Elizabeth Carls
On Trespassing
Our trespassing begins along the unused ghost of a road that forks away from the driveway and skirts the base of the rolling fields. The dog runs ahead off leash because I trust her. The road defines a space between field and marsh, it’s soft underfoot and the walking is easy. In other seasons the quaking aspens would be the sound of wind, but their dirty-white branches are leafless now. It’s quiet here. Our conversation kept to a minimum and our voices low so we can take in the subtle unseen sounds of spring. We tread lightly on the land, traveling as we often do, as pedestrians.
The Olsen sisters are of my father’s generation, older women in my life who are not quite friends, but something more than acquaintances. Their farm was a working farm when they were young, and their father was still alive. Before that, this land lay within a large expanse of undulating plains of glacial deposits known as the Western Superior Uplands. It was occupied by fire-dependent forests of white pine, jack pine, red oaks, and quaking aspen, with shallow wetland communities and deeper lakes left as evidence that the glaciers advanced to and then retreated from this part of Northern Minnesota. The transient glaciers shaped this landscape, leaving in their wake a diversity of habitats ideal for the flora and fauna that would come to reside here, eventually attracting the mostly Scandinavian homesteaders who would claim ownership, change this landscape, and choose to farm here.
The Olsen sisters aren’t young anymore and this is no longer a working farm. Now the old homestead is an occasional home. Both sisters left the farm with adulthood to raise their families and live their lives in cities, visiting the old farm on weekends that stretched into long lazy weeks of gardening during the summer months. These hills, edged with woods and wetlands, are once again in transition—the young forest maturing, and native forbs reclaiming the meadows. At present these hills and swales provide beautiful views from the farmhouse windows and ample space to take long, rambling walks.
The red metal livestock gate at the end of the driveway is closed, chained loosely, and padlocked, a signal that there is no one here to witness our trespass.
The swing gate, when closed and locked, is intended to keep uninvited cars from the long gravel driveway that leads to the house and to discourage strangers from wandering in. Later this year the beavers will dam the culvert that runs under the road encouraging the marsh to flood this, the far end of the driveway, reconnecting the wetland that the driveway now bisects. The livestock gate is not designed to be an effective means of keeping the beavers from their marsh. Likewise, for the coyotes who have always run these fields and woods, the gate constitutes an artificial border. I note the vaguery of this boundary as we climb around and through the gate to take our walk.
In all seasons, I am drawn to walk near these wetlands—marshes, potholes, lakes, and ponds of varying shapes and sizes—that define this landscape. Some, like the marsh the beavers maintain and regularly reengineer, are large enough and deep enough to hold water throughout the year in all but the driest years. I am especially drawn to this marsh community in the spring, because it is home to nesting pairs of sandhill cranes and trumpeter swans. Like the beaver, both species of birds were once extirpated from this area, pressured from their home habitat by rapid human expansion and exploitation. But both species have recovering populations who return to the same nesting sites year after year, which means these are likely the same swans and cranes I encountered here last year, the year prior, and that I will likely revisit again next year. I am comforted by the feeling of acquaintance and the implied familiarity.
I visit this part of the state frequently because my father lives here, but unlike the Olsen sisters I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in the city and for as long as I can remember I have been afflicted with frequent bouts of nostalgia for an idealized version of the countryside with quietude and room to roam unimpeded. It is possible that such a place exists only in the imagination.
I find it hard not to romanticize the idea of the English walk-about and the concept of the Right-of-Way that encourages and supports the long-distance walking tradition that is an ingrained part of the culture. The Right-of-Way holds that if the foot path has been traditionally trod in time immemorial, walkers may continue to use the path regardless of the land’s current status as private or public. And they do.
Here in the U.S., we fence our property and post our land with “no trespassing” signs. In urban and peri-urban areas we fence with chain-link or wood privacy fences, in rural areas with electric and barbed wire. These very real barriers all seem to be such a stark contrast to the inviting dry-stone walls and stiles, which are designed to allow free passage through the English countryside. I have had the privileged pleasure to walk some of those long-distance paths in England, through ramp-filled woods smelling sweetly of garlic, and to climb the stiles that separate one rolling green pasture from the next. I have walked routes that frequented private property, but because of the Right-of-Way permission to pass through is not necessary.
It’s early in the spring and the understory—a shrubby layer of mostly dogwood and alder—is still thin enough to easily walk through. This encourages us to leave the ghost-road, the Olsen’s land, and cross another ill-defined border to wander deeper into the woods. Scattered throughout these woods are vernal ponds—isolated low spots, that fill with water only in the spring and dry out by mid-summer. They are ephemeral. Because they are isolated from surrounding waters and dry for most of the year, these springtime pools are important breeding grounds for wood frog, the Western Boreal chorus frog, and fairy shrimp.
