Hickory Creek Nature Preserve

Hickory Creek Nature Preserve

Used to be, as a girl, I’d visit Sue in Brightway subdivision, and we’d walk to the end of a cul-de-sac, where suddenly we were in the midst of prairie. There was a trail through the long grasses into an area called “The Barrens” (only I didn’t know its name at the time). What I knew was the grass was short, the sun was hot, and it was easier to walk. The land was revealed as slightly rolling, covered in short grasses and scrubby bushes and trees.
We’d walk a long way, or at least, it seemed a long way, sometimes talking, sometimes silent. Before long, trees would appear ahead. So different from the prairie, we doubly appreciated the change of landscape. Growing up with land so flat that any tree stood out like a lone beacon, it seemed wondrous to approach what seemed a forest, but was really simply a grove, bordering Hickory Creek. I felt we were in the midst of wilderness, far from the people and cars and commuter trains of civilization.
Sometimes, I went there alone, to cry out my teenage pain when life seemed too big to consume without it sticking in my throat. The ungroomed scrub, the silent grove, soothed my young grief, placed it in a perspective that reduced it to a manageable size I could swallow.
Now, the path is covered with tarmac, a black slash across the prairie to the low grasses and finally, the “forest” along the creek. You can walk farther, into a true forest, which ends at Highway 30. The wide open land is reduced by a map to a tiny piece of the world, a little reminder of the grand prairie that once existed here. The grasses and trees are fenced in, to protect them from the ever-increasing hordes of feet that live and breath close by. Somehow, the power of the land to sooth is also reduced, to a curiosity, a historical marker of what once was.
I know the land preserved is the same size as that I walked when young, yet then it seemed an unmapped wilderness, beckoning to my imagination. Now, it is tamed into a preserve, a museum of nature, on display for joggers and bikers and power walkers, perhaps the occasional Sunday stroller.
A ghost of the prairie that once was, though reality tells me it was already fading when I first waded through its grasses. Still, I long for that lost illusion of wilderness, the perception of being miles and miles from the civilized world; a necessary escape to remind me I have such a small space in the life of this planet; such a relief to a teenager to glimpse she is not the center of the world. Tamed, reduced, named and labeled, “The Barrens,” that power is lost to me. Simply a curiosity, a sharp reminder that man remakes what is wild to fit his planned, mapped out life.
“Nature Preserve.” It holds nature chained, a necessary step, I suppose, to remind of what once was; a small gesture to the power now hidden away somewhere in the heart of my memory of a small grove of hickory trees.