The big old soft maple tree

About a mile from my childhood home flowed the Onion River, the water turgid with clay, cow manure and urine. Occasional sections were wooded but much of the wetland near to the river was used as heifer pasture. Abused would be a better word. Over the years much of the trampled riparian zone had been “left to nature” and was covered with willow and marsh grasses.

The only home for most wildlife was the area under and around a solitary, remaining oak, elm or maple tree. These trees, often located on a curve, held the soil from eroding the trampled banks; they were a young fur-trapper’s dream. One of them, known to our family as The Fabulous Tree, was a stopping point for every muskrat, mink and raccoon scuttling along looking for riverside cover. When it finally toppled, that riverside was just plain barren of wildlife.

Permission to fell a tree

This reminds me of another Tree. The Big, Old Soft Maple Tree was on my brother’s property near the confluence of Beet Creek and the Onion River. Like every other tree on the shores of Beet Creek it was felled to increase Beet Creek’s flow (or seepage) by the drainage commission which had legal authority to do so.

Through circumstance, intention, and legislation, the main stem of the Onion River has made quite a strong recovery since my childhood. But Beet Creek, one of its tributaries, continues to suffer from human ideas of progress. At some point it was used as a dump for cannery wastes and sewage disposal for the village of Belgium, but it also has been channelized and dredged for years for the purposes of gaining more ground for corn and to flow into and feed the Onion River.

The question we would raise today is, of course, whether water should be forced to run “against its will”. It is not even certain that clearing the riparian zone of Beet Creek will, in fact, improve drainage.

Costs of progress

This Tree was seven feet in diameter, with about 120 annual rings. It would have germinated when my grandfather was a child in about 1904. It stood in the way of what people call progress. But for generations of insects, birds, animals and human beings, the Tree was far grander than any dream of progress.

Although I live far away now from Beet Creek, Wisconsin, I lament the loss of this Tree, a victim of human desire to control nature for humanity’s benefit. I understand a little about poverty-stricken pioneering settlers who were scraping by, trying to make a living. I understand that sometimes such a stressful life doesn’t allow time for thinking through long-range “seven-generation” consequences. But I don’t understand the ongoing ignorance of what we now know as the importance of riparian zones.

Perhaps it is not ignorance but denial, or neglect or greed. More likely, in my opinion, the idol of technological control has blinded people who attend church on Sundays and sing “This Is My Father’s World” while going to work on Mondays and destroying the world. And in particular, this Big Old Soft Maple Tree.