A Beginning

Betsy noticed the sound of rushing water where I had only heard the burbling of the wee water making an island of the bottom land beneath the slope. Four hundred feet from that snowy slope is a long valley cutting upward toward the gravel road. There, a series of two or three small wetlands, small depressions that are the beginnings of the creek you see here, flowing mightily, as it drained eighteen inches of snow melted in sixty degree days over still frozen ground. The source of the rushing sound, a series of little falls cutting into the easily eroded black earth, lies about 450 feet from our north slope. The sound traveled just as easily over the cool air of the still snow filled wetland amphitheater. This melt will find its way into the ground, absorbed by the wetland, but also to the chain of lakes and then Minnehaha Creek, and finally to the Mississippi just 25 miles to our east.

Finally, a day of rest, snow still residing just outside the double wall polycarbonate panels, and the intense focus and resolve to place hundreds of tiny seeds of sedges, forbs, and graminoids into six hundred cells bedded with compost, perlite, peat, and rice hulls.

Minnesota At Mississipi

At the conjunction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers is designated park land. Rising above the Minnesota river is the Mendota Bridge (it is nearly silent and one wonders why New York City Bridges are so darn loud). 

Here, there are some very large trees.

A few are big enough to climb into.

And beavers...

...that may bring them down.

_____________________

This park is the site of an American policy of extermination, named for Fort Snelling, which looms on the bluff above the river floor. The land at the confluence of the two rivers was spiritually significant to the Dakota people, so it became a tragic irony that many of them should have been impounded here, died here, and ultimately expelled from their land under the gun of European Americans. Be vigilant against the concept of savagery as it is too often used to to conceal one's own.

Banks Of The Mississippi

Somewhere on the banks of the Mississippi, I believe I've seen a box elder bug sucking the life out of a mosquito.

Box elder bugs are vegetarian, as far as I can tell.