Support animals in need, and grow your own seeds

TL;DR – Donate any amount of money to support The Anti-Cruelty Society and I will send you seeds for your garden!

This point in spring means two things for me: Time to plant my garden, and time to support animal welfare in Chicago. I work for The Anti-Cruelty Society, helping them raise the money it takes to care for thousands of animals every year. Spring means it’s time to Bark From The Heart, and raise the money it takes to keep an open door for any animal in need. It also means anxiously checking the weather to determine when it’s safe to plant your garden.

This year, I’m combining two of my favorite things: The seeds I collected from my garden last year, and my dog, Dixie, who I adopted from the Society in March 2020. (She likes playing fetch in the garden while I drink my coffee in the morning.)

Donate any amount to my fundraiser and you will get your choice of mammoth sunflower seeds, Aztec marigolds, bottle gourds, or milkweed. Keep reading to learn what’s so dang cool about these amazing plants.

A perfect furry friend, but she would be a better model if she just sat still.

Your gift as seed money:

The Anti-Cruelty Society is the oldest animal welfare organization in Chicago. It was founded in 1899, first as an organization that lobbied for more humane conditions for Chicago’s children, and horses. Later, the focus of their work shifted to only animal welfare, and that is at the core of their mission today.

This Chicago dog is heads and tails above the rest.

Fun Chicago Fact: The Society moved into its building at 157 W. Grand Ave. in 1910, and the neighborhood has just kind of grown around it. Over the decades, the Society has expanded and built into other adjoining buildings on the block. That makes navigating the internals of the building a confusing mess, with rich history behind every single door.

The last year has been a challenging one for the Society, but they have navigated the pandemic expertly and swiftly, with the safety of all staff, volunteers, adopters, and every animal as the number one priority. At the core of what the Society does today is to create a more humane world for both people and pets. In the last year the Society placed over 4,000 animals into their forever homes, engaged over 5,100 people in our virtual programming, fostered nearly 1,500 pets, and distributed almost 550,000 meals to pets whose owners were economically affected by the pandemic. They keep an open door, and won’t turn any animal in need away regardless of age, condition, species or temperament.

A gift of any amount can go a long way to improving the lives of animals in Chicago. Even the smallest donation can make a world of difference in the life of one dog:

•$10 – One deworming treatment

•$25 – One microchip

•$35 – One veterinary exam

•$50 – One round of vaccinations

•$90 – Five days’ worth of food, water, and care

•$150 – One adoption fee

•$200 – Spay or neuter services

•$400 – Average cost to care for one dog during their stay

Why sunflower seeds are so cool:

Sunflowers are some of the most prolific, abundant, and diverse prairie plants you’ll find out there. Members of the aster family, they grow happily in the forests, savannahs, prairies, and roadsides all over this state. However, there is nothing native whatsoever about the mammoth sunflower, it’s just big.

Mammoth sunflowers, and sunflowers of all kinds, are hearty plants. Like, every good prairie plant its root systems are deep and strong, that’s how it’s able to hold itself up, and move along with the sun all day. Mammoth sunflower roots can push themselves four feet (or more) down beneath the surface, that’s why they’re so great for gardens with less-than-ideal soil. Their roots push down with enough force to break up hardened clay and move small rocks. Once down there, the roots introduce new beneficial bacteria and allow for helpful insects to make their way below ground.

Sunflowers are not picky about soil quality, in fact, they’re very useful at pulling bad gunk out of your dirt. (The word for this is phytoremediation.) Sunflowers are the enthusiastic cleanup crew for soil contaminated by polluted groundwater, lead, heavy metals, and other poisonous chemicals. If you visit Chernobyl and Fukushima, you may find fields of sunflowers pulling radiation directly from the dirt. A friend recently told me about a nonprofit based in Tulane City, Louisiana that filled some of the worst-hit neighborhoods in New Orleans with sunflowers following the devastating damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

These particular sunflower seeds are my personal heirloom variety. They grow as high as 14 feet tall, in the bed of clay and rocks in my backyard.

Marigolds for all season blooms:

Do you like cut flowers in your home? Do you want to feed the pollinators all season long? Did you know that marigold plants can grow about four feet tall? Because I learned that last year when I planted these guys. This variety of marigold grows so easily from seed, that you can sow directly in the dirt right now and feel pretty confident you’ll have blooms until November. This species is known as Aztec Marigolds and if you ever wanted to grow your own flower crown, this is the plant for you.

Marigolds are also known as “companion plants” that help other plants in your garden to grow, and keeps away pests like squash bugs, aphids and even rabbits. If you grow squash, melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, lettuce, pumpkins, beans, asparagus or onions, plant marigolds for a heartier harvest.

Taller than you think!

Bottle gourds for fresh foliage:

When we’re talking about the plant, we call them bottle gourds. When we’re talking about the fruit, we call it a calabash. Either way, these trellis-loving climbers will grow large enough to create a wall of foliage to beautify your garden all season. These particular seeds were harvested from last year’s longest gourd, Bert, and the most squat, Ernie. And yes, you can eat them.

Bert, in his youth.

Milkweeds for monarchs:

If you don’t have a green thumb, but do have a patch of dirt you can find, milkweed is the ideal plant for you. This native, weedy plant is a vital part of our landscape and the only host plant for caterpillars of the monarch butterfly. The monarch butterfly is about the coolest species of butterfly you’ll find. Monarchs every year migrate from Canada to central Mexico and back, which is astonishing in its own right. It actually takes three generations of monarchs to make the trip. The first two generations are the ones you’ll see most of the time, they flap those little orange and black wings north every spring. The third generation is what’s known as a super generation – it’s huge. The super generation of monarch is bigger and stronger than its parents or grandparents. It lives eight times longer and travels ten times farther. But the one thing that it needs at every leg of that journey, is milkweed. This is especially true right here in the Great Lakes region because we are often the first or last pit stop for migrating wildlife before or after crossing the lakes.

Photo credit to: US Fish & Wildlife Service, apparently I haven’t got a good milkweed picture.

