Watching Wet Land

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 10

Watching Wet Land

From his seat on the stationary hay rack, Alexander saw Laura Paruzzi pause above the wetland to survey the scene. The 25 kids and two chaperones, scattered around the site, were all sitting quietly apart, listening and looking intently at their surroundings. With pad and colored pencils in hand, each would soon begin recording. They would capture whatever they saw and heard with words and pictures, varied and colorful.

The ever present red-winged blackbirds trilled territorial rights at the intrusion. Song sparrows sang the high part. Leopard frogs snored below.

How elated he felt to be here on a warm, still day, with few clouds and sun. The kids were so focused! He could still see the amazed look on Laura's face when the schoolbus arrived at the Murphy farmstead. His neighbor, Delbert Crawford, waited there with a team of Percheron grays hitched to the hay rack. The kids just loved it! Rose was thrilled, too. Grandma Teresa waived from the porch as everyone climbed on. After the kids and their entourage were seated on the straw bales, Delbert said a simple, "Giddup." The wagon rolled. Kids whooped joyfully. Percheron ears twitched.

"That's Tom," Rose had said, pointing to the big gray on the left. "And that's Dan." The gee horse had turned his head at the child's voice, as if to acknowledge the introduction, to welcome the kids aboard. "He knows me," said Rose to Mai, as the team slowly made its way ahead of Delbert's clucking. They ambled down toward the wetland.

"What lucky kids," thought Laura, as she watched her charges sitting about the little pothole, all absorbing the wetland rhythm. Yesterday, they'd talked about the glaciers, theirs -- the oldest, the pre-Illinoian, the newer Illinoian to the west, and the recent Wisconsinan to the east. She loved seeing their faces when she talked about 500,000 to "two and a half million years ago" as the time period for the pre-Illinoian. "Imagine," she asked of them before they dismounted from the hay rack, "ice as thick over your head as from here to that barn way, way over there." The kids got very quiet.

Two pair of greater Canada geese honked out of their landing pattern. They flapped over the ridge on seeing the children. The resident mallard drake paddled calmly about, likely not far from his mate on a nest among the new cattail stems and last year's fractured rushes. One yellowthroat scuffed a gravelly song. Disguised as a supine grass stem, a garter snake sunned herself on the south side of a big bluestem tussock. A kestrel considered her too large for a meal, and chattered overhead.

Franklin's ground squirrel chirped and bolted for another hole. He'd surprised himself, and an eight-year old, too, by popping up near the young Thoreau. A few mosquitos, so easily identified, rejoiced at a ready lunch. The hydric evidence of the raccoon family's passage, now twelve hours gone, pooled a landing space for a greenbottle fly. A painted turtle surfaced submarine-like to the acrobatic patrol of a dragon fly air force. Waterboatmen rotated formation nearby.

Along to check on her town-dwelling neighbors, an American robin plucked noisy earthworms from among peripheral cornstalks. Tom and Dan creaked and jingled their harness as they munched hay and waited. Delbert sat still at the reins. Alexander Murphy absorbed the scene. The kids began to write and draw from the inspiration of their watery origins.

Laura, up long before dawn, thought about lunch.

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Next week... Chapter 11, "A Willow Stump Waits...".

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 10 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

Resources:
USGS Upper Midwest Environmental Science Center
USGS Northern Prairie Research Center
Iowa NRCS -- Better Wetlands
Arthur "Tex" Hawkins, USFS

Comments? Email feedback to The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 10

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.