A sure sign of spring, even on a blustery overcast day, is the annual Maple Syrup Festival at Indian Creek Nature Center. This year was the 40th such event, so we had even more reason to celebrate! I don't know how much of the metro population attends or volunteers during the course of the weekend, but it's well into the thousands, making this annual experience once that is shared around a pretty fair proportion of the community. The Maple Syrup Festival, along with Christmas, Pride and the Freedom Festival in the summer, and maybe some high school and college sports are ways we mark the year together.
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| Serving lines were short mid-morning Sunday |
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Beverages served inside
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Bluegrass music
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| Obligatory food porn |
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a little early maybe? but it's 5:00 somewhere
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Syrup is produced onsite
(We're eating last year's crop) |
The Nature Center promised "We won't run out of pancakes," but warned "We will run out of parking." It struck me as we ate in the auditorium that you and your family of whatever size could have easily found a place to sit down, but as usual cars were spread all over the property and down the roads. That shows, as if it needed showing, how huge a footprint cars require. It's the same at a Kernels game. I used to joke that it seemed like everyone at the game drove themselves to the game, then walked home and drove their other car to the game, but ha ha, no, that's how much space cars take. We need to stop taking all this for granted.
I also reflected, maybe because the day before I'd taken a group of students to the State Capitol in Des Moines, that semi-wild spaces like the Nature Center are at once a commodity (that we can sell to tourists), an amenity (that makes life in Cedar Rapids fun), and a space for nature. The Nature Center, as you can tell from their website, works really hard to make the fun educational, and nature education fun. And of course, the income generated by the Maple Syrup Festival helps pay for the year-round care they provide their property. Wild spaces are an unqualified good, though, and shouldn't require tourism to make us value them.
I'm not sure these days what Iowa values anymore--stay tuned for my annual pan-the-legislature post in about a month--but the Nature Center, in its quiet and subversively fun way, is doing great work in maintaining natural space, both for our use and for the rest of nature.
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| turkey vulture |
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forest slowly restoring itself,
but still scarred from the storm in 2020 |
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| fungi found a tree stump |
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