Backyard wildlife: Cooper’s hawk

There is a cooper’s hawk in my neighborhood. I’ve seen her more than once. The first time I saw her, I was ticking away at my laptop, near the window that faces my backyard. It was around noontime, and she flapped into my view swiftly and suddenly. She landed weightlessly on my deck railing, carrying a rat for lunch.

I called my husband over and we both marveled at our predatory visitor. From inside the house, we couldn’t have been more than ten feet from her. Admiring her white and auburn feathers, all puffed up against the January afternoon.

She hung out for a while, at least 15 minutes. I assume she was surveying the landscape, making sure it was a good spot for a picnic. Cooper’s hawks kill their prey by squeezing it with their sharp talons and strong feet. The rat picnic she brought to my yard had already met its fate, its tail hung limply under the hawk’s foot. I did not watch her eat the rat, she spent all that time surveying the landscape, before gliding into my neighbor’s yard to dine. They have grass, where I have a concrete patio, so I assume that was they key difference to the hawk.

I keep referring to her as “she” but I didn’t have the opportunity to ask her pronouns. Among Cooper’s hawks, the females can be as much as 20 percent larger than the males of the species. I don’t have much to compare her size to, but she seemed pretty dang big, so I’m going with it.

Cooper’s hawks are remarkable for their adaptation. Their population was, at one point, endangered. Since DDT was banned in 1972, their numbers have returned and they are now listed among the animals we should be “least concerned” about. DDT was disastrous to birds of prey. The chemical caused their eggshells to become so thin and brittle that the mother bird herself would often crush them just by sitting on them. Since then, cooper’s hawks are more commonly spotted where people are than any time in the last 50 years. Their rise has been particularly impressive in Illinois. They find plenty to eat among the wilds of the forest preserves, but that rat was probably an alley resident until a few minutes prior. Around here a cooper’s hawk might be just as likely to dine on a rat as they are a chipmunk, squirrel, mouse, bat, robins, blue jays or finches.

I recently saw her again while I was walking my dog around the elementary school near my house. I live about half a mile south of the Cook County Forest Preserves. I don’t know where she nests, but between the forests and the alleys, this is a pretty good hunting ground.

She was riding thermal masses high over the now-mown prairie that grows in the school yard. I caught sight of her, and kept track with my eyes as she perched on the tallest pine tree on the block. She stayed there for only a few minutes, before taking to the skies again. I lost sight of her after that, and kept walking along my usual route. About 20 minutes later, I spotted her again – riding thermals high above the backyards and alleys in my neighborhood.

Cooper’s hawks are famous for their vision. Their wide binocular eyes, minor blind spots, and super speedy eye movement, help them scan for prey from far above. I wish I’d gotten to see her strike, and maybe one day I will. They evolved to hunt for varmints on the endless acres of tallgrass prairie that used to cover the state, but they’re equally ready to hunt among the forests and shrubby areas. Cooper’s hawks are built for agility, their rounded wings help them glide nimbly, and their long tails act as rudders, enabling them to change course quickly. Now they’ve adapted pretty well to city life by hunting for rats darting between garages and trash cans in quiet alleyways. Any backyard can be your picnic spot when you’re a bird of prey, who no one ever explained property lines to.

A cooper’s hawks favorite meals are common at your backyard bird feeder. Finches, jays, robins, juncos are all tasty treats to a cooper’s hawk. That means if you set out your birdfeeder, you might attract a cooper’s hawk, which will want to feed on the birds that dine at your feeder. This is the equivalent of eating a patron at an all-you-can-eat buffet. In the human world, we’d consider that at the very least, rude. In bird world, it is what it is. I haven’t seen one of my diners attacked by the cooper’s hawk yet, but I’m not ready to say I’d change anything about my habits if it did.

There’s lots of birds in my neighborhood, but hawks tend to stand out. They’re often much bigger than other birds, for one. An adult cooper’s hawk can stand up to 20 inches high, and weigh about a pound. To contrast, the next largest bird that visits my yard, the blue jay, can get up to a foot tall and weigh almost four ounces. The hawk is also harder to spot. A flock of grackles makes itself known, no matter what, but unless she literally plunks down on your deck, the cooper’s hawk is harder to get a good look at. I googled it, and the most a cooper’s hawk can carry, is at much as it weighs. A cooper’s hawk can weight about one pound, so most pets are probably safe.

Trip report: Backpacking Sand Ridge State Forest, Illinois

Name: Sand Ridge State Forest

Address: Forest City, Illinois

Size: 7,100 acres

Activities: Hunting, hiking, picnicking, trap range, archery range, camping, backpacking, cross country skiing, dog training, equestrian trails, geocaching, hunting, hiking, mountain biking, picnicking, and snowmobiling.

Reservations: The 27 class “C” sites in Pine Campground, are reservable. Group campsites can also be registered in advance. There are 12 primitive backcountry campsites along 55 miles of trail, they are reservable in advance but the trail is so lightly trafficked it shouldn’t matter much.

Pros: Quiet, beautiful, largely unoccupied by other people, tons of trails, prickly pear cactuses grow abundantly here. Turkeys are everywhere.

Cons: Water is not available on the trail. You have to cache your water in advance if you’re backpacking, as there is none available on the trail itself. The map is accurate, but don’t trust the scale.

This prickly pear cactus is native to Illinois.

Report:

Located just a little south of Peoria, Sand Ridge State Forest is not like any other corner of Illinois that you’re picturing. It’s basically a desert. The Illinois River flows a few miles west of the forest, but not one drop of drinking water is found outside of the big campgrounds. The water is there, supporting an entire evergreen forest and farmland, but it’s not above ground where you can drink it. There are points in the park you could dig as far as four feet down to get to the water source, and since that’s not in line with Leave No Trace Practices, you need to plan ahead. This means two things for the average backpacker: That you need to cache your water in advance; and that prickly pear cactuses grow here.

Native Illinois prickly pear cactus. Say it out loud, it’s a real thing. It’s not made up like unicorns, it’s real like narwhals.

The trail is made almost entirely of sand.

