Wisconsin People & Ideas – Summer 2018

Along the Wyalusing Eric C. Carson searches for Wisconsin’s ancient river

Wild Ginseng • Roadside Memorials • Writing Contest Winners

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Augusta Brulla • Head Gallery Attendant, James Watrous Gallery Chelsea Chandler • Director, Environmental Initiatives Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Kelly Hilyard • Program Assistant, Environmental Initiatives Angela Johnson • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Bethany Jurewicz • Business & Events Manager Matt Rezin • Data & Office Systems Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Associate Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Nikita Werner • Administrative Assistant OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Tim Size • President Patricia Brady • President-elect Linda Ware • Immediate Past President Rich Donkle • Treasurer Vacant • Secretary Richard Burgess • Vice President of Sciences Vacant • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters Andrew Richards • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Ashley, Sauk City Kimberly Blaeser, Burlington Malcolm Brett, Oregon Frank D. Byrne, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Joseph Heim, La Crosse Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Jane Elder, Madison Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Bernie L. Patterson, Stevens Point Kevin Reilly, Verona Nathan Wautier, Madison Marty Wood, Eau Claire OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Andrew Richards • Foundation President Freda Harris • Foundation Vice President Rich Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary

Editor’s Note They said it was crazy—no, unconscionable—that I, born and raised in Wisconsin, had never been to a Culver’s Restaurant.

Nikita, who grew up in Sauk City with one of the Culver kids, used to go there all the time. Amanda travels a lot between Madison and Sparta to visit her parents, and she noted that there are at least eight Culver’s along the way. But Bethany, born and raised in Pennsylvania, stunned us all when she said she had never even had a fast food hamburger. So it was that my three work friends and I, seeing the big blue sign as we were driving home from a meeting in Sheboygan, came to an agreement about where to have lunch.

We ordered from the front counter and took a little blue placard with the number sixteen to our table. Why had I never come here before? I thought. I knew that Culver’s was a Wisconsin-based chain, but I winced at the word: chain. Were they putting smaller Mom-and-Pop places out of business, did they offer a living wage? I had a sudden urge to Google the carbon footprint of my impending meal. How many plastic straws does this place go through, anyway? These thoughts were wiped away by the baskets of burgers and fries placed before us by a woman named Karen, her gray hair pulled back in a neat bun.

Sitting in our booth, silently dunking French fries into little plastic cups of ketchup, we all seemed content with the simple pleasure of a shared meal. The crinkly fries reminded me of a restaurant near the pool I used to go to in Weyauwega when I was a kid. No more than a shack with a canopy covering six parking spaces and a picnic table, the Wega Drive Inn was a favorite destination for my brother and me after summertime swim lessons. A cheeseburger and swirl cone—one half chocolate and the other vanilla—was our reward for the especially teeth-chattering lessons on cool June mornings. We would eat at the picnic table, the late-morning sun warming the tops of our legs and drying our suits.

It’s funny how food can conjure specific memories of a certain moment in a person’s life. As I bit into that Culver’s cheeseburger, I felt transported back to a time when every decision—what to eat, where to live, who to love—hadn’t yet accrued the weight of political, environmental, and cultural consequence.

Patrick Stutz Photography

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark Bradley Patricia Brady Jane Elder Jack Kussmaul Tim Size Linda Ware

Wisconsin Academy Steenbock Center Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-263-1692 • wisconsinacademy.org

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Geologist Eric C. Carson on the banks of the Wisconsin River near Muscoda.

Photograph by Tom Jenz.

SUMMER 2018

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CONTENTS 04 From the Director 05 Letters 07 Happenings Wisconsin Table

08 Wild Wisconsin Ginseng

Jason A. Smith/Scott Gordon

Report

12 Stamping Out Tobacco Addiction

Christopher Hollenback

WE

KW

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/ist

ock

pho

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com

Photo Essay

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16 Not Forgotten: Wisconsin Roadside Memorials

Thomas Ferrella

Discovery

24 The River that Flows Uphill

Eric C. Carson

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Thomas Ferrella

30 @ the Watrous Gallery

30 New Midwest Photography

Curated by Andy Adams

Fiction

42 Static 1st-Place 2018 Contest Winner

Michael Hopkins

Poetry

48 Poems 1st–3rd Place Contest Winners

Jenna Rindo, Thomas J. Erickson, Justine Jones

Book Reviews

55 Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People

in the Heart of America, by Michael Edmonds

Shelby Anderson

56 Palominos Near Tuba City: New and Selected Poems,

by Denise Sweet

Barry Phipps

VOLUME 64 · NUMBER 3 SUMMER 2018

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 15589633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

Since 1954, Wisconsin People & Ideas has been a trusted resource for people who care about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works from our visual artists and photographers, and covers science and environmental issues that affect Wisconsin’s people, lands, and waters.

Copyright © 2018 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS JASON A. SMITH editor JEAN LANG copy editor JODY CLOWES arts editor CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

Mark Zimmermann

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Wisconsin thought and culture Become an Academy member and support programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture.

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From the Director

M

idwesterners pay a lot of attention to sun and rain, and checking the weather report is part of our daily routine. Most of us, though, aren’t checking our mobile devices to see what tomorrow’s soil conditions will be. Perhaps we should.

It turns out that, for all of its efficiencies, modern agriculture isn’t particularly efficient when it comes to conserving and sustaining healthy soils. Yes, we’ve come a long way from the Dust Bowl Era; in fact, Wisconsin led the way with innovations such as contour cropping. However, most farming relies on plowing and tilling that loosens top soils for planting new crops, which makes these soils vulnerable to gushing rainstorms and strong winds. Conventional farming also depends heavily on industrial fertilizers and pesticides that can compromise the soil microbiome—the ecosystem of tiny organisms that cycle nutrients, hold moisture, and store carbon.

In the Midwest, we’ve lost nearly half of the soil that was here when the sodbusters first broke up the prairies, and we’re still losing soil every season. Some of the hallmarks of soil loss and degradation are easy to see, such as diminished field productivity and gullies full of muddy runoff after heavy rains. Others, such as runoff-fed dead zones in local lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, are indirect but major consequences of the nutrient-laden soils flowing into our waterways.

Continued soil loss of this magnitude is “a disaster waiting to happen,” according to Jo Handelsman, Director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Handelsman was the keynote speaker

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at our Spring 2018 science conference, Science and the American Experiment, where the looming soil crisis was on the minds of several presenters. Handelsman pointed out how history shows that agricultural-based societies risk collapse when they’ve used up their soil, and she cautioned that scientific advances in fertilizers and genetics won’t do enough to offset loss of productivity due to declining soil. Fellow presenter William Barker, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at UW– Madison, noted that just attempting to sustain our current soil isn’t enough either. Barker said we need to incorporate restorative agriculture practices that regenerate healthy soils to begin to address the soil crisis.

At home and across the world, scientists are telling us that on a human-scale timeline, soil is essentially a finite resource. We’re simply not regenerating enough soil to replace what is eroding, and by the end of this century—particularly with the increase of slowmoving storms with catastrophic downpours—productive soils around the world could be very scarce.

So, if you eat food—fruits and vegetables, yes, but also meat and dairy products from grain-fed animals—what can you do? As a consumer, you can learn about how the foods you eat are produced and their impact on the soil, and choose to support regenerative producers. Farmers who are embracing low and no-till cultivation, cover crops, riverside buffers, and low-input or organic practices that can reduce erosion and revitalize soils are in the vanguard, but they are still very much in the minority.

The pathway we’re currently on is neither sustainable nor restorative. So as a society we need to re-think the status quo. Perhaps it is time for Wisconsin to again step in to a leadership role on how to keep its own—and the world’s—soils from slipping away.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

Member News

NEWS for MEMBERS BOARD ARRIVALS, DEPARTURES Earlier this year we welcomed Michael L. Morgan (Milwaukee) as a new Academy Board member. Michael is the former Senior Vice President for Administration and Fiscal Affairs at the University of Wisconsin System. Prior to his work at UW System, Michael served seven years in the cabinet of Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. We are honored to have his leadership on the Academy Board. After fourteen years of service on the Academy Board, James L. Perry (Larsen) has stepped down. During his decade-plus of service, Jim has been an invaluable leader, serving as Board President and most recently as Secretary and as the Academy’s representative on the Natural Areas Preservation Council. Many thanks to Jim for his commitment to the Academy’s mission.

DOUBLE YOUR DONATION Do you wish that more people knew about the Wisconsin Academy? This fall, we’re embarking on an effort to refine the Academy’s brand story and learn how to connect with more people across the state who can benefit from our programs and publications. To aid our increased branding and marketing efforts, the Wisconsin Academy Foundation has established a 1:1 matching grant (up to $25,000). This means that you can double the impact of your donation. Our goal is to have at least half of the matching funds by October 1, 2018. Give online at wisconsinacademy.org/ donate or by mail and designate your special gift to the “1:1 Matching Grant” to help us in this important work.

148 YEARS AND COUNTING In the run up to our 150th anniversary celebration in 2020 we’re asking members and friends to share special memories, notable achievements, and interesting stories about the remarkable people who have shaped the Academy over its history. If you have a memory, milestone, or story to share, please e-mail our development director Amanda E. Shilling at ashilling@wisconsinacademy.org.

Letters How Milwaukee artist Livija Patikne’s photographs came to inspire so many people is a story that few know about. Perhaps even less known is the essential role the James Watrous Gallery and Wisconsin People & Ideas played in making this happen.

Some thirty years ago, photographer Jim Brozek was given some Kodak slides by an apartment manager after his elderly renter died (she apparently had no known relatives). Intrigued by the subject matter, Brozek developed a series of large-format prints from the slides, which I subsequently showed at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts in the 1990s. During the 2000s we showed prints of Livija’s flower arrangements, self-portraits, and pictures of her husband’s grave at Portrait Society Gallery.

The Watrous Gallery in Madison responded to the images, and we mounted an exhibition of them, titled Flowers by Livija, in Summer 2012. In the months before the show, I worked with editor Jason A. Smith on an essay for the summer issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas to articulate what was so compelling about the private artistry of an older Latvian émigré, and why a woman without voice or agency might have left behind these “certificates of presence” (a line borrowed from Roland Barthes).

Based on the strength of the article and Watrous Gallery show, Beth Zinsli, curator of the Wriston Art Center at Lawrence University, invited us to show Livija’s work. Portrait Society Gallery then produced a book designed by Lydia Jarvis featuring Livija’s photographs and my essay; Emilie Lindemann included a chapter of poems about Livija in her 2016 collection, Mother Mailbox; painter Fred Bell composed a series based on Livija’s slides; and artist Paul Druecke launched a conceptual project in Livija’s name. Despite the humble nature of the collection, there has been consistent public interest in it, too, mostly stemming from the feminist orientation of this body of work (there are few like it in the world).

Early in 2017, we received a note from Kaspars Vanags, a contemporary curator in Latvia who had encountered my Wisconsin People & Ideas essay online while searching for images for a class he was teaching on vernacular photography. Vanags asked if he and his co-curators could include Livija’s images in an ambitious show about pre-digital forms of storage and memory, communication and art at the Latvian National Museum of Art. This is how Livija finally returned to her country of origin.

There were moments over the past thirty years when Jim Brozek and I asked ourselves if the copious amounts of time, energy, and resources that we were putting into Livija’s pictures were really worth it. But when curators Jody Clowes and Martha Glowacki of the Watrous Gallery and Jason A. Smith at the magazine took such an interest in the work, it seemed as if we weren’t on some strange, private mission after all. Our thanks to them.

Debra Brehmer, Director Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee

SUMMER 2018

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Happenings

CONGRATULATIONS

TO OUR 2018 FICTION & POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

FICTION WINNERS

POETRY WINNERS

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize

Michael Hopkins Neenah “Static”

Jack Harris Mazomanie “Aeshnidae”

AnnaKay Kruger Madison “A Sweet Thing”

Jenna Rindo Pickett “Head, Thorax, and Abdomen”

Thomas J. Erickson Milwaukee “November”

Justine Jones Madison “The Act”

FICTION HONORABLE MENTIONS

POETRY HONORABLE MENTIONS

“Icarus POW,” Bela Sandor – Madison “The Pencil,” Dion Kempthorne – Richland Center “Howard,” David Giffey – Arena “Open Book,” Kim Suhr – Wales

“The Dying Farmer,” Kathryn Gahl – Appleton “ Heading West on Hwy 54,” Anna Hahm – Madison “The Mission,” Elisabeth Harrahy – Oconomowoc “ Drawn Out,” Jeri McCormick – Madison “Most Saturday Mornings,” Gillian Nevers – Madison “To Dig a Grave,” Nathan Pyles – Lake Mills “My Brother,” Nathan J. Reidl – Madison “Rows and Rows,” Kiyoko Reidy – Madison

JOIN US on Friday, October 12, at 5:00 pm for a special Wisconsin Book Festival reading with our contest winners at A Room of One’s Own in Madison.

