An Earned Understanding.

       Morris Mill Pond was once a creek. Dammed long ago, harnessed for its power and then abandoned, its now still waters are slowly being surrounded by subdivisions and roads. The woods near the Pond's end slope steeply at first from the edge of a farmer's field, lined with thorn bushes interwoven with honeysuckle. The steep drop-off is eroding in places, exposing oyster shells and roots that struggle to hold the ground stable. Along the lip of the hill cherry trees grow at dizzying angles to the ground. They reach into the wooded area and in doing so they lean over the trail that leads to the pond. In the interior stand mostly sycamore trees that tower over everything else. These trees can be seen from a distance when driving to this spot, their smooth white tops reflecting the sun like fresh ivory.

            Down below, the ground tapers off to a slow gentle decline, almost flat, until it reaches the marshy end of the pond where reeds start to grow. In this time before all the leaves have taken hold I can lean on a sycamore that stands nearly 30 feet from the pond and see clear through the woods and across the pond to observe a red winged blackbird perched in the reeds about a football field’s

distance away. The ground beneath my feet crumbles and cracks as I walk atop sycamore leaves the size of dinner plates interwoven with lengthy strips of bark, continuously shed by the sycamores as they grow. A sawyer once explained to me that the sycamore is a 'noisy tree'; it is always dropping branches, shedding its bark and its enormous leaves, which in turn crunch underfoot. These trees seem to constantly be making noise.

            I sit and marvel at the sycamores around me. Their bases are covered almost completely with bark not so dissimilar to that of the white oak, but six feet up they begin to shed their skin in mottled oblong pieces of many shapes and sizes. I find them irresistible; they pop off with the pressure of just one or two fingers inserted behind. I know it is of no benefit to the tree but it is just too great a temptation to pop off one or two when walking through a sycamore grove like this. Even Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek(1974) describes being overtaken by this urge as a child in Pittsburg, where sycamores lined the streets. Dillard describes too the importance of the sycamore to ancient Romans, although not this American Species, but rather its European cousin. She describes how it is told that Xerxes "halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction the beauty of a single sycamore." I too have spent days thinking about and researching the sycamore and its beauty, for the tops so white and pure tower over all the other trees of the area like spires of a cathedral and the wide bases like marble pillars placed there to hold up the sky itself.”

            A little ways down the path and beneath the slanted cherries is the giant of the litter, a wise old sycamore, its base so colossal that it would take three grown men with arms outstretched to fully encircle its girth. It stands maybe 50 feet tall, though the top is broken off. It sits riddled with holes bored in by woodpeckers in search of a meal, and reminds me of an old war photo of a tree that was caught in a crossfire, shot up with holes. I have sat and watched woodpeckers tear through this tree’s upper trunk, and one species in particular stands out to me - Hylatomus pileatus, the Pileated Woodpecker. Its large stature and crimson head catch your eye immediately. The sound of it jack-hammering away at a tree with its steel-like beak the size of my middle finger echoing through the woods is sure to catch your attention. These birds have a place close to my heart. My freshman year of college we learned about the ivory-billed woodpecker which is now extinct. The Ivory-billed is the closest relative to the Pileated, and looked almost exactly like it except for being slightly bigger. To stand and watch through my binoculars the cousin of a now extinct organism is humbling. It is sad to me that such a large and beautiful organism like the Ivory-billed woodpecker could go extinct at the hands of the human race. I could not imagine knowing this pileated woodpecker and having to watch as its species dies out due to carelessness on my part. 

            Ecologists have written how, when paired together the Pileated woodpecker and the sycamore are important for other species in this area. The woodpecker excavates holes in the sycamore looking or food and afterward the cavity becomes the nest site for wood ducks, a frequenter to this pond. The sycamore is one of the wood ducks preferred nesting trees and the holes that the Pileated makes are large enough for the wood ducks to enter; a sort of commensal relationship between these species. Though not all is happy in this woodland relationship, there has even been found some competition between wood ducks and the Pileated woodpecker for nesting holes (Yetter, 1999). I have never seen such a competition but to imagine a small fancy wood duck competing physically with the large robust woodpecker for its hollow makes me chuckle to myself.

            Relationships like these lie unseen to the people driving by the pond and often remain unseen to most visiting the pond,: unseen, unless one is particularly looking for it, or perhaps just lucky enough to be standing before the natural world just at the moment it reveals its interesting complexities. To be witness to these ecological wonders takes exploring, getting one’s feet wet, and the occasional cramped neck from looking up so much. People today have become so confined to  their human interests that they have trouble seeing out their bedroom window into the world that as a child they once yearned to explore. Gary Nabhan points out, "If we take the time to look and listen rather than assume we know what's around us, our world view will radically change." Mine has.

            In the three years that I have been coming to Morris Mill Pond my world-view has changed before my very eyes. Three years ago, this pond was a mere fishing spot, a place where I could go to catch the trophy that I'd brag later on to my coworkers about. I’d drag my kayak down the hill through the sycamore grove and beneath the slanting cherries, the whole time not giving any thought to my surroundings, focused instead solely on the fish that I had come there to steal away. I saw this pond, like many people see other natural areas, as a source of accomplishment and a source of satisfaction through the action of taking. I took from this area only what I allowed it to give me.

            Now I see it differently. I enter the area with a completely different mindset; a mindset that took years to develop. I started noticing the difference this winter, when I would go to this area to just sit and listen, to explore the area with my senses. Now that I look back I can see the changes taking place much earlier than I had realized. This fulfillment of taking was gradually replaced when I realized all that the place had to give beyond any particular thing I could take away with me. Perception itself was the point: “To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part”(Leopold, 176). I continued to go there to fish, but I used that more as an excuse as it became less about fishing and more about getting to the area and allowing myself to become mindful of its beauty and unknown complexity.

            I no longer had to take because I had realized all that Morris Mill itself was willing to give. I only needed to open myself to the idea and allow myself to understand. I once saw a bird in a tree from the corner of my eye that I now see is a Pileated Woodpecker unknowingly making a nest for the wood duck. I once saw these trees that I had to carry my kayak around but now see them as towering sycamores stretching their arms towards the heavens. Morris Mill Pond has helped me to develop a greater appreciation. My eyes have become more attuned to picking up the complexities of nature, and I see its beauty and its enchantment.

            I see this as the antidote to what ails the world today, this “building of receptivity into the still unlovely human mind” (Leopold, 177).

 - Glen Metzler

Bibliography

Dillard, Annie. Piligrim at Tinker Creek. Harper's Magazine, 1974. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. "Conservation Esthetic." A Sand CountyAlmanac. Special Commemorative ed.      Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Yetter, Aaron, Steven Havera, and Christopher Hine. "Natural-Cavity Use by Nesting Wood Ducks in Illinois." The Journal of Wildlife Management 63.2 (1999): 630-38. Print