[In addition to the poems featured in our chapbook, we are pleased to present work from Indiana writers on the Human/Nature theme.
Read more about the chapbook here.]
But Why Would You Take Us Someplace That Could Kill Us?
Greg Schwipps
The metal sign’s enough to make me nervous – the white sign posted high on the rigid four-by-four showing the dramatic red circle, and within it, the black silhouette figure sailing over the black cliff into the white abyss. The Nature Conservancy has staked the sign by the trail maybe fifty yards before the edge of the cliffs. I don’t remember the sign being there. I do remember the cliffs as being real enough – I don’t care if we’re in Indiana and not Arizona or Utah: the trail leads through the woods to the sandstone cliffs that drop precipitously maybe a hundred feet.
It’s a warm Sunday in December, and I have both boys to myself. Their mother is at work. She knows I’m taking them hiking, but she doesn’t know where. I have only a vague sense of this, myself.
I’m leading the way down the trail, so I see the sign first. Like any good parent, I see this as an opportunity to both catch my breath and lecture a little bit. I point to the sign. The image has the desired effect. Their eyes go big. Milan is seven and Arlo is six. They are wearing knit hats on their heads and hooded sweatshirts.
“Okay,” I say. “Look here. Eyes on me, guys.” This is how I talk to them. Especially if their mother isn’t around. Man talk. All eye contact and short sentences. They know it’s coming and humor me. Above us the deciduous trees are leafless. It’s early December and just warm enough to be outside without winter coats. A cabin fever day.
“This hike is no joke,” I say. We’ve been hiking through the woods for nearly a half mile by this point. We just jumped ten whitetails and the boys each have a walking stick they’ve been using as lightsabers. The hike has been, if not a joke, a romp. Very little elevation and all downhill so far. Arlo has just spent ten minutes beating a brush pile with his lightsaber. They’ve chased each other down the trail like banshees. Yeah, it’s been a joke, and a fun one. I need to get their attention.
“Okay, guys. Listen. Up here? Where we’re going next? There are cliffs? And these cliffs? They are no joke!” I try to read the boys faces. They aren’t serious enough. I play the ace in the hole card.
“Boys, people have died here,” I say.
“What?!” Arlo asks. “People are dead here?!”
“Not now,” I say. “A long time ago. A guy died. He fell off this cliff. He was careless.” I am pretty sure this is correct. I am almost positive that I have heard that this really happened.
Both boys swivel their heads around, trying to see ahead down the trail.
“Why would you take us someplace that could kill us?” Arlo wants to know.
It’s a fair question.
***
I had first visited Fern Cliff in Putnam County, Indiana, sometime in the mid-nineties. Back then, it was designated a National Natural Landmark, and had been since 1980. I was a college student then, studying in nearby Greencastle, at DePauw University. College buddies and I had driven out to Fern Cliff several times. Oddly, even though I had returned to teach at DePauw and had been on the English Department faculty for over twenty years, I had never gone back.
So I honestly couldn’t recall how high the cliffs were. How dangerous were they, truly? Had someone died falling from them? I didn’t know. Maybe. A Google search didn’t reveal anything. But I wanted to show the boys something new, and when early December weather breaks in your favor after a long nasty stretch of a wet cold winter, sometimes you have to learn by doing.
The Nature Conservancy, as a worldwide organization, has protected over 119 million acres of land, according to their website. The group has been doing this work since 1951, working in seventy-two countries, and in all fifty states. They’ve protected over 100,000 acres in Indiana, including the 157 acres that make up Fern Cliff. It’s free and open to the public. I had parked in a small gravel lot off of a gravel road marked only by a sign noting the history and the work of the Nature Conservancy.
What to make of such work? Of course, the Nature Conservancy accepts donations. But it’s not taxpayer funded. I think many visitors to places like Fern Cliff assume it’s like a state park – they think their tax dollars are paying for it. It’s not true. The Nature Conservancy is a nonprofit organization – it’s a charity. In reality, very few of our wild places are supported by taxpayer dollars. People either choose to donate to causes like the Nature Conservancy, or they willingly pay a tax, in the form of fishing or hunting licenses, or they buy their state’s environmental license plates for their cars. (In Indiana, blue environmental license plate sales since 1992 have allowed for the purchase and conservation of nearly 100,000 acres of land.) By purchasing hunting and fishing licenses, states qualify for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service federal funds through what is called the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program. In 2018, Indiana got about $18.1 million this way. This money, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website, is intended for everything from land and habitat acquisition and improvement, to fish and game research and improved access for boaters and the public in general.
The thing is, growing up as I did on nearly two hundred acres of farmland that we owned in southeastern Indiana, I never worried about access. I worried about poachers. I worried about trespassers. If I worried about access as a young man, it was about others accessing our property.
Things change. Now I live over a hundred miles away from my family land. My two brothers and my aging parents are in charge of monitoring it. My dad, at seventy-five, still farms row crops and raises beef cattle, but he has officially named my younger brother Farm Manager, and that makes sense – my younger brother is a District Soil Conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His day job is to help landowners implement programs to improve habitat and control erosion. He and my older brother help my dad run our farm, and I go down with my boys and help on some weekends.
That home farm matters a great deal to me, but I can’t access it any time I want. Not on a warm December afternoon when my wife is working and the boys are threatening to tear the house apart. That’s when I need public land close by. That’s when I need access to Nature Conservancy land.
It took me becoming a parent to understand the true value of public land. My wife buys a fishing license, even though she doesn’t fish, because that money supports fish, lakes and the green spaces around lakes. I had to move away from home to see the worth in preserving wild spaces for all. These are some of the facts of my life.
