Lasting impacts

Heading towards the eastern edges of the Meramec River Hills, winding roads take a driver past deeply dissected dolomite and limestone hills associated with clear, fast moving creeks and rivers. Oak woodlands dominate here, punctuated periodically with old fields and cattle pastures; only a small fraction of the landscape is publicly owned.


This region is home to one of the largest prairie fen complexes in the Ozark Highlands, in acreage nearly as expansive as Grasshopper Hollow, the largest unglaciated fen in North America. Unfortunately, for many years, trucks and ATVs used the fen as a playground, causing serious damage to the flora and the hydrology. Much of the damage here occurred over 30 years ago, but the impacts are evident even today.

Stepping out into the rich, grassy prairie fen, one can notice undulations in the landscape--deep wallows where ATV operators and truck drivers rutted the land. Massive soil erosion occurred here during that time, and the foot deep ruts have permanently changed the natural water flow, causing wilting to occur throughout the fen despite the recent rain events. Long rivulets of water fill the ATV tracks in the fen, whereas historically, water fanned out across the whole area, thus supplying the grasses, orchids, and wildflowers like Queen of the Prairie with a constant water source.

In a valiant effort to repair the damage that occurred between 30 and 10 years ago, my colleague placed cedar logs wrapped in wood-based erosion control matting in the ruts to slow the flow of water and further erosion. Months after the waterbars were placed here, soil has accumulated and small tufts of sedges and grasses have colonized the ruts; the rivulets continue to flow at a very fast pace, shunting water away from the undamaged section of the fen.

The wide creek that separates two distinct sections of the fen, officially designated as a State Outstanding Resource Waterway, suffers today from a significant pollution problem, likely caused by malfunctioning septic systems on the adjacent ridgetop or the introduction of cattle into the creek. The highly nitrogenous water so filled with yellow foam and green cyanobacteria that none of us wanted to cross here, separated us from the small pink splotches of orchids. Each of breathed deeply and tried stepping on less slimy rocks to cross the creek.


Very unlike the opposite side of the creek, this side of the fen looked like an eroded glade--exposed rock, gravelly substrate, small areas of vegetation perched on islands of soil averaging one foot tall. No waterbars or other erosion control solutions would ever work here, the landscape so severely damaged by truck and ATV traffic that the diverse fen flora barely holds on for life, clinging to the disjunct patches of soil. But it was on this side that I saw the last blooms of this year's grass pink orchid (Calopogon tuberosus), known from only a handful of locations in Missouri. Rhynchospora grows here, too, always a very exciting plant for fen lovers. A large population of Queen of the Prairie grows here, though I missed the showy blooms.

And yet, this area once had a regular, constant water source, and probably 5 feet of soil covering the area. It was undoubtedly mantled in a rich grass-forb layer, vegetation apparently so inviting to ATV operators and truck drivers that it was seriously damaged almost 30 years ago, never to recover.

Stepping off the fen, (happy to see the waterbars working, though recognizing it will take a decade for noticeable repair) we realize that even ten years from now, the rutted, unnaturally undulating landscape will always remain, the hydrology never to return to the pre-damaged state.

But positive impacts occurred here recently, too, including a big prescribed fire earlier this year and a thinning project in the 1980s that opened the woodland enough for ample light to reach the floor. Beautiful, grassy woodlands and biodiverse glades host plants such as an enormous gentian whose flower stalk almost reached my shoulder.

A charming wilderness footpath leads the hiker through these managed woodlands along a curving trail for several miles, until we reached this:

An equestrian trail hooks up to the footpath, and for the next two miles, we walked the ridgetop because frequent equestrian use during wet weather has turned the hiking trail into a mud pit the width of Hwy. 19. It has been widely pronounced that when trails are opened to horses, a certain level of "acceptable degradation" is to be expected. I think we've passed that point on this trail, and I can't fathom how or when the trail will return to the narrow, single-file trail that allow hikers to feel a sense of solitude in the natural world. Equestrian users of this trail were asked whether they would support trail closures during wet weather, and overwhelmingly they said "no." One even said that "the definition of 'wet' is different for everyone."

Having witnessed such extreme and irreparable damage on the fen, the creek and the trail system in the Meramec River Hills, I found myself thinking of the site of my bird survey, to the 3,000 managed acres that now have a serious deer problem impacting the biodiversity of the woodlands. I just wanted to go home, to my vegetable garden and backyard woodland over which I have some sense of control.

