Wisconsin People & Ideas – Spring 2019

Drones in Dairyland

Inventing the Dells • Food for All • Painting Climate Change

Explore different perspectives 107.9 FM wpr.org

WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Breanna Dollak • Head Gallery Attendant, James Watrous Gallery Chelsea Chandler • Director, Environmental Initiatives Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Kelly Hilyard • Program Assistant, Environmental Initiatives Bethany Jurewicz • Business & Exhibitions Manager Matt Rezin • Building Manager & Membership Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Associate Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Nikita Werner • Administrative Assistant OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Patricia Brady • President Tom Luljak • President-elect Tim Size • Immediate Past President Rich Donkle • Treasurer Roberta Filicky-Peneski • Secretary Steven Ackerman • Vice President of Sciences Malcolm Brett • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters Freda Harris • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Tina Abert, Madison Kimberly Blaeser, Burlington Frank D. Byrne, Madison Joseph Heim, La Crosse Jane Elder, Madison Catherine G. Kodat, Appleton Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Dipesh Navsaria, Madison Kevin Reilly, Verona Linda Ware, Wausau Nathan Wautier, Madison Marty Wood, Eau Claire OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Freda Harris • Foundation President Andrew Richards • Foundation Vice President Rich Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary

Editor’s Note I have a distinct memory of a trip I took to Milwaukee when I was nine years old. One Saturday morning in June my family drove to the South Side to visit Great Grandma Leeser. After a day of listening to stories about how the Layton Park neighborhood was changing and how this or that great aunt wasn’t feeling so good these days, we exhaustedly checked in to the downtown Best Western. Mom said we needed to get some rest before our visit to the Milwaukee Public Museum, so Dad ordered Chinese food and we ate dinner sitting on our beds.

I had been antsy all day and was still very much so at bedtime. Even after the lights were out and my parents and brother had gone to sleep, I lay awake, recalling the museum brochure I had pored over during the weeks before our trip. Images of the massive dioramas, creatures and cultures I had seen only in books, and the eerily darkened Streets of Old Milwaukee swirled in my head.

When the air conditioner unit kicked off, I became aware of the sound of voices, car horns, and music. Where I grew up in rural central Wisconsin, the only latenight sounds were the steady drone of tractors punctuated by the yelp of a coyote or the brief roar of a passing car. Yet, just outside our third-story room at the Best Western were all these intriguing noises. When, after an hour of tossing and turning, my brother finally pushed me out of our shared bed, I instinctively moved toward that noise, that energy. Standing at the window and watching the steady stream of cars and people moving up and down Wisconsin Avenue, I realized how very different Milwaukee was from the rest of the state. Here is a place where no one ever goes to sleep, I thought, a place where anything is possible.

While I still feel that palpable sense of energy—a delicious jolt of possibility—when I think about Milwaukee, I understand that it is foolish to believe one can understand a city as vast as Milwaukee by simply looking through a window. Yet after years of encountering the city’s richness and complexity, of talking to its creative and resilient residents, I have found some truth in my childhood observations.

Readers will meet some of these residents—poets and photographers, historians and zoologists, restaurant cooks and community leaders—in this issue of the magazine. I hope these encounters encourage us all to see this marvelous city with new eyes.

Patrick Stutz Photography

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark Bradley Patricia Brady Kristen Carreira Jane Elder Jack Kussmaul Tom Luljak Tim Size

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

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Moriah Rataczak, a precision agronomist with Gumz Farms, holds her drone on a windy day at Shiprock Farm near Coloma.

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CONTENTS 04 From the Director 05 Letters 06 Happenings Wisconsin Table

08 Food for Thought, Food for All

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Mckenzie Halling

Essay

12 Diversions of a Different Nature:

The Many-Storied Career of Wisconsin Dells John Gurda & J Tyler Friedman

Report

20 Drones in Dairyland

Steven Potter

Essay

26 Bridge to Discovery

Allen M. Young

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Jorge Mejias

Lynne Railsback, Bull Thistle.

Watercolor on paper, 21¼ x 17¼ inches.

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VOLUME 65 · NUMBER 2 SPRING 2019

Mark Brautigam, Water Park. Archival pigment print, 39 x 52 inches.

