Robert Root

 

I should have realized that the Labyrinth Garden Earth Sculpture in West Bend's Regner Park wouldn't be a typical labyrinth. The words "Garden" and "Earth Sculpture" were the giveaways. The other labyrinths I'd walked in Wisconsin had been gravel paths between borders of stones and small boulders or they'd been paving stones between brick barriers, all leading to a bench in a center circle. Most replicated the medieval pattern from Chartres Cathedral, eleven circuits divided into four quadrants, rife with twists and turns; some followed the less complicated Cretan pattern of seven concentric circuits. But in the Cretan design of the Labyrinth Garden, a grassy path wound through barrier walls of well-tended flowerbeds. Beyond the outermost wall of flowers was a circling lawn ringed with inscribed commemorative "Celebration Stones." A low wrought iron fence enclosed it all and a huge metal dragonfly hovered above part of the path. It was as much garden as labyrinth.

 

Labyrinths are meant to inspire walking meditations, where you try not to think of the world beyond the labyrinth. Meditation guides advise you, "When you walk, just walk." You try to concentrate on your breathing or to focus on an emotion, like compassion or empathy or forgiveness. When you reach the center circle you hope to sit calmly, silently, and meditate a little longer or simply breathe, before winding slowly back to where you started.

 

But when I first walked the Labyrinth Garden, I found it hard to meditate. Rows of fragrant, colorful flowers, ornamental grasses, and herbs bordered the path on either side. Sometimes the breeze made the tallest flowers rock towards me and then sway away. Flitters of movement continually caught my eye: a goldfinch visiting one thistle after another, an upside down bee clinging to a pulsing flower, abundant butterflies drifting down or fluttering up. Once, rather than disturb an orange butterfly on an orange blossom, I waited for her to fly off before I moved past her flower.

 

I stopped often to bend and read identifying metal tags on low posts in the mulch. Some names were familiar, like Larkspur and Lupine and Prairie Smoke; some were whimsical, like Gryffindor Colors, Intelligent Design, and Panties in a Bunch. When I moved on, I would remember the names but not the images of the flowers. Further down the path I would stoop and read a name I'd read only minutes before, then mutter to myself, "Ah, Forget-Me-Not," as if I recalled it from before.

 

It took me a while to make my way to the center of the Labyrinth Garden, sit for a few minutes contemplating only morning air, then retrace the circuit at the same attentive pace as before. I circled the labyrinth, slowly reading inscriptions on the Celebration Stones. I paused once to watch a butterfly settle on one that read, "In Loving Memory." It was not my usual walking meditation. Still, after an hour in the Labyrinth Garden, in sunshine and warm breeze, gazing at flowers and grasses, at birds and bees and butterflies, I felt a meditative calm. I felt content. I felt at peace.

 

 

(Broadcast on "Wisconsin Life" June 13, 2018)

 

I'm the only one signed up for the cave tour at the Ledge View Nature Center, but Jane Mingari, the assistant naturalist, agrees to lead it. Despite a fear of tight, dark places, I'd resolved to explore a cave. Now I have no excuse to back out.

 

We walk to the entrance on the roofs of caves. Jane explains how the solution caves below us were carved by seepage of rain and snowmelt that sometimes became underground streams and even waterfalls. The ground beneath us is honeycombed with chambers and channels. The Carolyn's Caverns cave system is over 700 feet long. It's accessible part of the year for tours but closed from October to May for bat hibernation. Its first room, the Bat Room, has an opening in its steel door for bats—big brown, little brown, long-eared, and tri-colored bats—to enter and exit.

 

Jane urges me to explore two side rooms. I smile gamely and commit myself to crawling and clambering. I squirm on my belly in and out of one narrow passage and climb down a ladder into a small enclosed space with a muddy bottom. I hope I've acclimated myself to what's ahead.

 

We wander through other rooms and passages, stepping carefully on the uneven floor, wary of protrusions near our heads. I bend, I stoop, I crawl on my hands and knees, and I slither outright. Only one place is especially tight, less so for Jane than for me, but crawling through passages like the Whale's Throat and the Kid's Passage means venturing into long dark holes with no chance to raise my head or propel myself by any means other than elbows and thighs. I try not to think about getting stuck and soon realize I don't need to think about it.

 

When we descend to Carolyn's Cave, the original entrance to the system, we're 17 feet below the surface; at the bottom of Dave's Sink, the deepest room, we're 36 feet—four stories—underground. At times, bending to look down a dark passage, I feel the lure of crawling in to see just how far it would take me, how tangled and interconnected the cavities might be.

