An Afternoon in the Woods at Memorial Park

Most people who know Memorial Park in Neenah know it for the ball fields. There is a paved loop out around the sports fields, about a mile and a half, and on a nice evening it is full of people walking laps and kids at practice. What a lot of them never see is that the middle of the park, tucked in behind Neenah Middle School, is real woods. The whole place runs close to a hundred acres, ball fields and all, and back in the middle of it there is a stand of tall maples and oaks with a few dirt footpaths cut through the trees. That is where I spent this afternoon, and I brought the camera along.

It does not take much to leave the mowed grass and the noise behind. A few steps down one of these paths and the light goes green and soft, the way it only does under a full summer canopy. The trail is just packed dirt and old leaves, wide enough for one person, winding around the big trunks. I could still hear a lawnmower somewhere off behind me, but it may as well have been a mile away.

A little way in, this one stopped me cold.

A shelf mushroom close to the size of a dinner plate, growing right down low to the ground, tan and wavy around the edge with a dark, almost scorched-looking center. I am not enough of a mushroom person to tell you its name, and I would never eat one I could not identify, but I have a lot of respect for how strange and beautiful they are. This one looked like something off the bottom of the ocean.

Then I looked up, and there it was.

A bald-faced hornet nest, that gray papery football hanging off a maple branch maybe ten feet over the trail. If you look close you can see a couple of the hornets themselves, the black-and-white ones, coming and going from the hole at the bottom.

Here is something I only learned recently: the bald-faced hornet is not really a hornet at all. It is a type of yellowjacket, and it builds that whole nest out of chewed-up wood fiber, basically homemade paper. When you look at the swirls in the outer shell, that is exactly what you are seeing, layer after layer of it. It is an incredible piece of engineering, and it is also a very good thing to keep your distance from, which I did. I zoomed in with the phone and kept moving.

Back out on the wider path, somebody had been through here with a chainsaw.

A big tree had come down across the trail, and it was bucked up into neat rounds and rolled off to the side to keep the path open. I like seeing that. It is a good reminder that a place like this does not stay walkable on its own, and that somebody is looking after these woods so the rest of us can enjoy them.

Near the end I stopped at this old stump.

Whatever it used to be, it is most of the way back to soil now, all silvered and splintered and soft, with a little golden shelf fungus growing out of one corner of it. That is the part of the woods I always end up thinking about. Nothing gets wasted out here. The tree comes down, the fungus and the bugs and the weather take it apart, and it feeds the next hundred years of maples. It is slow, and it is quiet, and it is going on all around you the whole time you are walking.

I was only out there a little while, on an ordinary summer afternoon, and I came home with all of this. That is the thing about Memorial Park. Everybody knows the ball fields and the walking loop, and hardly anybody walks into the trees in the middle. If you are ever in Neenah and you want the woods without driving out of town for them, park off Gay Drive and go find the dirt paths. Bring a camera. You never know what is going to be hanging over the trail.

A Week Later

The woods stayed on my mind, so a week or so later I went back and walked the same paths. I am glad I did, because this was waiting on a mossy log.

Chicken of the woods. If you have never seen one, the color alone stops you. It is a bright sulphur orange with soft yellow edges, growing in overlapping fans right out of the dead wood, and in the shade it almost looks like it is lit from inside. This one had climbed most of the way up the log.

Chicken of the woods is one of the few wild mushrooms even a careful person can learn to recognize, and foragers love it because a young one, cooked, really does have a texture close to chicken. I am still not the guy who picks and eats what he finds, so I did what I always do. I admired it, I took the picture, and I left it for the next person and for the log it was busy turning back into soil.

On the way out I stopped for one more, and it is the opposite of the mushroom in every way.

One yellow leaf, dropped early on a rotting log, with a little fly keeping it company. It is only the first week of August, but there it was, the first small hint that the season is going to turn again. The woods are never really still. Something is always coming on and something is always letting go, and if you walk the same paths a week apart you get to watch a little of both.

This walk at Memorial Park is one of the stops in my photo guessing game, Where in the Fox Cities? Guess where around the Fox Valley each of my photos was taken.