@ Watrous Gallery

32 Uprooted: Plants in a Changing Climate

Lynn Keller

Fiction

44 Open Book

Kim Suhr

Poetry

51 New Wisconsin Poetry

Dasha Kelly Hamilton & Mark Zimmermann

Book Reviews

54 The Milwaukee Anthology, edited by Justin Kern

Alexander Shashko

55 Beginnings: The Homeward Journey of Donovan Manypenny, by Thomas D. Peacock

Thomas Davis

56 In Light, Always Light, by Angela Trudell Vasquez

Mark Zimmermann

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 by visual artists and photographers from all corners of the state, and explores science and environmental issues that affect our people, lands, and waters.

Copyright © 2019 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 MCKENZIE HALLING editorial assistant JEAN LANG copy editor JODY CLOWES arts editor CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader HUSTON DESIGN design & layout facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/WatrousGallery

Wisconsin ideas for the world Join the Wisconsin Academy and help us create a brighter world inspired by Wisconsin people and ideas.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn more.

From the Director

A

s we gear up to celebrate our 150th anniversary in 2020, I’ve been reflecting on the beginnings of the Academy and the ways in which our core values—curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and civil discourse—have informed our work for nearly a century and half.

Our formative years followed Wisconsin’s emergence as the 30th state in the Union in 1848, which was also the year the University of Wisconsin was founded. But, our core values are rooted in colonial America. In 1743 Benjamin Franklin organized the American Philosophical Society, a club for learned men to promote useful knowledge. During the American Revolution, John Adams, John Hancock and 60 other “scholar-patriots” established the American Academy for Sciences and Arts, motivated by an understanding that “a new republic would require institutions able to gather knowledge and advance learning in service to the public good.” Building a new nation with collective knowledge—not just the imposed will of a conqueror or monarchy—was perhaps a revolutionary approach on its own.

By 1848, while Wisconsin was entering statehood, the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists and other societies were busy convening a meeting in Philadelphia to establish the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Today AAAS marks this moment in history as “the emergence of a national scientific community in the United States … [whose] meetings, held in cities across the country, represented a who’s who of science.”

Those AAAS meetings around the country also helped to cultivate a crop of state and local academies and societies—such as the Wisconsin Academy—that would eventually spring up across the United States.

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But first came the Civil War, which diverted public attention and national resources away from scientific and cultural advancement. Still, in 1863, Lincoln signed legislation that established the National Academy of Sciences in order to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government—thereby codifying a formal relationship between the federal government and the field of science.

This was an era when the nation was re-building and imagining what would come next after the Civil War. Around the world, science was leaping forward in ways that would transform society.

The first modern periodic table of elements had been organized in 1869. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was shaking up the world of biology. Thermodynamics, physics, and mathematics were all breaking new ground. It was an auspicious time for Wisconsin to join other states that were also creating academies where knowledgeable scientists and thinkers could better serve the public good.

This notion that knowledge could be harnessed through collective endeavor to serve our common progress was already part of the American fabric when the Wisconsin Academy’s founders approached the Wisconsin State Legislature with a request for a charter in 1870. The founders—civic leaders like John Wesley Hoyt and eminent scientists such as Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin and Increase Lapham—drew inspiration from those colonial “scholarpatriots” and followed the examples set by the AAAS and other societies to establish an academy “for the purposes of gathering, sharing, and acting upon knowledge in the sciences, arts, and letters for the betterment of the people of Wisconsin.”

As we know, the Legislature granted the charter and the Wisconsin Academy became a new chapter in the American story of embracing and exploring knowledge for the betterment of all citizens. For 149 years, through various approaches, the Wisconsin Academy has continued to pursue this charge. As we step into the next 150 years, we hope you will join us in celebrating our role in this great American experiment.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

Member News

NEWS for MEMBERS

Letters

ANNUAL SPRING FUND DRIVE

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the poetry at the recent Poetry & Pi(e) reading held by the Wisconsin Academy and Chippewa Valley Writers Guild in Eau Claire was even better than the pie! Dasha Kelly Hamilton is an inspirational force to be reckoned with. I enjoyed her reading so much that I immediately signed up for the CVWG’s Priory Writers’ Retreat, where Dasha will be a writer-in-residence this summer.

As an independent nonprofit, the Wisconsin Academy needs the support of members like you who value our commitment to creating a brighter future inspired by Wisconsin ideas.