Between the Andys

Many years ago, I was a young voter in Louisiana. In one of my first gubernatorial elections as a registered voter, I was given the choice between the populist Edwin Edwards who put the operating budget of the state of Louisiana on the blackjack table at the Sands in Las Vegas and David Duke, the grand poobah of the KKK, a candidate who promised "re"segregation of Louisiana and a secession from the Union. I voted for Edwards because I grew up with pictures of him holding me as a child, of my dad shaking his hand, of Edwards conducting my dad's show band, and all of Edwards cronies sitting around a big table at Shreveport's Kon Tiki with egregious drinks covered in umbrellas and pineapple slices. Edwards was a nice guy, he didn't want to kill black people like the other guy did, so I voted for him. At least Edwards funded school lunch programs and rural education. Until Edwards was in office, many schools in rural Louisiana didn't even have air conditioning. My school didn't have it until 1983.

The gubernatorial election pitted two questionable characters against one another, and I voted for the most harmless of the two (despite how opposed I was to his welfare reform policies and his gambling addiction that threatened the state bursar).

And so, today, sidled up at Flat Branch in Columbia's fine but unsustainable downtown, I found myself rooting for a guy I can't stand, a tennis player who loves himself too much and possibly has an issue with anger management. A Roddick-Mrurray match, following a graceful Federer-Haas match that ended before my viewing option opened for business.

Reasons why I wanted Roddick to win:
I would like to see Federer destroy him on the court in the finals.
I would like for him to realize that to play tennis effectively, he needs to stop appearing like he's on cocaine with his frequent, manic adjustments on his shirts and caps and nose.
I would like for him to feel that he has a chance of success and have that chance crushed by a much better tennis player so that maybe he'll look deep within and realize that he needs more to his game than simple brawn.

Reasons why I wanted Murray to win:
Despite the annoying flexing of his muscle and his yelling to no one in particular when he makes a point, he's a decent player.
Murray is versatile, and his backhand sluice is capable.
Apparently he forgot that there was a net between his side and Roddick's, yet I hoped that he would recognize the net and hit the ball over rather than into it.
I'd have liked to have seen two interesting players pitted against one another in the finals on Sunday.

Alas, I'm stuck with a Roddick-Federer match, which is the equivalent of a tricked out black monster truck without a muffler but with orange and yellow flames on the side battling it out with a 1960 dark blue Mercedes Benz sedan, the model used for taxicabs in Germany in the 1970s-80s. I want the Mercedes to win. And I'd like the tricked out monster truck with no other skill than power to hit hard to break a strut, to fold under the pressure of skill and elegance, to collapse under the grace of real tennis, to recognize that American men's tennis belongs in the garbage. If Roddick wins Wimbledon, it will be because of his brawn rather than his skill. And frankly, its unsustainable, sloppy, and not worthy of record keeping because it's likely an artifact of artificial strength. Sort of like Serena's.

What is this? 1970?

So, when my last boss instructed me to "sit there and just look pretty because that's why we hired you," I was floored, outraged, and took it as his way of saying "just be quiet and don't cause a ruckus." I was convinced that he was an anomaly in today's world. Alas, Britian's Daily Mail just posted a downright terrible article about women's tennis, good looks and Centre Court at Wimbledon:

"Babe, set and match: How looks count for more than talent when they decide which girls will play on Centre Court

When it comes to choosing which women play on Centre Court, good looks count for more than big shots."

Ah, that's sick. Read the article here.

It's "cut AND burn..."

All across the White River Hills scores of volunteers, staff and Americorps crews spend their winter months clearing cedars off of hundreds of acres of glades each year. A noble cause, trying to restore the landscape to a semblance of what it was before cattle grazed the proverbial snot out of the land (which is precisely what one agency in Missouri is allowing to happen on high quality prairie remnants in the Osage Plains). Following the grazing of the 1930s when literally millions of domestic livestock chomped their way through the Ozark Highlands, Eastern red cedar popped up all over the place, forming impenetrable masses on glades and in woodlands. Many cedars were subsequently harvested for fence building purposes, but without a regular fire return interval on the glades, cedars returned to the scene after that initial removal, and many remain there today.

Glades are pretty sexy to landscape ecologists and botanists: they harbor restricted plant species, restricted animals like Eastern collared lizards who depend on wide swaths of glades for their life histories. Virtually every glade has its own character based on substrate, hydrology, plant dominance, past land abuse. Some glades have a natural shrub layer component--small areas with shrubby oaks that repeated fires knock back, but never kill. These areas perform a vital role for the breeding bird populations.

Glades twenty miles apart from one another can have rather different suites of plants: calamint a ground cover at one, not even documented at another, and so forth. Early explorers and land surveyors describe glades as "barrens," with "land open, rocky, thinly timbered. Unfit for cultivation." Of course, surveyors invariably fail to reflect on the veritable wildflower gardens they stumbled upon when they reached a glade in the Ozarks. They weren't paid to do so.

