I’ve walked in this forest across six decades, from my early childhood in the harvest gold 1970s into my middle age in the troubled 2020s.
An urban forest in the fall [Photo by Karl E. H. Seigfried]
The forest runs north to south, from up at Fort Sheridan in the Chicagoland suburb of Highwood all the way down to the Bohemian National Cemetery on Chicago’s North Side.
At the northern end, it reaches to the shores of Lake Michigan. The southern end embraces the North Branch of the Chicago River about four miles inland.
It’s a skinny, straggling, multi-city urban forest that sometimes narrows down to next to nothing.
It’s also full of stories.
Snow, sun, and dark of night
In the late 1970s, we still had snow in Chicago winters. Real snow.
Snow that sometimes blizzarded down so thickly that I could carve out glowing white tunnels to crawl through in our front yard winter wonderland that had been covered in raked piles of multicolored leaves just weeks ago and had served as my own little grassy veldt before that.
Snow that sometimes piled so deep that we have photographs, now faded to the look of an overdone red Instagram filter, showing me sitting atop our corner street sign, my moon boots resting on snow that seemed as high as Dr. J was tall.
Back then, my little family would drive our 1976 Volvo through silent streets to the forest, put on our boots with weird little squared-off toes with holes in them, click into our cross-country skis, pick up our strange and interesting poles, and schiss-schiss-schiss on the virgin snow that covered the paths where we had earlier walked to witness the fall colors.
Winter in the forest was magical. It could feel like you were the only humans alive in the world.
A possible path [Photo by Karl E. H. Seigfried]
Summers were fun but extremely sweaty. Midwestern humidity is not to be taken lightly.
Riding our bikes on the curving paths that sometimes were in shade but often in bright and cloudless sunlight as we struggled up the few non-flat areas could leave us soaking wet in our clothes, but zooming down the inclines in helmet-free wildness made it all worth it.
In high school, family time in the forest gave way to bike rides with my best friend that seemed to last forever on midsummer days when the sun wouldn’t set until nearly 8:30 at night, and the afterglow would just go on and on.
On one of those endless days, we went a bit too far and ended up far from home as night rose to engulf the trees and the air over the path seemed to turn black. Riding without my glasses in bright sunlight was fine, but the nighttime ride become uncomfortably intense as my vision shrank down and the dark shapes of restless nocturnal forest animals rustled in the undergrowth an arm’s length away and sometimes leapt across the path.
We survived and made it home to face parental wrath for missing dinner in the days long before cell phones.
We hate to keep asking, but it is serious. Costs have hit us too.
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Inside the earth
That same best friend was already on his second or third girlfriend before I’d kissed a girl. He had a bit of a Tom Petty thing going on, at a time when chicks dug dudes with diagonally cut bangs and bandanas around their necks.
His latest and artsiest girlfriend revealed that she’d been in a tiny cult that met in the forest in those strange days of the late 1980s.
The cult had maybe four members, one being the slightly older leader who convinced the others that they were all part of a tribe of elder beings who lived inside the earth.
There was some sort of pairing off and maybe even a marriage, but the part that freaked me out the most was the fact that they left the forest paths (one for walking and biking, one for horse-riding) and held some sort of homemade rites off in the parts of the forest we weren’t supposed to walk in.
When your father is a German immigrant, you are taught very clearly at a very young age that you do not leave the approved forest path. The thought of doing so still gives me a bit of involuntary willies.
Decidedly un-cultish, my best friend and his older brother (an Axl Rose type to his Tom Petty) would sometimes go off-path in the forest together. I was too sheepish to go on those summer trips. I can’t remember if they just took artsy photos or maybe blew up small objects.
I was (and still am) more interested in playing Poohsticks with pretty girls on the bridge that crosses the little creek that is really a dwindled bit of the Chicago River’s North Branch. Anyone who hasn’t played Poohsticks on a forest bridge needs to get out more and also to read The House at Pooh Corner.
An excellent bridge for Poohsticks [Photo by Karl E. H. Seigfried]
I’ve played Poohsticks on that bridge for decades, running from one side to the other to see who won.
Wizard staffs
Aside from mysterious nocturnal creatures and inner earth cults, there are also elves and dwarfs in the forest.
I know this much is true, for I see hard evidence of their inhabitation every time I walk along the paths.
There are dark holes in trees that are obviously the entrances to elf homes. There are ancient tree stumps clearly used by the elf-king to address his gathered followers during moonlight ceremonies.
