Last Day in the Shawnee - Bell Smith Springs

By Nick Mullins

May 27, 2014 - Following the Heartwood Forest Council we stayed a night with our wonderful friend Sam Stearns whose generosity and deep felt roots in the land rivals any Appalachians. Our last day in

the Shawnee National forest was spent hiking with Sam down into Bell Smith Springs, a natural area  Sam has spent 55 years of his life enjoying and protecting. The cool clear spring pools tinged with a dull blue pushed from aquifers deep beneath the hidden beauty of the sandstone canyons. Daniel and Alex moved ahead of Rustina and I and behind Sam, tromping as kids do on the well worn forest paths. Rolls of thunder came from the west, darkening the skies and promising rain. Soon we reached the largest area of the canyon just as the first waves of rain set in. Sam led us on a climb to a long covered ledge high above a spring pool, and we rested in the dry to watch the rain nurture the forest and ripple the pools below. We talked and listened, understanding the world, but not the people.
       We left the springs and went to Hill Branch, again traversing forest paths through beautiful diversity. The forest can create so much, but it is only what we can use or make profit from that interests man. Sam shared a story about a recent field trip he and his wife, a local 2nd grade teacher, led into Hill Branch. One child slipped and fell with no injury, but the mother who joined the trip was appalled at having her child brought to such an "unsafe" place, threatening to call the school board on Sam's wife  . The other kids enjoyed it thoroughly though as Sam recalled. "I wanted to say some things to that mother, but I resisted." I don't think I could have. Sam told us that the school nurse was in attendance and agreed with the overprotective mother, herself saying, "My son would hate it here. He doesn't like being outside."


   
Leaving those places I was reminded once again of Luther Standing Bear in his book Land of the Spotted Eagle

"In talking to children, the old Lakota would places a hand on the ground and explain; 'We sit in the lap of our Mother. From her we, and all other living things come. We shall soon pass, but the place where we now rest will last forever.' So we, too, learned to sit or lie on the ground and become conscious of life about us in its multitude of forms.

Sometimes we boys would sit motionless and watch swallows, tiny ants, or perhaps some small animal at its work and ponder at its industry an ingenuity; we lay on our backs and looked long at the sky, and when the stars came out made shapes from the various groups.
Everything was possessed of personality, only differing from us in form. knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty. We never railed at the storms, the furious winds, and the biting frosts and snows. TO do so intensified human futility, so whatever came we just adjusted ourselves, by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint.
Even the lightening did us no harm, for whenever it came too close, mothers and grandmothers in every tipi put cedar leaves on coals and their magic kept danger away. Bright days and dark days were both expressions of the Great Mystery, and the Indian reveled in being close to the Great Holiness.
Observation was certain to have its rewards. Interest, wonder, admiration grew, and the fact was appreciated that life was more than mere human manifestation; it was expressed in a multitude of forms.
The appreciation enriched Lakota existence. Life was vivid and pulsing; nothing was sacral and commonplace. The Indian lived - lived in every sense of the word - from his first to his last breath." - Chief Luther Standing Bear

                  This tour is more than going from place to place, telling stories and hearing others. It is about understanding, teaching our children about life and what it means to protect it, the systems in place that wastefully destroy it, and what we must be doing to change it so future generations will have more than just a few "natural areas" within national forests, which even they, as Sam will tell you, come under constant threat from resource extraction. Even now the possibility looms that horizontal drilling and well fracturing threaten the pure water aquifers that feed the Bell Smith Springs in the Shawnee National Forest of Southern Illinois.