Every natural route is a deer trail. They either start that way or the deer make them their own. They lace across the surface, indifferent to property boundaries, connecting everything. I am walking the remnant again, calculating that March sunshine justifies avoiding Saturday chores or office work to catch up on or the project I have going in the basement. 

The deer are calculating too. You see them at a distance in the fallow crop fields, adjusting tolerances for exposure risk during this hungry time, bargaining for precious waste grain left from the fall. Efficiency is everything. Melting snow reveals carcasses of those who made the wrong bet. Hollow rib cages rise over snow-flattened grasses in the ditches or off the roads a bit. Desiccated hide and tissue remnants. Ghosts of the animal abundance rising last May. Dead of too-much and too many.

Secrets hidden under opulent summer growth or buried by snow reveal in March, the nearly bare landscape exposed and pale again. I was looking for something green, some hint of spring, maybe a skunk cabbage in the low areas or some duckweed in the creek–and found nothing beyond invasive garlic mustard which stays green under the snow anyway. I was looking for some migrants, having heard that the juncos had left even though I still had them rummaging sunflower-seed hulls in my yard. 

The remnant’s prairie was still frozen deep, you can feel it in the way your footfalls bounce and mud slips on some permanence underneath. Snowmelt water pools in depressions and saturates the thin layer of thawed soil, slowly releasing into a million little seeps and rivulets looking for the creek. I hope they burn it this spring. The woodies are filtering in on the margins and I need to walk through the ashes. 

A jollity of chickadees, even more chatty than usual, bounced among the dogwood thickets.

Red osier dogwood is about the only color one sees apart from endless variations of tans and browns. Dogwood twigs are exceptionally pliable and I showed my daughter how to weave them into a bracelet when she was a toddler. She made me one and I hung it on the signal lever of my old truck where it stayed for years. It hung there–bouncing against the steering column and reminding us of a moment as she grew up, becoming more important each year. I sold the truck years ago and I don’t remember what happened to it.

A white-breasted nuthatch landed close. In the bright sun, its white cheeks and breast nearly glowing against its jaunty black cap and staid blue blazer. Dressing especially sharp for a Saturday.

I’m here again looking for something. I come to the remnant because I am dull. Because its close and because I know my way around. I read bald landscape phrenology where the clues still show, the stone piles, the jumble pushed up by a dozer or tractor or something. The big oaks stand nearly in a row for the length of two forties and if you scratch around in the understory, you find rusty strands of barbed wire. Beyond that, marsh-hay hummocks  hide the muddy creek where the old beaver lives on poverty wages. I come here because on a sunny Saturday, I can still find solitude despite the acute cabin-fevers of my neighbors driving them to every park and conservancy in Dane county. I’m here again because I’ve been coming to places like this since I was a boy and I still carry the things I’ve found.

There’s big-bird movement in the ash snag. It’s a yellow-bellied woodpecker, a favorite. I watch it through my binocs. It forages from one big tree to the next and I wait long enough to watch it complete a circuit of several acres to return to the same snag again.

I hear a man’s voice, and then a child’s. They’re calling out commands to a dog that won’t obey. I step deeper into the buckthorns–downslope so my outline can’t be seen. Maybe the dog will find me but I am happy to stand and be still.

I’d grow roots if I could, reaching for the sky and letting the birds and squirrels pick through my fingertips. I’d let my skin weather and furrow until I become tough and resilient. I’ll stand here and make the deer walk around me, to churn the icy mud in March. I’d stand through the seasons and watch. It’s a tractor trail that became a deer trail as the understory closed around it. You can follow it through the cut in the aspen clone to the creek until the clone closes over it again. It’s a favorite spot. Golden-crowned kinglets will come if you call to them here. But not yet.

There is no stasis. Its all in flux. Soil microbes live and die a thousand generations before the oaks reach adulthood, senesce, and release themselves again. Glaciers come and go and continents drift. The soils churn while the rains cycle and we think we understand the scale of it, but only as a hedge against the bewilderment we’d know if we were brave enough to really look. The deer feed the scavengers and the soils and me. We wait here, with our silly self-importance–tawdry kings, hording our wealth like it was ours to own. What if, like the manna, it turned rotten and wormy overnight? Would we find empathy then? Justice? How would we understand love unobscured by this bitter illusion of autonomy?

There’s plastic trash snagged in the understory tangles, carried here by winter winds and new shotgun hulls in the matted prairie. Dog shit on the trail by the mud parking lot. Microplastics and toxins fall in the rain and circulate in my own blood (and yours too, likely). Atmospheric carbon dioxide crossed 400 ppm this week and it will be warming, on average, for the rest of my life. But we sing “All things bright and beautiful” every spring–so there’s that. 

I wish I could find wisdom here. I wish I knew what to do. I wish knew what to say. I wish we could make dogwood bracelets together that way again. I wish I had something hopeful for my friends being purged from their jobs. I wish I could tell my kids it was getting better–that emissions had peaked and humanity had arced back to justice and sanity. I wish I had the ’72 Chevelle I had in high school again. I wish it weren’t so monstrously wrong now. I wish my students didn’t need to carry their heavy anxieties. I wish I could sleep through the night. 

What if you knew you’d not live to see Easter? What if your Lent was perpetual, if forty days were forty years or forty centuries. Would you eat the chocolate then? Abandon the practice? Abandon the faith? I’ve had that conversation with colleagues who teach and research at the intersection of Christian faith, ecology, and climate science.

And there by the road is my first migrant of 2025. A red-winged blackbird, a juvenile male, his pale epaulettes indicating subordinate rank. Poor bugger. Probably has no idea what he’s in for when the older males arrive and begin pushing him around. His only strategy for his offspring is to keep striving, and stay alive.