For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; Yea, they have all one breath . . . –Ecclesiastes 3:19
At the north end of the Ravenswood line, the el comes down to earth. You walk right out of the train onto streets where well-trimmed lawns front solid brick homes. You may meet an occasional solid citizen walking a besweatered dog or taking a child to the corner park.
“In May, when the prairie first comes up, it’s eerie, because everything is two or three inches tall. It looks like a golf course”–but a golf course with a difference. “The whole surface of the ground is covered with color–pink shooting stars, yellow star grass, white Seneca snakeroot, pink phlox, violet wood sorrel–masses of this stuff. There’s not a square foot that doesn’t have flowers in it. It looks rich–inspiring–like a garden.
The heartbeat of the project is not meetings or agitation but work days. By prearranged and published schedule, anyone who wants to come is invited to meet near one of the project’s seven prairies along the North Branch of the Chicago River (Sauganash, Bunker Hill, Miami Woods, Indigo, Wayside, Milwaukee Road, and Somme Woods, going from south to north). “Our work days are always ritualized,” says Larry Hodak. “Always on Sundays. The elders gather and see who will do what. There’s a sense of community, especially at lunch and on the walks.
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A work day is a mix of brute labor, fellowship, and nature watching. The workers use only hand tools. The latest additions are scythes, to speed up the brush cutting. (“We’re forging into the 18th century with our management techniques,” chuckles Ross Sweeny.) This isn’t archaism for its own sake. For one thing, at the beginning, officials of the Cook County Forest Preserve District (which owns all the North Branch prairies) would have looked more askance at a group of chain-saw-wielding novices than at a group using hand tools. Another reason is practical: “Chain saws and the like are only suitable for a small group,” says Pete Baldo. He and his wife, Kris, were mainstays of the project; they now devote most of their time to a similar volunteer effort at Wolf Road Prairie. “[A chain saw makes it] uncomfortable for other people and for new volunteers–they can’t hear what they should do. Hand tools create a more informal atmosphere, but still very productive.”
Just what constitutes “helping” is not intuitively obvious to the uninitiated urbanite. In Ross Sweeny’s 1984 North Branch scrapbook is a picture of a small clump of tree stumps. The photo is captioned: “The best looking buckthorn in Indigo Prairie”–in other words, the only good buckthorn is a dead buckthorn. Yet a young pin oak of the same diameter would be carefully cut around and preserved. Sure, they’re both “natural”–but one is a weed and one isn’t. No prairie project veteran could possibly confuse the two, any more than a Chicagoan might mistake the corner of Michigan and Randolph for the corner of State and Madison.
“Those areas are gone. We had a big seed source in Des Plaines, we’d had three or four years of wonderful experiences there.” Then one year they rounded up a crew of 15 or 20 people, parked on a residential street nearby, climbed up the embankment–and saw, instead of waving grasses, four inches of gravel and a new Montgomery Ward warehouse.