If we get into our Wayback Machine and go to late summer 2020, we will see that I had been stuck at home for about six months. My casually planned backpacking trips were cancelled suddenly, and against my will. So, like many of us, I stayed home. Watching the news, and the covid numbers, for months on end was both helping and not helping. By summer, I’d pretty much decided that Illinois’ response was about the best you could ask for, and our neighboring states were maybe mucking up a little much for my taste (sorry, Wisconsin.) The upside of this, was that it inspired me to stay within state lines, and get to know Illinois a little better.

Chicagoans, and I am guilty of this, have a tendency to default to Wisconsin or Michigan for our camping adventures, but Illinois is right here, waiting for us to go and explore it. When Labor Day rolled around, and I was firmly losing my mind, I picked the first proper backpacking trail I could find within state lines and went there, with a partially baked plan. Enter Sand Ridge State Forest.

BC3

The Yellow Trail at Sand Ridge State Forest is a 15-mile loop that goes through upland boreal and evergreen forests, and low farmland. The higher elevation is on the north end, and the lower elevation is on the south. Sand Ridge State Forest lives up to it’s name – prepare for sand. You don’t need to prepare for beaches, because there is no water, but sand is everywhere. The trails are sometimes wide fire lanes, and sometimes winding footpaths, but the one constant is sand. If you’re going to do this loop keep in mind that sand is an unstable thing to walk on. If you’re used to walking the well-worn paths on the Ice Age Trail, or trodding up and down the boardwalks at Starved Rock State Park, this trail will be far more work on your body. I wore a pair of trailrunners with a little, essentially, mud flap on the back and I think that worked in helping me hike that surface. If you’re hoping to speed through the trail, bear in mind that it’s a lot like walking on a soft beach in parts.

This would have been a much greater challenge for me had it not rained for two out of the three days I was on the trail. I’d complain, but the rain tamped the sand down and I think that made it easier to walk.

The map for Sand Ridge State Park is, technically, a good map. But is it a useful map? Sort of. It’s got a learning curve, I’ll say that. The park itself is bigger than the map suggests, and there are places where the map suggests the trail might not be as long as it is. The topography is not well communicated on the map. The Yellow Trail in particular is not well supported by park staff, which might be exactly what you’re looking for. The signage on the trail itself is good, if sparse. Wayfinding is accurate and clearly marked, but sometimes the only way to really “feel” like you’re headed in the right direction is by watching the campsite numbers change.

I lucked out and managed to speak (masked) face-to-face with park staff, a few minutes before I hit the trail and I made some logistical changes because of that conversation. Primarily, I decided against my plan to go counter-clockwise instead of clockwise. The trail is a two-way street, but you might want to navigate it clockwise because then it’s easier to cache water ahead of time, without doubling back too much.

I took a leisurely three days to do this trail. A more ambitious hiker could easily do it in one or two nights. You won’t find expansive dramatic vistas at Sand Ridge, but you will be able to watch insects and birds flit about fallow farm fields. You might hear woodpeckers hunting for grubs among the canopy. You might find the hawks riding air streams hunting for prey to be too majestic. You will probably get bored of seeing all these central Illinois native cactuses, because they are so abundant. If that’s not interesting enough for you, then I suggest you consider what your mind’s eye tells you is beautiful, and ask why it doesn’t include this little bit of Midwestern paradise.

BC3, shoes drying out front.

My route:

I parked on Pine Valley Drive, south of the Goofy Ridge blacktop. Pine Valley Drive is a gravel road, but there’s a little cutout for parking immediately south of the trail. I planned to stay at BC 1 the first night, BC3 the second night, and BC7 the last night. Before hitting the trail I’d stashed water at Bishop Road, and Sand Ridge Road. Water is available via a hand pump at Oak Camp, and I mean a big ol’ hand pump. Oak Camp is just a little ahead of BC1, so we topped up there before heading to camp.

BC1 is a lovely site. It’s narrow and long, which provides good privacy from the trail itself. It’s across from a game field, which was the site of a beautiful sunset and turkeys gobbling in the morning. Every site has a fire pit and tent pad, but no picnic tables and only a few overturned logs for seating.

The view from BC7 to the Yellow Trail.

Just after breaking camp the next morning, the skies opened up. The rain continued to fall for at least the next 24 hours straight. (That’s why I didn’t take many photos.) Once you’re rained on, there’s a point at which it stops mattering because you can’t get any wetter and I achieved that point just south of Sand Ridge Road on my way to BC3. I don’t mind hiking in the rain, because it tends to drive others away affording me more time alone in the woods. It also helps dampen sound, and changes animal behaviors. Nature is different in the rain.

BC3 was probably my favorite campsite. It was HUGE. I was camping with myself and my husband, but BC3 has space for at least two or three other tents without getting crowded. Honestly, the size of this camp was downright luxurious. That gave us a little space to hang things and hope to dry them out before moving on the next morning.

BC7 sits at the top of the steepest hill in the park. And its so, so long. This is the corner of the park where had I not spoken with park staff I would have done something supremely dumb. Initially, having never toted my own water to camp before, I thought I’d go counter clockwise, stay at BC7, and just double back carrying all that water. In my mind it made sense, because it looks like a smooth-ish trail, that can’t be too long, right? Wrong. I was wrong, don’t do that. The ascent from Sand Ridge Road to BC7 is steady, and consistently up. You want to do this stretch of the trail exactly once. If you stay at BC 7, do the trail clockwise and stash your water at Sand Ridge Road. If you want to do it counter-clockwise, stay at BC6, and stash your water at the same spot.

The view from near BC7.

BC7 was near the prettiest dang view I saw the whole time I was there. Fairy tales and fantasy adventure movies wish their settings were as pretty as this. BC7 is a bit closer to the trail itself. But this part of the park is also more remote. Mosquitoes weren’t a huge problem while I was there in early September, but that may have been in part because of the rain. By the time we got to BC7, the rain had passed, and being so high on the ridge lessened the number of bugs.

This was my first experience stashing water ahead of myself, and I think I did okay. It’s an odd experience when you’re normally a Midwestern backpacker because what we don’t have in topography, we make up for in abundant water sources. Because there were two of us hiking, we bought those big jugs of bottled water, and went through about a gallon each per day. Again, this was in early September, and it did rain on us so heat wasn’t a major factor. I’m not going to advise anyone to carry less water, because that advice can go south quickly, but do consider the weight of the water when you’re carrying it, and factor that into your pack weight. I literally just wrote my name on the jug in a sharpie marker, and left them a few hundred feet away from the road, a few dozen feet off the trail, hidden behind a tree where I would find them when I got that far. Try not to stash your water so other hikers have to see it as they pass, that kind of mucks up the natural character of the spot.

Packing in your water also means packing out your water. There were no trash cans anywhere on the trail, so I secured the empty jugs to my pack when hiking. It got to the point where I started to feel like the trash lady from The Labyrinth. Thankfully, the trail was not busy at all. I think in the three full days I spent there, I saw exactly two other people. A couple of fresh-faced day hikers, just as I was rounding the top of the hill by BC7. I think I was startled by their clean, unsunburnt faces just as much as they were by me, in all my dirtbag glory.

Backyard wildlife: Mourning doves

The mourning doves have come back to my yard. I hadn’t seen them in weeks. For much of February, a polar vortex sat on the central United States, and I didn’t see a single bird until things warmed up. The first morning above freezing I heard them coo-woo-OOOOO-ing while I was still in bed.

We first saw our house before we bought it, on a Sunday in April. We heard them coo-ing in the backyard that sunny, cool afternoon. Buying a house is a stressful and protracted stupid experience, at least it was for me in 2019. The first house we went under contractor for, we did not buy because it was sinking. The second house we nearly bought had mold on four levels. But the third house we did buy because it acted like a house should. Getting a backyard was the main reason to move from our Logan Square apartment, but I had long before stopped dreaming of the garden I planned to grow because getting the place to live was such a headache. (Shout out to home buyers in 2020 and beyond, I see you.) I can’t remember much about either of the other two houses’ yards, I think I blacked out those experiences. At this house, the cooOOOO-woooing caught my ears, and I took that as a positive sign.

From my desk, I face a window that overlooks my backyard. The yard just to the north has a tall fir tree, and a crab apple tree that’s nearing the end of its useful life. Just to the south, there is a magnolia tree. I suspect the doves live in one of them, but don’t know that for sure. The first sunny day after the vortex ended, I saw half a dozen of them congregating on my deck. All poofed up and nipping at the sunflower seeds I’d left out.

Mourning doves are close cousins to the common pigeon, the biggest difference is the feathers. The same buff and brown birds that coo and preen on my deck, are just middle class versions of the shiny, grey-green, roughed up city birds that you find at Daley Plaza. I have seen pigeons on my deck, but only very rarely and never when the doves are around. I know doves will hang out in flocks, but I don’t think they consider the pigeons part of that flock.

I don’t think ones in my yard migrate in the winter. I think they might be year-round Chicagoans. I try to keep seed out all winter, but I’m inconsistent about it, so they can’t rely on me as a food source. They have a crop in their esophagus that allows them to store sometimes thousands of seeds for later. Kind of like carrying your entire pantry around in your throat, or having really big pockets full of granola bars.

The doves hung out all afternoon, warming themselves in the cold late winter sun. I watched two of them nip and fuss at each other. Birds around the globe clean each other’s feathers and skin with their beaks. The word for this is “allopreening” but it’s not fundamentally different than when my husband asks me to scratch that spot on his back that he can’t reach himself.

Mourning doves can hatch up to 12 eggs per pair per season, which makes sense because they’re heavily predated wherever they are. They’re pretty efficient parents though. He usually takes the eggs in the morning and afternoon, she keeps them warm in the evening and all night.

Males exclusively make the coooOOOOO-woooooooing sound that I like so much. Females are much quieter. To my ears it sounds like the feeling of warm air and sunshine on your skin. The male bird is calling the females to mate. I like to think that if we could translate what they are saying to each other, that each cooooOOOOO-woo would be like a sonnet. A beautiful poem calling to his partner. I’ve been around enough human men to know it’s probably much more simple than that. I guess as long as the female doves aren’t annoyed, that’s fine. They famously mate for life, so presumably she’s used to this by now.

I’ll keep seeing them all season, they’re familiar with my yard as a hangout with a free buffet. I bet I’ll see little hatchlings soon enough.

Arguing with myself: Chicago winters are harrowing and imposing

Introduction

Dear reader,

I was prepared to post Part 1 last week but we were in the midst of a 17-day stretch of subfreezing temperatures where the snow just wouldn’t stop coming, and I had to rethink my whole position. I still stand by everything I said in both pieces, but it felt disingenuous not to acknowledge both sides of this coin. (The same goes for last week’s piece about why homelessness is bullshit and should not exist, and that it’s appropriate for the camping community to consider the relationship between those two things. Thank you to everyone who helped us raise over $1,000 to end homelessness in Chicago.)

Today, you can read Part 1, The Idealist. here. Sign up here to be notified.

Part 2 – The Realist

I spoke too soon. A foot of fluffy flakes fell on top of the feet that were already there. I have to disagree with me from Part 1. Snow creates tremendous anxiety. Until the last foot fell, I agreed entirely with Part 1 Lindsay. Last week, I spent a few days anxiously googling “ice dam” and trying to determine how much worry I should have over the coming thaw. If my house is a ship, I am the captain, steering it through an icy storm. I don’t want to take on any water.

When the snow was falling, the twentysomething guy next door was out around 11 p.m., snowblowing the sidewalk. When that was done, he started to shovel the steps down to the basement apartment. Exasperated and exhausted, he told my husband he’d never seen any snow like this in his life. I have. I was a kid though. I don’t know the gap between our ages, but if I had to guess, the last time I saw snow this high was before he was alive. I’d like to think this is in-line with “normal” because I saw it as a kid, but what I saw as a kid doesn’t count as normal.