Membership dues cover only a portion of the cost of publishing our remarkable magazine, Wisconsin People & Ideas. This spring, please consider a tax-deductible gift to the Academy.

Your support helps to fund this magazine as well as programs that connect Wisconsin people and ideas for a better world. Give online today at wisconsinacademy.org/donate.

Thank you!

FELLOWS NOMINATIONS We will open our nomination process for the 2020 class of Wisconsin Academy Fellows this fall. The Fellows Award recognizes Wisconsin educators, researchers, mentors, artists, and civic or business leaders who have made substantial contributions to the cultural life and welfare of our state and its people. We encourage our members to submit nominations for people they believe would make a good Academy Fellow. More information about the nomination process will be provided online, as available. To learn more about our current and past Fellows Award recipients, visit wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

Ashley Curtis, Eau Claire

My thanks to the Academy for arranging the Poetry & Pi(e) event in Madison, and for sending me home with additional copies of the Winter 2019 issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Of course, I love the article that Wendy Vardaman wrote about me. One of the qualities I’ve always admired in her writing is the way she layers time, and she does that so well in this article. I also love the whole issue. I had time to read it cover to cover last week, and I came away from the reading feeling more peaceful than I had in a long time. All the people featured in this issue care deeply for what they do, care enough to do it well, care enough to do it without undue attention to being paid back for their care. The articles gave me a feeling of a caring world, and that’s where I want to live. This issue made me feel we have such a world, if only we’d see.

Margaret Rozga, Milwaukee Wisconsin Poet Laureate

NEW FOUNDATION BOARD MEMBER In February 2019 the Wisconsin Academy Foundation Board welcomed its newest member, Kristen Carreira. Kristen is a Financial Advisor with Carreira Quinn Financial. Dedicated to managing the Wisconsin Academy’s endowment, the Wisconsin Academy Foundation Board was founded in 1992. We are pleased to have Kristen’s expertise and passion for civic involvement placed in the service of the Academy’s Foundation Board. Welcome, Kristen.

Erratum We mistakenly identified the Bay View neighborhood in Milwaukee as Bayview in the Winter 2019 issue of the magazine. Our apologies.

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Happenings

Kristine Hansen wants us to know that she has a passion for Wisconsin cheese. “Carr Valley Cheese’s Cocoa Cardona was my first cheese epiphany. While I can’t remember where I first tried this goat’s milk cheese, the world definitely stopped,” she writes in her introduction to the Wisconsin Cheese Cookbook: Creamy, Cheesy, Sweet, and Savory Recipes from the State’s Best Creameries (Globe Pequot Press, 2019).

A nationally recognized food and travel author based in Milwaukee, Hansen provides plenty of cheesy inspiration for home cooks, including new twists on old classics—apple pie with sharp cheddar crust, goat cheese-layered taco dip, and caramel apple cheese curds. But the Wisconsin Cheese Cookbook isn’t so much a cooking guide as it is a comprehensive exploration of the Wisconsin cheese industry, complete with profiles of creameries across the state, interviews with cheese makers, and historical reflections on changes to cheese making and consumption alike.

The book is broken down into sections based on state regions, making the creameries and their supporting recipes easy to follow for cooks and road trippers alike. A few of Hansen’s favorites from around the state include LaClare Family Creamery in Malone (Fond du Lac County), Landmark Creamery in Paoli (Dane County) and Holland’s Family Cheese in Thorp (Clark County). The book even includes recommendations of Hansen’s favorite Wisconsin restaurants and the cheese-centric options on their menus as well as a handful of the best artisan cheese specialty shops.

The cookbook is completed by beautiful images of Wisconsin farms that adorn each page, reminding readers of the intimate connection between the land, family farms, and cheese making.

“Cheesemakers in Wisconsin say that what makes their cheese so tasty is the quality of the cows’ milk,” writes Hansen. “This philosophy is not that different from the winemakers who search high and low for the best wine grapes. It all goes back to the soil and, to borrow a French term, terroir.”

While we no longer have the 1,500 or so cheese factories we had in 1899, the 150 we have today remind us that cheese making is essential to our economy and way of life. Whether you decide to travel Hansen’s path and explore the state’s creameries or stay home and follow Wisconsin Cheese Cookbook recipes from the comfort of your kitchen, you will get a taste of Wisconsin culture and tradition.

