Vi and I don’t have to travel to see signs of the coming seasons. By looking out or living room window we have been watching the leaves on a hackberry tree turn from green to yellow before they flutter to the ground.
Hackberries are among the tree species that are last to leaf out in the spring and are among the first to drop their leaves in the fall. We have watched the leaves of that tree come and go for many years. We planted it to replace an elm tree that died during the years when most village elms were victims of Dutch Elm Disease. The hackberry will be void of leaves before a maple in the yard realizes fall is coming.
There have been many local seasonal changes to witness through the years. A favorite September evening activity was driving along “Highbank Road” west of Muscoda. During late summer we could park and look across the Wisconsin River bottoms to check out the wood-duck numbers.
As the evening sun sank there might be numerous flights of “woodies” come into the sloughs to spend the night. Sometimes the number of ducks seen was very impressive. The theory was the ducks were coming from the hills where they fed on acorns during the day.
As duck hunters, the boys and I would discuss the possibility of a forecast cold snap sending the birds south before the hunting season opened in early October. This year the apparent lack of water in the bottoms may cut back on the number of ducks in the area.
It was a spring trip along Highbank Road that is most memorable, especially for Vi. It was on a Sunday afternoon, probably in the early 1960s.
A groundhog scampered across the trail ahead of us and went up a tree. I was not very knowledgeable about that animal species and I wanted to photograph it as it perched on a tree limb about 8-feet up. I didn’t know groundhogs (wood chucks) could climb.
The problem was, we didn’t have a camera with us, it was in Muscoda. But we did have a lawn chair in the trunk of our car. Vi agreed to sit in it, under the tree with the “hog”while I went for the camera.
Our scheme worked. We had a picture for the paper that week – of a lady sitting in a lonely lawn chair, next to a dusty, sand road with a groundhog perched on a scrubby oak tree branch over her head.
Vi reported that a couple of cars passed by on Highbank Road while I was gone. They didn’t stop to check out the strange scene. Perhaps they thought it was too strange to safely stop.
Sadly, we didn’t save that once-in-a-lifetime photo. But we do occasionally talk about that Highbank Road adventure.
