I’m knee deep in mud and I can’t get out. My green rubber boots are slowly filling with cold water, but it’s a welcome relief in the 96 degree heat. I grew up watching 1970s television shows that overdramatized the crisis of quicksand. This isn’t that, but still I have to get to more solid ground.
The natural bottom of a Lower Wisconsin River Valley creek, like the one I’m standing in, is rocky and sandy, but the spot where I’m pulling watercress is silted up. I am holding a huge, heavy fistful of gray watercress roots that looks like a clump of wadded up cat fur or a dead wet rat. I toss the mass up the steep bank and use the momentum to loosen myself from the mud. It doesn’t quite work, but I’m able to grab onto some young willow branches and pull myself onto a large reddish sandstone rock that’s protruding from the water. I balance there a minute and consider whether I should try to pull a stretch of rusty barbed wire out of the creek while I see it. I give it a quick tug but it’s buried thirty years deep. It’ll have to wait. These are the kinds of choices I make as I move along Brown Jug Creek, clearing it of invasive species.
That’s the main task this hot, humid Thursday evening in July of 2021: clear the creek of watercress so the water flows freely. While I’m at it, I’ll also monitor the banks and pull wild carrot and sweet clover by the roots before it goes to seed. I grew up on Missouri farmland turned to suburbia near a similar creek, but I am here now a year in the Driftless area of Wisconsin as a steward of the land, on a former dairy farm that’s been twenty years in prairie conservation.
Just an hour ago, I was on my sixth video conference call of the day, talking about how the marketing department at the nonprofit academic database where I work is falling apart. Four people quit and my boss got pushed out this past week. The Operational Excellence team led by a thin masculine Dutch woman with extremely high cheekbones who walks on a treadmill during meetings, has come in to clean things up and prioritize the work so we can create more sales leads, as if we can control the forces that want our product to be free. I call her the Terminator. What would she think if she could see me in my sweaty yellow men’s Ralph Lauren cotton button down (thrifted for three dollars) and straw hat, working in the material world?
The creek near my childhood home was too small to have a name. When it rained, water came rushing out of a cement culvert and over some huge limestone boulders that we climbed unsupervised, looking for screw-shaped fossils called crinoids that proved the whole area had all once been underwater, a warm, inland shallow sea.
Who named this Brown Jug Creek? The water is clear glass. It’s only brown if you stir up the bottom or let it get muddy in the first place. My wife Jenny and I have let it silt up because we’ve been lazy about pulling watercress in this summer’s intense heat. Our ancestors—well, not mine, I’m first generation Greek-American, though I still take the blame for the white settlers—brought the watercress here in the first place. I wonder what the Indigenous Ho-Chunk peoples called this stretch of water. Surely not brown anything. Ach, “Brown”—I suddenly realize—that’s the last name of the man who built the 1918 farmhouse where Jenny and I live. In the early 20th century, Charley and Eliza Brown owned the 200 acres that include the headwaters of the creek, a spring where the water bubbles up out of the ground all day and all night. Until now, I assumed the name of the creek was descriptive—maybe from above the creek was shaped like those brown stoneware jugs with a thumb loop used to store beer or moonshine. But duh, white people like to put their last names on things. I feel kind of naive like this a lot of the time, embarrassed by my ignorance.
We sometimes brag that if there’s an apocalypse our friends should head this way because we have clean water, a wood stove, and canned food. There are actually two springs on the parceled-off 63 acres Jenny and I “own”, whatever that means. The other is tucked under some willow trees at the southern end of the property. We’ve walked up as far as a small beaver dam, but otherwise left it alone. I rehearse the story about how this place is our climate refuge, but the truth is that I don’t believe things will get that bad in my lifetime. You think I’d feel differently after the smoke from Western wildfires clogged up our Wisconsin sky this summer, but I’ve become a master at compartmentalizing.
I share Jenny’s despair about climate change and I have been deeply afraid during the intensifying storms, but I’m here because Jenny says so. A big part of me still wishes I lived in Brooklyn and just wandered around the Botanical Garden during the early Saturday free hours, musing about the racist connotations of the phrase “invasive species.” But here I am in a front line battle against a changing landscape. I don’t want to be doing this, I say aloud to myself when things get hard, and grow angry. At Jenny for trapping me in the Midwest of my childhood. At myself for letting it happen. At my colleagues and staff for making nonprofit work unnecessarily stressful. At the misguided sense of capital “P” progress that led all of us to this futile self-defense.
Jenny and I are new here this year. We bought the property—fortuitously—at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic from a tiny white woman named Laura who’d worked the land by herself for twenty years. We’d been in contract for eight months before we closed the deal remotely the first week of April, 2020. I’m sure we looked like all the rich assholes decamping from the cities when things got rough, but choosing to actively conserve land is hard, hard work. I had no idea. We’d searched for a place like this, with freshwater, at least twenty acres, and an old farmhouse, for three years, fought about it, actually. I objected to the location, couldn’t shake the New York City real estate mantra, “location, location, location.” This place was ten miles south of where I wanted to be, just outside the safety zone of a hippie dippy town called Viroqua where we knew gay farmers. Our closest town, Blue River, Wisconsin—technically it’a a village—has 434 residents. Half of them voted for Donald Trump in the last election and spray-painted 2024 over Pence’s name after he lost and the January insurrection didn’t succeed. Only one house has a Black Lives Matter sign, and the only store in town, which is part junk shop, part head shop, part tackle shop, sells confederate flags. If you Google hard you can find a long letter online from one local who objects.