Mckenzie Halling 6

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

ABHM

COOKBOOK

MUSEUM Established in 1984 by Dr. James Cameron, America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee is preparing once again to open its doors to the public. From 1988 to 2008, the museum brought people from all over the world to the city’s historic Bronzeville Neighborhood to experience and discuss African-American history as an integral part of American history. Through guided tours led by griots, oral storytellers who interpret the exhibits and facilitate dialog, visitors explored exhibitions organized around the museum’s four themes: remembrance, resistance, redemption, and reconciliation.

Cameron, one of the only known Americans to survive a lynching, would often join tours and relate to visitors his own story of terror, anger, and, ultimately, forgiveness.

The name of the museum comes from our contemporary understanding of the mass atrocities perpetrated against captured Africans and their descendants over the past four hundred years.

Cameron believed it important to use the term “holocaust” in the name in order link it to the many other museums around the world that help people understand and cope with various holocausts. His vision for the museum was as a place for education and empathy building in order to achieve a just and peaceful society. Yet Cameron wanted museum visitors to understand that while the Black Holocaust began hundreds of years ago, its effects—and even some of its practices—continue to this day.

Cameron’s passing in 2006, combined with the global economic downturn, forced the museum to give up its Bronzeville space in 2008. In the wake of the closing, the nonprofit Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation formed to honor Cameron’s mission and vision. In 2012, the Foundation opened an online virtual gallery of the museum exhibits and developed a series of educational programs for local libraries, churches, and schools.

Through the efforts of Virgil Cameron (Dr. Cameron’s son), museum head griot Reggie Jackson, curator Fran Kaplan, and interim executive director Brad Pruitt, along with the support of a committed developer and other community partners, American’s Black Holocaust Museum was reopened in the fall of 2018 at the corner of West North and North Vel R. Phillps Avenue. A soft launch party, with actor Danny Glover as the keynote speaker, welcomed supporters and community members to the new space, which today includes exhibits from the old museum, such as a recreation of the a slave ship interior, and new interactive exhibits on African people before captivity, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Civil Rights Movement, and more. According to the website, the museum hopes to establish regular visitor hours in Summer 2019.

Happenings

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS S P E C I A L E F F E CTS

Katherine Cramer

Jo Handelsman

Patty Loew Three Academy Fellows have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Author Katherine Cramer (2018) was elected for her expertise in American politics and public affairs. Biologist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Jo Handelsman (2009) was elected for her contributions to scientific research. Native American journalist Patty Loew (2016) was elected for her research and scholarship about Native Nations. Cramer, Handelsman, and Loew are among more than 200 newly elected members for 2019, which include journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic and former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Compare the original Star Wars to the recent spin-off, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and it’s hard not to be impressed with how far visual effects technology has come in less than half a century—everything looks a little more real, makes you believe a little deeper.

Back when movies were recorded on film, and even in the early digital days, visual effects were added to scenes through rotoscoping, a process in which film technicians would painstakingly edit every single frame. Today, movie directors rely on award-winning software like SilhouetteFX to speed up the rotoscoping process. Co-designed

by Perry Kivolowitz, a computer science professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, SilhouetteFX automatically applies digital paint strokes across hundreds, even thousands, of frames.

SilhouetteFX has been used to support jaw-dropping scenes across popular films such as Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and The Greatest Showman. The software is in such wide use that it garnered an Academy Award for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scientific and Technical Achievement this past February.

The New York-born Kivolowitz, who moved to Wisconsin in the 1980s, provides an example of how the software works by asking us to imagine a helicopter lifting off from a parking lot in California for a movie that is supposed to take place in Afghanistan. “Blue screens work great in a controlled environment,” he says, “but you can’t really hang a curtain behind a helicopter,” After the scene is shot, SilhouetteFX is used to “cut out” and “paint” over the entire background, even as the helicopter takes off. Later, film engineers can add a background that will seem natural because the rotoscoping is almost seamless.

The Academy community was saddened to hear of the recent passing of two Fellows: chemist Alfred Bader and composer Maury Laws.

Maury Laws (2011) was born in 1923 in North Carolina.

After returning from service in World War II, he became a touring musician before finding work arranging and composing music for TV and film. He is perhaps best known for his original soundtrack work on animated children’s classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1965) and Frosty the Snowman (1969). In 1985, he moved with his family to Appleton, where he composed music for Off-Broadway theater and orchestras across the globe while contributing to the music and culture of the Fox Cities.