Once, we found the wooden crown that the king had dropped at the end of some dark-of-night revelry. We left it on a stump. No one wants to be cursed by a king of their forest elves.
Usually, we leave golden raisins at elvish sites, because golden raisins are what I took along in a little Ziploc baggie when I was myself a golden-haired and elfish toddler going for forest walks with my parents.
There are also strange stones that are clearly entrances to the underground dwarf strongholds. We sometimes leave raisins for them, too, even though they might prefer the peppermint schnapps and Black Cavendish we leave out for our gnome at home.
I haven’t met Odin wandering in the forest, yet, but I’m sure that I will eventually. Or maybe some other wizard of uncertain provenance (hopefully benevolent and only mildly grouchy).
I’ve been picking up sticks there to use as wizard staffs since 1977, when the Rankin/Bass cartoon movie of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit first aired on NBC, and I was first smitten with Gandalf.
My latest forest-found staff is nearly seven feet tall. I’ve added runes for Odin, a brass bell for Black Sabbath’s wizard, and a blue light for one of my favorite Grimms’ fairy tales.
We change so much over the years, but the song remains the same.
Cement and spiders
This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .(Kobayashi Issa)
And yet, with all of these stories and all of this magic, this is an urban forest.
All the trees seem limited to the same hard line of height. It’s not a forest of towering Yggdrasils, but of spindly Midwestern trees that seem to fall over well before they reach the skies and are carefully cut up and placed aside by the forest crew, left for the lichen to cover and the bugs to chew.
Fallen tree at sunset [Photo by Karl E. H. Seigfried]
The hand of the human caretakers can always be seen, either through cryptic codes marked on the trees with spray paint or in the clearing of the path for elderly walkers (it’s a stretch to call any of us hikers).
The most fundamental fact of the forest is that there is nowhere you can go within it where you don’t hear airplanes overhead and the expressway through the trunks.
Maybe that’s not so bad. After all those years of standing in the rhythm section next to overly macho drummers at South Side jam sessions and playing in the bass section next to the blasting brass in all those orchestra rehearsals and performances, it’s nice to have some white noise to cover the ringing.
Periodically, the fragile illusion of being deep in Mirkwood is further broken whenever the marching trees takes a break for a busy street, and we have to wait patiently for the red light to change so we can get over to the continuance of the forest.
Back in the 1980s, during the Generation X dip in teenage population after the Baby Boom had long faded away, a high school on the edge of the forest had been shuttered.
Walking around what seemed like a small city of cement and peering in the windows was like taking a time machine trip, since some of the classrooms were exactly how they were left in 1981, with remnants of the 1970s like John Travolta posters still up on the walls.
There were rumors of evil guard dogs set up as security, but we never saw a living thing as we took artsy black and white photos to show off our punk rock haircuts.
Near the school, the blacktop bike path briefly went down into an underpass tunnel that was always damp. I would lean low over my handlebars and resist looking up, since the dark ceiling of the tunnel was covered with enormous spiders. They were, however, mundane and non-Tolkienesque.
The tunnel goes under the expressway, that eternally rumbling reminder that nowhere in this forest is at all far from pavement and pollution.
Forest preserved
Meanwhile, I’m still thinking…
(Marc Bolan, channeling Chuck Berry)
Meanwhile, I still think of this forest as a sacred place – a place where the Nine Worlds can intersect, even with the sound of the rush hour commute filtering through the branches.
It’s my forest. It’s the forest of everyone who’s every walked, ridden, or skied within its borders.
It’s a forest preserved, a preserved forest for all of us. It’s a remnant of what-used-to-be be preserved inside of what-is, so that we can go into it and get at least a taste of the other world and the Other World.
This is where I sometimes dream that I’ll go when I die, to wander alone through the crunching leaves of a crunchingly lonely autumn that lasts forever.
The loneliness of the short distance walker [Photo by Karl E. H. Seigfried]
This is where the shades of years past hover and overwrite the gaze with filters of melancholy memory.
This is where I know that the spirits of the land take refuge, where they can still be glimpsed on a late-fall day, if you turn around quickly enough.
I practice Ásatrú, a modern religion that reimagines Old Norse and Germanic religions within the context of our lives today.
But I’m not Icelandic, and I’m sure as Hel not a Viking.
I teach with PowerPoint. I write with Word. I record with Logic Pro. I communicate with Zoom. I spend more time connected to digital devices than I do touching grass.
I practice modern Ásatrú, not ancient paganism.
I’m an urban Heathen, and I love the urban forest.
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