Your friend John Kason passed away yesterday.
You probably didn’t know John, but if you love Cleveland Metroparks, you’ve seen him in every landscape. John was Cleveland Metroparks first and only Assistant Chief Naturalist, back when “naturalist” meant hard-core biologist, and later became the first and only Wildlife Manager for Cleveland Metroparks. John was a founder of the Association for Interpretive Naturalists, one of only two of the original group remaining, when he left us in August.
John was my friend. I heard the news late yesterday, and tried to absorb it today, but found that I could not. Tonight I went out on the back patio in the dark and sat, and I thought of John. And there was one firefly. Only one. Now, fireflies have been absent from here for weeks. The two species that inhabit our shrubby yard line, one blinking fast and one blinking slowly, gave up their show over a month ago. I hadn’t seen them since. Until tonight, when I thought hard about John.
There were two Johns that changed the face of Cleveland Metroparks in the 1960-1990 era, John Kason and John Gerlach. I called them John of the Wetlands, and John of the Trees. If you love the roadside beauty of trees blooming in spring, summer and fall, think of John Gerlach and his assistant forester, Rick Tyler. They labored for years, making the roadside specimen tree program throughout Cleveland Metroparks the envy of landscape architects and university forestry departments nationwide. Your drive through Cleveland Metroparks is beautiful because of them.
If you love wetlands, and ducks and geese and frogs and toads and salamanders and beavers and the warm smells of the richness and fullness of ponds and marshes in Cleveland Metroparks summers, think of John Kason today, because he built most of them. Sanctuary Marsh, Bunns Lake, Judge’s Lake, Lake Isaac, Bonnie Park, Blueberry Falls, Shadow Lake, Big Creek Wetlands, Albion Road wetlands, the Bridge to Nowhere wetlands, South Chagrin wetlands, all these and more bear the mark of John Kason and the myriad of years of summer crews that sweated and toiled with John and his plans to increase diversity throughout the park district that you love today.
When I started my career with Cleveland Metroparks, John was one of the first people I met. My office was at the Zoo then, and one day John took me upstairs to meet Joe Pavalonis, the first Director of Planning and Natural Resources. “So,” Joe said, “you’re the new Chief Naturalist, eh?” “Well Kid, here’s how it is. There’s only four kinds of trees – Pine trees, and them that ain’t, and trees that are in the way, and them that ain’t!” I was later to discover that old Joe, and the Johns, and Rick and Jack and Tom and Steve and so many others loved the landscape and the trees and streams and lakes and rivers of the vast expanse of Cleveland Metroparks, and their careful planning and hard work added thousands of acres of conservation land to the park that you and I and they loved, and set up long term plans to care for it for generations to come.
I came to know John best when we undertook Cleveland Metroparks first urban deer research program under Chief of Natural Resources Tom Stanley in 1984. I had experience with wildlife telemetry, working with porcupines in northern Vermont and the deer research was a natural extension of that. John and Tom and numerous staff and volunteers sat night after night after night at our “research headquarters” (my living room) in Strongsville waiting for radio signals to tell us that yet another deer had blundered into carefully constructed live traps and was waiting to be radio-collared and released. Many deer were, over those winters, with John’s careful oversight. We discovered then that there was a large and local Cleveland Metroparks deer herd, and also an ever-changing, very fluid Greater Northeast Ohio deer herd that came and went into and away from Cleveland Metroparks at their whim. One deer was recovered over 52 miles from the initial point of capture in the Mill Stream Reservation, and John and I took to the air in a Cessna once to find others that had strayed as far away as Elyria. John was the first biologist in northeast Ohio to begin to plot car-deer accidents in the early 1980’s with results showing that the Solon and North Royalton West 130th Road areas were initial car-deer collision clusters, deserving special traffic attention.
Later on, I had the privilege to fly into northern Ontario fishing lakes with John, and watch him delightfully explore, like the kids he never had but always loved, the birds and bugs and moose and fish of yet another biome. John instinctively understood wildlife, and habitats, and the seasonal interactions among them. With John I watched beavers and otters and loons and moose, and fell under his spell of tales of years in the north woods and his extrapolations south into the park district that we all loved.
The last summer that John worked for me, he called me in one morning to tell me that his intern’s brother had been lost on a Navy flight in the Mediterranean Sea. He asked me to be there when he talked to his intern. “Brian,” John said, “Everything dies. Even the stars die. Only one Guy didn’t, and that’s why we go to church every Sunday. Your brother lives.” I had to leave John’s office then, and in my car I shed unabashed tears, for Brian, for John, and for the shallow life that most of us really live. For more than 25 years I’ve remembered, “…everything dies, even stars die….” And John’s few simple words have sustained me, and so many others, through the years. Nature lives. The earth lives. And so do we.
Tonight, in my back yard, I saw a firefly. Fireflies have been gone for over a month now, and I haven’t seen a single one. John Kason passed yesterday, and I still remember thousands of fireflies in July over the mowed meadows that he created and maintained for the grassland birds, and the small mammals, and the butterflies, and the fireflies in Cleveland Metroparks. I haven’t seen a single firefly in over a month, but I saw one tonight in my back yard, and I thought of John Kason.
Robert D Hinkle, PhD
Chief Naturalist Emeritus
http://www.ClevelandMetroparks.com