Kenosha News/Sean Krajacic

Alfred Bader (1987), born in Vienna in 1924, was a chemist who escaped the Nazi-led Holocaust as a child and went on to build Aldrich Chemical Company in Milwaukee. Through hard work and attention to detail, Bader fostered a lengthy and successful business career that included many patents and publications related to chemistry. In addition to his business ventures, he had a generous spirit and love for fine art.

Bader’s legacy and charitable work are carried on today through Bader Philanthropies.

Kivolowitz brings the same energy and enthusiasm to the Carthage College computer science program that he does to his SilhouetteFX software company. He understands how demanding the software industry is and regularly reminds his students “to take pride in their work [as] they are no different than composers, sculptors, poets— all start with nothing, and, by the strength of their mind, all end with something beautiful.”

Mckenzie Halling

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Wisconsin Table

FOOD FOR THOUGHT, FOOD FOR ALL

BY M CKENZI E HALLI N G

F

rom the outside, Tricklebee Café at 4424 West North Avenue in Milwaukee’s

Sherman Park looks like any other restaurant.

An A-frame chalkboard outside announces the special of the day: winter grain stew with a side of Hasselback potatoes and a radish, apple, and roasted sprout salad. For dessert, there’s lemon-

Tricklebee Café executive director Christie Melby-Gibbons believes everyone deserves a warm, healthy meal.

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Mckenzie Halling

lime tart with an oat crust.

Photo Credit

Wisconsin Table

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Wisconsin Table

Mckenzie Halling

Upon entry, however, it becomes clear that this café is different.

Today’s special is the menu, and there are no indications of how much lunch costs. Instead of a cash register, there is a plastic donation bucket seated on top of a wooden pulpit that wears a sign reading, Order here.

The Tricklebee Café is a pay-what-you-can restaurant, and absolutely anyone is welcome to a healthy, delicious meal, regardless of his or her ability to pay for it. Even those with no money are encouraged to come and eat, and are asked only to stick around after lunch to help wipe tables or clean up dishes.

The inspiration for the nonprofit Tricklebee Café began about four years ago when Christie MelbyGibbons was living and working as a Moravian pastor in Downey, California, southeast of Los Angeles. At the time, her church was struggling to find food donations for its community meals. After learning that nearly one-third of all available food goes to waste in America, and much of it before it even reaches consumers, MelbyGibbons began asking local grocery stores to donate food items that has passed their “sell-by” dates (sell-by dates are different than expiration dates in that they are meant to indicate peak freshness). Soon, Melby-Gibbons was picking up two carloads of food every week.

It was during this time that Melby-Gibbons found what she says is her real calling in life. “We need to get over this idea that healthy eating is only for certain people,” she says. “There should be access to affordable, healthy food every day for everyone on the planet.”

While researching how to expand her food program, Melby-Gibbons came across One World Everybody Eats, a nonprofit organization that works to alleviate food insecurity and strengthen communities through the pay-what-you-can restaurant model. According to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger relief organization, nearly one in eight Americans face food insecurity, which means they are not getting the recommended nutrition to maintain health. To address this issue, OWEE supports new and established cafés through consultation and networking.

“If we could eliminate waste in restaurants, agriculture, grocery stores, and wherever food is served or harvested, I believe we would have enough food to feed the world,” says OWEE founder Denise Cerreta in an interview in More Magazine.

Cerreta and OWEE developed a pay-what-you-can model in which at least 60% of restaurant customers pay market price (typically between $5 to $8) for their meal, and 20% pay above market price in order help cover costs for the 20% who pay below or nothing at all. Melby-Gibbons attended a few OWEE summits and felt inspired by the stories of the café owners and volunteers who serve nearly 4,000 meals a day. Soon after, Melby-Gibbons and her husband, David, decided to return to the Midwest, where she grew up, to start her own pay-what-you-can café.

After learning of high levels of food insecurity in Milwaukee, Melby-Gibbons and her husband decided to open a café in Sherman Park, a neighborhood that is emerging from a history of violence and disrepair by building a more diverse and secure community. “We

The Tricklebee runs with help from volunteers such as David Melby-Gibbons, Christie’s husband, and a handful of employees, including head cook Tesh Price.

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Wisconsin Table

looked for an area that was neglected,” she says. “Then we bought a house in the neighborhood. We thought, Ok, we are going to live where we do this.”