THANKS TO OUR 2018 CONTEST JUDGES Victoria Houston (fiction) and Karla Huston (poetry), as well as to preliminary readers CX Dillhunt and John Lehman. All contest judging is done blindly and the winning submissions are selected on criteria established by individual judges.

CONTEST WINNERS RECEIVE CASH AND PRIZES Winners receive awards of $500 to $100, publication in Wisconsin People & Ideas, and a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. First-place winners in both categories also receive a one-week writers’ residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts & Crafts in Mineral Point.

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THANKS TO OUR 2018 CONTEST SPONSORS:

WISCONSIN

BOOK

F E S T I VA L

Happenings

WI DNR

O UTD O O RS From stress relief to improved cognition to reducing inflammation, spending time in nature is scientifically proven to be beneficial to our mental and physical wellbeing. A new initiative from Wisconsin State Parks called OutWiGo encourages Wisconsin residents and visitors to improve the health of their minds, bodies, and communities by getting out and active in our state parks and natural areas.

OutWiGo kicked off in May 2018 with a few words from Wisconsin State Parks Director Ben Bergey and a series of silent sports events at Mirror Lake State Park in Baraboo. Bergey outlined how “Wisconsin State Parks provide a lot of great opportunities to get outside, recreate, and be healthy.”

One of the goals of the initiative is to encourage 20,019 people to sign and online pledge to get out and active. While the pledge form seems more like a survery about which state parks, natural areas, and types of recreation people prefer, the concept behind committing to spending more time in our state parks is a sound one. To this end, several OutWiGo-endorsed activities—a variety of trail hikes and lake paddles—are planned through the year, and participants are asked to share photos and stories of outdoor wellness activities on the Wisconsin DNR social media pages.

Rac

In celebration of the life and works of Appleton poet and educator Ellen Kort, an annual $500 scholarship has been established by the Fox Cities Book Festival and Kort’s family for a creative Appleton high school senior who has prevailed through hardship and intends to continue on a creative path through post-high school education.

Students can apply for the Ellen Kort Dreamcatcher Scholarship through their school guideance counselors or request application information from Cindy Kort at kortcindy@aasd.k12.wi.us. Applicants are encouraged to use creativity to show the scholarship review committee how they have found their creative voice, and how they can help others to find theirs. The committee is eager to consider a wide range of artistic and creative expression, along with the completed application form, which should be submitted for consideration by April 13, 2018.

hel Crowl

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS

C R E AT I V I T Y

Marcia Bjornerud

Geologist and Academy Fellow Marcia Bjornerud (2016) has a much-anticipated book, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, arriving this September from Princeton University Press. The book seeks to change the reader’s perception of time by shedding light on how geologists have charted the distant past and unraveled the mysteries of Earth’s processes.

“We are a time-illiterate society, and our lack of a sense of temporal proportion underlies many of the intractable environmental problems that we have created for ourselves,” says Bjornerud, who is also a Professor of Geology at Lawrence University and an essayist for The New Yorker. Her new book is a call to better understand our place in “deep time” and “reconfigure our political and economic systems to make possible the decade-tocentury-scale planning needed to face impending changes in the climate.”

While most of Academy Fellow John Lyon’s (2018) work focuses on the fishes and waters of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, since 1986 he’s also been involved in studying Mexico’s endangered freshwater fishes.

To prevent these fishes from becoming extinct, Lyon is working with Austrian colleague Michael Koeck to coordinate an international network of conservation scientists and tropical fish hobbyists who host captive colonies of the rarest species in home aquariums. These innovative conservation efforts were recently featured in Yale Environment 360. Details about Lyon’s conservation work with one particular group of fishes, the Goodeidae, can be found at goodeidworkinggroup.com.

Educator and Academy Fellow Emily Auerbach (2006) recently received the 2018 ATHENA International Award from the Women’s Network for her three decades of encouraging lifelong learning in the humanities, including her fifteen-year track record of directing the UW Odyssey Project, which has helped hundreds of students near the poverty level get a jumpstart on college.

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Wisconsin Table

WILD WISCONSIN GINSENG

BY JASO N A. SM ITH with contributions from Scott Gordon

F

or over fifteen years, David Jorgenson* has been digging up and selling wild ginseng roots that grow on

his property near the Mississippi River in Vernon County.

Like many “diggers,” Jorgenson got into ginseng harvesting after a neighbor saw a few of the innocuous-looking plants on his property and asked if he could have them. Jorgenson couldn’t understand why until his neighbor pulled up the plant to reveal a spindly, parsnip-like root that he said was worth a lot of money. Jorgenson did some research on the plant at the local library and quickly realized that the roots his neighbor was harvesting were too small to sell to a reputable broker—and that his neighbor was harvesting the plants illegally. *Name changed to protect identity.

REPORTED IN COLLABORATION WITH WisContext is a digital news and information service of Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, and UW Cooperative Extension.

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Wisconsin Table

A slow-growing perennial plant in the ivy family, wild ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) is a threatened species in Wisconsin. Here, as in nineteen other states, there are laws that regulate the harvest, sale, and purchase of wild ginseng. In Wisconsin, you need a license from the Department of Natural Resources to harvest the plant, even on your own property, and harvesting is prohibited on stateowned lands as well as national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges.

The wild ginseng harvest season in Wisconsin runs from September 1 to November 1, and is limited to mature plants that have three or more prongs with five leaflets and a flowering stalk that produces red, seed-bearing berries in the fall. As the root is the prized portion of the plant, harvesting effectively destroys it. So, as a condition of licensure, harvesters are required to plant all of the seeds in the vicinity of the harvested plant. The rules and regulations surrounding wild ginseng may seem onerous, but they are meant to ensure the survival of a species that is struggling to survive across the globe.

Ginseng root is a traditional herbal medicine, extremely popular in China, Taiwan, and Korea. The word ginseng is derived from the Chinese term jen-shen, which means “in the image of a man.” The most sought-after ginseng roots are wild roots that resemble the human form (hence the name), with thick bodies and leg-like tendrils.

Often chewed or taken in pill form, the slightly bitter root is thought to raise energy levels, lower cholesterol, enhance strength, and reduce stress.

Ginseng use is so prevalent in some countries that it can be found in teas, sodas, candies, soups, and even cigarettes.

Because of East Asia’s insatiable appetite for wild ginseng, wild Asian or Korean ginseng (Panax ginseng) was harvested to near extinction over the last few centuries. While many farms in Asia (and a few in Wisconsin) now grow cultivated versions of ginseng, American wild ginseng is worth far more than these.

Chinese and Korean customers will often pay between $500 and $800 per pound for dried, whole-root wild ginseng—more than ten times the price of cultivated roots. The Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau estimates that the state produced about $35 million worth—just over one million pounds—of cultivated ginseng in 2017 on roughly five hundred acres, mainly in Marathon County.

Almost 98% of the cultivated ginseng grown in the United States comes from Wisconsin. Yet this represents only 10% of the global supply, with China, Korea, and Canada producing almost all the rest.

Exact numbers for the wild ginseng harvest are more difficult to come by, as diggers are often hobbyists who jealously guard patches of found and wild-simulated—hand-planted but not treated with chemicals or pesticides—ginseng on their properties. However,

Cheri131/iStockPhoto.com

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Wisconsin Table

Jerry Davis

DNR wardens estimate that Wisconsin diggers pocketed close to $1,000,000 in 2015, based on 1,294 pounds (dry weight) of root sold.

Its extraordinarily high value has led to a steep decline of wild ginseng plants in heavily wooded areas of the central and eastern United States where poachers illegally harvest and sell the root on the black market. High-tech monitoring and tracking mechanisms—trail cams on ginseng patches as well as forensic dyes on, and microchips in, large roots— deployed by state and federal agencies don’t seem to deter criminals intent on cashing in on the multimillion dollar wild ginseng industry.

Yet, for all its value, we know very little about how the human body actually responds to this popular herb. Research shows that there are about sixty active compounds, called ginsenosides or panaxosides, found in wild-grown ginseng roots. Relative quantities of these compounds vary based on where the roots are grown, their ages, how they are prepared, and other factors, but some studies indicate that they have a variety of effects on the circulatory system and nervous system: some act as stimulants, others as sedatives.

“Herbal medicines are the product of dozens of chemicals that interact to create a physiological effect,” explains UW Health physician David Kiefer, a specialist in integrative medicine. “In ginseng that’s mostly triterpenoid saponins,” antioxidants that Kiefer says may help treat inflammation. “These ginsenosides … can apparently reduce the ill effects of cortisol, a chemical produced in the adrenal cortex that’s associated with stress and diabetes,” says Kiefer, adding, “though it’s not exactly clear how.”

As for wild Wisconsin ginseng, Kiefer points out that its most interesting and credible effects are on diabetes. “It seems like it can help lower blood glucose, including glucose that sometimes increases after people eat a meal,” he says.

There is not, however, a conclusive body of research on the ginseng plant and its pharmacological effects. Even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has categorized ginseng as a “generally recognized safe food,” it is still probably a good idea to check with a physician before taking any herbal supplement—especially if you are taking other medications.

“For me, herbal medicines including Wisconsin ginseng have a role [in good health], says Kiefer, “but I take an analytical, very science-based approach to this.” The important thing, notes Kiefer, is to consider herbal medicines in concert with the other factors affecting a patient’s health, in much the same way that we might consider nutrition.

Sustainable harvesters like Jorgenson also worry about the health of ginseng itself. While this amazing but fragile plant faces threats from poaching and over-harvesting, it, like the rest of our planet, is feeling the effects of our changing climate.

While ginseng can grow well in diverse microclimates across USDA growing zones four through eight, relatively small variations in the mean maximum summer temperature may threaten the species. According to Sara Souther, a professor at Northern Arizona University and former UW–Madison postdoc who studied

Wild ginseng plants in eastern Iowa County. Wildsimulated plants sown from responsibly gathered seeds, lightly cultivated and sustainably harvested on long rotations in private woodlands, can help wild ginseng populations rebound from overharvesting and poaching.

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Wisconsin Table

thirty wild ginseng populations across six states, some can handle an increase of only three degrees Fahrenheit in annual average temperature before they begin to struggle. These localized wild ginseng populations have “specialized to the particular conditions at their site,” Souther says, noting that they are “kind of genetically cut off” from one another and cannot readily interbreed with other populations that can handle more heat.

Climate change in the upper Midwest is also expected to bring more frequent and intense rain events that will likely make things tougher on wild Wisconsin ginseng. Moisture is good, but too much stagnant moisture is bad, because the plants “have kind of a tendency toward fungal infection,” Souther says. This helps to explain why ginseng does particularly well on hillsides, where gravity helps moisture drain regularly from the soil.

According to Bob Beyfuss, a former Cornell Cooperative Extension educator and ginseng expert, wild ginseng is not an easy plant to grow. It does best on well-drained, north- or northeast-facing hillsides with lots of shade, optimally 60% to 80%. Finding wild ginseng already growing in an area is a good indicator that the conditions are right to grow more. Other indicators for suitable planting are low deer traffic (more than twenty deer per square mile causes the plants to drop out of the ecosystem), and an abundance of stinging nettle (which indicates adequate moisture) and fiddlehead fern (which grow best in calcium-rich soil). Beyfuss says that sugar maple groves are an especially suitable place for growing ginseng plants, which likely co-evolved with the trees because they provide a calcium-rich leaf cover. Too, maple leaves break down more readily than other leaves such as oak (which contain tannic acid that can prohibit growth), which means that young plants can more easily reach the surface in early spring.

During the summer, a cluster of small, white-yellow flowers appears on plants over two years old, and seeds form from fertilized flowers usually (but not always) after the plant is five years old. Seeds must undergo a season of cold to start off their eighteen-month germination period. So it’s often best to pick and plant seeds as soon as they mature in late summer to early fall (seeds found on the ground can be planted, too). New plants don’t appear until the following year and can require an additional five or more years before the roots are large enough for harvest.

The age of a ginseng plant can be determined by counting the number of stem scars on the rhizome, an underground tissue between the stem and the larger root. The rhizome can be found by removing the soil around the base of the stem. Each year of plant growth and die off adds a stem scar—a knobby ring—to the rhizome, so a five-year-old plant will have four stem scars on the rhizome.

