along the trail and walked past more downed trees and branch piles, I wondered if the ice itself was to blame for the dead trees or the wind. Had the tree been encapsulated like the grass and immune to the wind, could it have survived the weight of the frozen water? It certainly would not have been uprooted had the wind not gusted.
What is this human obsession with blame? Some things just happen. But some don’t and that’s what’s with the obsession. Let go, walk on.
I took an opportunity to stand on the top of a bluff and look down on the trail far below. My son hesitated to join me, a cautious one. Later, I will learn that someone died falling from one such bluff on another trail in this very park the day before and will feel grateful for his cautious nature. His long-legged father has previously dismissed my concern about jumping bluffs and while I cannot describe the adrenaline rush from successfully making such a jump because I have never done it, I am content with minding the edge. I get plenty thrill from the view, from my son’s observation that the pool of water next to us could be responsible for the trickling blessing we received earlier when we stood beneath the rock.
My lungs filled with gratitude as we followed the trail back down the bluffs toward the parking lot. The woodsy air, if humid, had done the trick and made me happy to be alive, happy to be a creature of this mostly hospitable planet. My boots were muddied and I had splashes like chocolate milk on my black cotton leggings. Sweat lingered on my oversized back. A practical, upright boy with long legs like his father’s led me to the end of the trail that had been new to him just ninety minutes earlier. It wasn’t a difficult trail. We aren’t expert hikers. We are just people who live in the woods and enjoy leisurely exploring it. We gave a little over an hour of our day and received immeasurable peace. My son declined to drive back home, in no hurry to earn the hours he needs to get his driver’s license. He is already sixteen. Schedules that mattered so much to me and my friends in the 1990s mean less to him and his friends in the 2020s. Schedules that matter so much to him and his friends would have meant less to my friends and me.
The rest of the day I spent tidying the house and performing other mundane tasks to distract me from wondering if my younger son had enjoyed band camp. The chaos at the beginning of the day did not bode well for a happy day camp experience, not for one who thrives in peaceful places, like we do. When I finally saw him walking down the stairs of the yellow-brick, castle-like building that I swear had crenellations once upon a time, his red cheeks and downturned mouth warned me he would be launching into a plea to skip the rest of the week.
I can imagine a time when I would have said Absolutely not. We paid good money for this camp. We no longer live in such a time. How can I force him to join the cacophony, show off his human ways to the other humans his age, vying for a better seat, hollering the loudest WHOOP, eating the most chicken nuggets, when I myself do not wish to engage much with humankind this summer break? I know it’s a waste of money, but hey, we are supporting institutions of higher education in a time when they desperately need our support, right? And I know we, too, are human and tribal and would probably experience more joy in our lives if we made a bigger effort to be a part of a community.
Not this summer. This summer is for us to play in the woods. This summer is for us to be together as a family and find non-human friends in the forest, to connect with others virtually from the comfort of home, because humanity is a little scary right now. Humanity desperately needs trees and friendship and I am finding it difficult to be friends with humans who don’t hug trees. Heck, I am also finding it difficult to be friends with humans who do hug trees, but have strong feelings about the correct way to hug them. I feel less human with other humans and more human touching bark and mud. For me and my family, it’s a summer of withdrawal, not necessarily into nature, because we are a technology-loving bunch. It’s a summer of withdrawal into peace. We are seeking peace this summer and we know where to find it. I wish that for everyone, to know where to find peace if that’s what you seek.