And so, in an effort to restore these rich, dynamic pieces of our state's natural history, we cut cedars. Thousands of cedars each year. Some are cut by contractors who sell the logs (and sometimes leave behind a mess of branches), while others are cut and piled into windrows awaiting a conflagration. (In the early days of cedar clearing projects, cedars were piled into massive heaps; when the heaps burned, soil below would bake to the point of sterilization. I think most folks are piling in windrows these days. I hope so, anyway.). If you miss the stage when the cedar needles have turned red and instead grown gray, the cut cedars don't burn as well. Glades all over the Ozarks are littered with big slash piles of cedar debris from restoration projects because of this timing issue.

But I can deal with bare slash. It's unsightly, no doubt, but glade vegetation can grow around and through bare cedar logs and branches. With enough fires, the slash will eventually disappear.

A harder pill to swallow is what I've seen five times this season on different project areas in the southwestern Ozarks: large areas cleared of cedars, yes, but rather than bands of glades resembling 1930s aerial photos and survey record descriptions, dense stands of even-aged hardwoods forming thickets a turkey can't break through. Redbud, Carolina buckthorn, various oak species grow in a fast flush when light is made available from cedar cutting exercises in this part of the state. It seems that managers in charge of these areas are forgetting a rather pertinent aspect of glade restoration--in the early stages, implementation of frequent fires to knock back the sprouts. Oh, there may be patches of high quality glade vegetation mixed among the sprouts, but glade tiger beetles can't live there, fire mediated plant species can't thrive there, and greater roadrunners won't be able to break through the thickets there.

There's a turning point in glade (and woodland) restoration where the structure of the landscape is in place and fires maintain rather than restore a given area. Unfortunately, for some of these glade restoration projects in the Ozarks, managers will have to push the fire prescription, send really raging hot fires through the project area to knock back the sprouts; and in some cases, they'll have to go back out there, chop down the sprouts, stump treat with herbicide, and then, maybe then, they'll burn frequently enough to reach the desired condition.

When we came up to a large area under restoration and beheld -not a landscape in the early stages of restoration, but a wave of oak sprouts and 12 ft. tall redbuds with a few rogue glade plants toughing it out for light, my colleague exclaimed, "good lord, what a mess! Where's the fire?!"

Yawn

"You're in the seventh level of Dante's Hell right now..." Doug tells me as I rest my forehead on my wrist. Sidled up at Flat Branch for another day of tennis, NBC shows their personal bias towards American men's tennis and I'm stuck watching a point by point ace game between Roddick and Meltzer. Each time Meltzer tries to bring Roddick to the net, America's one dimensional player slams the ball to the baseline, never stepping foot anywhere near the net.

Boring tennis. Anyone suffering through the Roddick-Meltzer match today must be stronger than I am. I instead turned away from the match after the umpteenth ace and listened to Peter's story of finally meeting the 75 year old guy who regularly steals the bar's copy of The New York Times, a meeting which involved Peter's engaging with the thief. Peter confronted the old man, explaining that the newspaper is regularly read by several very regular patrons and the bartenders, now knowing why the newspaper disappears everyday around 2, have come to recognize the old man and have started hiding The New York Times from him. It's sad it's come to that, of course, but sadder still that better matches weren't aired while I had no obligations to a paying job on a Saturday.

At sunset (9:33)

My heart broke for Sharapova at the end of the third set on Wednesday. As someone who fights against injuries before they are properly healed, often with disastrous results, I knew she wasn't very happy with her game: she wasn't strong enough, not fast enough, her serve lacked the velocity it had pre-injury. Granted, she's a better hard court player to begin with, but she just hasn't recovered from her surgery in time for Wimbledon. Obviously, she's not very happy that she tanked at the French Open (but she's never been great on clay, either) and now on grass, but she's pretty sure she'll be ready for the US Open in August. From her post match interview:

Q. What have you learned here about how far you have to come back to your best level?
MARIA SHARAPOVA: Uhm, it's tough to assess what I learned 30 minutes after losing the match. Uhm, especially when you have a few opportunities, and, you know, not playing your best tennis, but then, you know, feeling like you still have many chances in the match.
It's difficult to assess, you know, what I could have done. You know, it's too late now to assess that. But just move forward. And, you know, this is not an overnight process. It's gonna take time, as much time as it needs, as much time as I need on the court, you know, to get everything together.
As much time as it needs, I'm ready for it.

