Notes from my Knapsack 10-6-22

Notes from my Knapsack 10-6-22
Jeff Gill

When the ground is broken
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One of the first merit badges I earned in Scouting was the one for "Fish and Wildlife Management."

I can honestly say I was interested in it because my grandmother had turned me on to Aldo Leopold with a copy of "Sand County Almanac," but truth is it looked cool, and I wanted it on my merit badge sash with First Aid and Woodcarving.

Three geese flying in front of low green hills, a forested lake in the foreground. It was everything I went to camp for in one patch, and at Camp To-pe-nee-bee in the summer of 1973 I earned it.

What I remember most from the work was about erosion. Anyone earning Fish & Wildlife Management had to put in some hours on a conservation project, and mine was installing rip-rap on the path down to the lake.

Before that summer, I'm sure I'd seen erosion. After that summer, I've never been able to stop noticing it. Six hours with axe, bowsaw, and a pick-mattock will help anyone to focus their mind, even someone almost twelve and thinking more about scenery than ecology.

Years later, I got to be the director on the summer camp staff for what we called then the Nature Area, later named Ecology-Conservation. We taught Mammals merit badge and Environmental Science and Weather and Astronomy and yes, Fish and Wildlife Management. Older and perhaps a touch wiser, I was now looking for possible conservation project locations around camp, and kept a list on a note card in my pocket.

What I was learning was how heavy use of a landscape, even a fairly undeveloped area like a Scout camp, creates erosion. If you've got wooded terrain, cut down a few trees and walk a few dozen boots across a slope, and there's a certain resilience to the soil under a patch of woods that gets broken down. It's as if the soil has a sort of skin, those layers of leaves and debris in various stages of decay, and grasses or mosses or whatever is growing in that particular amount of sunlight and soil chemistry, and they weave together to create a topmost portion which protects what's below.

Peel some of that leaf mold or turf mat away, and you have a more vulnerable soil beneath that can wash along and gully down and become a valley where once was a plain. Even slopes with the natural layers on top can hold together, but once just a few Scouts tramp directly down the slope it's amazing how quickly you can see after the next rain the marks of erosion. Angling trails across a downhill stretch is important, and putting in rip-rap or other erosion control barriers is often necessary.

Breaking the ground, cutting open the surface of the soil, is a ritual occurrence for new construction, but it's also a visceral reality in any landscape, one worthy of acknowledgement. Because the landscape will now start to change, regardless of what you build next.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking about watersheds and soil and erosion and conservation these days. Tell him about what groundbreaking means to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.