Some ginseng plants can live more than fifty years. But these are rare finds, as massive overharvesting during the 1970s destroyed much of the old-growth ginseng in the U.S. For Jorgenson, harvest and replanting are all part of the annual ginseng cycle that keeps the species alive. He prefers to harvest later in the season, just before the first frost when the plant’s yellowing leaves make it easier to spot. “Any later and the stem falls off and you won’t be able to find the root,” he says. Jorgenson picks and plants seeds as he goes along, covering them with an inch or so of soil and fallen leaves.

Plant size doesn’t always indicate a ready-to-harvest root. “Sometimes a really big plant will have small root,” he says. In this case, Jorgenson gently re-covers the root with soil and breaks off the stem so no one else can find it. “It’s an investment,” he says. When he does find a plant that is ready for harvest, usually one that is twelve to fifteen years old, Jorgenson uses a screwdriver to carefully move the soil away from the root and tendrils. Once he removes the entire root, he places it in a bag with some others to be sold green to a licensed buyer who “lives down the river.”

While dried ginseng usually fetches a better price than fresh, Jorgenson worries that his roots will be stolen if he leaves them in the garage to dry. He mentions the recent confiscation by police of thirty pounds of illegally harvested root at a house down the road, and tells of a relative who has seen vans drop off groups of men in camouflage to scour private properties for the plant. While Jorgenson’s stories might seem far-fetched, Shawna Stringham, a warden with the Vernon County Department of Natural Resources, confirms that “in some cases landowners have been ripped off of hundreds or thousands of dollars” worth of wild ginseng.

Jorgenson says that a lot of the old-time diggers, the ones who know how to responsibly harvest the root, have been pushed out of the business by people looking to make a quick buck. In the end, it might just be the sustainable diggers like Jorgenson who save the species. “I’ve hunted and fished all of my life, and I never understood the reason that people poach or don’t follow the laws,” he says. “They are there to improve the harvest and to ensure that we have these plants for years to come so that my grandchildren can get excited about hunting for wild ginseng.”

Jason A. Smith is associate director of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters and editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas.

Scott Gordon is an associate editor at WisContext, a service of Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, and UW Cooperative Extension.

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UW–Madison Department of Medicine/Clint Thayer

Report

Stamping Out Tobacco Addiction

BY CH RISTO PH ER H O LLEN BACK

A

s a boy growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Boston, Michael Fiore bought packs and packs of

Winston brand cigarettes for his mother. Hyde Park was a rough part of Boston in the 1960s, and Fiore remembers “living in a city surrounded by smokers” and feeling “overwhelmed by the burden of preventable illness and death.”

Named a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2004, Michael Fiore is a physician, a professor, and the director of the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. Here Fiore checks patient Mike Eheler’s carbon monoxide levels. Eheler, a father of four, quit smoking with help from Fiore and the UW–CTRI.

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Years later, as an adult, Fiore decided to do something about it. He went to medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago and pursued his internal medicine training at Boston City Hospital. During this time, he convinced his mother to quit smoking, and continually encouraged his Uncle Anthony, a heavy smoker in Boston, to quit, too.

Subsequently Fiore earned a Master’s degree in Public Health from Harvard, and worked under former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop at the Centers for Disease Control. This was in 1988, when Surgeon General Koop released a report revealing that nicotine was as addictive as cocaine or heroin. Taking what he learned from his time with the surgeon general, Fiore came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to establish a program to help smokers quit.

Back in the late 1980s, one out of four Americans still smoked. Bars and restaurants were filled with smoke, as were many workplaces and stores, and even public spaces such as courthouses and hospitals. Few doctors regularly asked their patients if they smoked, and, even if the patient did, there were few resources doctors could draw upon to provide advice and support. There was scant research on how nicotine addiction worked, and nicotine gum was the only medication approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat it.

“All we had was counseling and gum,” Fiore says with a wry grin.

But things would soon change. Fiore founded the Smoking Cessation Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in 1989, and through it met Tim Baker, a noted clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at UW–Madison, who was conducting research on addiction.

A turning point for the clinic and Fiore and Baker’s partnership came later that year when Fiore received a “K Award” for career development from the National Institutes of Health. With the K Award funds, Fiore explored how to incorporate smoking status as a vital sign for every patient at every healthcare visit, much like respiratory rate and blood pressure. In 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article by Fiore about how including smoking as a vital sign could dramatically change the way the healthcare system treats tobacco use. “Cigarettes are now responsible for more than 430,000 deaths each year in the United States. As with past epidemics of this magnitude, institutional changes in the practice of medicine must be adopted to overcome the enormous disease burden resulting from tobacco use,” wrote Fiore in what would become a foundational moment in the history of public health.

While they were advocating for changes in practice and policy, Fiore and Baker were also running clinical trials of smoking cessation products such as the nicotine patch, which was approved for the treatment of tobacco addiction by the FDA in 1990. Their unique three-legged-stool approach to tobacco addiction—advocacy, clinical trials, and public awareness— caught the attention of then-UW–Madison Chancellor Donna

Christopher Hollenback

Report

Michael Fiore and Tim Baker founded the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention in 1992 and since have treated approximately 300,000 patients for tobacco addiction. Here, they are pictured at a 2017 event where Baker was bestowed with the prestigious Ove Ferno Award for groundbreaking advances in clinical research.

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Report

The Toll of Smoking in Wisconsin Nearly a million Wisconsinites were smokers during 2012. That year:

7,356

deaths* were associated with tobacco use

15%

of deaths among persons aged 35 or older were attributed to smoking

$600M

was spent to treat smoking-related illnesses

$320M

in worker productivity was lost due to smoking-related illnesses

Source: Palmersheim KA, Prosser EC. Burden of Tobacco in Wisconsin: 2015 Edition. University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Center for Urban Initiatives and Research: 2015 * An estimated 6,678 people died from illnesses directly related to smoking; another 678 people died from illnesses and fires indirectly related to smoking.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Shalala, who invited them to form an official center. “Dr. Fiore’s center provides the scientific rigor for strong advocacy of smoking cessation,” noted Shalala.

In 1992 Fiore and Baker founded the UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention (UW-CTRI). During the next quarter century, their work would help people breathe more easily across the globe. In 1996, Fiore served as panel chairman, and Baker as senior scientist, on the first-ever smoking cessation clinical practice guidelines for healthcare providers published by the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research. The next year, UW-CTRI began clinical trials of another key medication, bupropion (Zyban), and in 2005 would test varenicline (Chantix). These would become two of the now seven FDA-approved medications that have helped thousands of smokers to quit. Today varenicline remains one of the most effective treatments available.

By the late 1990s, the public was becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of smoking. In 1998, the attorneys general of 46 states banded together to sue America’s four largest tobacco companies in order to recover the costs of caring for smokers who had developed cigarette-related illnesses. Under what was called the Master Settlement Agreement, the states obtained a 25-year settlement of hundreds of billions of dollars from the tobacco companies, which were also forced to make other concessions (including changes to cigarette advertising) in order to decrease smoking rates in the United States.

The following year, the National Institutes of Health awarded a five-year transdisciplinary tobacco use research center grant to UW-CTRI. It was the first in a remarkable string of four consecutive “center grants” that allowed Fiore and Baker to take a long-term look at tobacco addiction and how to treat it. In their studies, the two examined various pharmacotherapies and counseling approaches in numerous comparative effectiveness trials.

Their research has not only examined the effectiveness of treatments, but also how quitting smoking affects a person’s physical health, mental health, and quality of life, including social interactions. In addition, Baker has explored the genetics of nicotine dependence and treatment response. In total over the last 25 years, Fiore and Baker were awarded more than $100 million in NIH peer-reviewed grant funding for their pursuit of innovative ways to stop tobacco addiction.

Under the leadership of Fiore and Baker, the UW-CTRI published the results of their research in more than 300 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, including 27 in the Journals of the American Medical Association and another eight in the New England Journal of Medicine. Fiore gives much of the credit for publication to lead scientist Baker. “He is the consummate scientist: rigorous, insightful, thorough, and clear,” says Fiore.

In 2000, Fiore and Baker added a fourth leg to their stool with an outreach program to help healthcare systems incorporate UW-CTRI research into everyday patient care. This approach became a national model for effective tobacco control programs.

Today, nearly every patient in Wisconsin is asked about his or her tobacco use status. Recently, this evolved into a National Cancer Institute grant award to collaborate with Wisconsin-based Epic Systems to incorporate tobacco treatment standards into electronic health records.

Report

In 2001, UW-CTRI published groundbreaking research showing that tobacco withdrawal persisted in some cases for months after patients had quit smoking, demonstrating the need for providers to follow up with patients long after they’ve quit. Two years later, at the request of then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, UW-CTRI created a National Action Plan for Tobacco Cessation, which called in part for a nationwide telephone quit line similar to the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line they established in 2001. Today, anyone anywhere in America can call 800-QUIT-NOW and get free help to quit smoking.

While their work has helped approximately 300,000 smokers to quit in Wisconsin alone, and their research for tobacco treatment is considered the gold standard across the globe, Fiore and Baker in no way feel like their mission is complete. More than 480,000 Americans continue to die every year from smoking—more than the deaths from homicide, suicide, AIDS, illegal drug use, and motor vehicle accidents combined. Tobacco use is still the leading preventable cause of disease and death, killing more than 7,000 Wisconsinites every year.

“There’s a saying that goes something like this: When a thousand people die, it is a statistic, but when one person dies, it is a tragedy,” Fiore says.

Fiore felt that sense of tragedy on August 26, 2007. Following a Sunday tradition that spanned decades, Fiore telephoned his Uncle Anthony, one of five uncles who helped raise him in Hyde Park, where his large Italian-American family lived.

“During that phone call, I asked him about the hoarseness in his voice,” Fiore says. “Uncle Anthony told me it was nothing, but the doctor in me became concerned, and I urged him to have it checked at his local clinic. Uncle Anthony waited almost two weeks; by then he was totally unable to speak.

“Over the next few weeks, I traveled repeatedly from Wisconsin to Boston to be with my uncle: from his biopsy that documented non-small-cell lung cancer, to the day he had an MRI that showed his cancer had spread to his bones and virtually every organ of his body, to the single failed effort at chemotherapy, to the visit to help him settle his modest estate. On November 11, 2007, exactly eleven weeks from that Sunday telephone call, my Uncle Anthony died of lung cancer directly caused by his thirty-year addiction to tobacco.”

Fiore has poured the emotion of that experience into his efforts at UW-CTRI. He reprised his role as chairman of the panel that updated the Clinical Practice Guideline: Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence. Published in 2008, the guideline has been called “the best of the best” by former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden, who praised “the process, content, practicality and the rigor of its work” as a “model for any clinic or medical practice.”

Fiore stresses how the goal of UW-CTRI is “always to come up with ways to translate the research findings into treatments that help smokers quit.” To this end, the center recently has examined electronic cigarettes and is running nine ongoing research studies on tobacco dependence that help many participants break the habit for good. The latest study made statewide news, resulting in more than 2,220 smokers calling to seek help to quit smoking in the first 48 hours. This research will determine whether two highly promising modifications to varenicline treatment—the addition

Tobacco use is still the leading preventable cause of disease and death, killing more than 7,000 Wisconsinites every year.

of a nicotine patch and an extended, 24-week treatment period— produce superior outcomes when they are used either together or alone.

“I’m so grateful to Tim Baker and our colleagues, collaborators, funders, and all those who have made these advancements possible,” says Fiore.

Fiore’s gratitude for these advancements is shared by long-time smokers like Inda Lampkins who tried to quit but found she could not. Lampkins, a Milwaukee resident who was diagnosed with lung cancer, joined one of the UW-CTRI studies because she says she didn’t want to die from smoking and leave her kids without her.

“It really worked,” Lampkins says. Now she’s smoke-free and in cancer remission, and she couldn’t be happier about it: “I thank God for the study.”

Christopher Hollenback is a senior outreach specialist in the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He has contributed to ESPN: The Magazine, AARP Bulletin, Modern Drummer, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, and Packers.com.

Hollenback is the author of two thriller novels, Sleep When You’re Dead and Thread the Needle, and the editor of a children’s book called Secrets From Detention.

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Photo Essay

NOT FORGOTTEN: WISCONSIN ROADSIDE MEMORIALS

BY TH O MAS FERRELLA

I came to this project through another life.

In 1991, when I was working as an emergency medicine physician, I observed the construction of a memorial at the intersection of East Washington Avenue and 4th Street in Madison where two young Madison East High School students died after being struck by a car while crossing the street. I knew about the accident because I had cared for one of the girls.

Over the next several months, I witnessed the evolution of the memorial as I drove by.

While I was struck by the beauty of it, what truly resonated with me was the memorial’s organic, personal nature: a free-flowing, improvisational community art piece paying tribute to the lives of these two young women. There were no preconceived designs, no architects. Colored plastic flowers, stuffed animals, handwritten messages, balloons, and bits of personal memorabilia woven into the fence gently swayed as cars sped by.

Then, one day, it was gone.

Since then, I have photographed and documented roadside memorial sites throughout Wisconsin, often talking with the friends and families of the deceased who make them.

Memorial makers say that these earthly spots where someone took his or her last breath hold tremendous meaning, and they provide places for grief that is often confined to a funeral home or cemetery. To many, these are sacred sites.

Roadside memorials are most often built without permission, yet there is an unspoken acceptance of their presence—and occasional visitors—by private landowners, businesses, and local governments. During my twenty years as an artist and photographer, I have seen hundreds of these sites in Central and South America as well as in the southwest United States. But roadside memorials seem to be relatively new to Wisconsin. Or perhaps I just wasn’t seeing them. I do now.

This photo essay, a website documenting over 120 of these sites, and all my endeavors surrounding this project are intended as another means of remembering these people and honoring their lives.

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Photo Essay

Lucas R. Wohlfert • Hwy 14, Emerald Grove – Rock County

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photo essay

Steven J. Brown • 2741 N 41st Street, Milwaukee – Milwaukee County

Tyler Francis Knipfer • Huxley Street and Aberg Avenue, Madison – Dane County

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

photo essay

James Lierman • County FF, west of Wonewoc – Juneau County

Unknown • 5837 N 63rd Street, Milwaukee – Milwaukee County

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photo essay

John Brendan Hallinan Primm • E Washington Avenue and First Street, Madison – Dane County

Taliliyonna Starr Garrett • 3758 E Washington Avenue, Madison – Dane County

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

photo essay

Tiffany M. Dutcher • Highway 51 and Hoepker Road – Dane County

Wenxin Huai • 410 S Park Street, Madison – Dane County

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photo essay

Tony Robinson • 1129 Williamson Street, Madison – Dane County

Jason Wittman, Danny Tate III, Justin Wolf, and Joshua Ashworth • s8617 Hwy 23, Plain – Sauk County

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photo essay

Matthew Court • 2898 University Avenue, Madison – Dane County

Thomas Ferrella is a Wisconsin-based multimedia artist and former emergency medicine physician. Ferrella uses his work to comment on and respond to social and environmental issues. His photographic work documenting Chicago murder sites, Not Forgotten, was shown at the Gage Gallery in Chicago and endorsed by TIME as a “you-can’t-miss” exhibit for 2016. In 2017 Ferrella mounted 1 Mundo, a solo show in Camagüey, Cuba, that explored a vision for a unified world. Recently, the Wisconsin Historical Society acquired Ferrella’s series of Wisconsin roadside memorial images for its permanent collection and will continue to add more photographs as the project evolves.

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Discovery

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

discovery

THE RIVER THAT FLOWS UPHILL

BY ERI C C. CARSO N

P

eople tend to see a river as an immutable part of the landscape.

We notice the changes that happen on a monthly and seasonal basis: the effects of spring snowmelt and summer drought and the rise and fall of intermittent floods. But we generally accept the notion that where a river flows at this

Eric C. Carson

moment is where it flowed in the past.

The view down the Wisconsin River from Cactus Bluff in Ferry Bluff State Natural Area. Millions of years ago this valley was carved to a depth of over 600 feet by an ancient river. The last major glaciation deposited as much as 300 feet of sand and gravel, resulting in the broad floodplain and terraces that characterize the Lower Wisconsin River valley today.

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Tom Jenz

discovery

From a hillside near the Shadewald Mounds, just outside of Muscoda, Eric C. Carson describes how thousands of years of glacier-derived sediment covered the deeply scoured bedrock of the ancient river valley (visible in the distance) with sand, gravel, and other debris.

If we look a little deeper, however, we see evidence of rivers responding to changes in land and water uses, even changes in climate. For instance, compare a photograph of a certain stretch of a river taken in the late-1800s with one taken today—they often look very different. There are parts of Wisconsin that feature halfburied fence posts and other kinds of evidence of sediment flushed from fields during the early decades of agriculture and deposited onto flood plains. Fueled by global climate change, the heavy rains of 2008 led to flooding that drained Lake Delton and altered the landscape of 31 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, causing over $763 million in damages.

When we look back in time and think about a river the way a geologist does, we begin to see that rivers are actually quite mobile across the landscape. Geologists have long understood that, given enough time, rivers can actually migrate. North America is dotted with places where rivers have changed course, abandoned established valleys to form new ones, or even reversed the direction of flow. As long ago as the late 19th century, geologists documented that the Ohio River, which today flows southwest out the Appalachians to its confluence with the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illinois, was formed perhaps a million years ago by redirecting and integrating several rivers that formerly flowed northward toward the Great Lakes lowland.

To study such events and processes of the ancient earth, geologists must turn the scientific method on its head. Based on a clear progression that emphasizes the reproducibility of experiments, the scientific method is quickly challenged when exploring events that happened in the distant past and at a monumental scale. A professor I knew as a graduate student was fond of saying that geology is not about conducting experiments, but, rather, collecting data to help understand what the experiment had been. This is the framework in which I learned to do science, from the time I was an undergraduate geology student until I became a research scientist. However, the past few years of studying the history of the Wisconsin River has been an exception to the way I was taught to adapt the scientific method to the realities of our peculiar science.

E

ven though geologists understand a great deal about the most recent glacial advance that covered about half of Wisconsin some 24,000 years go, we have much to learn about the series of massive glaciations that happened here and across North America over the last 2.5 million years. The Wisconsin River has been deeply affected by all of this glacial activity. The river originates in Lac Vieux Desert in northernmost Wisconsin on the border with Michigan and flows across glacial deposits from the last Ice Age. One of the youngest landscapes in Wisconsin, the Northern Highlands formed as massive blocks of glacial ice, left behind and buried in sediment, finally melted—hundreds or perhaps thousands of years after the end of the Ice Age. The result is a chaotic landscape, pocked with kettle lakes and detritus from the last ice sheet, and the Wisconsin River wanders across it.

North of the town of Merrill, the Wisconsin River flows along channels carved into igneous and metamorphic rocks that formed over a billion years ago. Near Stevens Point, it enters the Central Sand Plain, which was the floor of a massive, glacier-fed Lake

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Discovery

NORTHERN HIGHLANDS

Rhinelander

Merrill PRECAMBRIAN UPLANDS

Wausau

Stevens Point

CENTRAL SAND PLAINS/ WIS. DELLS/ BARABOO

GLACIAL LAKE WISCONSIN

LOWER WISCONSIN RIVER

Portage

Madison Eric C. Carson

Wisconsin that pooled at the edge of the ice sheet some 20,000 years ago. At Wisconsin Dells, the river flows through cataracts carved into the sandstone over the course of about a week by the catastrophic draining of glacial Lake Wisconsin some 17,400 years ago. The Wisconsin River then wraps around the eastern end of the ancient Baraboo Hills, and finally runs westward through the Driftless Area to its confluence with the Mississippi River. It is this final reach across the Driftless Area, a stretch known as the Lower Wisconsin River, that provides clues for understanding the radical changes that have occurred to the Wisconsin River and other rivers in the Midwest over the past several million years.

The rivers that flow across the central portions of North America are defined by a series of surfaces that slope so gently as to be imperceptible to the human eye, on the order of ten or so centimeters per kilometer (a little over six inches per mile). The Lower Wisconsin River is no different. It features a deeply scoured bedrock valley that was filled by sand and gravel during the last glaciation. Beneath this sand and gravel, the buried bedrock floor of the valley slopes to the west: an absolute indication that it was carved by westward-flowing water. The floodplain and the river itself also slope gently westward. Along the steep walls of the ancient river valley, which is in some areas miles away from the river we know today, stand several sand-andgravel terraces. These terraces represent remnant floodplains from when huge volumes of sediment-laden water emerging from the ice sheet also flowed west.

Yet the Lower Wisconsin River contains an anomaly: preserved in three discrete pieces along the valley is a higher and therefore older terrace than the sand-and-gravel ones deposited by flooding during the last Ice Age. Carved into the bedrock by flowing water and covered by a mélange of unconsolidated sediments—river sand, lake clay and silt, landslide and slopewash sediment, windblown sand—this terrace represents the ancient floor of the valley from a time long before it had been scoured as deeply as it is today.

As long as geologists recognized this terrace as a fragment of ancient valley floor, they inferred that the buried bedrock that underlies it dips to the west, just like all the other surfaces in the valley. However, because of the sediment deposited on top of the terrace and its imperceptible slope, there was never a way to verify this inference. Lacking verification, the most plausible interpretation was that it dips west and simply represents an older iteration of the Lower Wisconsin River than we see today.

Yet the landscape contains clues that point to an alternate theory.

Many of the tributaries of the Lower Wisconsin River angle to the east where they join this westward flowing river; these have long been known in the geologic literature as barbed tributaries, and they indicate a river that has experienced a significant upheaval. Too, the valley of the Lower Wisconsin River narrows as you follow it downstream, which is the opposite of what we see with almost every other river. Where it joins the Mississippi River at Prairie du Chien, the Wisconsin River curves to the north to join the south-flowing Mississippi; south of the confluence of the two rivers, the valley of

A topographical map of Wisconsin shows the diverse landscape through which the Wisconsin River travels today. Note how the lobes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of northern and eastern Wisconsin between 26,000 and 10,000 years ago, deeply affected the course of the river, and contributed to the formation and subsequent draining of glacial Lake Wisconsin.

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discovery

91° W

90° W Baraboo Hills

Mi

ss.

Riv e

r

43° N

L. Wisconsin R iver

Military Ridge 0

LiDAR-derived image of the lower Wisconsin River valley and its confluence with the Mississippi River. The geomorphological clues that indicate drainage reorganization has occurred include the barbed tributaries of the lower Wisconsin River (pale blue arrows); the curved inner valley wall at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers (solid orange line), which is similar to the inside of a bend on a single river (example identified by dashed orange lines); and the narrow reach of the Mississippi River immediately downstream from its confluence with the Wisconsin (yellow bracketing arrow). The white boxes indicate the three remaining segments of the terrace where Carson and his team took 63 core samples.

km

30

the Mississippi River also narrows. These geologic clues suggest that the modern river system does not reflect the system that once flowed across this landscape.

The westward-flowing Lower Wisconsin River may not be exactly what it appears at first glance, and the bedrock terrace contains the key to discerning what river systems looked like here millions of years ago. While tens to hundreds of feet of glacial till obscure most of the river’s older landscape, the Driftless Area has remained untouched (yet very much surrounded) by glaciers over the past 2.5 million years. The bedrock terrace, preserved within this time capsule of sorts, allows me to ask a fairly direct question of the earth: Was the original valley carved by a river flowing toward the west or toward the east? It’s a question as intriguing as it is unique, since in my experience it is rare that an important scientific question offers only two possible outcomes.

A

s a geologist, I specialize in studying the processes and histories of rivers; more specifically, I study rivers that flow near the former margins of ancient glaciers. The idea that glacial activity may have caused the ancient Wisconsin River to flow to the east grew from many discussions I had with my former doctoral advisor, James C. Knox, before he passed away in 2012. Jim was the EvjueBascom professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a pioneer in stream and soil research. Over the years, he and I tossed around hypotheses about the Wisconsin River that couldn’t be tested because of insufficient topographic data. In the early spring of 2013, however, improved topographic models, based on a new generation of laser-derived data called LiDAR, became available. Generated by measuring the two-way

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

discovery

travel time of laser light shot from an airplane toward the ground, LiDAR data are accurate enough to identify ground surface elevations to within a few centimeters. Finally, we had a way to evaluate the elevation and slope of the ancient bedrock terraces.

Scientific research is often collaborative, requiring multiple voices to provide a breadth of insight, experience, ideas, and skillsets. Posing and answering the question of whether the Lower Wisconsin River valley was carved by an eastward- or westward-flowing river was no exception. Several of my colleagues at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey—John Attig, Elmo Rawling, and Ben Bates—assisted with the LiDAR data interpretation and subsequent fieldwork. We began by taking a series of hydraulic core samples along the terrace, driving hollow steel rods down through the surface sediment to the bedrock terrace and describing the cores we collected to identify the depth at which we struck bedrock. We combined the LiDAR data, coring information, and core descriptions to precisely identify the elevation of the river-scoured bedrock terrace to within a few centimeters at a handful of points. Then we collected this information again and again at dozens of points along the valley to build enough data to identify the trend.

