Mengerson Nature Preserve is in the middle of urban sprawl

Mengerson park is just down the road from Northwood Plaza on Fort Wayne's northeast side. There are 36 walkable acres here, and it's very private as it is cut through three layers of woodland. I would think many Fort Wayne residents barely notice it as they pass by on their way to Target or the Cinema Grill. But I think it's great - donated by the Mengerson family to be entrusted as public land. A couple, the wife with the lovely name of Ursula, made this generous gift, to make it possible for all of us to be able to find recreation and refuge in the middle of the city: even if it is near Suburbia. It was donated to the public land trust organization ACRES.

It's muddy through the woodland. Bring your mud shoes in the spring. I did see redbuds and pear trees beginning to bloom, and a layer of forest wildflowers. How I wished my dear friend JoAnne, who lives in California now, could have been there - she is from Fort Wayne and introduced me to this little nature preserve ten or more years ago. I haven't returned since then, but I don't think much has changed. JoAnne is an environmental scientist, and knows the names of all the plants - including the wildflowers' names that I am rusty at recalling - and walks with such focus and understanding it is a pleasure to be with her.

There are boardwalks built up in low places, and it's great to get up out of the mud. A couple of bridges span the creeks, and water is running, since it is spring. The trees are not leafed out yet. Even so it's a thick curtain, protecting us from busy Stellhorn Road. This park is literally found between a couple of houses near Maplecrest, and Reed at the next cross street. There isn't much parking, but I found a spot on the gravel rectangle.

Look for a few giant shagbark hickories. They curve inspirationally, as one could imagine seeing giants in the dark. There are also a few beech trees, one so smooth it has attracted the love carvers. A bit of patio furniture has found its way on one patch of the forest floor, and I found it charming, if not bound to be destroyed within the next six months. But this being a land trust, part of ACRES, and not formal Fort Wayne park property, there may be no regular maintenance crew that makes its way through here.

We walked the circle that claimed to be 1.2 miles, and it was a fine day. Give it a whirl. Imagine being a middle school kid, having the time of your life carousing in here some warm, moonlight night. Hurrah to public land. Get out there and enjoy yourself some.

Survivor at Metea Park

It was an usually hot day in Northern Indiana. Alright - to be accurate, it was an incredibly hot day - it was late May, and often the weather here is rainy and cool; or clear and 72 degrees. This day hit almost 90 degrees, not a cloud to deter the sun and high humidity.

I had not attended a lot of the scheduled school events for my oldest daughter, and so I had signed up to be a parent helper for this end-of-school event: "Survivor" competition at the beautiful Metea Park - named for one of our local American Indian Heroes - Chief Metea. The kids showed up on the school buses and I drove in - I had one thing the teachers' note had neglected to require for the kids - a hat. Who would have expected it to be 90 degrees that day? At least they told the kids to come prepared with bug spray and sunscreen.

The classes were divided into various teams and sent to different locations in the park. Most of the parents had wimped out and cancelled because of the forecasted heat. I was the only parent with my child's class in the morning - another parent of a boy braved it with me in the afternoon.

The first exercise was making this class of 29 students, competing against five other classes - divide into groups and do a word search problem. Each group of four or five did one of those matrix-type word search problems and somehow ended up with a single word - I've forgotten how to pay attention as well as a sixth grader, so I'm foggy on the procdure here. The students weren't thinking ahead well enough to choose balanced teams - they grouped up as friends - so some of the small groups were a lot stronger than others; some finished quickly and others really struggled. Finally, all the groups came back with their single words, and as a large team had to unscramble the words to create a large sentence. The sentence was about the scientific method. I was told not to help with the actual thinking work, and saw for myself, quickly, that one of the words had a capital letter, which meant it was the start of the sentence (duh). Well, after many false tries, they correctly formed the sentence, and the timed challenge stopped.

It was only about 9 a.m. The sun god was beating us unmercifully from the sky, and we had at least five more exercises to complete. It was time to move on in the park, and we had to start hoofing it. Nearly everybody had a water bottle, but one boy had a leather back pack and he called out to everybody, "Does anybody need

water?" The rest of the group was laughing at him for the heavy, old school backpack, but several of them took one of his extra water bottles - he was carrying a heavy load in consideration of his fellow students, and I later realized my daughter had been in preschool (and she says Kindergarten) with this boy. I didn't recognize him now - no longer a small child, he had dark hair and a heavier frame than some of the boys - an Italian football player. His foresight with the water may have saved the day.

The next exercise consisted of writing a poem about the Survivor experience, as a group. I suggested instead of sitting in the blazing sun, they find the one spot under the nature center where there was shade, and then they did so. They let one girl, known by the class to be a good writer, to lead the group, and many of the other kids gathered around her to help. Other kids wanted to help, but nobody figured out how to delegate work, so there were quite a few kids who had nothing to do. While some kids found words and wrote the poem, with a set number of lines and syllables per line, others were standing around - and of course this turned into whistling with blades of grass and sundry monkey jinks. Not sure of my true role here, I asked boys to get down from the bird house they were climbing on, then told SOME if they weren't actually helping they needed to be quiet so as not to distract from the others. They weren't really listening to this, however, and one girl jock finally lost her cool and yelled SHUUUTTTT UUUPPP at the boys, who not yet owning the hormone advantage of puberty realized they had been bettered, and faded down. All without getting surly about it - attitudes and spirits have not yet been demoralized out of these sixth graders. Hope is not yet lost.

(I didn't realize when I started this, to really do it justice I need to break it all into two parts. In a day or two I will write here the conclusion of the mighty Survivor adventure. You all have a nice evening. See you later.)