On my deck, I have a concrete planter shaped like a skull. It sits about a foot tall and stares at me from the deck while I work. One day I watched the snow rise from just under its eye sockets, to well over it’s head. The snow kept coming with very little warning. I watched the railings of my deck disappear from the bottom up. I remembered one winter a few years ago when it snowed for what felt like a month straight, and never melted once. After a while the snow was higher on the ground than my old coupe was off it, which made it super difficult to get around. I’m grateful not to be driving anywhere right now. I haven’t seen my planter in a few weeks, though.

Wednesday there was a break in the weather. I thought that would be the best chance I’d get all week to run to the errands. An hour spent shoveling, sweating and huffing, and my car made it halfway out of the garage before getting stuck. Another 20 minutes of pushing and rocking, and it was back in. It was a short trip that took a long time and accomplished nothing. Thursday I tried to shovel my way to the trash cans, but the back gate was frozen in place.

Then, the icicles began to form. At first, they were a sort of magic I hadn’t seen in a long time. Now that I am a homeowner, they mean something else. A friend posted a picture of her glass block window, ice covering it from top to bottom, and spreading to her brickwork. Then one appeared on my siding. And another. I began furiously googling about ice dams. I anxiously checked every interior window and wall, looking for damp. I had my husband climb into the attic to verify the absence of moisture. I kept checking the dark corners of the basement. Each morning I woke up to another subfreezing day, with new, larger icicles hanging off my roof, from the soffits and the siding. It’s not inside, and I want it to stay that way. The snow on my back deck compacted itself, thanks to a few somewhat sunny days. I watched the snow on the railing for a few days as it warbled and wobbled, slowly collapsing on itself. The edges are now ragged, and growing their own icicles. They worry me less. Even my birdfeeder has its own tiny icicles hanging off its roof.

I keep checking on Texas, a place and people I have rarely bothered with. I am angry for them. I feel privileged to live in a region that is used to winter, because that means we are operating with a baseline level of knowledge that many Texans are not. I replaced all the batteries in all my combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors after reading one too many horror stories. A photo of skyscrapers celebrating Valentine’s Day against vast darkened neighborhood made clear who the haves and have nots are in Houston. I pull up the local power outage map for where I live and I frown, because they all occur in neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Where I live on the far North Side, I’m so unconcerned with power that I leave lights on all over the house and scroll mindlessly on my phone, while paying half attention to Netflix. The food in my fridge has not gone bad, except through my own neglect. Is this the system working like it was designed to?

The thaw came right when it said it would. Seventeen days below freezing. These long cold snaps used to be more common when the jet stream was strong, but now it’s an uncomfortable anomaly. I spent all weekend before the thaw fretting over the ice dams on my roof. Using three broom handles duct taped together and a coat hanger fashioned into a hook, I put old tights and long johns filled with calcium chloride onto the roof line. The YouTube videos I watched all suggested careful placement to create a channel was the best bet for clearing out the ice, but I was unwilling to get on a ladder. Imperfect application seemed to have gotten me somewhere. The front of the house has gotten the brunt of it. There’s a gutter that can’t be more than three feet long, but it is full of ice bergs. On Sunday I was okay with how things were moving on the sides of the house, but the front was not improving. A small ice rink formed on the steps. When the temp is above freezing, I can hear the water running inside the wall by my front door. The air hovering around freezing means the ice patch isn’t going anywhere any time soon. I named the ice Salt Goodman, AKA Slippin’ Jimmy. I throw ice melt on Salt Goodman at least twice a day. The heavy wet snow the forecast promised just turned into rain. Slippin’ Jimmy took over my whole front stoop and most of the sidewalks.

I just spotted a housefly. It found a sunny spot on the blue plastic of my bird feeder. I didn’t believe it at first because it’s still February. It hasn’t been unseasonably warm. It’s only been above freezing long enough to melt the icicles on the roofs. But it’s shiny carapace and jittery movement is unmistakable, that’s a house fly. They only live 28 days, I read. In colder climates they’ll often hibernate until temperatures warm up. The temperature has been steadily rising for the last two days or so, maybe this one just woke up early? This is a tough time to be an emergent pest. The crab apple tree outside my window is getting a little fuzzy on the ends of its branches. In a few weeks that fuzz will turn into blooms. I still think it’s going to be a late spring, but I feel better knowing that it’s coming. Today, the temperature hit forty degrees. The air in my nostrils is humid for the first time in months. I know we have weeks of winter still to go, but suddenly it feels like we’re past the worst of it.

Arguing with myself: Chicago winters are stunning and important

Introduction

Dear reader,

I started working on this piece in late January when winter was settling in for real, but before the deep freeze took hold. What follows are my subjective feelings about how that went. I was prepared to post Part 1 last week but we were in the midst of a 17-day stretch of subfreezing temperatures where the snow just wouldn’t stop coming, and I had to rethink my whole position. I still stand by everything I said in both this piece and that, but it felt disingenuous not to acknowledge both sides of this coin. (The same goes for last week’s piece about why homelessness is bullshit and should not exist, and that it’s appropriate for the camping community to consider the relationship between those two things. Thank you to everyone who helped us raise over $1,000 to end homelessness in Chicago.)

Today, you can read Part 1, The Idealist. Tomorrow, enjoy Part 2, The Realist. Sign up here to be notified.

Part 1 – The Idealist

A few weeks ago Natalie Moore tweeted something accurate about winter on social media. Natalie is correct. It is cliché and boring to brag about the weather being not-cold where you are, when places with four complete seasons are experiencing their coldest one. Since I am not commuting this winter, my main exposure to it is by shoveling the pile of snow that won’t stop accumulating and walking my boot-averse dog around the block. My desk is pushed up against a window overlooking my backyard. From here, I watch the weather change, seasons advance, wildlife arrive and depart, and lights flip on and off in my neighbors’ apartments. Where I sit, I have a front-row seat to the year-round performance of Chicago in its natural state.  