Those several weeks of data collection stand out in my memory.

The anticipation of answering the east-versus-west question lent a tension to the fieldwork that I had never experienced in all my years of research. As we collected cores kilometers apart and eventually tens of kilometers apart, I plotted each day’s new data to look for emerging trends. Within the first few days, I began to develop a broad sense of how deeply we should core at a given location depending on whether the bedrock terrace dipped to the east or to the west. While I wouldn’t normally anticipate a particular outcome from collecting research data, I was hoping we would identify that the terrace dipped to the east. The implications were tantalizing: A different configuration for the Lower Wisconsin River necessitates a different one for the upper Mississippi River, and for tributaries of the upper Mississippi River—the Black, Chippewa, Root, St. Croix, and Minnesota.

Moreover, rivers flowing to the east across Wisconsin and Minnesota probably wouldn’t have reached the Gulf of Mexico. If this were true, it would prompt a reconsideration of the way we understand rivers across the North American continent.

While I am by nature an early riser, I recall numerous sleepless nights in the summer of 2013, thinking about the emerging work and waiting for the alarm to sound for another day of coring. I would hope and, sometimes, even despair over the depth to which the core was penetrating, and obsess over the location and placement of new cores. My anxiety turned to excitement when I began to be able to predict the depth at which the core would strike bedrock if the terrace were indeed dipping to the east. When we moved to a site at the west end of the terrace near Muscoda, I estimated we’d need to strike bedrock no deeper than seven feet—which we did. The data all pointed to a valley that, while occupied today by a westward-flowing river, was actually carved by an ancient, eastward-flowing river.

The months that followed were filled with marshaling additional evidence to support this new interpretation of the river. We pored over the data to look for holes or flaws in the interpretations and presented our results to colleagues in the field for their critical assessment of the work.

G

iven our findings, my colleagues and I have developed a picture of a vast ancient river system that drained almost all of what is now Wisconsin and Minnesota. We have named it the ancestral Wyalusing River. The course of the Wyalusing River was certainly controlled by the local bedrock. Erosion-resistant layers of dolomite bedrock form topographic highs in the state. The east-west running Military Ridge in the southwest corner of Wisconsin, which is capped by one of these layers of dolomite, prevented these ancient rivers from flowing to the south. Instead, they flowed to the east. Fed by glaciers of an earlier era, these swift rivers cut deeply into the weakly cemented and easily erodible sandstone that underlies the dolomite and moved into the Great Lakes lowland and eventually to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the North Atlantic Ocean.

Perhaps a million or more years ago, encroaching glaciers blocked the Wyalusing River and dammed a vast lake in the river valley. The rising waters spilled over the dolomite ridge to carve a pathway to the south, flowing into a new valley between Prairie du Chien and Dubuque, Iowa, and continuing to the Gulf of Mexico. The new, shorter pathway to the oceans captured the rivers across Wisconsin and Minnesota and formed the upper Mississippi River system we know today. Glaciers caused the reorganization of these river systems, but the lack of glaciation in the Driftless Area left scattered fragments of ancient river valleys exposed at the surface rather than buried by glacial sediment. This was the window into the geologic past that allowed us to understand the legacy of the ancient rivers of Wisconsin and Minnesota.

I see it every time I look at the Wisconsin River now. When I hike up to Ferry Bluff or drive across the river at Spring Green or Muscoda, I look at the river around me and see the water flowing to the west on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. But I also see the ancient Wyalusing River, its water flowing to the east and bound for the North Atlantic Ocean. Two rivers occupying the same space at different times.

Eric C. Carson is a geologist with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. He received his BS from West Virginia University and his MS and PhD from UW–Madison. His research focuses on developing new methods for dating the advance and retreat of the last great ice sheet across North America, processes associated with rivers and floods, and how rivers sculpt landscapes.

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@ Watrous Gallery

NEW MIDWEST PHOTOGRAPHY A FlakPhoto Project

T

here’s a quote I scribbled on a yellow piece of paper and taped to my bedroom wall back when I was twenty-five-years old: “A place is artistic if an artist lives there.” At the time, this idea was really important to me because I felt like a failure for never leaving Wisconsin. Like many people, I genuinely believed that you had to live on one of the coasts to find creative success. I grew up in rural Jefferson, and for most of my childhood I was certain that someday I would move far away, to a big city, to “make it.” For a variety of reasons, I stayed, and, though it’s taken me a while to realize it, I’ve come to see that the Midwest is actually a perfect place to make a creative life.

Part of what led me to this conclusion was a photography website I launched in 2004 called FlakPhoto.

Publishing the site connected me to hundreds of imagemakers from around the world and gave me a creative outlet to promote their work to a worldwide audience— all from a one-bedroom apartment in Madison. Where I had struggled to find a photo scene here in Wisconsin, in just a few years, I had organized a global community of photographers on the Internet.

FlakPhoto changed my life and the way I think about where I live. My fourteen years of hosting this online community has led me to some incredibly talented

artists based right here in the Midwest. So when the James Watrous Gallery approached me to curate a photography exhibition, I knew immediately that it should focus on image-makers who had decided to put down creative roots in this part of the country. Our goal with New Midwest Photography is to showcase a variety of artists currently living in our midst, to look at and celebrate their work, and to recognize this part of America as a vibrant hub of photographic practice.

The following pages provide a glimpse into the ways that the ten photographers in this exhibition use their cameras to understand the places they call home. The process of making art is a personal one, so it’s not surprising that each photographer blends individual observation with regional knowledge to make images of the Midwest they know and love.

When my wife, Kristen, and I decided to buy a house in Madison a few years ago, I realized that I had changed.

All of a sudden, staying here made sense. There is a lot to love about the Midwest: the slow pace, friendly people, and beautiful landscape. It’s easy to forget that this is an ideal place to make a creative, fulfilling life.

In a way, that’s the point of New Midwest Photography: to prove that great things can happen when you know where you belong.

Andy Adams

Andy Adams is an independent producer and publisher whose work explores current ideas in visual culture. He directs FlakPhoto Projects, a digital/arts lab focused on promoting photography in all of its forms. Find him on Instagram ​@FlakPhoto​.

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@ Watrous Gallery

On the Edge, Chicago, Illinois, 2015.

CLARISSA BONET Chicago, Illinois @clarissabonet Clarissa Bonet grew up in Florida, a lush, tropical environment where cars dominated her way of life. Nine years ago, Bonet moved to Chicago and was struck by the large swaths of concrete that covered the city’s surfaces. The sheer urban expanse, populated with anonymous individuals she would never see again, felt wholly foreign. To understand this new landscape and her role

within it, Bonet started making images, which led to two ongoing bodies of work: Stray Light and City Space. Light plays a key role in Bonet’s images, and she uses it as a tool to transform the landscapes before her lens. “I think Chicago is a unique city in that it’s vertical and dense, but not so dense that light doesn’t penetrate to the sidewalks,” she says. “During the day, light and shadow dance over the surface of the city as the sun moves across the sky. Just be tuned in and look for it. Once you are, you see that it’s everywhere.”

Inspired by street photography, Bonet also draws influence from the staged compositions of contemporary artists such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Hannah Starkey, and Jeff Wall. The resulting images are visual experiences of the city, rather than simple documents. In 2017 and 2018 Bonet was awarded Individual Artist Grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to continue these projects. She hopes someday to publish these works in a book.

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@ Watrous Gallery

they depict the type of gentle masculinity I am attracted to, and also the kind I want to embody. My photographs of relationships speak to a drive to be seen, understood, and desired through the eyes of another person, a reflection of the self as the ultimate intimate connection.” Working within the framework of queer experience, Dugan’s portraits examine the intersection between individual self-concept and the search for connection with others. She photographs people in their homes and personal spaces using medium and large format cameras to create a deep, sustained engagement, resulting in an complex yet intimate portrait of contemporary America. Dugan’s latest book, To Survive on this Shore, will be published by Kehrer Verlag in September 2018. She also is the co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, a creative collaborative that promotes work by women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists.

SEE THE EXHIBITION On view at the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts 201 State Street • Madison

SEPTEMBER 7 – OCTOBER 28 Kelli and Jen, 2017.

Please join us for these related events, which are free and open to the public:

CURATOR’S RECEPTION

Friday, September 7 • 5–7:00 pm with informal presentations in the gallery beginning at 5:30 pm

ART@NOON TALK

JESS T. DUGAN St. Louis, Missouri @ jesstdugan Identity and social connection are driving forces in Jess T. Dugan’s work, and she has long been drawn to making portraits in pursuit of a deeper understanding the human experience. For the past seven years, she’s been shooting Every Breath We Drew, a series that explores issues of gender and sexuality in the 21st century LGBTQ community. “I combine portraits of individuals, couples, and self-portraits to investigate themes of identity and connection while also speaking to my own personal experience,” Dugan says. “The photographs of men and masculine individuals are a kind of mirror;

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with Andy Adams Friday, October 26 • 12–1:00 pm Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following exhibition sponsors:

@ Watrous Gallery

Eye Spy, Watson, Illinois, 2015.

TYTIA HABING Watson, Illinois @tytiahabing

Sometimes we need to leave home in order to understand what we value about it. Tytia Habing grew up in rural Illinois but spent most of her adult life in the Cayman Islands. After her son was born, Habing felt a powerful urge to come back to the farm. “I didn’t appreciate where I was from until I was gone for many years. I realized I couldn’t live without being near my family, without wide-open spaces, without having four seasons. I yearned for a simpler life,” she says. This bucolic lifestyle plays a key role in Tharin, Habing’s ongoing documentary portrait series of her son. Her luminous black-and-white images reflect a reverence for the natural world that Habing developed on the farm but also through studies in horti-

culture and landscape architecture. Her photography is a visual expression of the free-range way she raises her children, a lifestyle she feels is quickly fading. “Only 15% of children in the United States now live in rural areas, and my son is one of these declining numbers. Not only that, but even rural children are staying indoors much more than children did in the past. Having wide open spaces to explore, living close to nature, and being afforded a modicum of independence as a young child was the norm for me growing up. So not only am I photographing my son’s present; I am photographing my past.” Habing is also producing a new series focused on the natural beauty of winter in the Midwest.

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Untitled (from Wide Eyed), 2008.

Street photographer Garry Winogrand famously said, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

One can’t help but think that Jon Horvath is compelled by a similar desire to show us the world as it looks through his camera. Horvath’s eye is charged with wonder. He embraces the act of photographic wandering, seeking moments of discovery to share with us. In addition to his art background, Horvath’s studies of English Literature and the History of Philosophy influence his approach. “Images provide an opportunity to say something that escapes the confines of words. Words have precise definitions. Images can be far more open-ended,” he says. This kind of visual fluidity defines his ongoing series, Wide Eyed, a repository of personal observations, glimpses, and passing thoughts about the things Horvath encounters on his travels. What these pictures mean is entirely up to the spectator, and their mystery is part of the fun. Horvath’s work is held in the

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JON HORVATH Milwaukee, Wisconsin @jonhorvath

permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art, and is included in the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. He teaches in the New Studio Practice program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

@ Watrous Gallery

Rose of Sharon, 2012.

JULIE RENÉE JONES Dayton, Ohio @julie.renee.jones

Julie Renée Jones learned about photography from her father, a practicing amateur imagemaker. His portraits of her, which captured stolen moments and emotional expressions, suggested to Jones that there was more to photography than traditional Say cheese! images. “As I grew up I often looked back on these photographs as relics of who I really was—enraptured by the

fantasy that photography presented while yearning to uncover the truths buried within the image,” she says. Jones went on to earn a Master’s degree in photography and develop two kindred yet dueling bodies of work: Thirteen and Umbra. Both bodies deal with the role that family and childhood play in the way we understand ourselves, the power of imagination to transcend and reveal reality, and the specifics of growing up in suburban Midwest America. “I see the Midwest as a borderland where different landscapes, histories, cultures, and peoples meet. This makes it particularly suited for my interests in the borderlands we face on a psychological level: between innocence and experience, reality and fantasy, waking and dreaming, and the untamed and curated state of the ‘natural’ environment.” Jones’ images are part performance and part play, and she conceals conventional photographic reality with optical tricks, extreme light, and vivid color. Her creative vision for these works led to an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Montgomery County Artist Opportunity Grant from Culture Works.

