A Hint of Spring and "A Sand County Almanac"

January can be a long, cold month here in northern Missouri. Then we begin to have a few days that give you hope that spring will return. On these days I begin to think of Aldo Leopold and his little masterpiece “A Sand County Almanac”. Leopold, known as the father of wildlife ecology, was at the forefront of conservation ethics.

Aldo Leopold taught at the University of Wisconsin and wrote from his weekend retreat, an overused sand hill Wisconsin farm. ”The Almanac” was published in 1949 a year after his death. It is a collect of writings made of his thoughts while working his old farm and other essays on the then emerging field of conservation ecology. His slim volume has become a nature writing classic similar in status to Thoreau’s “Walden”.

The first chapter “January” is an essay about a skunk that has awoken from its winter slumber to a world of melting snow and lengthening days. The skunk begins a journey across the farm to find food, leaving a trail which is investigated by the tracker Leopold. Each January I find myself pulling out my copy of the almanac and beginning to read it again. I usually only make it through the a few chapters before I put it away for another year. But just as longer days and warmer temperatures make gardeners get out their seed catalogs, I too have to have my spring fix of Aldo Leopold.

On The Road

I am dedicating this summer to the “road trip”. Both in literature and in life. We used to move a lot when I was a kid because the type of work my Dad did. And I am feeling the call to travel again; for the first time in a long time I have the opportunity (read time and money).

My first trip will be to the old lake cottage in Minnesota. Someone in our family has been spending a summer there for the past 100 years. On the way up from Kansas City I will make it into a two day car trip. I will avoid the interstate and take the blue highways as William Least Heat Moon would do. For reading material I am taking along Jack Kerouac’s famous road trip novel On the Road and a new road novel by Jim Harrison, The English Major (to see my review visit GoodReads). I’ll be shopping at used bookstores along the way to find John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie.