GOING NATURE’S WAY By Kate Crowley I am intrigued by the idea of Sense of Place; to feel completely ‘at home’ in one particular place. I have read that people who grow up on the Great Plains feel claustrophobic when they are in forested environments and in reverse, people who have grown up surrounded by forest find the openness of the plains unnerving, with nothing to break the view to the horizon. I grew up in the city, but the Minnehaha Creek and Parkway were just two blocks away and I spent countless hours playing and exploring there. The city lakes were within biking distance. The Mississippi River was just blocks away from the apartment where I lived the first four years of my life. When I was 36 I married Mike and moved to our current home and it was perfect. When my dad first visited us in our new home, he said, “Kate must think she’s died and gone to heaven”. This is where I am supposed to be. Scientists who have studied the e...
Because of the floods our trip to Itasca became one day instead of two and we had to drive south from Willow River to get around the closed roads and bridges to find a route we could use to go west. This took us around Lake Mille Lacs, over to Brainerd, then up to Walker and on to Itasca. There I received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Minnesota Association of Environmental Education (MAEE). This was an amazing honor and wonderful recognition from my peers. The event was held at the Mary Gibbs Center in Itasca State Park - the headwaters of the Mississippi River and an important part of our 2013 expedition. Lake Itasca is shaped like a slingshot and the river drains out of the north end over a series of slippery stepping stones. It is hard to envision the small stream that exits the lake to be the same river as the industrial waterway we saw near New Orleans. The Mississippi starts in the true north - land of red and white pines and Minnesota...
Day 13 – March 30 It rained during the night and was still raining when we got up, but it gradually lightened and by the time we left Strawberry Plains the sky was clearing and it was 63F. Before hitting the road we met with Bubba Hubbard, the Director of the Audubon Center , Andrea Schuhmann their Outreach person and Chad Pope, the center ecologist. We talked about how we might connect with them on the bike trip. They recommended a number of people and groups – either bike related or river. We appreciate these local resources and the networks they can link us up with. Andrea is an avid biker, originally from Kentucky and she said she has found the ethic in Mississippi Very different than what she was used to. She didn’t want to scare us, but she just wanted us to know that there isn’t a lot of respect on the road for people riding bikes. A couple features of Strawberry Plains that we really liked were the rain chains and the chimney swift h...
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