Past the farthest outpost of big box store clusters, past the last suburban and exurban subdivisions and commuter apartment blocks, past even where the last mobile home park, named Mobile Manor, sits below the highway, in what looks like the Minnesota River’s floodplain, lives a sanctuary of oaks.
My tires bump over the railroad tracks and crunch over the crushed stone of the unpaved lot. No other cars. A few notices about deer hunting regulations posted on the kiosk. But it is late January, the hunt is over, and, but for the whistle of the occasional freight train rumbling along its eastern edge, all is quiet in the wildlife refuge.
I edge around the gate that keeps out vehicles, and walk out into a dramatic opening up of the landscape. There, I stand listening to the stillness. Temperature hovering around freezing. Striated pennant clouds, sky of chalcedony blue, sun radiating a quiet, silvered light. A red squirrel trills and chatters at me, then I hear the nasal cha! cha! of a red-bellied woodpecker.
Tension in my shoulders that I didn’t realize was there vanishes in seconds, seemingly magicked away by one quick swirl of free-flowing air.
The bur oaks, who I came to visit, seek out the sun, as do I. Hillsides and bluff tops bathed in light are beloved by these oaks. They need wide spaces to grow into their full horizontal grandeur. As their humble student, I have observed that under these conditions they seem happiest, reaching their full magnificence.
Do you ever perceive happiness in a landscape? Any being that is thriving — freely expressing its essential nature and gifts — is, by my definition, happy. Maybe perceiving such encourages a reciprocity of happiness between human and landscape. Or maybe we actually become one with the larger happiness we sense, rather than separate from it?
I crunch along the bluff top trail overlooking the mile-wide river valley, over sparse patches of snow. A pair of swans wing over, trumpeting their two-note calls. A broad landscape of scattered oaks gather some distance from the trail, on a hundred-acre stage with the birds and I as their audience.
Before me stand dozens of bur oaks. They pulsate with presence. They emanate a powerful, gnarled charisma, each reaching branch heavy, bold, furrowed. Definite. No oak ever looks vague or indecisive in any way. Nor are any two interchangeable.
They grow themselves into extravagant, dancer’s poses that somehow suggest they are in motion even while standing still. Even their smallest twigs exhibit this character, and reflect the parent tree — looking, each spring, like exquisite, flowering oak trees in miniature.
A bur oak community both speaks and listens. Anyone with an open mind can sense this. This place is carrying on a conversation, one in which I gladly participate, by my walking, listening, sensing presence.
Following the deserted trail, I wonder whether any of these oaks were here when the Wahpeton Dakota called this land home. But by their size, I would guess them to be no more than hundred years old — perhaps descendants of the oaks originally here when European Americans migrated here 150+ years ago. After displacing or driving out many Native people, they cleared trees for farming and building. Perhaps that is what happened to the massive oaks one would hope to find in this remnant landscape.
Maybe the descendants of the Dakota who lived here still tell stories about what this savanna once looked like; the glory of those ancestor oaks, within a landscape the people carefully maintained with fire. There is a centuries-long history of care and reciprocity here between humans and land, this much I know.
I pick my way, far into the sea of dead stalks, to greet one particularly whiskery oak. A red-tailed hawk utters small, hoarse calls from a nearby tree. I rest a hand on the oak’s deeply furrowed bark. I was a child who believed that somewhere, there was a tree with a magic door that only I would be able to see, and that it would lead me to an enchanted wood.
I wonder how long that girl looked for that portal tree? Somewhere in the middle of my life, I had an epiphany. It was: I am already in the enchanted realm. That realm is here, where we stand, on this breathing Earth. This place of wonder and endless portals: physical, spiritual and imaginal.
My error, if you call it that, was never in seeking an embodied and inspirited otherworld as a child. Rather, it was in ever believing the fallacy that enchantment is just a fairy tale for children. That paradise is somewhere else. That this numinous earth we walk upon has no soul, that the ground to which we return holds no meaning or mystery.
Tell that to the oaks, the birds, the sky, the land itself; tell that to your own heart. Then sit quietly, and listen what answer they make in return.
It is a sad truth that no photo I have ever taken of this place, or any savanna (or any oak tree) does it justice. Where is the dazzling sense of depth in the landscape, one of its loveliest, liveliest characteristics? Depth that seems to go beyond three dimensions, into four, or even five.
I apologize. But let me assure you. The vast space that looks flat in these photos is, in reality, fully rounded — defined by wind, distant bird song, gopher mounds and mole hills; sumac, sunlight reflecting off broken stems, cloud shadows, ghosts of the oak ancestors … and by the measureless time it takes to walk from one oak tree to another.
Beautifully sung, as usual! And yes, pictures never come close to the experience…..yet still in many moments, I’m drawn to try once again!
I love this so much!!! I grew up in the tattered remains of North America’s Oak Savannah.
A slender transition strip, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Canada, between call grass Prairie and the eastern hardwood forest. Anywhere from 1 to 60 miles wide. The dominant species in mind particular space-time continuum was
Quercus Macrocarpa. Burr Oak. The species cognomen describing the acorn. Large cap. It usually covers 3/4 of the seed.
Majestic and ancient. Fireproof. Slow growing, long lived, unimaginably strong.
Your prose is a good pairing. Emulating those qualities. Great peace!