The chorus begins in March. There is a phenology of frog songs that I am just starting to learn. The wood frogs are the first to sing. They are followed in April by the spring peeper, and by May it is the Northern leopard frogs’ turn to sing. Like the ponds themselves, the sound of the wood frogs is transient. The song builds to a frenzied din, that first fades and then abruptly stops as we approach. When the previous winter’s snow has melted and the spring rains have finished, the frogs will have moved from these ponds to new homes in deeper, more permanent wetlands. The vernal ponds will be gone, leaving behind only soft, low spots in the landscape that will fill with annual sedges.
The woods we wander are a possession held by an unseen someone. The fact that they are someone’s possession, renders them both less wild and simultaneously, more menacing. Whoever owns these woods likely uses them only for hunting as evidenced by the deer blinds littered at random throughout. The blinds are mostly made from scrap lumber, left to rot, and fall from the trees. They bring to mind the forts we made as kids in what we thought of as a no-man’s land, but which was in reality owned by the FAA to serve as a buffer around the airport. As city kids we would trespass into this swampy, weedy, woods to build our hide-a-ways from downed branches and whatever illegally dumped rubble we could collect. There the crushing roar of the airplanes flying low overhead was loud enough to become a silence that enveloped us and made me feel comfortably invisible. We never imagined that our trespassing made us juvenile criminals; we were just city kids building forts and trying to lose ourselves in the only woods we had access to.
The deer blinds here feel sinister. They offer an unfair advantage to the men who hunt here, lending an eerie air of threat to these otherwise welcoming woods. There is no shooting now—it’s spring and killing is a fall sport.
The sky opens where the canopy of trees gives way and the woods transition down a gentle slope to the shoreline of a nearby lake. We use the openness of the sky as a landmark, a guidepost as we make our way through the woods towards the lake, the dog and I both drawn to any waters’ edge.
We pause with an audible intake of breath as a pouch of pelicans flies silently over the lake, white silhouettes on their annual migration from their winter home in the Gulf of Mexico, on their way to summer in the shallow lakes of Northwestern Minnesota. The pelican, another species that was once nearly extirpated from Minnesota, has in recent decades, returned to their old nesting sites and migration routes. The release of our held breath acknowledges that this pouch is a rare sight that we are afforded only because we are trespassing.
After the pelicans have flown fully out of sight, we continue our walk towards the lake until we are confronted with what feels like an act of vandalism—unsightly and loathsome “No Trespassing” signs nailed haphazardly to a row of trees defining a boundary that would otherwise not exist. The signs prompt us to turn north, making our way back to the Olsen’s fields despite the fact, that we have for some time already been trespassing, yet there is no one here to witness it.
Trespass from the Old French trespass, meaning a passage, from trespasser meaning to pass through from one place or condition to another. It's difficult to fathom that passing through should require permissions, or that our harmless and enjoyable walk here is a crime.
As we make our way back towards the Olsen’s using the unused, but still standing silo on their farm as our new landmark, we come across a fallen down house in among the trees. The house, not much more than a cabin—wood-framed with handsome stone steps—was at some time somebody’s home. I later learn that the old homestead belonged to a bachelor farmer, a Norwegian and a drunkard who died years ago. The county maintained the road—the ghost road we came in on—until the old man died. Now nature is taking down the tiny wood-frame house, reclaiming this land. The woodbine vines climb with tendrils, entangling and pulling the dilapidated cabin closer to the ground. I imagine what the pile of rubble will look like next fall when the woodbine has turned its flame-red fall color, but I know I won’t come back to witness that because in the fall there will be shooting. Many of the boards, decaying with weather, are flecked green and gold as common green shield and powdery goldspeck lichen establish themselves on the wooden substrate. Eventually the derelict cabin will be gone, a legacy left to the woods. The only evidence of the life lived here that remains is the Lawn-Boy lawn mower, which sits untouched and shrouded with weeds where it was last parked near the cabin.
When we’ve left the woods, walking once again under the full expanse of sky, in the open rolling fields of the Olsen Farm, the dog finds what’s left of a dead porcupine. Mostly what remains of the decomposing body are stiff hairs and delicate bones, which she thoroughly investigates but is wise enough not to roll in. Eventually, weather and an unseen army of micro-organisms will reclaim even the quills leaving no trace of the porcupine, no evidence of what was likely a meal for the coyotes who run these hills, the coyotes who have always run wild through these woods and hills.
Elizabeth Carls is an emerging writer whose work has appeared in Texas Gardener Magazine, Yard and Garden News, and various online publications. She is currently working on her MFA in The Creative Writing Program at Hamline University. She lives on a tiny urban homestead in St. Paul, MN.