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| Bill & Gracie at Al Sabo Preserve |
I grew up in an industrial city in Northern Indiana.
The post-WWII factory boom that created America's middle class also boosted the tax base of my home city. Immigrant workers poured in from Chicago and the deep South, and for awhile that city was a nice place to live for people hoping to have a comfortable life for maybe the first time.
Today, that city is looking a lot like Flint, MI. Or some of the sadder parts of Detroit.
I moved to Kalamazoo in 2007 with Bill, my husband, who grew up near Kzoo and lived here for years before we met. Kalamazoo has been hit by the 2008 crash as well, like lots of other Midwestern cities, but it has something most of them don't: Beautiful wild nature preserves and parks.
What makes Kalamazoo unusual in this regard is that these are not tradition one or two block city parks with a swing set, a jungle gym, and maybe some benches and a semi-kempt rose garden.
Instead, Kalamazoo's wild places and working into the city proper.
Each of them contain upwards of 100 acres.
What this means is that all kinds of wild creatures feel at home in Kalmazoo: Sandhill cranes, coyotes, foxes, deer, eagles, raptors like red tail hawks and falcons, bluebirds, song birds, and all manner of woodland fauna too.
Walking city blocks is a different experience from walking a nature preserve. You can read Thoreau's reflections on Walden Pond and dozen times and you won't get the same sense of peace and silence you get from one hour walking any of these wild places.
No noise except birds and wind. No people (if you are lucky... if not you might pass one or two). New smells, new sensations, and very soon a sense of coming back to yourself, as if you were not discovering this place but remembering it.
Enough of that. I'm really just writing this as an excuse to share Bill's latest photos. I will be back and wax poetic when I'm feeling so more Thoreau-ish.
For now, enjoy these latest from Al Sabo Preserve, just a mile from our home.