 

Jane illuminates layers of Silurian strata, fossils, miniature stalactites, chert and cave coral. She steers me around "hungry mud," the sticky pools on the cave floors, remnants of times the caves have been flooded, at least once as much as eighteen feet deep. By the time we make the long crawl through the Whale's Throat back to the Bat Room, I'm busy thinking about the slow and relentless formation of the caves, the scale of their existence. Despite the weight of the rock strata above me, the density of the walls around me, the impenetrable darkness beyond this room, I feel no eagerness to leave the caves. When we reach daylight, I feel no sense of relief.

 

I suppose you could say I confronted my fear of crawling in caves and overcame it. It seems to me more likely that I was too absorbed in where I was to notice my fear. Neither the caves nor my guide would let me think about that.

 

 

Note: "Cave Crawling," Wisconsin Life, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 13, 2018

 

I stopped recording radio scripts for Michigan Public Radio in 1987 and concentrated on writing academic and literary essays, as well as a book about wandering Great Lakes states. When my wife and I spent a few years in Colorado, I wrote a book about wandering in the Front Range. In 2008, we moved to Wisconsin where I soon found myself writing a book about its foremost nature writers (Walking Home Ground) and later started another one about following the Niagara Escarpment from Waukesha County, where I now lived, through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario back to western New York, where I grew up. Occasionally, I revised segments of the book-in-progress and submitted them to literary journals.

 

Through all those years we routinely listened to public broadcasting in our car and in our home. That was how I became familiar with the "Wisconsin Life" programming on both Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. The Wisconsin section of The Arc of the Escarpment, my book-in-progress, was full of narrative moments set in a chain of locations from my southeastern county to the northern limits of the Door Peninsula and beyond, and I considered excerpting some segments to propose to the producer of the radio show—I had once been a radio essayist, after all, and wasn't likely to attempt video stories for the snippets shown on television. The sample I sent her turned out to run too long but convinced her shorter ones might work. Eventually I drove into Milwaukee a couple of times and taped several submissions each day while she supervised me from Madison. I recorded six essays, half of them revised from chapters in my then unfinished book (I still had Ontario and New York research to do) and others that grew out of rambles around Wisconsin or excerpted from Walking Home Ground.

 

As it turned out, "Wisconsin Life" aired only three of the essays, one a year in 2016, 2017, and 2018, and the producer I worked with left the station. I was discouraged by the scant broadcasting of my writing and didn't try to submit more with a new producer. But recently, checking the program online, I learned that those three recordings still had links, all with additional background music and introductory remarks from the producers. "Synchronicity in Nature and Life," linking the Niagara Escarpment and the Ice Age Trail, was broadcast April 22, 2016; "The Welcome Oak," set in the section of the IAT I stewarded for a while, was broadcast May 17, 2017. Both have their texts online. "Cave Crawling," broadcast June 13, 2018, only has a link to the recording; I'll post the text of that essay next week. The following week I'll post "In the Labyrinth Garden," one of the unaired scripts, without a recording.

 

In the twenty-nine years between my final Michigan broadcast and my first Wisconsin broadcast, the nature of communication changed quite a bit. I'm aware that I'm now as likely—perhaps more likely—to publish a new essay online as to publish it in print. Since many of those sites are available on cellphones, publication is often possible on podcasts or at least with audio or video accompaniment—that way, readers don't have to only read but can also hear and/or view a reading while they walk or run or even drive. When my essay "Time and Terrain," another segment from The Arc of the Escarpment, was accepted by The Split Rock Review in Spring 2018, I was asked to record a reading of it; I also provided a short piece on writing about place for a Contributor Spotlight. They're still online.

 

I've just listened to all the essays I recorded for "Wisconsin Life" and The Split Rock Review and I'm not too embarrassed by them. At home, I read aloud a large portion of what we listen to at dinnertime, more often fiction than nonfiction, and try to adapt my reading to approximate the voices of characters and narrators. I suspect that, in the age of rampant (and too often necessary) self-publishing, it could be possible for me to do my own audiobook of something or other. I'm not much tempted to, but I'm glad I had the chance to be an audio essayist as often as I did. It was almost like keeping up with the times.

 

 

Notes: Links to Online Essays

 

"Synchronicity in Nature and Life," Wisconsin Life. Wisconsin Public Radio, April 22, 2016.

 

"The Welcome Oak," Wisconsin Life, Wisconsin Public Radio, May 17, 2017,

 

"Cave Crawling," Wisconsin Life, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 13, 2018,

 

"Time and Terrain," The Split Rock Review, Issue 10: (Spring 2018)

 

Contributor Spotlight March 13, 2018: Robert Root on "Time and Terrain"