Q. How close are you to getting back to the level you want to be at? How far away from it does this match tell you you are?
MARIA SHARAPOVA: I don't know. I don't really know. I mean, I'd honestly tell you if I knew. It's just one of those questions where I don't really have an answer.

She'll just move forward, cross court and to the net with those long legs and hopefully return to her graceful and powerful pre-injured state in time for her favored hard court surface in Queens.

But in a cruel world as this one is, the sun set in England just moments before the final shots between the talented (and dashing) Croatian Marin Cilic and Germany's Tommy Haas were played. I've followed Cilic for a few years now, and he keeps improving with every match. His fans, clad in what may be Croatian soccer jerseys(?) are a devoted lot, offering soft standing chants and cheers from the stands. So a great afternoon of tennis in an air conditioned building eating melon, strawberries and mixed greens came to an end too soon; the final points of this match will be played at that dark hour in America when my friends in New Orleans can go to O'Flaherty's Irish Pub and take their pick in the sticky morning air between Wimbledon and a cricket match in its 12th hour.

Grass

Oh, I'm on grass alright--thick stands of big and little bluestem, gama grass, Indian grass, breaking through the grass and forbs to tally up the field sparrows, yellow breasted chats, indigo buntings, and prairie warblers. The blue grey gnatcatchers hang out on the edges.

While I'm in the woodlands, those with access to ESPN2 can see if Maria has actually been playing tennis during her recovery period. Roddick is still in (damn it), Nadal, Gasquet and Monfils aren't even participating in Wimbledon. The baseline grass is already burned out while grass at the net is pristine.

SCHEDULE OF PLAY

Centre Court - 1pm start

M Sharapova v. G Dulko
G Garcia-Lopez v. R Federer
S Querrey v. M Cilic

No.1 Court - 1pm start

S Greul v. N Djokovic
J Groth v. S Williams
T Haas v. M Llodra

No.2 Court - 12 noon start

M Fish v. J Tipsarevic
V Azarenka v. I Raluca Olaru
R Soderlingv. M Granollers
A Rezai v. E Dementieva

Play starts at 12pm on the outside courts and at 1pm on Centre Court and No.1 Court.

On the Longest Day of the Year

Yesterday, while sweating it out in my 82 degree house, I received the following sentence from my friend Harry:

"I'd like to be up to my eyeballs in a cool, clear creek."

I, too, would like to be there, bobbing around with my goggles on looking for mussel beds in a tributary of the Eleven Point River or jumping off a sycamore-bound rope swing (after investigating the pool depth with my snorkel gear). But I don't float Ozark rivers on the weekends, and I don't like driving long distances to high quality recreational spots (invariably mobbed with people) on the weekends. I log enough miles in my car during the week. So while I, too, pined for a quiet afternoon at a nice place like Pickle Springs, I settled for checking out the creeks in Columbia to see what kind of crayfish I could find. Oh, but I'd never make full body contact with one of these creeks...

Following a stellar long run, time with Hemingway in the backyard, and a two hour session in my new vegetable garden, we set out for one of Columbia's smaller little rocky creeks to see if there was any life in it at all. Sediment loads are, as expected for an urban watershed creek, pretty high here, but I quickly found damselflies, water striders, tadpoles and mayfly larvae. Flipping several large rocks on my search for crayfish, I disturbed the sediment, sending blooms of brown topsoil downstream. Doug stepped on a large slab of limestone when out rushed a crayfish who bolted so fast I couldn't even see what species it was. At least evidence of life!

I stepped from rock to rock downstream, peering under the larger ones in hopes of finding more crayfish. As the water level dropped, I walked up the manmade riparian area onto the manicured turf only to find this:

Great. I'm already on stomach-destroying antibiotics for a bacterial skin infection of a source unknown, with one open wound on my almost bare foot...



And so, we walked another 700 yards along the bank to find a downspout shooting torrents of milky-white water into the creek. It hasn't rained for a few days now, so I'm not sure what the source of the water could be; nevertheless, the white sediment (paint? limestone chat?) persisted in the creek for roughly a mile, a mile of the creek in which two shirtless little boys were catching crayfish and swimming in the deep holes.


The summer solstice ushers in cold food season: hummus, three bean salad, wheat pasta salad, baba ganoush (roasting the eggplant late at night when the oven won't heat the entire house). My new reading list began yesterday with a quick return to the library of two F. Scott Fitzgerald novels--both of which so despised by my Finding the Lost Generation professor that they never made it onto the "optional reading list" we were issued over the summer. Instead, I'm spending the rest of the light of day in my Adirondack chair in my overgrown backyard with my Hemingway book where all my favorite characters are dying.