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Duke’s Place, Westside, Detroit, Michigan, 2017.

Dave Jordano has been making pictures for nearly fifty years.

His passion for the medium was inspired by photography giants such as Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, and Minor White. After a long and successful commercial photography career, Jordano began making personal work in 2000. Since then, he has produced several long-term documentary projects, all of which focus on the Midwest.

“I consider myself a cultural documentarian. I love the architecture, the people, the landscape, and the culture of the Midwest. It has a specific identity that blends the best of all the other American identities into one,” he says, adding, “We are the most homogenized people in the United States.” In 2016 Jordano published a book, Detroit: Unbroken Down, that documents the lives of the city’s struggling residents. A new series called A Detroit Nocturne, which was also published as a book, looks at the places in which residents live and work through nighttime landscapes that blend documentary

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DAVE JORDANO Chicago, Illinois @dave.jordano

realism with a lyrical beauty. “I’ve chosen to make these images at night not only to put more emphasis on their locale by presenting them in an unfamiliar light, but also to introduce a moment of quiet and calm reflection. Pieces of the past, present, and future are rendered here to be carefully considered. They are, after all, the physical evidence of where we have carved out our collective ambitions and lived our dreams.” Jordano is currently producing a series of night photographs in the Chicago area.

@ Watrous Gallery

Untitled, Fairfield, Illinois, 2015.

NATHAN PEARCE Fairfield, Illinois @pearcephoto

Like a lot of his friends, Nathan Pearce couldn’t wait to leave his small town. So when he was eighteen, he set out to see America. Pearce spent several years living on both coasts and decided to return to rural southern Illinois when he was twenty-five. What he discovered upon his return was a place far more interesting than he remembered, a place he felt compelled to photo-

graph. “There is a strange feeling here—a stillness. When the fields have been cleared after harvest, I can look out in multiple directions and see for miles. That flat land can be maddening for someone who lives in the city. Life moves slowly here, and the people are more relaxed than in the cities I’ve lived in. Perhaps they have their priorities in order,” he says. Pearce makes his living working at an auto repair shop, but his passion is making pictures with small, handheld cameras. He’s a book and zine maker, too, which means that his photography is often made for the printed page. While he’s developing a new book project to be published by Deadbeat Club Press later this year, Pearce’s primary focus is Midwest Dirt, a serial collection of monochrome images that document the people and places that surround him. These are personal pictures, and they reflect Pearce’s changing perspective on the place he calls home. “As life continues to evolve, so will this work. I guess that is the nature of an evolving, ongoing project. If the project has a stopping point, I sure haven’t found it yet.”

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@ Watrous Gallery

Wilton, Iowa, 2013.

Barry Phipps is one of those creative polymaths who does a little bit of everything. Since graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1990, he has spent nearly three decades making music, fashion, and photography. A 2012 move from Chicago, his home for over twenty years, to Iowa City, kindled in Phipps a desire to better understand his new surroundings. Over the next four years, he took countless road trips and shot hundreds of rolls of film.

The resulting images of his adopted state are rooted in an appreciation of the layers of time that develop around specific places.

“I’ve photographed hundreds of these places all over the state, and I am amazed at the similarities from town to town. In larger cities with higher demand on real estate, stuff is bulldozed over and gentrified; but in these small towns, old places remain and are repurposed,” he says. “New stuff happens alongside the old, and it’s

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BARRY PHIPPS Iowa City, Iowa @barry_phipps

these layers of cultural accumulation that excite me most. It’s like the present is never uniformly present tense here.” Phipps’ vivid compositions that look just so familiar underscore the beauty and mystery of Midwestern communities that may not survive the 21st century. His first book of photographs, Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs, was recently published by the University of Iowa Press.

@ Watrous Gallery

River Brush, La Crosse, Wisconsin, 2016.

JASON VAUGHN Milwaukee, Wisconsin @jason_vaughn

Sometimes an outsider’s eye can show us things we take for granted. Jason Vaughn had never visited the Midwest until he met a woman from Wisconsin who would become his wife. When they moved to the state a few years after they married, Vaughn realized that its rural places were fertile territory for photographic explo-

ration. In 2011 they had a child, and, during that same year, Vaughn was diagnosed with cancer. These two events changed the way Vaughn thought about his relationship to nature. He started making large-format photographs of the Wisconsin landscape, a process that forced him to slow down and eventually change the style of his work. Vaughn’s latest project, Driftless, is a meditation on his experience of raising a small family in the Driftless Area. “My wife’s job had relocated her to La Crosse for a year. We were expecting our second child, and I started feeling the classic urge to lay down roots, own a home, and feel settled. Instead, we rented an apartment near the Mississippi River. I felt like a temporary visitor, and, during my year living on the river, I began to examine the process by which people drift through a space—sometimes becoming lodged, sometimes becoming permanent, and sometimes breaking free and moving away.” The resulting images from his Driftless series, collected in a book of the same name to be published in September 2018, are contemplative reflections on the stages of transition and motion that we all experience.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Aunt Becky Sitting on a Bucket, 2017.

Lindley Warren has been making images for fifteen years— nearly half her life. Since 2015, she’s been shooting The Meadows, a meditation on her family members and their troubled history. “My photographs bridge the intersection between my familial experience in poverty and my current life. They also reflect my reality as an economically insecure artist and academic,” says Warren, who plans to keep on taking images of her family for the series, which is named after the trailer park in which they reside. “I want to keep shooting until it feels completely exhausted. But really, I can’t imagine a time when I’m not photographing my family. It’s become a deeply important thing to me,” she says. Hers are quiet, still images and the process of making them has provided Warren with a tool for rebuilding broken family bonds. Like many photographers her age, Warren wears multiple hats. In addition to making images, Warren is an editor and curator who leverages digital platforms to create communities of interest around photography. She is the founder of various projects, including a photography maga-

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LINDLEY WARREN Iowa City, Iowa @lindleywarren

zine dedicated to exploring human connection and interaction called The Ones We Love and The Photographic Dictionary, which seeks to define English words through user-submitted photographs. In early 2018, she launched The Reservoir, a quarterly web magazine focused on the politics of picture-making that features articles by photographers and writers from around the world.

OCTOBER 11–14, 2018 Fall festival schedule announced August 21

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Fiction

STATIC

BY M I CHAEL H O PKI NS

I

got stung. On my ankle, I saw three bees, and could feel them right through my sock. I brushed them off, escaped from our vegetable garden where I was weeding, and ran into the house.

“Damn it,” I said to Betty, my wife, who was chopping carrots, “I got stung.”

“Where?” Betty asked. “On your face again?”

“My ankle.” I pulled down my sock and showed her the marks. Three red dots were already starting to swell.

“Right now, take some Benadryl,” she said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You always say that,” she said. “Your ankle is going to blow up like a balloon and you’ll be up all night.” She turned to our kitchen cabinet. “Here it is.” She dumped the pink pills into her palm, picked two, and gave them to me. “Take ’em.”

I got some water and swallowed the pills. When I was younger, bee stings never bothered me, but as I got older, my reaction grew worse and worse. I’m not sure why. As a kid, I prided myself for never getting poison ivy, or fevers, or allergies, or needing glasses— the commonplace weaknesses among my friends. Perhaps I missed some physical inflection point in my life. I’ve been so busy, I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of things.

My dad came into the kitchen. “What happened?”

My wife pointed to my foot, which had started to swell, “Gary got stung in the garden.”

“Put mud on it,” dad said. “It draws out the poison.”

“Listen to your father.” She nodded. “Mud will help.”

“I’ll get some dirt,” my dad said.

“Don’t go near the garden,” my wife cautioned. “That’s where the bees are.”

He nodded. “I’ll steer clear of them.”

We ate a late dinner together around the kitchen table. My foot, covered in mud, resting on a towel, was propped up on a spare chair.

“I think we should call an exterminator,” my wife said.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. My foot had started to itch.

“This is the third time you got stung this month.” My wife put a forkful of kale into her mouth. “When?”

“Tonight,” I said. “I know what to do. It’s a ground hive. We just need to pour ammonia into the hole, at night, when the bees are dormant.”

“Not ammonia,” my dad said. “Gasoline.”

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Fiction

“Are you nuts?” I said, “That would be dangerous.”

“Well,” he said, “don’t the terrorists use ammonia to make bombs? That might be more dangerous.” My father sipped his iced tea. “Did you hear about that attack in Paris? I saw it on the news. What’s wrong with these people that they would blow themselves up?” He straightened in his chair. “Before long they’re going to start doing it over here.”

“Let’s not start in on this again,” my wife said. “Can’t we have a normal conversation at dinner for once? No politics.” She dropped her fork on the plate and glared at me.

“I’ll do it tonight,” I said.

My dad looked under the table. “What’s with your foot?”

M

y wife and I were in bed. I’d finished reviewing a presentation I was on deck with the next day. I looked at my foot. It appeared okay. The drugs and mud had done the job.

My wife was turned on her side, asleep, and I turned off my light.

“We need to talk,” my wife said in the darkness. She sat up and turned on her nightstand lamp. “We need to do something.”

“I poured a gallon of ammonia into the hole,” I said. “They should all be dead by morning.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Listen,” I said, “I’m tired. My foot hurts. I don’t want to argue. Can we just go to sleep?”

“No, we can’t. We have to move your father.”

I turned on my light. “Let’s give the in-home care another try.”

“No,” she said. “We tried that twice and they both quit after a few days.” She raised her hands in the air. “He threw a cup of coffee at the last one.”

“She was messing with his maps.”

“That’s another thing,” my wife said, “he’s got his crap spread out all over the living room: maps, fishing gear, his lure projects.” She turned to me and rubbed my shoulder. “You love your father. I do, too. But it’s been three years, and he’s getting worse. More than we can handle.”

“I’ll work with him to keep the living room clean.”

“It’s not just that,” my wife said. “TJ found him wandering on his property the other day.

And I came home from work yesterday and your father had emptied all the kitchen drawers.

He said he was looking for the car keys so he could pick up your mother.”

“Maybe my brother …”

“Your brother won’t be of any help, and you know it. We’re in this alone.” She waited for me to respond. “We haven’t been able to take a proper vacation for three years.”

“We haven’t done a lot of things in three years.”

“What is that suppose to mean?” she said.

“Nothing.” I threw off the covers and got out of bed. Why did I say that? It’s like shutting your car door while the keys are still in the ignition: you hear the door slam and feel surprised.

“Where are you going?” She raised her voice. “Don’t walk away from me.”

“I’m going to pee.” I leaned over and scratched my ankle. “Can’t I take a piss?”

“I made an appointment for us at the facility in Oshkosh. Tomorrow. Four o’clock.”

“I can’t go at four. I have that all-day project review” “Get someone to cover for you. Vivian. You put in enough damn hours.”

I knew Vivian could, and would, fill in for me—she understood the project details as well as I did. I could duck out a little early. “Okay,” I said, “we can check it out.” I really had to pee.

“What about my father? That’s not a good time to leave him alone.”

“I called TJ,” she said. “He’s going to come over and sit with your father.”

“You made all these arrangements before we agreed to it?”

“Yes.” She turned off her light. “While you’re up, take some more Benadryl. It’ll help you sleep.”

I thought about Vivian. She was going to wear her green dress and black heels. We’d discussed it. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said.

“Whatever helps,” my wife said, her voice muffled by her pillow.

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O

J U D G E’S N OTE

VI CTO RIA H O USTO N Written with an immediacy that brings you right into the story, “Static” has instantly recognizable characters. Most important: the unspoken is apparent, easy to read between the lines. A very moving—and very real—story.

ur neighbor TJ was a good friend, a real outdoors type. He’d taken my father walleye fishing, but my dad would not remember this.

“It looks like you have quite the project here,” TJ said to my dad. They shook hands.

“I’m going to Canada. In the spring.” My dad pointed to the maps that were spread out on the floor. “I’m going to start on the East coast, high in the North Country, and work my way West.” My dad got down on his knees and traced a finger along the maps. “I’ll start here and follow the change in weather. I’ll hit each lake when the ice has just thawed, and be the first to fish it.” He looked at TJ and I thought my father’s long beard could use a trim. I tried to get him to shave it off, but he said he needed it—for what I was never sure. “I’ll be like Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Me and the creator. The first man to see it all.”

“These lures look pretty good.” TJ picked one up. “You make them yourself ?”

“Yes.” My dad took in a sharp breath, puffed up his chest. He looked proud of his work, and it made me sad.

