ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 13 



-» 



NEAR BYRON, ILLINOIS 



A Boyhood on Rock River 



The readers of the Audubon Bulletin would, perhaps, be interested in a 

 boy's reaction to a Rock River environment. To get the setting, imagine a 

 great shallow bowl about two miles across, not much over a hundred feet 

 deep, very gently sloping sides and a level bottom about a mile wide. On 

 this level bottom lies a sleepy little village, on a terrace well above even the 

 flood waters of the stream which has been trenching the valley ever since the 

 time of an earlier glacier. 



To the boy mind the rim of the bowl was the boundary between the seen 

 and known, and the great world beyond. The second-growth forest which 

 topped the rim, its irregularity softened by distance, gave a somewhat wavy 

 but nearly even sky line. To the east the rim was sharply notched where 

 the trees had been felled to make way for the steel rails tying the little 

 community to the metropolis more than eighty miles away. Day after day 

 the boy looked from the doorstep at this gateway notch, its vertical sides as 

 high as the forest trees, and watched for the swift emerging of the smoking 

 iron horse with its train of coaches bringing strangers and messages from 

 the cities and people beyond the rim. 



To the north and to the south were other notches where wagon roads 

 had long ago been cut thru the timber, notches whose sides were softened 

 in outline by the healing growth of shrubs and saplings. Thru these came 

 the wagons of friendly folk with their burdens of farm produce. The bowl 

 sagged to the west and opened in a deep notch cut, not thru the trees by the 

 hand of man, but deep in the hills by the gnawing tooth of the river. From 

 points of vantage you could get glimpses of the shining water as it turned 

 around a rocky point and was lost behind a bluff it had made. 



The boy never dreamed that hundreds of thousands of years ago, before 

 the time of the glaciers, this wide valley had been made by the slow down 

 cutting of a stream which flowed east to join the master stream lying 

 seventy-five or eighty miles west of Chicago, and by the still slower weather- 

 ing of rain, wind and frost ; that a great glacier had filled the valley of 



