For his birthday, my son and I spent a day last week walking the winding roads of a 340-acre cemetery and arboretum in North St. Louis. We were not there to admire the pink granite burial monuments of Adolphus Busch, William Clark, or the other notables, but to visit the trees.
Bellefontaine Cemetery is the oldest garden cemetery west of the Mississippi, a Level III arboretum (which must have at least 500 species of woody plants), and home to some of the largest and most beautiful native trees in the Midwest. Following the map, we tried identifying without the tags — cherrybark oak, shingle bark oak, bur oak, post oak, white oak, swamp white oak, Ozark chinquapin, pawpaw, sassafras, persimmon, ginkgo, shagbark hickory, horse chestnut, bottlebrush buckeye and bald cypress — they read like a poem. We searched the ground for acorns and seed pods which my son will germinate and grow into trees for the arboretum at the university where he teaches biology.
My son loves trees. Bellefontaine sits in a neighborhood that is now neglected and run down. It is not very far from Coldwater Creek, where Mallinckrodt, the chemical company, dumped radioactive waste during the race to build the bomb. It is also just south of the place where the country’s two largest rivers join — the Missouri, which meanders all around the north of the city carrying muddy sediments from the Rockies and the Plains, and the Mississippi, which runs clear and clean from Minnesota.
I had come back to Missouri, where I was born and first learned to look at trees and birds and to paddle wild rivers, where my children were born and my cousins still live. Vermont has been my home for a long while now. Uplifted schist and granite mountains are my geology. Birds that arrive in April and leave in October are my rhythm. Fens and bogs and wet mossy forests are my places of escape.
But Missouri, this place where warm shallow seas from a half billion years ago left behind sandstone and limestone bedrock, will always have a hold on me, even if the winters are what we would call a long fall, and August might be thought of as one of Dante’s circles of hell. This river valley, where the eastern forest meets the oak savanna and western prairie, where the glaciers gave up, stopping halfway down the state, leaving good soil to the north and the old Ozark mountains to the south. You will need field guides for them all. Everything is here. Carolina wrens, white-throated sparrows and red-bellied woodpeckers, birds flown south from Vermont last month, sing and call every morning on my run, leaving me confused.
I have as many cousins here as there are native oaks. We fill in each other’s stories, finishing sentences and correcting errors. I learned that my dad played guitar. At parties, he was the guy outside horsing around with the kids or playing music, while the adults gathered in the kitchen laughing and drinking. I am gobsmacked, for this is what I do.
My sister and I visit the house my dad designed and built for us in 1948, the year before I was born, the most lovely Tennessee stone one-story house I have ever seen. The owners are home and invite us in. I am awed by dad’s cleverness. He died in 1951, probably from asbestos. I never knew him or this house, as we had to sell and move to a poorer neighborhood.
I decide to go back to all the places where I have lived, from the inner city to the most remote backwater of wilderness, snapping photos of all the houses, hiking all the forests. I want to check my memories.
My son tells me not to drink the water because almost all our old towns south of St. Louis are now Superfund sites. Lead and barium mining brought prosperity to the region for a while, then left arsenic, barium, cadmium and lead in the soil and water for future generations to deal with.
Driving south into the mining district, I hike over and under impossibly balanced pink granite boulders, round as sleeping elephants, large as houses. I text photos to my kids, and they emoji hearts, for they remember climbing on these Elephant Rocks, the old weathered plutons of the St. Francois Mountains. The granite tombs of Bellefontaine, the castle-like buildings of Washington University, and much of St. Louis were built from this quarry. The stonecutters have engraved their names and dates in the rock— Isaac M. Johnson New Hampshire, 1860. Nearby towns are named Ironton, Cobalt, Leadington, Mineral Point, and Hematite, the lead belt of Missouri.
Driving farther south to the sandstone formations, waterfalls, and caves of Pickle Springs, I get to hike with Lorie Hetrick, a park naturalist who has just published a book called, “Mosses of Missouri Through a Hand Lens.” She leads a group of us bryophyte-lovers who are happiest when crawling on the ground, jeweler’s loupes on our eyes, faces in the moss.
I don’t make it all the way down to Coldwater, where we owned 40 acres of oak, hickory and short needle pine, raised goats and chickens, and where my son was born. Paddling the St. Francois River, we use to fish and swim in the cold clean water. But this was poor land with few jobs — raising cattle, or logging or working at the oak pallet mill.
A few years ago, prosperity was coming with a new lithium battery recovery plant. Built two years ago, it exploded and burned last year, killing the fish and polluting the air, water and ground with chemicals and heavy metals.
The new owners are planning on rebuilding despite local resistance, but this time in a more remote area, not so close to town. Madison County has been blessed and cursed with cobalt, nickel, lead and copper. What do you do if there are no jobs for your kids, yet the only potential industry is fraught with danger?
I guess you really can’t go home again, or if you do, be prepared for the new reality where environmental protections have failed and our leaders tell us, “Don’t worry. Everything will be OK.”
Micki Colbeck is a writer and naturalist. She chairs the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.