It seems amazing when I look back on it all, but for my first 44 years in Chicago, I never set foot in any of Cook County’s forest preserves. I settled in Chicago in 1966. I visited my first forest preserve in 2010.
It’s not as if I were some nature-shy tenderfoot. As a college student I camped in the Smoky Mountains. In my 30s, I made four grueling canoe trips through the Ontario wilderness. After the my girls were born, I bought a canoe and started taking them on little trips. But for some reason I remained oblivious to the Cook County Forest Preserves.
Then in 2010, a nervous dog changed it all. Micah was a pit bull mix we adopted after my wife saw his photo on the internet. The shelter people couldn’t tell us much about him. They didn’t know his age and had no record of where, when or why he had been picked up. He seemed to have been neglected. He did not know the standard commands “come,” “sit” and “stay,” and he didn’t respond well when we tried to teach him. Our cute new dog was a behavioral handful.
Micah’s problem was common. Although pit bulls are among the smartest, easiest to train and most affectionate of all breeds, many of those in shelters have been recovered from people who mistreat their dogs or train them to be aggressive. Micah was not aggressive, but something in his past life had left him nervous and unable to focus.
Fortunately, we found a pit bull reform school that dealt in tough cases. I signed Micah up for the eight-session rehabilitation course. He took to instruction immediately and learned to do all the tricks and follow all the commands.
There was just one problem: Halfway through each one-hour session, Micah would have a nervous breakdown and start barking uncontrollably. The instructor kept him away from the other dogs by putting him in a timeout cage. By the end of the eight weeks, I asked the instructor whether Micah should take the class a second time. He said no.
“I’ll tell you what to do: Take him out to a forest preserve — any forest preserve, just so long as it’s deserted,” he said. “Let him off the leash and explore the trail with him. It’ll help him bond with you. It’ll settle him down. Just make sure there’s nobody else around. Dogs are supposed to be on the leash in the forest preserves.”
I don’t remember which forest preserve we tried first. It was winter, and the place was deserted. I unhooked his leash and said, “Let’s take a walk.”
Micah seemed to get it. He stayed a few paces ahead of me as we began to explore the trail. He sniffed everything and seemed to find each new smell exciting, as if his liberation from the shelter were now complete. We repeated the routine at different forest preserves, and the bonding seemed to grow tighter. Micah was heeding my commands now, on the trail as well as at home, and he was becoming calmer and less nervous.
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Then came the unannounced pop quiz. On a February morning in 2011, we drove to the Thaddeus S. Lechowicz Forest Preserve on North Central Avenue. With no other cars in the parking lot and no footprints in the snow, we seemed to have the place to ourselves. I let Micah off the leash, and we proceeded down the slope from the parking lot to the deserted picnic grove on the river flood plain.
And then suddenly, we weren’t alone. Micah and I stiffened as we saw a couple perhaps 100 yards ahead with two dogs starting the 20-foot climb up from the riverbank into a meadow. I knew what was coming: Micah would dash toward the other party, and three desperate humans would struggle to separate three snarling, powerful dogs.
But that’s not what happened. I whispered, “Micah, sit!” and he sat. “Good boy!” I whispered as I attached his leash, and the two of us waited while the couple and their dogs struggled up the slope and into the meadow.
The instructor had been right. Long walks off the leash in the forest preserves had settled Micah down. He was bonded to his caretaker.
But Micah wasn’t the only beneficiary of the forest preserves. As winter progressed and our walks grew longer, I noticed I was settling down, too. My nervous system had its own history and needed as much therapy as my dog’s. Daily contact with nature and a mile of vigorous walking were beginning to change my psyche. By mid-2011, I had become a forest preserve junkie. The trees and trails had become my dope.
Micah had to be euthanized last year on the day after Christmas, but his place was quickly taken by a blue pit bull pup named Zuby. Our new dog came to us only 2 months old, with no nervous disorders. Yet, Zuby turned out to need the forest preserves as much as Micah did. His body craved exercise, and his curiosity craved novelty and excitement.
Since 2010, walking my dog through a forest preserve has become essential to my well-being. It’s a joy that meets the literal definition of re-creation. And there are thousands of others who re-create themselves in their own way in these same sylvan environments.
On the Nov. 8 ballot, Cook County voters will be asked to approve a $1.50-per-month increase in their property taxes to enable the Forest Preserve District to catch up with deferred maintenance and acquire more properties for preservation of those natural habitats.
I just talked to Zuby, and he said it’s a good deal. Please vote.
F.K. Plous is director of communications at Corridor Rail Development LLC in Chicago.
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