Beauty is common if you look for it, but it is truly rare to step into the wild’s inner sanctum, a place and condition apart from time and humanity. For me, I am always oblivious until I am there, when some element of the wild jolts me outside of my consciousness and into a place of pure feeling (the description is embarrassingly corny, but it’s the best I’ve got). And I am only ever there briefly, because almost as soon as the feeling hits, the mind reflects. I was there most often as a child. Now I’m lucky to be there once in years.

Most recently, I was at the Utica Lake tamaracks searching for the little yellow lady’s slipper, which had been reported there in the 1970’s. The tamaracks are thick with poison sumac and exotic shrubs like hybrid honeysuckle and glossy buckthorn. It is a traverse that requires balance, patience, and focus. The tamaracks are bisected by a small stream that drains Utica Lake. The canopy opens around the stream, and when I stepped out into the open, I had found about a dozen of the little yellow lady’s slipper orchids. I also found another orchid, the showy lady’s slipper, which is even rarer in SE Wisconsin. The opening there provides just enough light for these orchids to hang on.

The little yellow lady’s slipper (Cypripedium parviflorum var. makasin)

The showy lady’s slipper (Cypripedium reginae). This orchid is becoming increasingly rare, because it requires ample light, and the boggy areas it prefers, often with some intrusion of calcareous groundwater, are increasingly choked with glossy buckthorn. This orchid blooms a few weeks after the little yellow lady’s slipper. I had to return to get a shot of it in flower.

As I stood there with the orchids on the sedges of the bank, a branch snapped in the tamaracks across the stream. I looked up from the orchids, and my eyes were quickly drawn to a large, white form approaching through the trees. For a brief moment, I did not understand what I was seeing, and I felt something akin to wonder and terror together. It was a white deer. I muttered an expletive, and it turned tail and ran, leaving me there standing stupid with a cloud of mosquitos and deer flies.

I didn’t raise my camera in time to catch the deer, and it wouldn’t have been right anyway. I did happen upon a spot where it had bedded down and left behind white hairs.

A white deer is not a miracle. Neither are orchids or tamaracks. The moment on the bank had nothing to do with any of those things apart from the others. It was everything, and I would describe it as everything that was there as well as everything that was not. There was no meaning or message. The experience was limbic. Still, there was something best described as spiritual. I felt like I was the deer. I wonder if it wasn’t how a deer, a wolf, or a bird feels all of the time. Or something that man has lost in looking.

A few more elements from the tamaracks….

Starflower (Trientalis borealis)

Naked mitrewort (Mitella nuda). These stood 3-4 inches tall, their nickle-sized leaves looking like decorations pinned to the mossy logs and roots [/caption]