Laura left because she was tired. And she needed to be closer to doctors. She loved the place and took the work seriously. She even wrote into the sales contract that she’d train us at least once a month for the first year. Work days. It was Laura who taught us what the creek bed should look like. Laura who told the story of pulling twenty-feet wide blankets of watercress by hand for months to get the creek in the shape it’s in. I don’t want to fuck it up. Laura found arrowheads in this creek. But all I see is rusty, discarded farm equipment, tractor tires, and endless weeds, plants they tell me I’m supposed to pull because they don’t belong here. They. I use that pronoun to signal obligation a lot.
I jump up onto the long grassy bank of the creek, bravely as if I’m not afraid of snakes. On dry ground I wave a stick to warn the critters that I'm about to make a sudden move, but a stick can be a liability in this soft earth. Instead I carry a shovel they call the Parsnip Predator because it does double duty. It’s got a sharp U-shaped blade you can use to slice through the thick tap roots of poisonous parsnip, wild carrot, sweet clover, or burdock growing horizontally out of the bank. Most of these invasive species are biennials, so you pull them up when you can or slice the root an inch below the ground to keep them from spreading. It usually feels like a losing battle. I bend down to pick up the spray-painted-Day-Glo-orange-so-it’s-easy-to-find shovel where I’ve dropped it and prepare myself. I have to go further up the creek, dig deeper into the brush, but I am scared of what I’ll find there and vaguely worried that some part of me will disappear there forever. I’ll give this place five years. I once was an urban explorer and now I’m lost in the woods.
Of course, this isn’t the witch-thick forest you read about in a fairytale. I am surrounded by green, fast-growing trees and shrubs—buckthorn and black locust and honeysuckle—relentlessly spreading along the banks of the stream. The trunks bow out over the water and form a canopy of shade. That’s one good thing about creek work—it’s cooler on a blazing hot day to follow the water and the shade, to work roots out of wet ground, even if it means no one can see you if you get into trouble. And truly, ironically, it’s beautiful.
Along the banks lay the decomposing trunks of cottonwood and box elder, covered in leathery sage green lichen and tiny white mushrooms, poison ivy and wild grape vines with fruit too seedy to turn into wine. The hollowed out cavities of the dead trees house wrens and woodpeckers, ground squirrels that make outsized monstrous noises and, I like to pretend, elusive owls. Dense tangles of deliberately-felled branches and thin trunks of buckthorn and autumn olive—the woody invasives, overgrown and hidden now by weeds—trip me every five feet where Laura left them last winter. There are so many places for badgers and whippoorwills, coyotes and possums to hide. I don’t yet know enough about these animals to know where they actually nest, but I am convinced they’re busy watching me make my way towards I don’t know what. The frogs plop into the water ahead of me. The imaginary snakes slither under the lip of land that forms a four-inch shelf over the water. The ubiquitous red-winged blackbirds warn me not to get too close to their kin. The gray catbirds—the robins of the country—are just a little too friendly. Why won’t they just shut up?
Beneath the scrubby invasives, I am alone with my fear and my changing sense of self. What am I doing here? Do I really want to preserve the prairie? Am I ruined for the city? What if Jenny and I break up because I’m lonely and have no extramarital friends? Can a liberal, lesbian extrovert make it in Trumpland without a community? Does anyone have a community anymore? Why can’t I settle in and settle down, stop telling Jenny how much I miss New York City? Is New York City really what I miss? Or do I just miss my younger insouciant self? What am I doing here?
I’m ruining my marriage, that’s what. Depression soft and thick as the mud we’ve let settle at the bottom of the stream sucks me down into dark thoughts I believe at my core to be true. That I’m a mediocre dilettante. A bad friend, incapable in my middle age of intimacy. Scattered, fat, unwell. My mind is a sieve. I grasp at phrases I’ve heard other people say to explain my shattering soul, my ego on grotesque display. But I can’t make this dissolution stop.
To sooth and amuse myself as I make my way up the creek, I recite this line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,”: “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Can the assonance of poetry save me from myself? T.S. Eliot is so out of fashion, so elitist, so utterly racist, but his words spoke to me when I was twenty-three, as if I knew a thing about middle age. At fifty-three these lines are an atheist’s prayer. Let me live through this work day, this stretch of creek.
Catherine is a writer and editor in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Pocket Myths, Behind a Door, and poetryfoundation.org. She lives with her wife in the Driftless region of Wisconsin where they are restoring the prairie and working on a book of dueling essays about their small town gays version of Green Acres.
Photo by Deva Darshan