Most Illinois residents probably don’t know that the extreme southern tip of their state includes the beautiful and rugged landscape of the Shawnee Hills.  Most of the people in Illinois live in Chicagoland, which is about as far away as you can get from the Shawnee Hills and still be in the same state.  The hugely popular residential area near Lake Michigan is famously flat while southern Illinois features picturesque canyons and knobs.  Bordered by the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, two mighty ancients of North America, this lesser-known rugged terrain is part of the South.  Think Kentucky, which dozes just across the Ohio.

It’s a long drive down there from Chicago, and Marty and I always left the office too late in the day, trying to do one thing too many after arriving late to work after striving to finish up one more chore at home.  There was usually a midnight rest stop after which I fell asleep, miraculously trusting of Marty’s careless driving in the incredible blackness beyond the interstate.  I’d wake again at the Podunk hotel, yawning in the lobby while he checked us in.

Crappy coffee in the morning – but who am I to say what southerners should drink?  A big, greasy breakfast of eggs and potatoes, then we’d drive into the national forest to check on Marty’s endangered plant restoration.  Each site required some hiking, but the one on Scot’s Bluff was the longest trek, maybe two and half miles from the muddy, rutted-out road where we’d leave the car.

One sunny late spring day we parked there in the grassy wood’s edge and swapped our sneakers for hiking boots, shaking a fistful of sulfur powder around the top of each sock to keep out the tiny chiggers that would otherwise drive us to distraction with their incredibly itchy bites.  Then Marty grabbed his shoulder bag and we headed downhill, following the narrow ruts of an abandoned road for awhile.

Marty was way ahead of me in no time, tall and long-legged as he is, so I was left to my own devices for enjoying the hike.  We had been working together for several years, and were a good team, despite the fact that we had very little in common.  I came into his lab as a volunteer, my UC Berkeley degree in Humanities having nothing to offer his plant conservation biology program, save for a searing interest in environmental issues and an aptitude for manipulating software.  I had been slowly honing in on restoration ecology as the target of my soul, and was so excited to suddenly be among its practitioners that I decided to go back to school.  Catching up on math and science was not a task for the faint of heart, and though I got an ‘A’ in trig and chemistry, my enthusiasm soon died with a wounded whimper.  Something about the scientific venture seemed just a little too cold and aloof to me.  I couldn’t quite do it.  My heart demanded equal ground with my brain, and the poet in me kept bursting forth to rail at the unfeeling, yet never truly objective, numbers.  Not to mention my steadfast inability to write in the passive tense with an ascetic vocabulary.  I struggled through the bleak language of scientific papers wanting to scream, “Will someone please just come out and say something?”  My passion about restoration ecology remained strong and true, but I realized my place in all this might be as the assistant, or maybe the programmer.  I retained my left-brain/right-brain divide, and was happy to have a little time to myself during these field trips.

I embraced the gentle warmth – much warmer than Chicago temperatures that time of year – and enjoyed the gnarly black oaks, stately even in their stunted stature.  I enjoyed the wonderful quiet, the re-wilded land, even the southerness of it.  A couple centuries ago this had been the most developed part of Illinois, due to commerce on the waterways.  Highways changed all that, and now southern Illinois is a ghost of its brief former self.  Most of the roads and buildings from that fleeting heyday have long since returned to the earth.  Good to know how quickly this can happen.

As we neared the bottom of the slope, we left the old road and took up with a creek.  Shallow and not too wide, it allowed us a dignified crossing.  Then we began to climb back up slope – nothing steep, just long.  I never really did get the lay of that land, and was no help when Marty began to wonder out loud, “Is this it?”  Sometimes he was over eager, but on reflection he was always able to recognize the site and find the rebar he had used to mark the spot.  He pulled his field book from his shoulder bag along with a thirty-meter measuring tape and read aloud from his notes.

“Transect 30 meters long running due north from the stake, plots every 10 meters starting at five meters.  So, plots at five meters, 15 and 25.  Is that right?  Yeah.”  He glanced around sizing up the landscape and decided, “I’m not gonna bother with the tape.  The vegetation is so sparse here, I bet if I just pace form the rebar we can find the first plot.”

A glance here and there was all it took for me to discover the rebar, a solid metal post sticking up several inches above the scruffy plants that were biding their time there.  Then Marty measured off the meters with his long stride and age-softened work boots.  I waited until I heard “Four, five,” then meandered over to the spot where he had stopped, eyes scanning the brownish ground for any remnant of the shiny tags we’d added as aids to relocating our struggling waifs.  As usual, I spotted one before Marty (it helps to be a foot closer to the ground).  The copper square had lost some of its shine, but it was clearly number 17.  Marty consulted the sketch map in his field book.

“That’s the northwest quadrant,” he reported.  “So there should be another one here, here, where you’re standing, and then one in the center.”

The surrounding glade vegetation being fairly low and sparse, we easily found the four other tags.

“Great!” Marty declared.  But it wasn’t so great, as we couldn’t find any plants.  This was fairly common in our business, but always harshly disappointing.

Several moments after I’d given up the search, Marty asked, “Is this a milkweed?”

He was desperately scrutinizing a tiny stem and two leaves.  This also was fairly common, this undying hope for a survivor.

“Na, It’s a Coreopsis.  Okay, nothing at five meters.  Next plot’s at ten.”

When he paced off the distance, his fifth footfall coincided with an alarming buzzing sound, loud yet indistinct in the ground layer.

“What was that?” I demanded.

“I dunno.” Marty wasn’t impressed.  “An insect?”

I stayed where I was.  Something about that sound told me in no uncertain terms to keep away.

“Come on,” Marty whined, the ace of impatience.

“What was that sound?” I insisted.

“I dunno.  Are you gonna make me do this myself?”

“I’m not coming over there til I know what that sound was,” I told him.  I really don’t think I had any choice about the matter, was governed by reflexes at that moment.  Something in my primitive brain stepped to the fore and held me back with a force unmatched by deliberation.  Maybe it was the same part of my brain that decided I really didn’t want to be a scientist even if I could get high grades in the required coursework.  Or maybe it was something in my heart, a tender spot for the cry of another creature, or maybe it was my amygdala – whatever it was, Marty didn’t sympathize.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.  “All right, I’ll do it myself.”

He started poking around with his hiking stick, pushing aside grasses to discover a shiny glimpse of scientific metal, and all at once let out a, “Holy shit!”

“What?”  I was still tense, the back of my neck on high alert.

“Hannah,” he said, “you’re not gonna believe this.  It’s a rattlesnake!  No – wait – oh my god, it’s two rattlesnakes!  Wow, they’re big ones.  You’ve got to see this.”

Having never seen a rattler before, I did move a little closer to behold the mythic dark and light pattern of the stalwart creatures that lay curled together in a big heap of herpetology.  I was pleased to behold them and happy to leave them alone.

Marty, however, didn’t share my reaction.

“They’re in the plot!” he cried.  “Move, you guys.”

Much to my horror, he even prodded them with his stick.  My mind was racing, wondering whether I’d be able to find my back to his car and get medical help in time should he fall victim to his own bravado.  But the snakes weren’t moving for anything.  They were blissed-out together in the dappled sunlight, brave enough to ignore a silly scientist and wild enough to charm an urban poet.

Marty sighed at length.  He consulted his field book again.

“Next plot’s at…fifteen meters.”

– Jenny McBride