***
I don’t think the boys feel scared by my lecture. They feel energized. Ready to face the cliffs of death. The charge down the trail and I right behind them.
Fern Cliff does not disappoint. We find ourselves on the top of sandstone cliffs, looking out over wooded ravines. I am doing that dance I do all the time now – I am trying to try to grab two boys at once, trying to keep up. The trail leads from one drop-off to another, and at any time, a cut will appear underfoot, leading dangerously to the floor of the ravine. Some of these cuts are a foot wide, some are partially hidden by fallen leaves.
There is a creek running through the valley below, and I know my initial plan of staying on top of the cliffs is doomed. If the boys see water, they will go to it. I stall them with the only thing that works.
We eat goldfish and graham crackers sitting on a fallen log with the sounds of the wind moving through the bare trees. Below us the creek flows like a silver ribbon. Somewhere beyond that a county road lays like another ribbon, this one of gravel and mud. Beyond even that, a hog farm rests up on a hill. A dog barks. The farmer starts his truck and goes about his chores. But we’re here, up on Fern Cliff, and we’re in the middle of 157 protected, preserved acres. In the middle of summer, the leaves would block the sights and the sounds of the road, the farm.
But none of that is bothering us now, anyway. We’re happy to be out of the house. We’re enjoying the air and it feels like we’re on the edge of a great precipice.
“I like these cliffs,” Milan says.
“Let’s head down to the creek,” Arlo says.
“We’re going slowly,” I say.
And so we do. We spend another hour kicking around the creek. We discover the moss-covered concrete foundations of an ancient factory, now completely taken back over by the woods by the creek. Of all things, this the foundation of the Root Glass Company, what was once a thriving quarry that shouldered sand out of nearby Snake Creek.
According to the book Our Past, Their Present, by John Baughman, the Root Glass Company originally bought these 160 acres in the early 1900’s to use the sand for glass making.
A lot of the sand went by rail car (the train tracks weren’t far away) to Terre Haute, where much of the sand was turned into glass for the original Coke bottles in 1915. And because this sand from Fern Cliff and Snake Creek minerals incidentally made green bottles, Coca-Cola bottles have had that trademarked greenish tint ever since.
Eric Bernsee, Editor of the Banner Graphic, the local newspaper in Greencastle, writes in a November 21, 2011, article: “In its heyday, the Fern Cliffs quarry reportedly operated day and night, winter and summer. For about a 10-year period, the Root Co. took some 20,000 tons of sandstone a year out of the Putnam County site. Incidentally, the existence of Fern Cliffs has been traced back nearly 200 million years with the geological formations there said to once be the shore of an inland sea. It was also known to have been the home of a Shawnee Indian tribe in the 1800’s.”
Right now, my boys are climbing on these stone foundations, remnants of this factory which once stood several stories tall – a veritable campus in the woods designed to grind stone and sand out of the earth. Some of the foundations are square, others a perfect circle. It’s easy to imagine the buildings rising from them. Yet no roads or even paths to or from them remain. The men who toiled in them year round, like the Shawnee who were here long before them, are long gone. We are the only humans in the woods today.
Eventually, the boys will tire. We will make our way back to the bowl of the ravine at the base of Fern Cliff. Standing at the bottom of the cliff is like standing at the foot of a skyscraper. The boys will pause and look up, touching the vertical walls.
I have forgotten how we came down.
No matter. Milan decides that we will climb up one of these chutes, a chasm maybe two feet wide between two giant slabs of stone. Under our feet is nothing but slippery clay and mud. Verdant green ferns. The namesake.
The higher we climb, going nearly vertically now, the chasm narrows. The boys are ahead of me, and nearly overhead. I keep thinking they will stop. They are climbing through the chute, grabbing roots, handfuls of mud. I am reaching overhead, pushing their feet, their butts. Pushing them up. They don’t stop. They keep climbing up.
As we get close to the top of Fern Cliff, the cut narrows and now my shoulders are rubbing on both sides. I am in danger of getting stuck. My feet are falling out from under me. I am afraid at this point the boys will climb out on top of Fern Cliff again, and I will be stuck in this chute. Or I will fall to the bottom again, forced to go around the bottom of the ravine. Then they’ll surely fall from the top, looking for me.
I climb and pull as hard as I can. I can’t not make it.
Arlo pops out first. If someone had been standing on the trail, it would have looked like the earth was giving birth to a dirty child. And then another! Milan climbs up, pulling himself free from the cut with his elbows. Finally, I am out, huffing and puffing.
“Don’t fall off now,” I say. We are back on top of Fern Cliff. We can see the treetops, the creek down below. The wind whistles by our ears. It’s later in the day now, the air softer. It’s much cooler.
We are filthy, but the boys pose for a picture by the falling man sign. They make exaggerated faces. Oh my! No one fell today, their faces say.
And with that, we begin the longish walk out. We leave behind the quiet cliffs, the green ferns, the scarred mud scratches where our boots clawed for traction. No matter. Rain will heal those scars.
We walk and leave those cliffs behind. We leave those old foundations behind. The sand and the stone that those men toiled for over a century ago. Somewhere, too, if we had dug long enough, we might have found the arrowheads or the corn grinders of the Shawnee. Their spirits. Fossils of the mammoths. Mosasaurus teeth.
We go back to the waiting truck, and the simple sign that says, keep this land like it is, right now. Preserve it. Hold this dear.
Back to Human/Nature writing.
Read more about the Human/Nature chapbook here.