The Midwest, at least the general Chicago area, has a reputation of being super flat. This is mostly deserved, thanks to glacial activity that just pushed and scraped and flattened most of the area pancake flat. If you head down to Southern Illinois you get some great cliffs and stuff, the north west of Illinois wasn’t really touched by glaciers, and even in the general Chicago area you have moraines and other deposits left behind by the glaciers.
You also have streams and creeks.
There’s one little creek called Plum Creek that went through our town, and through the public park. It was pretty dry most of the year, just a muddy trickle at the bottom of a deep ditch, but it’d flood in the spring. It cut through that flat land like a knife. When I was little I’d pretend I was Laura Ingalls, living near Plum Creek and everything, even though her Plum Creek was in a different state.
We were warned sternly every spring not to play in the creek beds because if it rained someplace else and the creek started to flood someplace where we couldn’t see it the water could come rushing down and drown us faster than we could get away. Especially if we were in a ravine with steep banks. This happened often enough that I remember it happening at least once a year, but I don’t think it was actually that common. It just seemed so common because everyone talked about it.
I grew up around a lot of thickly wooded forest preserve. We’d walk the trails regularly, go camping multiple times each summer. The forests were mostly oak– multiple varieties of oak- with some hickories too. We’d talk about making iron gall ink but we never did (and back then it would probably have been incredibly hard to find a recipe and materials to do so– our local library didn’t have a copy of “Paradise Lost” and when I tried to request it the librarian shrugged and said no nearby libraries would have it so there was no point in trying to do an interlibrary loan). Oaks have wide but shallow roots that really do look like gnarled grasping fingers.
Just like little Plum Creek, the forests we wandered through had little streams and creeks that had slashed through the land, leaving ravines too wide to jump across, and very steep sided. We’d skid down on our butts and hop across the shallow water and sucking mud and clay bottom as best we could and then clamber up the other side, grabbing on to knobby roots and whatever other handholds we could find. There were hills which were steep to us and laughably small to people from other parts of the USA, and the occasional big boulder.
The forests were brown. Always.
The leaves were green in the spring and summer, sure, but there was a perpetual carpet of shed leathery brown leaves on the ground, on top of brown mud and mulch. Brown tree trunks rose out of the brown ground. Tangles, sometimes impassible tangles, of shiny brown thorns blocked passages. Tender shoots of green poked up through the leaves sometimes, but over all, it was brown.
The a forest full of trees tossing their leaves in the wind sounds like… so many things. Like whispers and shushing, like rain falling, like waves rolling. Even without the rising and falling monotonous buzz of cicadas, the sound fills your awareness until its full to overflowing and then sinks into the background again, as present as water when in the lake, as cold in the winter, as humidity in the summer, as the pressure of a friendly dog leaning against your thigh. It’s there and it’s constant.