While one in ten Wisconsinites are food insecure, the highest rates for the state—22%—are in Milwaukee County, according to Feeding Wisconsin, the statewide association of Feeding America.

When rent or medical bills need to be paid, corners get cut—usually starting with meals. Families facing food insecurity are prone to further health risks; hunger and health are intimately connected.

Melby-Gibbons sees Tricklebee fulfilling three central needs for residents of Sherman Park. Tricklebee serves as a spot for community interaction. It’s a safe, warm, and peaceful place for community members just to be neighbors. The café’s large dining tables encourage barriers to crumble as strangers dine together.

In this way, the café also provides spiritual nourishment for its customers.

“The most consistent feedback I hear is, ‘What a joyful place,’ ” says Melby-Gibbons. “The space lifts you up.”

Just as often, it is the need for physical nourishment that brings in food-insecure residents who are struggling to find healthy, fresh food or produce in their neighborhood. Hunger Task Force, a leading anti-hunger nonprofit in Milwaukee, identified Sherman Park as a food desert—one of five neighborhoods in the city without access to a nearby grocery store. Slightly over half of Sherman Park’s residents are low income, according to a Milwaukee neighborhood survey from Urban Anthropology, and likely face transportation challenges that make travel to distant stores a difficult prospect.

The name, Tricklebee, was inspired by the saying, “the trick will be,” since Melby-Gibbons knew from the start that the largest trick would be funding the café. However, two and a half years after opening, the café is still afloat, thanks largely to overwhelming community support. Food preparation, custodial, and table waiting tasks are all handled by Melby-Gibbons, a few hired staff members, and a team of volunteers. On this particular day, volunteers Neil Moss, Amy Matkey, and Lakeya Yarbrough are assisted by MelbyGibbons’ husband, David, who helps out at the café whenever he can.

Most of the volunteers begin working at the café as a community service project; others hear about the café through word of mouth.

Every day, the menu at the café changes based on which food donations are available and which need to be used the fastest.

Almost every ingredient on the menu is vegan friendly and gluten free, because working with mainly plant-based materials helps kitchen workers minimize instances of cross contamination while preparing food. A vegan menu also conforms to many dietary restrictions and ensures the food being served is low in unnecessary fats and salts.

Each recipe is created by Yatesha “Tesh” Price, Tricklebee’s head cook. When the need arose last December, Price agreed to be the interim cook “until they found the right person.” It took only about two weeks for Melby-Gibbons to realize Price was exactly “the right person” they were looking for: she is a great cook, has the right creative energy, and believes in the café’s larger mission.

“I’ll tell you how I come up with the menu, but only if you don’t laugh,” says Price with a grin. “It’s based on the weather. I think of a menu that would make me feel comforted depending on the weather outside. … It’s like [the TV show] Chopped, the vegan version!”

In forwarding her mission of food equity, Melby-Gibbons also focuses on educating Sherman Park residents on healthy food through free Healthy Choices workshops where community members can come and learn how to cook. Knowing where to buy a product like kale is one thing, she says, but knowing what to do with it and how to prepare it is just as important. The café has also been providing youth opportunities to learn about food sustainability through a variety of internships where students can help in the gardens, in the kitchen, or with custodial tasks.

According to OWEE, pay-what-you-can cafés are also in the works for Oshkosh, Wausau, and Marshfield. But, as of now, the Tricklebee Café is the only operating donation-based restaurant in Wisconsin. Plans to bring a pay-what-you-can restaurant to the Madison area are in the works, too. Chef Dave Heide, owner of Liliana’s in Fitchburg and Charlie’s on Main in Oregon, has spent the past year and a half planning his own version of a pay-what-you-can restaurant, to be called Little John’s. According to a recent article in Isthmus, Heide plans to open Little John’s on Madison’s west side and sees the restaurant as an opportunity for veterans in Madison to undergo kitchen training and work as chefs. Heide says he’s got bigger plans for community food security in the future and hopes to someday open a food truck that can travel to food deserts in Madison.

The pay-what-you-can philosophy works so well in action because it minimizes food waste while providing nutrition and education to communities in need. Melby-Gibbons, Heide, and other pay-what-you-can owners/operators across America are at the forefront of imagining a more equitable food security future.

