Winter 1999

The Unseen
Indiana Dunes photo by Ronald W. Kurowski. Snowy owl photo by Kanae Hirabayashi. Words by Stephen Packard.

A snowdrift tells the story of recent winds. This drift sits atop the longer history of a Lake Michigan dune. Dune cottonwoods may have many feet of buried trunks below shifting sand. Under the snow, meadow voles tunnel through the grasses that will hold the sand once a grassland turf has formed.

In the shape of the snowdrift we can almost see the currents of past winds. In the dune that rose grain by grain, we sense decades and centuries. And in the unseen evolutionary forces that designed the tawny little bluestem to stabilize this dune, and the snowy owl to eat the voles that eat the grass — the past we perceive is millennia, and eons.

To be in touch with the strange intensity of the owl in this photograph, we need to be told by the photographer that, as she snapped the shutter, on Chicago's frigid windswept Montrose Beach, a peregrine falcon was dive bombing its fellow raptor. Unseen here, just outside the frame.

The concealed present and past include people too. We owe our contact with today's wildness to the activists and neighbors, and civic leaders who protected it. And to the ecologists and grade school teachers, and all those who taught us to sense more than we can see. Unseen friends enrich our experience.

In winter landscapes of death and promise, and rest, and peace — we feel the rich starkness of life and nature. In the presence of the unseen.

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