Journal of First Class at The Clearing in Door County, Wisconsin 1957
October 11, 2015
upon trailing arbutus still in bloom, and, in the proper spirit of appreciation for this often-earliest flower which braves the snows, we got to our knees and bent down with noses to the earth itself. And we breathed the incomparable perfume of the arbutus, Epigaea — “one who trails upon the earth”, the mayflower, the fleur de mate,
A little way farther, we came upon wintergreen with its evergreen leaves and its scarlet fruits left from last year. We tasted these for another bit of the true essence of the north — and there were scarcely enough to go around, once that teaberry flavor was discovered.
We found gaywings, too, the tiny pink polygala with scarcely any stem at all. And there were thousands upon thousands of dwarf, blue-lilac, dwarf iris decorated with a pearling of water drops. Goldthread, a flower found far into the Arctic, was in bloom among the moss.
Mats of bearberry Arctostaphylos with their evergreen leaves were in bloom. These were clusters of waxen white urns tipped with pink, another blossom which is native to the far north. And Labrador tea . . . bunchberry . . . blueberry bushes . . . pipsissewa . . . pyrola . . . cranberries . . . all these were native to tundra and the Arctic, yet remained here in Wisconsin as a remnant of plants which were far more abundant during the times when the last great glacier slowly receded and left a blossoming tundra behind. Plants like these contain within themselves a peculiar charm and excitement which few of the larger, more common, more southerly flowers seem to possess. On that cool, wet, northern morning, they were a fitting ingredient in this unique habitat.
And then it was time to hurry back to dinner.
After dinner, the clouds parted, the sky was bright, warmth returned. We went back to the Ridges. The afternoon’s adventure was longer than the morning’s and perhaps revealed more kinds of flowers, but some of the charm was lacking . . . the mystery of a rainy morning among cool conifers, where a water thrush sang and the flavor of wintergreen was on our lips, the fragrance of arbutus in our nostrils, the essence of the Arctic or the Pleistocene all about us.
The high point of the afternoon’s exploration of the Ridges was Lloyd Williams’discovery of the ram’s head lady’s slipper Cyprepedium arietinum, surely one of the tiniest and most intricate of that exotic clan, furiously patterned with maroon hair-lines on ivory.
That evening, people of the community gathered with the students in the school for an illustrated formal lecture by Rutherford Platt. Our genial, enthusiastic fellow hiker and teacher, who had bent in reverence with us over our arbutus blossoms, had showed us the curious “camel’s face” in the butternut bud scars, now became a famous adventurer and explorer who had risked death in the Arctic a dozen times. He had photographed amazing, minute wild flowers on barren, sterile rocks on which no other white man had ever trod . . . was all but trapped by crowding ice bergs . . . might have been marooned at the terrifyingly remote end of the world where he found fossils of ancient forests . . . who observed the ice cap, and then bent to photograph a flower, the Loiseleuria, so tiny as to be almost invisible, yet exquisitely fashioned in charming ivory vase form. With him, we explored the Greenland shores and landed at Thule, met Eskimos and watched a polar bear on an ice floe, saw kittiwakes and dovekies and the midnight sun.
And with an effort, we came back to reality and the school at THE CLEARING, discovered that it was very late, and we had had a long and exciting day.
May 24. Friday
Early, along the bluff, the wind was cold and punishing, whipping the cedars, but down along the lane there was shelter, the trees were quiet, the rising sun was warm,- and the birds sang and fed. Over in the aspen grove beside the road to the parking lot, the yellow lady’s slippers were in full bloom at last. There were several dozen, and one clump of four golden pouches was especially beautiful in the slant light of early morning.
That morning, after a briefing on the use of plant keys, Mertha Fulkerson reminded us of something. All week we had been taking knowledge and inspiration from THE CLEARING. Now it was time for us to give something of ourselves to make our presence worthwhile to the benevolent spirit of the woods. Consequently, off went the group, armed with axes and saws and enthusiasm, to break up the brush left after trees had been cut to make way for a road. The purpose was to reduce twigs and dry branches to small stuff