The city can be noisy and noxious.
One recent morning, I stepped out my office door and was engulfed by the sound of a jackhammer and the toxic whiff of diesel fuel. At times like that, I find myself longing to get away to someplace quiet, wide open and wild.
And just like that, I’m there. A mere two blocks east, bathed in sunlight, I watch ducks dunk to the bottom of the Summerfest lagoon for their lunch.
The city has so many natural respites. Standing in the sand at Bradford Beach, I can stretch my sights to the blue horizon. Walking the banks of the Menomonee River, I’ve spotted a great blue heron as water gurgles over a spill dam, drowning out the nearby traffic. And I’ve hiked through a field of indigenous plants in the shadow of the 35th Street Viaduct, yarrow and milkweed and sunflower gone to seed, yet preserved by the fall frost.
But I’m a small-time urban explorer compared to Eddee Daniel. For more than six years, off and on, Daniel tramped through the Menomonee River watershed – from Washington County to the Port of Milwaukee – with camera and backpack. His photographs and lyrical reflections were published this past summer in a book, Urban Wilderness: Exploring a Metropolitan Watershed, a naturalist’s travelogue, of sorts.
What he captures, vividly and with a true love of the local environment, is the poignant paradox of wilderness in an urban setting. The visuals are arresting: a river tributary sparkling in the sun with the mountainous Menomonee Falls landfill looming in the background; a brood of mallards waddling lockstep along the concrete-lined Honey Creek in West Allis; the bronze leaves of a roadside shrub stirring in the autumn breeze beneath the High Rise Bridge downtown.
It’s a delicate balance, the built environment and natural world. In our quest to control nature, we have pushed manifest destiny to the limit, becoming now the ultimate invasive species. Living and working in an urban setting – driving on elevated freeways, walking along concrete sidewalks, barricading ourselves in cubicles under artificial light – the balance can tip, leaving us feeling disconnected from earth and sky. As Daniel puts it: “If a tree falls in the city, will anybody hear?”
Daniel does. He works in the city, teaching art and photography at Marquette University High School, and lives along the Menomonee River in Wauwatosa. And in his spare time, he documents the natural secrets of our urban area – here before our eyes, if we just search a bit.
Daniel tells of watching hundreds of geese in V-formation at sunrise – within the city limits. “People happily drive an hour or more northwest to visit Horicon National Wildlife Refuge in order to witness a similar phenomenon. During migration season, in the early morning, here in the northwestern corner of Milwaukee, wildness is undeniable.”
It’s easy to flee the city and think we’re getting back to nature. But it is civilization that made possible the idea of wilderness to begin with, as Daniel points out. His book is a reminder to us to value – and do our best to help protect – what we have in our own backyard. “It is more important to discover where we are than to seek out new places,” he writes.
Look and you’ll see wildness all around, sometimes conspicuous, sometimes not, measured in frames large and small: In the old-growth woods of a state forest, or in a single blade of grass, pushing stubbornly through a crack in the sidewalk.
