HE WALKED ON

ANDY LARSEN,,,NATURALIST, TEACHER, FRIEND...

...HAS WALKED ON

• 
• 

Monday, 9:00 AM.  28 degrees F at the ferry dock, 26 on the back porch.  Wind SW, mostly calm at present, but picking up.  The sky is partly cloudy, the humidity 81%.  It will warm into the low 40's today, then the highs will drop to around 30 through Thursday.  It will warm into the low 40's again  and rain on Friday.
   We got home yesterday from good friend Andy Larsen's "Celebration Of Life" memorial service, which was held Saturday at the Mequon Nature Preserve north of Milwaukee.  The trip down was a bit arduous as it rained all the way and threatened to turn to ice, but we were fortunate and dodged that bullet.  The weather was cool but sunny and beautiful for the return trip, and the event on Saturday was very successful and attended by about 300 people.
   Andy was a very popular naturalist, teacher and writer who had a considerable following in Milwaukee and throughout Wisconsin.  I usually hate such events as they often end up being more about the presenters than about the person being memorialized, but this was different, probably because Andy was himself so different, his personality and teaching so unique that it stood up to the  best efforts of the speakers.
   Andy taught by putting his students (regardless of age or degree of dignity) through unique learning experiences.  Seldom was anything dull, and was occasionally even mildly hazardous.   There were a number of speakers, none of them told the same story, and many were humerus.
   I have one of my own, although I did not relate it at the memorial.
   Early one spring evening several years ago we were at the Larsen farm, sitting around the campfire with Andy and Judy and a few other folks, having  drinks and a quiet conversation, when we heard a persistent "peent, peent, peent."  We all recognized that sound as the unmistakable courtship song of a male woodcock, which tries valiantly to impress his lady love by flying straight up like a little helicopter to a dizzying height and then dives straight down, pulling out at the very instant of crashing dead in a heap, and then doing a courtship dance.  Andy got up and started off, we all thought, to find the little daredevil.  Several of us followed, not only because we were interested in witnessing the death defying display, but because Andy had long been severely afflicted with Parkinson's disease and couldn't be trusted to wander off on his own in the dark of night.   So we bravely followed Andy, his flashlight piercing the gloom.
   I should have know something was amiss when we didn't head directly towards the sound of the action, but walked on down the dark road towards County Highway K.  Ah, I thought , we are sneaking up on the madcap rascal from a different direction.  That theory was proven wrong when Andy took another turn in the dark and crawled under a barbed wire fence.  Then the flashlight went out.  We had no real option but to follow closely or risk loosing him or ourselves in the enveloping blackness.
   The mystery of where we were heading grew as our feet began to get wet, and it wasn't long before we were ankle deep in cold water.  The entourage stopped and we all stood silently, since there seemed to be nothing else to do.
   Then after some moments of utter silence we heard a faint "peep," and then another and another, until there was a racket, a veritable din, of "peeps."  We were standing in the midst of a chorus of spring peeper frogs.  Then Andy turned on his flashlight.  There were tiny greenish frogs everywhere around us, obviously thousands of them, each one no bigger than a fingernail.  And they were copulating, the male frogs astride the female, all of them in an obvious state of ecstacy, all the while singing their diminutive hearts out.
   Thank you, Andy.
Judy read the following poem as a final tribute:

DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WEEP

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there. I do not sleep. 
I am a thousand winds that blow. 
I am the diamond glints on snow. 
I am the sunlight on ripened grain. 
I am the gentle autumn rain. 
When you awaken in the morning's hush 
I am the swift uplifting rush 
Of quiet birds in circled flight. 
I am the soft stars that shine at night. 
Do not stand at my grave and cry; 
I am not there. I did not die. 
      Mary Elizabeth Fry
  

   The poem is beautiful and relevant, but it is a 
scientific poem,a rational white man's poem
that refers to the immortality of the atom,
not of the soul .  I prefer to think of my friend Andy 
in the Ojibwe idium; he walked on..