My wife came into the room. “Dad, you and TJ are going to harvest some tomatoes, and peppers, and kale from the garden while Gary and I run an errand. You can tell him all about your trip.” She turned to TJ. “Watch out for bees.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I poured a gallon of ammonia in their hive. I’m sure they’re all dead.”

“Bees,” Dad said, “you can’t live with ’em and can’t live without ’em.”

“You guys go,” TJ said. “Take your time. Your father and I are going to have fun together.”

My dad struggled to get up. TJ helped him to his feet, and my dad bent over and wiped at his knees. I remembered my dad playing softball when I was a kid. From the stands I watched him swing the bat with authority, run the bases, dust off his uniform after sliding home, greeted by his buddies with a plastic cup of beer, and slaps on his back. My mom sat next to me, with a broad rimmed hat to shield her face from the sun. My dad looked into the stands and blew her an exaggerated kiss. She caught it on her cheek and blew it back. She hugged my brother and me, kissed us on the tops of our heads so hard that we spilled our sodas.

“Come on, let’s go,” my wife said, giving my arm a slight tug. The black and white image in my head from the past was replaced with the gloomy color of the moment.

W

hen we came home, my dad and TJ were drinking a beer and working on lures.

They pasted hooks to pieces of painted cork, decorated with feathers my father had collected from our chicken pen. The place reeked of glue.

TJ looked up. “How’d it go?”

“I have to admit I was surprised,” I said. “Much different than I thought it would be.”

My dad looked at me. “Where did you go?”

“Hey,” TJ said. “The bees are still there. I got stung twice, so we couldn’t pick the vegetables.”

“Are you all right?” my wife asked. “Do you need Benadryl or anything?”

“Nah,” TJ said. “I’m not allergic. They’re just mosquito bites to me.”

TJ turned down our offer to stay for dinner, he had to go home and let his dogs out. Dad talked about how much he liked TJ, who helped him improve the lures and gave him pointers on the trip. When dad was talked out, we ate in silence. He would go through an almost manic-depressive cycle several times a day: first a lot of talk, lot’s of random details, and then quiet—a boat traveling through a hurricane and hitting the eye of the storm. That spot of calm worried me; one day I knew that he would never make it back out.

“Who died?” my dad said.

“Not the bees,” I said.

“Gas,” my dad said. “I told you to use gas. You have any?”

“I have a couple of containers I use for the mowers.”

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Fiction

“Let’s do it tonight,” he said. “Those tomatoes are ready to burst on the vine. We should pick them ASAP.” “So you remember the tomatoes?” I said. There were patterns to his dementia, but I was always surprised, even hopeful, when he remembered something so recent.

“Sure, I remember.”

“Okay,” I said, “you and me tonight. We’ll gas the bees.” My wife looked at me with concern. “It’ll be fine,” I said. And it’ll give us a chance to talk.” Under the table, I gave her foot a gentle tap.

“Okay,” she said. “But be careful.”

Betty had been very kind to my dad at first, but lately she seemed ready to pick a fight with him. I understood. We’d both thought that, with the kids out on their own and the dogs dead, we’d have our freedom. The place in Oshkosh was perfect.

Designed to be more of a community than a hospital. They had art classes, concerts, a fishing pond, and even daily Mass that I knew my dad, a fervent Catholic, would appreciate. But, my relief was smothered by guilt.

W

He would go through an almost manic-depressive cycle several times a day: first a lot of talk, lot’s of random details, and then quiet—a boat traveling through a hurricane and hitting the eye of the storm.

That spot of calm worried me; one day I knew that he would never make it back out.

e stood in the moonlight. I looked at the hole. There were no signs of the bees. I emptied the plastic gas can into the hole. “Two gallons,” I said to my dad, “that should do it.”

“You need to light it,” he said.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “This should do just fine.”

I don’t think so.” He pulled on his beard. “Remember that monk. The one who set himself on fire?”

“I’ve seen that picture,” I said.

“He sat down in one of those yoga poses and covered himself in the gas.”

“Jesus, Dad, what are you thinking about?” He never seemed unhappy, a bit lost in thought perhaps, but not discontent.

“It doesn’t matter.” He leaned over the bee hole. “That monk was doing just fine until he lit the gas.” My dad laughed. “Then he burned like a motherfucker.” He kicked at the hole. “I think this might make the bees angry, and there will be hell to pay for anyone who works around the garden. We need to burn them.”

I thought he might have a point. Two cups of ammonia was supposed to kill the hive. I’d poured in a gallon and it hadn’t had any effect.

“You got a match?” he asked.

I pulled a lighter out of my pocket and a pack of cigarettes dropped onto the ground.

“You smoke?” he said.

“No I don’t smoke.” I shrugged. “Just one or two, now and then.” I put the cigarettes back into my front pocket. “Don’t tell Betty,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”

“Secrets huh?” my dad said. “I guess we all have ’em.”

He looked at his fingers. “I quit thirty years ago. Your Mom made me promise. I did it cold turkey. We didn’t have those patches back then. Kents were my brand. That small box, the castle on top, the word Kent in big blue letters, outlined in gold—it makes we want one right now.” I was often amazed at how much he remembered. Some memories grew deep roots, while the everyday stuff dried up and blew away.

“She said she didn’t want me dying too young.” He rubbed his face. “Then she goes and gets cancer.” He looked me in the eyes. “I wish I never quit. I miss her like all hell. We might be together now.”

It had been a long time since he’d mentioned my mother as part of his past. When her name came up, he was usually wandering around the house, going from room to room, looking for her. Every time we took a drive somewhere, he’d ask if we were going to pick her up.

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“Dad, stand back,” I said. I leaned over, and gave the disposable lighter’s flint wheel a sharp spin.

The explosion was a muffled thump. The bright fireball knocked us both on our butts.

I couldn’t see my dad. After a few seconds my eyesight returned. I could smell burnt hair.

“Are you okay?” I said. His beard was singed. I ran my fingers over the top of my head and eyebrows. I too was singed.

He let out a deep breath and reached towards me. “Give me one of those cigarettes.”

We sat there smoking. “They’re dead now,” he said.

I nodded and blew smoke in the direction of the hole.

“You know I can hear you and Betty fighting at night.” He took a deep draw on the cigarette, held it for a few seconds, and let out the smoke. “I don’t sleep well.”

“It’s normal, Dad. All couples fight.”

“It’s about me.” He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “I understand, son.” He squeezed my shoulder. His grip was stronger than I expected. “You watch yourself, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Vivian.”

“How do you know about her? We work together.” I wondered how the project meeting had finished up today; I made a mental note to give her a call later—it was a valid reason.

“You’ve never met her,” I said.

“No, but I’d recognize her if I ever did. You talk about her at dinners—all the time. You don’t even know how much, do you?” He leaned towards me, the flame-curled hair in his beard sparkled. “I see concern in Betty’s face when you bring her up.” He flicked away a halfspent cigarette.

I did enjoy Vivian’s laugh, how it filled me with energy, made me feel young. My dad looked at me as though he could read my thoughts and I looked away.

“Gary,” my wife shouted from the deck. “Are you alright?”

“We’re fine. Just talking.” I could see her in the moonlight, in her night robe, arms folded, concerned. “We’ll be in soon.”

“You know I think about her sometimes,” my dad said.

“Betty?”

“No, Vivian. What she looks like.” He laughed.

“Drop it, Dad.” “I hear you and Betty fighting in your bedroom, but not much else.” He stretched his back.

“Your mom and I had sex right up to the end. Even after her chemo.”

“Dad, come on, stop.”

“You and I never had that birds and bees talk.” He laughed.

“I’m a little old for that,” I said.

“Can you promise me something?”

“Sure anything.”

“Your brother.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I said. “I promise.”

“No,” he said. “He’s your older brother. He’s not your problem. Don’t let him tie you down.

My father had a drinking problem. I think it passed to your brother.” He sighed. “I’m glad he never had kids. A man can be real hard on his kids when he’s been drinking.” He looked up at the moon. “I want you to be free.”

“Dad,” I said. “I’ll visit you every day.”

“Every day?”

“Every day.” I patted his leg. I knew I could swing down from work and spend dinnertime with him. Longer visits on the weekends. I could bring along my brother.

“It’s quite a distance,” he said.

“Not that far,” I said.

He looked at me. “Your hair’s all burnt.” He touched my head. “No need to visit me.

Canada is pretty far away.” He asked for another cigarette and I lit one for myself—just one more. I looked up for a constellation I might recognize.

“You okay, Son?”

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

“I’m fine. I just have a lot going on.”

“Don’t miss your life,” he said.

I looked over at him. Sometimes his way of speaking bugged the shit out of me. “How can I possibly miss my life?” I said. “I’m in it every second.” I searched my pockets for gum.

“Be still and know that I am God. That’s from Psalm 46. I’d spend all year planning my fishing trips. I never liked ocean fishing; I was always a freshwater man. I would spend all year mapping out every small detail. I jumped out of bed every morning to go to work, because I couldn’t wait to get on the lake and get my line in the water.”

I thought we should be heading in but wanted stay outside.

“You know what I would do on those lakes?” he said.

“Fish?”

“I would start planning my next trip.” He rubbed his hands over his face, like he was just waking up. “I’ve missed a lot of moments right in front of me.”

It was quiet. The air was still. Something splashed in the pond, perhaps a frog. I thought about Canada: my dad and me sitting by a campfire under the stars. A crazy idea—but, maybe not.

“I miss the static,” he said.

“Static?”

“Yeah, sitting on the couch, tired from an honest day’s work. Drink a few beers. Watch the news, then Carson, Tom Snyder, the national anthem—and then static. The end of the broadcast day.” He shook his head. “The world would stop.”

A sly grin crept across his face. “Don’t tell your mom I was smoking. She thinks I quit.” He struggled to his feet, and I helped him up. “Aren’t we supposed to be picking tomatoes?” he said.

“We can do that tomorrow.” I patted him on the back. “Time for that tomorrow.”

He cleared his throat. “And even those who are yet to come, will not be remembered by those who follow.” He stretched his arms into the sky, arched his back, and wiggled his fingers.

“That’s from Ecclesiastes.” He sighed, and looked at me. “It all goes by too fast. Too goddamn fast.”

I looked down and wondered if the bees were dead. I hoped they were.

Michael Hopkins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His writing as a book and music critic has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Scene, and Magnet. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University and has spent 35 years working in diverse research and engineering roles. An extensive world traveller, Hopkins currently lives on a farmette near Neenah with his wife and their dog, cats, and chickens.

Read award-winning fiction from new and established Wisconsin writers at wisconsinacademy.org/fiction.

SUMMER 2018

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Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry Head, Thorax, and Abdomen of a wasp appear from layers of lace in your wedding dress.

It has just enough zest left to sting like old vows and broken promises. That same day you are deep into spring cleaning your daughter brings home lice. Live insects are crawling through her crooked part.

You distract her with fairy tales, fractured so the princess never needs toxic potions with snappy names like RID or NIX. Years of marriage are lost to a fine-tooth comb, metal tines track each nit latched to strands of her chestnut hair.

You wipe them away like bald-faced lies, search the almanac hoping for a cure that requires only a smudging with cedar smoke. The school nurse calls, reminds you to toss each soft doll and security blanket into a dryer set on high heat. Each cycle must be dipped, scalded, or spun to death.

Meanwhile, the doorbell rings, papers are served, toxic solvents are mixed with chrysanthemum flowers.

Spring solstice is not made from bee wings and the breath of sun it is built from an ant stealing one grain of sugar from the layer of cake you’d saved for good luck.

Jenna Rindo

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Poetry

Seven-Mile Loop Past the Cemetery You run in pre-dawn dark, vague moon overhead, cratered ovaries spit race enzymes.

Fifty-mile weeks on spongy footbeds pound porous your bones. You repeat hill climbs.

A charm of finches gorging thistle serenades each crescent regret you cycle within.

The raw stench of cow manure and piss sprayed, then held in factory lagoons unpins family farms, rural charm, once unparalleled.

Your feet go on moving, sweat gritty with mistakes.

You arrange words, fracture stanzas, compelled to interpret the roadkill, its rib cage bleached opaque.

Acid rain etches each infant tombstone.

Day breaks, lines fade into our pocked ozone.

Jenna Rindo

Jenna Rindo and her husband raised five children on five acres in Pickett, Wisconsin, where they also tend a small flock of chickens and Shetland sheep. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Natural Bridge, Prism Review, Tampa Review, and Bellingham Review. A former pediatric nurse, Rindo now teaches English to non-native speakers.

