Nick Blocha
I stopped the golf cart on the mowed trail to look over the forty-some acres of restored prairie. First thing in the autumn morning, the air cool and crisp wafting from the bay’s calm waters on my cheeks, filling my lungs with awakened life, I felt the sun on my face and listened to the hiss from the waves of the indian grass, big bluestem, and many reeds still damp with the changing season’s dew. Birdsongs are sung in the early morning, gulls guffaw, and I was in need of moving my body. I let the breath and warmth of life abundant rouse my body and soul, calming my mind and heart. When I had my fill, the electric cart continued on, the shovel and pile of black dirt rattling and jumping in the back.
The project I was tasked with, and gladly took into my own hands, now on the brink of completion, was to lay soil around a young black walnut tree whose root-ball had been exposed to the air by consistent erosion from the streambank it was against. The five-hundred-year flood we experienced in summer, poured thousands of gallons into the Okoboji lakes via streams and inlets just like this one, and thus the rivers these lakes filter into. I’d done a lot of disaster relief downstream on human creations over the summer, but it felt good to be working to restore nature, with nature.
I’d clipped branches from one of the cedars on Lakeside’s campus, an introduced species in Northwest Iowa and thus in the eye to be replaced by more walnuts, sycamores, and hickories. Besides, a humble trim doesn’t maim a tree. I didn’t need to collect much from the cedar, just a few inch-wide branches to stick vertically into the mud of the riverbank, and some thinner ones to weave between them, creating a barrier to hold in the moist, black soil I was packing in. A tree tends to grow a number of roots equal to the branches it hosts above ground. It can survive with a few limbs clipped or roots exposed, but when the root-ball, the heart of the tree, hits air and dries out, it can mean a withering of its life, and in the case of this black walnut, falling into the stream and becoming another log of debris in Little Millers Bay.
I think about the way I helped the walnut tree. My process is a natural way to aid a natural thing. Something I greatly enjoy. I’d rather my hands be covered in the paint of the Earth and my nostrils be filled with the smell of petrichor and decaying plant matter over drywall or the soot made from mankind’s mechanisms. Tossing in and tamping down layer after layer of roughly twenty-gallons of the rich dirt, my cedar fence held strong. Recognizing the pride that rose within my chest at the completion of this project, a relatively easy doing over a few afternoons and mornings, I called it complete. I’d walked out to check on it a day after a new rain, which came welcomed by most up here. Already the lake levels are receding drastically as little precipitation has fallen since mid-summer. Still, my cedar fence and compacted Earth held, and the black walnut stands, ready to grow tall among its siblings of cottonwood and oak in the years to come.
About The Author
Nick Blocha is serving as a Land and Water Steward via Green Iowa AmeriCorps at the Iowa Lakeside Labs (ILL) in Milford, Iowa. Sister lab to the state hygienists in Iowa City, ILL analyzes water samples from around the state, hosts researchers and students, artists and writers, and aids in a number of environmental and community efforts with a multitude of partnering organizations and government agencies.
With a background in the arts and storytelling, and as a long-time environmental enthusiast, Nick grew up as a barefoot hippie in the woods of North Carolina and Atlanta, and values the service they can provide and assist with via the GIA program. Nick seeks to focus on the spaces where human society and nature intersect and coexist in harmony.