People, not just Chicago, tend to talk about winter as if it’s a nuisance, or a bad thing. I refuse to do this anymore. Cold is good. Winter inspires awe because of snow. Every year I’ve spent on this earth has seen winter, some milder than others. This one started late, we didn’t get our first big accumulation until after Christmas. I suspect it’s going to be a late spring. It’s easy to whine about winter, but those mild ones without much snow, or without a good, hard frost, leave me more depressed. They tend to take three or four times as long as the cold, snowy ones.

Snow is a kinetic sculpture. The first snowfall this season fell in fine flakes, delicate enough to hang lazily from thin juniper needles and cling even to tiny branches. When it finished falling there was no surface left indelicately covered anywhere in the city. The next snowstorm brought flakes that were too heavy for such delicate work. Unless caught by a sturdy branch, or worn like a hat on tree galls, it was too heavy to stay above the ground. Too wet. I heard it fall off my roof with heavy thuds. The snow that fell on tree branches clung there, like it was too afraid to let go and fall to the ground. Its presence on the branch created more surface which allowed, funny enough, more snow to cling uncomfortably. Physics and temperature dictate the shape and motion of this sculpture.

The morning after the first heavy snow I filled a bird feeder with sunflower seeds. Using an old garden rake and an open window, I placed it gently on top of the fresh accumulation on my deck. The sun caused crystals to melt and restructure the sculpture. A few days later the feeder had sunk a little as the snow melted and birds found it. No human has stepped foot back there since the storm, however, days later the surface was marked by tiny pairs of footprints. Here the sculpture lives in the negative. In the early morning, when the sun was still rising in the low eastern sky, the angle of the light highlighted those footprints as tiny shadows. Visitors include dark eyed juncos, cardinals, mourning doves, blue jays, and finches. Even the heaviest bird who visits my feeder weighs just a fraction of a pound. Their footprints suggest a wild, harried party took place, with the feeder at the center of the festivity. The parties that do arrive are small. Red house finches arrive in pairs, secure one seed each and flap off to eat it in peace. Jays know how to empty a dance floor. As the sun continues to rise, the shadows disappear. The sparkling layer of frosty flakes on top of the mountain of white that coats my deck possesses a magic quality that inspires artists, and capitalists mimic. Even their best work is just an ersatz copy. Sunlight works to destroy all evidence of the dance done by my avian visitors. Given enough time and sunshine, the first things to disappear are those footprints.

A later prediction turned out to be a heavy, wet dud. The forecast said it would be anywhere from 2-12 inches of accumulation. What we got was an inch and a half of the kind of falling slush that leaves your woolen hat soaked and your sidewalks icy. For weeks, the cold has been in league with the snow. The polar vortex settled in over a weekend. It was the kind of cold that you can hear coming. The old plaster walls in my house creaked and groaned as the chill caused sudden constrictions. For weeks I checked the basement sink every day to make sure it was still dripping. The cold is not unusual, but how long it sits on top of us is. Air travels differently now that the jet stream is weak, so cold snaps last longer than they used to. The snow that followed came silently and unannounced. It snuck in without warning. Fat, crystalline flakes fell weightlessly. It was very pretty from indoors, behind a window and under a blanket. In Chicago’s history, this is among the top five lengths of time with this much snow on the ground.  

The snow outside my window created a high contrast world. The flakes fell from nowhere visible because they matched the color of the sky. They fell to nowhere visible because they matched the ground. The falling snow was the same color as every roof, sidewalk, yard, parkway, tops of tree branches, porch railing, and the whole, flat sky. I watched the flakes fall in the positive. I saw them in the moments where snow was not already. I watched them flit past a tree branch, the neighbor’s siding, a darkened garage window, or the red breast of the cardinal singing by the feeder. Over the course of a day the hills of snow on every surface grew a few inches. A demonstration of what collective action can lead to, even when you can’t see how it started or where it will end.

Heavy blankets of snow illuminate the night. All summer the moonlight soaks into the earth, but when snow covers everything, all that light reflects back. I’ve slept under the full moon reflected off snow so bright and undisturbed you’d think a streetlight was pointing in my window. I did a lot of reading as a kid, using the moonlight reflected off the glassy snow outside late into the night. Back then it was easy to see winter as the cyclical magic that it is. As a kid I eagerly constructed snowmen, rolling them carefully down the hill in my yard. Now, I like to walk around the neighborhood when snow is fresh. It’s the best time to see all your neighbors at once. Shoveling, playing, sledding, pushing cars. I keep track of the weather and calendar to see how long it takes for the neighborhood snowmen’s heads to roll off their bodies and plop onto the ground.

I refilled my bird feeder one afternoon and hours later it was half-buried in fresh accumulation. The little roof over the feeder provided some protection. I didn’t pull it out of the snow because I was curious to see who would find it. This free buffet is known to jays, cardinals, finches, one small mouse, plus the squirrels. I’m not terribly discerning about who I invite to my winter feasts. The rats know about it, but they’re less greedy than you would think. Just after dark, I can watch them from inside. The snow was still falling when the rats had tunneled who-knows-how-far to be the first to dine. For the next week or so the birds were scarce but most of the seeds were still there. Despite the long cold snap, even rats know to share.

Living with four full seasons is awe-inspiring every year. The air in winter is tangibly different than the air in summer. July coddles you with humidity and sunshine. February forces you to attention, it brings your blood to your face. Shoveling snow reminds me how strong I am. Perpetual 80-degree sunny days might sound nice, and maybe they are, I don’t know. Where I live, that first forty-degree day feels like hope, and that couldn’t be true without the feel of subzero air in your nostrils.

Help end homelessness in Chicago because it’s a terrible place to winter camp

TL;DR Homelessness is bullshit and should not exist. Donate to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless through this fundraising link, and be entered into a raffle for a copy of “Chicago Transit Hikes” and a hand-knit hat. Every $10 donated will get you one entry into the raffle. Starting the moment this post goes live and ending Saturday at noon central. The winner will be contacted by me directly, but the real winners are the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless – the oldest organization in Illinois working to end homelessness at its root.

I’ve been stuck at home for not quite a year. I’m getting a little stir-crazy. I’m already dreaming of all the camping and backpacking I could do this spring. Meanwhile, I woke up to a snowstorm this morning that should plop another foot of snow on top of the foot of snow that was already on the ground. On the one hand, I’m dreaming of hammock camping season. On the other hand, this is winter in Chicago, and nothing is out of the ordinary.

