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Lost and found

Natural History, March, 2003 by Beth A. Middleton

My father always knew just which direction he wanted to go and how he wanted to get there. Of course he did have a secret: he and his truck never left the secure confines of the dairy country south of Lodi, Wisconsin. He drove the back roads of Dane County in a big Ford F-150 pickup on his rounds, delivering tractor oil to the farmers and carrying pesticides back to our own place--the same pesticides that probably caused his kidney cancer. I marveled at how he never got lost.

I have fond memories of wandering our farm, bringing my father his lunch during the spring field work. On his infrequent breaks he taught me--as his mother had taught him--the names of the plants and animals that tenaciously clung to the wild nooks and crevices of our land. My farm background turned out to be excellent training for my adult occupation as a wetlands ecologist and environmentalist.

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After my father died, I rescued his truck from our dirt-floor garage. Its back bumper, which had taken the brunt of many an unloaded oil barrel, drooped as forlornly as the tail of a dog that's lost its master. The cab still smelled vaguely of farm animals and cigar smoke. I fixed it up and made it my own.

The pickup had been the perfect vehicle for my father, but it raised eyebrows and drew surprised comments from my colleagues in Carbondale when I self-consciously parked it next to their Toyotas and Hondas in the faculty parking lot of Southern Illinois University. "It was my dad's" I told them, as though that would explain everything.

One day I drove the truck out of comfortable, rural southern Illinois and into the city of Saint Louis. I was driving alone, with no one sitting beside me to read the map, and memorized the route before entering the city. But on my way back, I missed a turnoff on the interstate and suddenly found myself in heavy traffic on a highway unknown to my mental map. I tried to find a place to pull off and study my Rand McNally, but all the exits led to abandoned buildings and blighted industrial complexes.

Few urbanites understand the panic the city brings on in country bumpkins. If we get lost, we risk being blinded by fright. We have no survival skills for the city. John Muir, America's most famous country bumpkin, grew up on a farm not far from my parents' place. So Muir and I were both products of the same rural landscape. When the obstacle of Louisville stood in Muir's way during his famous thousand-mile walk, he navigated the city with his compass and talked to no one.

Now here I was on an unknown highway, surely headed into the city's most treacherous section, and all I had to guide me out of danger were my farmer's instincts--the legacy of generations of people living close to nature. My father had taught me to love the land, hate the politics. Surely there was something in that philosophy to guide me out of this heart of darkness called Saint Louis.

Cars and trucks hurtled by at amazing speeds. Go east, drive to the river, my ancestors shouted--just when my brain was millimeters away from stone-cold shutdown and my heart was pounding like a half-killed rabbit going into shock. And so I steered my dad's truck along a course that followed no map except the faint natural marks of the land. I drove east, away from the sun. The road began to slope toward the river. My heart pounded less; my head cleared. The blighted city gave way to cranes and riverside loading equipment and then, there were the Mississippi and the Gateway Arch to Illinois. I drove across some bridge and soon found myself in the farm country east of Saint Louis. The wheels of my dad's truck hummed beneath me. I was safely on my way back home.

Beth A. Middleton is now a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wetlands Research Center in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Lost and found

Natural History, March, 2003 by Beth A. Middleton

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