A Winter Playground on the Marsh

We marched onto the ice, fanning out in every direction.  Large bluffs loomed over us on one side as we looked out onto one large white expanse of ice. A train rumbled by and a few people walked along the marsh trail.  The dogs ran and ran and ran. There was an eagle's nest high up on a tree. My husband dropped down for a snow angel.  The kids played hide and seek in the dried cattail grass. 1,077 acres of natural wetland. The summer and spring are great for hiking and biking. In the winter, the marsh turns into an ice-rink and an all-ages playground. It is one of La Crosse's best-kept wintertime secrets.

Winter Landscape This is like a place we used to know, but stranger and filled with the cold imagination of a frozen four o'clock daylight eaten by clouds, blackened like slate horizons. In this coulee, there is a sensual bond with earth, wilderness, and solitude in the starkness of snow, the randomness of woods. Allow the moment as daylight is swallowed in a meandering , thawing river, the connective life blood carrying us along with hope that winter is not static but a gradual metamorphosis of our longings. Silence evaporates in the dusk of a March thaw: exacting harmony as a hawk circles a tree. --Gayle M. King, St. Paul, MN  And we came back later in the day with our ice skates.

                     Skating

And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not their summons. Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel
We hissed along the polisshed ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle. With the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the shadow of a star
That gleamed upon the ice. And oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

Stopped short — yet still the solitary cliffs

Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round.
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

--William Wordsworth

And a week later just the two of us.

And when we left with numb fingers and red noses, I said a quiet thank you to the nature gods  and the Eco Park for helping maintain this beautiful, natural wetland in our town.