A perfectly respectable place to live, three seasons out of the year.

I’m still super lucky. I have a roof over my head, I have a job that allows me to work remotely, I am warm and I have enough to eat. There are thousands of Chicagoans today who are experiencing homelessness who probably aren’t dreaming of spending time outdoors this spring. If I were planning a winter camp and saw that a foot of snow was in the forecast, I’d seriously consider canceling my trip, or bringing different or more things to make my stay in that storm more comfortable. A person experiencing homelessness isn’t so fortunate. When you live on the street, the only protection from the weather is what you can find or carry. To many people who are experiencing homelessness, taking refuge in a shelter during extreme weather events isn’t an option, often due to past negative experiences. You wouldn’t walk up to somebody at a public campground and start telling them their tent is set up wrong, or this is a better way to start a fire or correcting anything else you didn’t like about their campsite. You’d be rightly labeled a rude jerk. It’s kind of the same for people experiencing homelessness. If it’s not something you have personally experienced, it’s probably not a good idea to act like you know how to fix it.

A beautiful place to camp, a terrible structure to live in all winter.

Homeless encampments have one big thing in common with the average campground – gear. Everyone knows that a tent set up under a highway isn’t there because somebody thought it was a nice space to reconnect with nature. When somebody finds a sleeping bag tucked between concrete columns, just feet away from traffic, everyone knows that isn’t debris because it’s obviously the few belongings our neighbors who have the least, have to survive. Socks always matter more than most other things you could wear, that’s true for both urban and recreational campers. One huge difference is you can walk away from your unsecured, unguarded campground and feel reasonably confident it will be there when you get back. People experiencing homelessness don’t have that level of security or camaraderie. Often the police, the city, or even aldermen’s staff members, will “clean up” these encampments as if they’re littered only with trash and not with humans with nowhere else to go.

An example of the kind of comforts I take for granted at home, like hand-knit socks on a rainy day.

There is absolutely no good reason why homelessness should exist. There are plenty of good reasons that it persists, but not one good reason for it to continue existing. We have enough peopleless homes, and enough unhoused people, especially in Chicago where we invented the skyscraper, to solve this problem.

The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless is the oldest organization in Illinois working to end homelessness at its root. Because we are in the middle of a long cold snap, and because the snow hasn’t stopped in weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness. CCH has seen gigantic victories in the last year to help keep people from experiencing homelessness in the first place, and to get people into supportive housing whenever possible.

So this week I am raising funds for CCH. Starting today, anyone who makes a donation to this fundraiser will be entered into a raffle for a signed copy of “Chicago Transit Hikes” and a hand knit ribbed beanie, made by me, specifically for the raffle winner. Every $10 donation will earn you one entry into the raffle. The raffle will end at Noon, Central Time, Saturday, February 20.

A lovely winter scene, a terrible place to camp.

Walking the dog in late December

Author’s note: This piece was created as part of a nature writing workshop through the Morton Arboretum, led by the ineffable Cindy Crosby of Tuesdays in the Tallgrass. My years in journalism taught me to, above all else, keep myself out of the story and Cindy is intent on making me break that rule. This piece was first drafted just after the first real big snowstorm that happened in late December 2020. I adopted my dog in March 2020, so this moment was her first real taste of snow. I haven’t seen the opossum since then, but I suspect she’s still around. All images are mine but were not taken on the walk in question because I was busy walking.

I click the leash onto my dog’s collar. The air we step into is crisp and clear. It’s just a few minutes before sunset and snow is in the forecast. My dog’s feet are actually made of sugar, compressed into little beans, and walking in any amount of moisture causes her to melt (or at least act like she is.)

She sniffs around the neighbor’s juniper bush before leading me north on the sidewalk. When she stops to investigate the message board that is the corner yew hedge, small flakes fall visibly under the streetlight but land imperceptibly on my face. We continue towards the old stump, another communication hub for area canines, where the flakes burst on my hand like tiny ice bombs. By the time we reach the twin pines, about halfway around the block, the snow began to accumulate on the grey asphalt. My dog picks up her pace, her pointed ears now glued to her head, streamlining her against any wind that might delay her return home. I notice the flakes gathering on her mottled back and my navy coat. They hang in place as we walk, our movement does not cause them to shift, fall or clump. It is almost as if they were thrown there with force. Like we were hit by hundreds of Lilliputian snowballs. We round the corner and pass the apartment where her mortal enemies live – an identical pair of small, white dogs. Today (from behind a window, inside an apartment) they fire the first dozen, raging yaps. My dog returns with three, sharp, perfunctory borks. She pulls at the leash, refusing to linger as I exchange pleasantries with my neighbor, smoking a cigarette on his porch. As we approach my front steps, the melted snow on my glasses blurs the Christmas lights on my hedge. In the time it took us to walk around the block, a thick dusting of snow turned my street into a patisserie window.

As we approach our front stairs my dog jolts suddenly into action. Summoning the ferocity of her wild dingo ancestors, she lets out a prolonged series of sharp, angry barks and pulls hard at the leash, which propels me forward with all 26 pounds of her force. Rounding the hedge, I see a large, naked rat scurrying down the wrought iron fence that separates my stairs from the side yard. No, not a rat – the opossum! When the snow is fresh some winter mornings, I see her little footprints in the tracks she leaves on my front steps. They look like five stubby fingers spread wide. I watch the opossum scurry down the garden bed, now mulched for the winter. I try to hold my dog out of sight of our neighboring marsupial, but her varmint-hunting instincts compel her to try and get it, I guess. When the opossum reaches the back fence, she climbs it smoothly and gracefully. Her pale, round body and long, pink tail, sparsely covered in wiry hairs, disguises surprising efficiency and agility in movement.