J U D G E’S N OTES

Karla Huston

What captures my attention in “Head, Thorax, and Abdomen” is the duality of the narrative: toxins and stingers, bald-face lies, fairy tales, and a princess.

There’s something creepy about it, and I say that in the nicest way. The author makes fine use of assonance and alliteration, creating phrasing that chimes and echoes throughout the piece. While the language is lovely, it’s also prickly. This poet is a good storyteller with no wasted words or narrative set-up, starting with the “trouble” and weaving a tale with no happy ending.

SUMMER 2018

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Poetry

November What kind of times are these, when to talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors?

—Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Born Later”

My sons told me that November was coming but I didn’t believe them. There’s no way it will ever be November, I said. We’re not that stupid. Not here, this is America.

Now, when I meet up with my friends we don’t talk much about November even though it’s November and that’s all we used to talk about.

We talk about sports and our kids and our work.

Before November, we prided ourselves on not talking about our work, but there it is.

My wife doesn’t like to watch the news during November because November reminds her of her father and her bosses who did things to her in November during the years when every month for her was November.

I sit at my desk and force myself to read the stories about November in the paper.

Sometimes, I want to shout about November but the guys I work with go through their lives as if November never happened. I think they think I’m crazy to worry so much about November.

Sometimes, I wonder if they even know it’s November.

November, though, is no time to be quiet— not with wind whistling through the trees and the leaves and dead branches waiting to be cleared away.

Thomas J. Erickson

Thomas J. Erickson is an attorney and member of the Hartford Avenue Poets. His award-winning chapbook, The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom, was published by Parallel Press in 2013. Other books include The Biology of Consciousness (Pebblebrook Press, 2016) and the forthcoming Hailstorm Interlude (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Erickson lives in Milwaukee with his wife, Daphne, and is the proud father of Charles and John.

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Poetry

At the Monkey Skull Museum The skull of the pygmy marmoset is the size of one of those plastic mini-football helmets my dad would get for me for free with a fill-up of a tank of gas at Citgo. The bone is so thin it would be like breaking the crust of crème brûlée to get to the tasty brain whether by talon or claw or spoon.

You can see the faint line of plate fusion dividing the skull of the tufted capuchin.

A marking as delicate and fine as a painted horizon line on the glaze of a Grecian amphora.

The one that looks the most human is the bonobo its skull looks eerily similar to Norman Bates’ mother when her bewigged visage turns toward Vera Miles below the dangling light bulb.

Hitch said blondes make the best victims because they’re like bloody footprints in virgin snow. He liked his icy blondes but he was irritated at Vera because she got pregnant so he gave the good part to Janet Leigh who’s now forever immortalized for being stabbed in the shower. Hitch knew the value of women.

My wife keeps talking about how she wants to go now.

She’s had enough of this museum.

There’s this “universal phenomenon” of men interrupting women which I suppose started four million years ago when humans split from monkeys. I’m not going to interrupt her because I am, all of a sudden, sympathetic.

Thomas J. Erickson

J U D G E’S N OTES

Karla Huston

I am charmed by the ordinariness of this tongue-in-cheek homage to November, which comes every year whether we want it to or not. Glum and cold, November is a month for local, state, and national elections. As a political poem, this one works well—it doesn’t finger-point or wag, nor does it preach or wave conflicting allegiances. This poem is playful and skillfully crafted. Even though November is used 15 times in the poem, it doesn’t feel repetitive.

SUMMER 2018

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Poetry

The Act There was a boy who was not yet a man who spent a summer grafting buds onto peach branches. It was hot; it was the bay shore of Maryland and 1974. He carried a small knife and used it with his hands, used it to open with his hands. With each slit on the alreadytree he opened a small window and took out the bud, all reaching and green. And with each slit on the bare tree he opened a window, the church window, and sealed it with the bud. The colors in the panes filled in. It was perfect except for the tape, which wound around the bare branch, the already-bud, and joined them like a law. Slowly they began to hold, and later began to grow. The trees became a world of growing, of knowing there would be fruit to eat. Sometime soon. And the pay was not good but the peaches were. And he worked, and he worked, and he made it work.

Justine Jones

Justine Jones holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She works at Madison East High School, and is pursuing a career as an educator and a writer.

J U D G E’S N OTES

Karla Huston

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

While this prose poem has an aura of mystery, I don’t feel shut out. Rather, I feel invited in to read. The author anchors the poem in time and place with a “boy who was not yet a man,” a boy who grafts a bud to another tree. The tape that holds the graft together is “wound around” (or is it a wound?), and the tree has been hurt so it can accept the intrusion of the other—joined “like a law.” This poet’s deft use of language, metaphor, and repetition keeps me returning to this piece.

Poetry

What’s Leaving Me my grandmother is a serious woman. she can close the night like a black faucet. she bore ten children and gave them names like kitchen knives: Peter, Gina, Melissa. after Mass in a van aside her husband, she ate morsels of raw ground beef kept always in her purse. the day Jack Kennedy’s scalp left his head like a slashed petal, she took to the hallways with a staple gun, and everything held fast to its place. last week my grandmother called me honey for the first time, her paper cheek against my neck as I bent through a car frame to hug her. one day when I was ten, scraped knee weeping like a maple leaf, she came to me where I sat in the kitchen and pressed her fingers to my skin. she has never talked of her family’s farm in red Iowa—the years they trapped berries in glass jars, sealed them with silver layers of wax. warmer months, they tapped the great yard for syrup. but I will pull the nails out of you, she said. it’s April, today—the sap is too thin yet to bleed.

Justine Jones

Hear our 2018 contest-winning writers and poets read these works and others at 5:00 pm, on October 12, at A Room of One’s Own in Madison during the 2018 Wisconsin Book Festival.

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WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fuller Opera House c. 1900

FEBRUARY 2-8, 2017

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How does Frank Productions’ new venue fit into the existing scene?

Madison activists mobilize for a new reality

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Dave Cieslewicz looks for a path to Democratic victory

ARTS APLENTY Our guide to upcoming highlights in theater, dance, classical music and visual art

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BOOK REVIEW

Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America

by Michael Edmonds Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 304 pages, $28.95 Reviewed by Shelby Anderson

Michael Edmonds’s new book, Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America, provides an enlightening and well-researched account of our always-evolving relationship with birds.

Edmonds is director of programs and outreach at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the author of two scholarly-yet-accessible books, Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan, With More Than 100 Logging Camp Tales (2009) and Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader (2014). Edmonds is also a dedicated birdwatcher, and his passion for both bird observation and conservation comes through in Taking Flight.

A researcher at heart, Edmonds has spent the last twenty-five years poring over archaeological reports, missionary journals, letters, early scientific treatises, memoirs of Native American elders, and Midwestern folklore to reveal how our ancestors thought and felt about the same birds we see today. The respect and knowledge with which Edmonds deftly leads the reader through this history brings a fresh, exciting perspective to a seemingly mundane subject.

It turns out that birds have always fascinated humans. Some of the first humans to inhabit the Midwest, such as the Aztalan and Cahokia peoples, left behind petroglyphs and stone objects featuring carvings of birds. Native Americans built effigy mounds often in the shape of birds, and Edmonds notes how “allusions to birds permeate the entire cultural experience of American Indians.” Superstitions held by the many immigrant communities across the Midwest and the stories and folklore told about birds provide glimpses of the role birds have played in our lives over the generations. Today over 50 million Americans head outdoors, sometimes before dawn and in inclement weather, just to catch a glimpse of their favorite species.

From the opening chapter, Edmonds urges us to take an ethnobiologist’s point of view when it comes to our history with birds: Instead of judging the practices and beliefs of Native Americans and

subsequent European settlers, he argues that to understand their relationships with birds, we need to look at these cultures holistically. “By trying to appreciate how they understood the same birds that soar past our binoculars or perch on our feeders,” he writes, “we might learn not just about the past but also about ourselves.”

After reading Taking Flight, I’d argue that Edmonds is right—our relationship with birds says a lot about us. While Native Americans lived closely with the natural world, revered birds, and relied upon them for sustenance, the early explorers in the New World were focused on collecting, categorizing, and capitalizing upon native flora and fauna. In the 19th century, as manifest destiny took hold, pioneers and sportsmen alike hunted several bird species to extinction, most notably the passenger pigeon. A collection of over sixty historic images provides readers with visual evidence of how subsequent generations revered, depended upon, and, sometimes, slaughtered birds native to the Midwest.

Although we are no longer blasting birds out of the sky by the thousands as our forebearers once did, Edmonds ends the book with a simple request: That when we think about birds, we also think about our impact on the environment. The call to action doesn’t seem out of place: “Each of us needs to imagine how we nurture the world as well as exploit it, how to tread as carefully in our own lives as a great blue heron does in the shallows.”

Shelby Anderson is a staff member of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards and editor of their magazine, Wisconsin School News. A lifelong resident of Wisconsin, Anderson has worked as a reporter at newspapers in Minocqua and Sun Prairie. He lives in Madison with his wife, Laura, and daughter, Pippa.

Don’t know what to read? Check out reviews of new and interesting books by Wisconsin authors at wisconsinacademy.org/reviews.

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BOOK REVIEW

Palominos Near Tuba City: New and Selected Poems

by Denise Sweet Holy Cow! Press, 75 pages, $16.95 Reviewed by Mark Zimmermann

Readers familiar with Anishinaabe poet Denise Sweet’s work must be well aware of how engaged and perceptive she is as an interpreter of what’s going on in the world, how things happen, and why they matter. A professor emerita of Humanistic Studies, Creative Writing, and First Nations Studies at the University of Wisconsin– Green Bay, Sweet served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2008. She is a widely anthologized poet and author of three collections, including the award-winning Songs for Discharming (1997).

Her recently published fourth collection, Palominos Near Tuba City, exemplifies the talents that have earned Sweet considerable accolades. Many of the poems in this collection touch on environmental and spiritual themes and consider the lives of indigenous peoples in different parts of the world. Perhaps the most striking poems involve personal experiences of a particular place or moment that consider matters of longstanding historical import.

“The Lost Maya” combines these elements when Sweet writes of a church in the Guatemalan town of Panajachel where candles “invoke the patron saint / of beggars,” whose statue looks down on her “in stone-cold indifference.” As she gives “prayers a chance,” she observes stiff planks beneath her knees that “show years of anonymous penance.”

Given the centuries-long history of colonialism that brought countless indigenous peoples to their knees, that patron saint of Christianized beggars—in one of the hemisphere’s most impoverished nations, no less—appears in a far-from-divine light. To Sweet’s credit, this is suggested through language and sharp observation, rather than delivered as a polemic. The same holds true throughout her other poems in the collection, which convey her deeply moral center without being overly moralistic.

Later in the same poem, Sweet acknowledges a dawning awareness of how she might be viewed in the context of the region’s colonial history: … though my skin brown, my nose Mayan, and I call myself Indigena, I bear an unearned pride that makes no sense here.

To them I am the gringa who hides her privilege like a birthmark, groomed, well-dressed, and unused to the heat, I am the foreigner of complaint of El Norte.

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America could use more poets, travelers, and citizens like this.

Sweet’s awareness of privilege, place, and the way people around her see her, expressed with plainspoken gravitas, elevates the experience of travel to that of poetic journey.

Privilege of another shade, and in another place, gets called out in a number of poems about America in this collection. In “Indian War,” Sweet takes on the pervasive stereotypes of Native Americans in professional sports and popular culture. Part of her powerful response: “On the prairie of justice and imagination / I go back to the Lakota Nation and / the tradition of restraint and male mockery.” Exactly what form such male mockery takes in this poem is quite funny, yet dead serious.

Due to my unfamiliarity with some of the references and vocabulary found in Palominos Near Tuba City, I occasionally felt like a visitor when reading this collection. Terms from the Anishinaabemowin, Mayan, and Spanish languages stand out on the page—chimookamon, kachikel, cofradias—and leave me thinking how richly they must resonate when Sweet reads them aloud.

Because she provides a glossary for the Anishinaabemowin words, Sweet comes across as a welcoming host who wants to share her language and culture with her readers. By not including the words from Mayan and Spanish, Sweet perhaps suggests that readers who don’t speak the languages should do some work on their own, which again riffs on themes of travel and awareness.

Like a travelogue to which one returns, always to learn something new about both people and place, Palominos Near Tuba City is worth reading and thinking about again and again.

Mark Zimmermann is author of the Pushcart Prizenominated collection Impersonations (Pebblebrook Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in Cream City Review, Verse Wisconsin, and The Writer. He is a member of the Hartford Avenue Poets and has served on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission since 2004. He lives and teaches in Milwaukee.

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