Fresh Air and Common Sense

To be honest, I don’t know wether I am a typical city dweller yearning for a quiet life in nature or not.  What I know is that I have lived in the city almost exclusively for my entire life.  About the only time I didn’t live in a city was when I was in the Navy, and then I was either on a base or on a ship, both of which could be considered small, self-contained cities on their own.

I also know this, that I love getting out into nature.  Camping, hiking, heck, even a trip to the dog park is a nice time for me, given that each is a slightly different level of “being in nature.”

Of course, nowadays, camping is not what is was years ago.  Years ago you drove out to the end of the road, picked up a backpack with all of your gear, and schlepped into the woods for at least an hour before making camp.  You carried water up from a stream, you crapped behind some bushes, and you lived rough until you returned to civilization.

Camping in the modern world is different.  You drive to a campground where you are assigned a site where you pitch your tent right next to your parked car because guerrilla camping is illegal in most states.   You bring water in bottles because you worry about contaminants from the free-flowing water in the streams and rivers.  You crap in a permanent pit toilet or even (gasp) fully-functioning bathrooms with modern plumbing,  hot water, and even showers!  Some of those campsites even offer electrical hookups so you don’t have to miss your favorite TV shows.

Even people are different now than they were years ago.  I remember as a child walking with my mother five blocks to the store with her little shopping basket, then wheeling the groceries home.  I remember running around the neighborhood with my friends, climbing trees, walking along railroad tracks and building tree houses on land that wasn’t ours, but wasn’t clearly someone else’s either, with wood we scrounged from the dumpsters behind local businesses.  I remember walking five blocks to school, until a confrontation with a local bully caused my mom to transfer me to another school where I had to ride a school bus, but that is a different story.  The point is, back in the day, we walked … alot.  And back in the day, when we walked so much, I was skinny, and  I have the photographic evidence to prove it.  It is not some delusion or fantasy.  It was real.

In my early years, my nature-centric stomping ground was an area I knew early on as “the barracks.”  It was a plot of land that had once been home to a US Army training facility and Nike Missile Base.  It eventually became known as Havenwoods State Forest, and is known to very few of the nature-deprived people of the city of Milwaukee.  Now, yes, I know that a barracks is a building, and not a plot of land.  I remember as a younger child still geographically locked to my block being able to look out my bedroom window and being able to see the old barracks buildings before they were torn down.  I am not sure when I became aware of the name “Havenwoods,” but that slice of land was very important in my early days.

First off, it was a wide open space for exploring, playing cops and robbers, cowboys and indians or what have you.  There is a creek which flows along a set of railroad tracks, and a grove of apple trees that had been planted by the city in between the Army closing it and the state taking over the land.  I remember that cutting a diagonal across the southern end of Havenwoods would reduce my walking time to the local park and public  swimming pool by about ten minutes and would take me right through that apple orchard.  After hours of swimming on a hot summer day, I would pass through those trees looking for a ripe apple for a snack on the way home.

Second off, it was a place for some very real adventures.  One time, while walking along, a friend of mine and I came upon a grass fire.  It had burned an area about a baseball diamond in size and was spreading.  We set about stomping out the flames as best we could, and after about twenty minutes, the fire department arrived and finished the job with their handheld pump water tanks.  

On another occasion, my friend and I were working on a treehouse we had built in a buckeye tree.  It was a glorious thing, consisting of two platforms in two different spots, but no walls, just some makeshift railings that wouldn’t protect anything.  My buddy Mark was scrambling up a particular branch we called the lookout branch.  It was angled in such a way that you could get about 30 feet up pretty easily, and we had both climbed it many times.  Unfortunately for Mark, a side branch gave way and he fell, landing on his back and smacking his head on the ground.  We grabbed our bikes, afraid of getting into trouble, and beat feet to his house, blood running down Mark’s back.  When we got home, we told his mom that the aforementioned neighborhood bully has been throwing rocks and hit Mark in the back of the head (hope you didn’t get into any trouble, dude).  Mark needed stitches, which instantly made him a local hero to the other kids.  

Another great adventure was when we found an open manhole.  In the middle of a mound of dirt that looked suspiciously like a volcano, we had found a manhole that had apparently had been subject to an attempt at being filled in, as it contained a mound of dirt that reached almost all the way to the top.  One could just slip under the lip of the open manhole and enter the tunnel.  It was long and dark, there were pipes along the top and various metal implements on the walls.  I was never brave enough to go out of sight of the manhole, but the tunnel extended on for quite a distance.  It was a great place to play secret agents.

Of course, thinking about those formative years led me back to Havenwoods and the old neighborhood.  I went into the ranger station and explained I was writing about my childhood there and one of the park rangers and I pored over old, faded aerial photographs of the park lands.  I told her about the old treehouse and she knew exactly which tree I was talking about, even though I had incorrectly identified it as an elm tree when talking to her.  It was the only tree in the forest that matched the physical description I gave.  She located it on an aerial photo for me, and its location matched my memory, so I grabbed my camera, leashed up my dog, and headed out in search of my childhood tree.  Now, some 30 years later, walking on a crushed limestone path, I found the tree that had been such a memorable part of my childhood.

The years had not been good to the tree.  Approaching it from what I considered to be the back, which was the side we drove railroad spikes into and ailed boards into to get up into the tree, I noticed two things right away.  First, I noticed that there was a huge gash on the back of the tree where termites or some other natural evil had befallen it.  I also noted that the lookout branch was now just a stub of its former glory.  When I returned to talk to the ranger, I was feeling slightly guilty, wondering if the damage inflicted by a couple of kids in search of adventure had hastened the noble tree’s demise.  She informed me that when she arrived at the forest in the late 1980’s, the tree was healthy and strong, and that the decline has only been over the last decade or so.  And so, as I sit here writing these words, a landmark associated with my childhood is dying, and it feels like a part of me is dying as well.

I learned other things about Havenwoods during my visit.  I learned that the site was actually a prison operated by Milwaukee County built in 1917.  The southern end of the land was the prison farm, complete with silos. The prison farm was so fruitful, the prison was completely self-sustaining, producing not only enough food to feed its own population, but also to supply other county institutions as well.  It was taken over by the Army in 1945, and in 1956, the Army added a Nike Ajax Missile site to the landscape.  The Nike base was closed a mere seven years later in 1963, and the Army closed the prison in 1969.  The buildings were demolished in 1974, and the underground facilities of the nike missile base were finally collapsed and covered over in a 1996 land reclamation project.

I also learned that the tunnel we used to play secret agent in was part of the underground steam system, where steam was piped to different parts of the facilities for heat, hot water and power.  There was even an outlet from the steam tunnels near the old buckeye tree, I used to climb as a kid, which I would have discovered on my own had I not been so chicken in the tunnel and walked it to the end.

Now, Havenwoods is a state forest where a small slice of nature is available to the children of urban Milwaukee.  It contains grasslands, woods and wetlands.  It serves as an environmental education center, and the Lincoln Creek, which flows through Havenwoods is, through a series of retention ponds, a major cog in the plan for flood control on Milwaukee’s north side.  Mostly, it is a place to learn, relax, recreate, and find your inner naturalist, right in the middle of a metropolitan area.