The air is palpably silent when my dog and I go inside. Instantly she locates a ball, and all memories of the varmint exit her mind. I jog to the back of the house to try and catch another glimpse of the opossum from the window over the backyard. Through my fogging glasses and the waning light I watch her amble slowly down the top of the fence. Her movement is less graceful now that the threat has passed, but she is unquestionably stable. As she scuttles behind the garage and out of my sight, my dog drops the ball at my feet. I pick it up and remembered one evening last summer when I stepped onto my back deck and found a dead young opossum between my potted plants. I toss the ball into the kitchen, and think about how I left that opossum where it was, went back inside, and huddled by this same window. I watched gleefully a few minutes later as a very much not-dead opossum cut quickly across the length of my deck, and disappeared among the summer foliage of my garden gourds. The space behind my garage, is narrow and full of piled logs and extra siding. Once when the weather was better, I climbed back there wearing thick garden gloves, picked up all the aluminum cans, candy wrappers, chip bags, old cassette tapes, and fast food cup lids that had piled there for years and years. I left the logs and siding where they were. Opossums cannot dig, but they like a shelter from the weather just like anyone else. The ball again at my feet, I lob it into the hallway. I hope, but trust, the opossum has a safe place to winter.

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Rachel Mylan is a one-woman snailforce

Author’s note: I first met Rachel Mylan through our neighborhood Buy Nothing group. She posted that she had 200 snails in need of rehoming and wondered if anyone was interested in adopting a gastropod. While I wasn’t prepared for the responsibility of pet snail ownership, I had a billion questions about why she had 200 snails to rehome. It turns out, snails are excellent classroom pets, and they’ve been a helpful tool in her educator’s toolbox. Since so many of the classrooms she worked with in previous years are not meeting in-person this year, she found herself a bit overwhelmed with snails. Mylan asked me to emphasize that garden snails have no business outside in Chicago because they have the potential to become an invasive species. This post was written by, me, Lindsay Welbers. All photos were provided by Rachel Mylan. Our conversation has been edited below.

Rachel Mylan is out to change the way kids look at snails – one slime trail at a time.

While working as a teacher in a California preschool classroom, Mylan became fascinated with the average garden snail. The Chicago-area native first noticed the tiny gastropods while standing outside on a 24-hour diner named Norm’s on a rainy night.

Snails, like the slugs and earthworms common in the Great Lakes region, are most active when it rains. Mylan scooped one up, put it in an empty fish tank in her home, and accidentally started keeping pet snails.

“I was just amazed by them. You bring them into the classroom and kids are in awe of them and even your rowdiest three-year-old will sit in amazement watching a snail move very slowly across a piece of paper,” Mylan said. “I realized there was this magic quality about them, they sort of draw people in.”

After a few days, she would let them loose in her garden. But when she moved back to Chicago three years ago, the snails came with her.

Because they lay so many eggs, snails are considered an invasive species anywhere they are not native. In Texas, invasive snails have devastated crops and vegetative ground cover, while out-competing the region’s native snails. In Florida, invasive snails have been found in over half of the state’s watersheds.

“Snails are a really natural phenomenon in California,” Mylan said. Switching jobs meant moving out of the classroom and into work with a nonprofit that trains teachers. “That’s where the sort of snail breeding situation came to be. I was working with all these teachers,” Mylan said. “I had snails that I brought with me from California. They had so many babies I didn’t know what to do with them.”

Snails, it turns out, make great classroom pets. They live in a tank, enjoy an occasional misting of water to keep damp, and they eat mostly vegetables.

“Snails are, like, really hearty and really they don’t need very much. So from that angle, they’re a really good classroom pet. Leave them alone over winter break, and that’s good for them because they hibernate and that’s how they grow,” Mylan said.

The snails Mylan keeps are helix aspersa, the standard garden snail. In captivity they live for three to four years. “I think of snails as slow-motion puppies. If you watch them … if you really take time to watch them, snails are very curious and very playful.”

When a snail first hatches, it eats the shell of its egg casing to create the snail, that it carries on its back. When it first emerges from the ground, a snail is smaller than a pinkie fingernail, and within a year will be about the size of a quarter. Some of Mylan’s two-year-olds are the size of a half-dollar.

For a classroom pet, the snail’s characteristic slowness it’s part of its appeal. “Their life is eating vegetables, drinking water, they crawl around and play. They like climbing, going under things, and crawling around. That’s pretty much their lives.”

Mylan said she see snails playing with each other all the time. Little snails catching piggyback rides on larger snails, or snails holding their face up to the misting water, apparently in enjoyment. Pretty charismatic for something that creates its own trail of slime and it uses to slide along on one giant muscle.

Because a snail is capable of reproducing after one year. And because snails are hermaphroditic, any snail can mate with any other snail. Mylan likes to point out that means that snails are neither “he” nor “she,” so she uses “they” pronouns when discussing the snails and their habits. It’s one of the ways she uses snails to open a door to larger social-emotional conversations with the preschool and kindergarten kids who have snails in their classrooms.

“Kids are sitting on the edge of a much thinner threshold of amazement and they see things and notice things. They take time to figure things out because they’re seeing everything for the very first time,” Mylan said.

“When I was a school director in my hallway we had a snail tank instead of a fish tank. We did that as a goodbye spot for kids who were having a hard time saying goodbye to their parents. The kids would say ‘look at that snail, he looks sad’ and they would point to a snail who was maybe off by itself.”

Her school’s snail tank created an opening for kids to single out the physical manifestation of an emotion, and in doing so learn about their own emotions.

“They say toddlers aren’t always known for being slow and gentle and I’ve seen so many rambunctious kids who are able to really fully sit down, hold the snail, and adapt their physical needs to what the snail needs. You have to wait patiently for it to come out of its shell. All sorts of creatures have very different needs and its part of it,” Mylan said.

Interested in keeping a pet snail of your own? Mylan will have more snails available when the next clutch is ready to graduate out of her tank. Reach out to her directly at midwestsnailsforce  at gmail dot com or find her on Instagram at @snailsforce. Teachers, especially, should reach out to her about classroom education opportunities.

Know someone doing something super cool in an outdoorsy way anywhere in the Great Lakes region? Third Coast Hikes wants to know about them!