A Conservationist Manifesto

Limberlost

Limberlost It is my belief that to do strong work any writer must stick to the things he truly knows, the simple, common things of life as he has lived them. So I stick to Indiana. —Gene Str atton-Porter \ W ith a startled scrawk and a fluster of wings, a great blue heron lurches into the air and goes flapping away, legs trailing behind like the tail of a kite. The bird’s hasty exit roils the muddy broth of a pond where it was feeding. Ignoring the commotion, a pair of coots and a clutch of mallards cruise on among the cattails and rushes. A part of me older than my own body wakes and stirs. The man who has led me to the lip of this pond grins broadly, for Ken Brunswick delights in the company of birds and gathered water. For more than a century, this glacial pothole and the surrounding lowlandsweredrainedbyanetworkofditchesandburiedpipesknown as tiles. Water gathers here now because some of those tiles have been plugged and some ditches have been filled, thanks to the efforts of Brunswick and a few hundred other dedicated people, all of them inspired , directly or indirectly, by the books of Gene Stratton-Porter, a best-selling author who flourished here on the eastern edge of Indiana a hundred years ago. She lured me to this place by her photographs and words. I have come to Loblolly Marsh to see a remnant of the vast, magnificent, vanished wetland that Stratton-Porter made known to readers around the world—the Limberlost Swamp. As a writer, I have alsocomeheretoseehowwordsonapagecanmovecitizenstoreclaim a portion of their neighborhood for water and wildness. \ Ken Brunswick first saw this low ground covered in a sheet of water following a hard rain back in the spring of 1976, soon after he moved into a farmhouse on a nearby ridge. The sight of so much blue spread across the bottomland made him glad, even though he regretted the trouble for his neighbor, whose plowing would be delayed. “Seeing all that water,” Brunswick tells me when I visit him on the site of the flood a quarter of a century later, “I knew I had come to a blessed place.” Caring for Home Ground 146 The place is in Jay County, Indiana, along the border with Ohio. Lay a ruler on the straight boundary that divides the two states, slide your finger to the halfway mark, and you’ll be pointing at the spot where I talk with Brunswick on a windy, sultry, voluptuous day in May. Thanks to the glaciers, the land hereabouts is gently rolling, like a moderate sea. All over the countryside, tractors are tilling and spraying and seeding. In swales the freshly turned soil is the color of coffee grounds, but on the crowns of uplands erosion has bleached the soil to thecolorofwholewheatbread. Everyfieldisbackedbyastandoftrees. Ahardwoodforestcoveredthisregionbeforeitwasclearedforfarming, and the trees would come back swiftly if the fields were left fallow. That margin of wildness drew Brunswick and his wife across the border from Ohio to start a dairy farm here in Jay County. “Iliketoseesomethinggrowingbesidescowsandcrops,” Brunswick tells me. He’s midway through his fifties now, husky, with sun creases about the eyes, thick white hair, a gray moustache, and a ready smile. As we talk, his head swivels every time a bird flies past, and his voice pauses at every whistle and call. “I always used to say I wanted to be an ornithologist when I grew up,” Brunswick recalls. “Folks raised their eyebrows, wondering how I’d ever feed a family.” He fed his family, and fed many other families, by milking a herd of Holsteins morning and evening, seven days a week, for fifteen years— a long labor that shows in the muscles of his forearms, which are bare on this balmy day. A decade ago he gave up milking cows for restoring wetlands, first on his own farm, which we can see on a rise to the south of us, and now here on these acres that straddle Loblolly Creek. He still wears a farmer’s scuffed leather boots and weathered jeans, but his khaki shirt and matching ball cap bear the logo of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, which hired him to oversee the recovery of this marsh. Limberlost 147 His affection for the sight of water gathering in pools makes him...