A few years ago I came down a backcountry road in Wisconsin looking for a place where a man had given his life. The road had once been the route of pioneers moving west, then a farm road running through dry, sandy, marginal fields. In the days of Prohibition it had carried illegal whiskey distilled hereabouts, some of the last trees having been cut down to cook the bootlegger’s brew. Then in 1935 another sort of settler came along. It was the time of the Great Depression, and he could buy a lot of land, 120 acres in all, land abandoned by its owners, for a little money in back taxes. The land had no economic value left in it. The man, whose name was Aldo Leopold, knew that but did not mind; he was not after gain or even subsistence. He began coming out regularly from the city of Madison, where he taught at the university, to plant trees. For thirteen years he planted and nurtured. Then, in 1948, he died fighting a forest fire on a neighbor’s land. Knowing those few details, I came wanting to know what manner of man he was and what he had died for. There was no publicity, no tour guide provided, but the dense forest of pines was a sufficient announcement that here was Leopold’s place, now all grown up again to natural splendor. I walked through an open field rich in wild grasses and forbs to a small, gray, weathered shack where he had stayed on those weekends, regaled by the smell of his new pines coming up and the sound of birdsong and wind in their branches. From the shack, I found my way down a short path to the Wisconsin River, rolling silently between its pungent banks, the warm summer sun glinting on its ripples. One August years ago Leopold, as recalled in a sketch he wrote and collected in A Sand County Almanac, found the river “in a painting mood,” laying down a brief carpet of moss on its silty edges, spangling it with blue and white and pink flowers, attracting deer and meadow mice, then abruptly scouring its palette down to austere sand.
