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A book by May T. Watts: Reading the Landscape of America
To read on this page:
May Theilgaard Watts' famous letter that started a
movement.
Our autumn newsletter with articles on berries and
stargazing.
We are
human beings. We are able to walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its
suburbs to have a footpath, a long one.
The
right-of-way of the Aurora electric road lies waiting. If we have courage and
foresight, such as made possible the Long Trail in Vermont and the Appalachian
Trail from Maine to Georgia, and the network of public footpaths in Britain,
then we can create from this strip a proud resource.
Look ahead
some years into the future. Imagine yourself going for a walk on an autumn day.
Choose some part of the famed Illinois footpath. Where the highway crosses it,
you enter over a stile. The path lies ahead, curving around a hawthorn tree,
then proceeding under the shade of a forest of sugar maple trees, dipping into
a hollow with ferns, then skirting a thicket of wild plum, to straighten out
for a long stretch of prairie, tall grass prairie, with big blue stem and
blazing star and silphium and goldenrod.
You must
go over a stile again, to cross a highway to another stile. This section is
different. The grass is cut and garden flowers bloom in great beds. This part,
you may learn, is maintained by the Chicago Horticultural Society. Beyond the
garden you enter a forest again, maintained by the Morton Arboretum. At its
edge begins a long stretch of water with mud banks, maintained for water birds
and waders, by the Chicago Ornithological Society. You notice an abundance of
red-fruited shrubs. The birds have the Audubon Societies to thank for those.
You rest on one of the stout benches provided by the Prairie Club, beside a
thicket of wild crab apple trees planted by the Garden Club of Illinois.
Then you
walk through prairie again. Four Boy Scouts pass. They are hiking the entire
length of the trail. This fulfills a requirement for some merit badge. A troop
of Scouts is planting acorns in a grove of cottonwood trees. Most of the time
you find yourself in prairie or woodland of native Illinois plants. These stretches
of trail need little or no upkeep. You come to one stretch, a long stretch,
where nothing at all has been done. But university students are identifying and
listing plants. The University of Chicago ecology department is in charge of
this strip. They are watching to see what time and nature will do.
You catch
occasional glimpses of bicycles flying past, along one side. The bicycles
entered through a special stile admitting them to the bicycle strip. They
cannot enter the path where you walk, but they can ride far and fast without
being endangered by cars, and without endangering those who walk.
That is all in the future, the possible
future. Right now the right-of-way lies waiting, and many hands are itching for
it. Many bulldozers are drooling.
—MAY THEILGAARD WATTS, letter to
the editor, Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1963.
May Watts’ letter inspired a
dedicated group of volunteers who worked with her to make the trail a reality,
and is generally credited with starting the rails-to-trails movement in the
United States. (Watts’ fantasy of a separate lane for bicycles did not come to
pass. The IPP is shared today by bicyclists, joggers, users of motorized
wheelchairs, and walkers afoot.)
May Watts had been inspired by the
public foot paths of Britain (as she described in her book Reading the
Landscape of Europe), and by the Appalachian Trail. Her proposal reflects
her understanding that nature is worth observing even in ordinary,
long-inhabited places like northern Illinois, and that human beings need places
to walk, where we can make intimate contact with the landscapes we inhabit. In
a later letter, she remembered what had been lost as the automobile came to
dominate the landscape:
I remember
lanes and byways where one could walk between fencerows full of hawthorn, wild
plum, elderberry. I remember when the lanes were widened and hardened, and one
needed to be alert, but there was still a footpath alongside, and a ditch with
frogs, and fence-posts with meadowlarks. I remember when the road widened again,
and the fencerows were blighted with weed-killer, but one could still walk on
the edge, in gasoline fumes. And now the walker is often fenced out. He is
illegal.
Is not the walker entitled to damages for his deprivations? Where slum
clearance has displaced people, they are often given help in finding new homes.
Then why is an erect, air-breathing, unmechanized human not entitled to
recompense for his losses? We are willing to accept this 54-mile strip of
footpath, for a start.
For more about the Illinois Prairie
Path, and the work of many volunteers to create and maintain it, visit the IPP's web site.
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