While their menus might vary and their locations differ, these cafés share a core belief: healthy, nutritious food should be affordable and available to all people.

Mckenzie Halling is the editorial assistant for Wisconsin People & Ideas. She is a senior studying in the UW–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication and will graduate in May 2019. Last fall, Halling was managing editor for the seventeenth edition of Curb magazine, a School of Journalism publication. Halling has a passion for writing, and she enjoys exploring captivating ways to use digital and social media to tell stories.

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Essay

Diversions of a Different Nature THE MANY-STORIED CAREER OF WISCONSIN DELLS

BY J O H N G U RDA & J TYLER FRI ED MAN

W

hen the westbound Empire Builder train stops in Wisconsin Dells on its daily trek to Seattle, passengers

behold a spectacle they won’t see anywhere else on their 2,200– mile journey. The panorama includes the Dells Bells Wedding Chapel, Old River Mini Golf, Ghost Molly’s Showboat Saloon, Just A Game Fieldhouse, Ghost Boat Tours, Sandbar Sports Grill, San Antonio Mexican Restaurant, and Wizard Quest Interactive Scavenger Hunt. There is scarcely time to take it all in before the train pulls out again. Seconds later the Empire Builder is crossing a steel truss bridge high above the Wisconsin River. A dam below releases a torrent of whitewater, but upstream the river is placid and deep, hemmed in by walls of buff-colored sandstone eroded into shapes that suggest more complex sculptural possibilities.

FRIEDMAN

AMONG THE WONDERS OF THE DELLS

PHOTOGRAPHY PLACE TOURISM

J TYLER FRIEDMAN

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This essay is adapted from Among the Wonders of the Dells: Photography, Place, Tourism, by J Tyler Friedman with an introduction by John Gurda.

Available June 2019 from the University of Wisconsin Press.

The exhibition is at the Museum of Wisconsin Art from June 1–September 8.

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Essay

The duality, even dichotomy, between the town and the river is Wisconsin Dells’ signature. For generations the place has been both a natural wonder and a human marvel, with the balance tipping decisively toward the human side in recent decades. Today’s river runs a gauntlet of hyperdevelopment—waterparks, ziplines, go-kart tracks, roller coasters, fancifully named resorts—that threatens to overwhelm the natural setting. Despite those incursions, the river remains the community’s central artery, the silent partner in an arranged marriage between nature and commerce that is unique in American tourism.

Nature came first, of course, and the features it produced appeared, in geological terms, practically overnight. Roughly 15,000 years ago, when Wisconsin’s last glacier began to soften, its meltwaters were dammed by a wall of ice in the present vicinity of the Dells. The frigid pond backed up to become Glacial Lake Wisconsin, a body of freshwater larger than Rhode Island. Nearly 150 feet deep in places, the lake inundated more than 1,500 square miles of what is now central Wisconsin. As the climate continued to warm, the ice dam was breached. A crack in the slowly rotting front widened in minutes to become a chasm, and the waters of Lake Wisconsin came pouring out in a deluge on the scale of Noah’s flood. The entire lake was emptied, geologists say, in a matter of days. At its peak, they estimate, the water flowed south at the rate of forty million gallons a second, fast enough to fill a modern basketball arena in ten seconds flat.

Its erosive power was beyond imagining. Picture a gigantic loaf of sugar—flat, unresisting, and eminently soluble. Then visualize a river turned loose across it—a raging stream, in fact, carving intricate

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channels through the loaf ’s core and carrying dissolved sweetness away to line the downstream banks. That, in bold strokes, is the creation story of Wisconsin Dells. Ancient seas laid down thick beds of sandstone, sugar-white in places, that had been slowly eroding for millions of years. The modern Wisconsin River, which emerged at the outlet of Glacial Lake Wisconsin, accelerated that process exponentially, cutting an intermittent canyon seven miles long and up to one hundred feet deep. The river’s irresistible power created formations that 19th-century geologist Joseph Granville Norwood described as “a mixture of the grand, the beautiful and the fantastic.”

Upstream from the canyon stretched a vast plain, soggy in places, that today supports cranberry bogs and potato farms. Below it, the Wisconsin River flowed across a broad bed of fine sand—dissolved bedrock—all the way to its confluence with the Mississippi.

Humans entered the region not long after the ice left and the river came to life. A procession of cultures, including ancestors of today’s Ho-Chunk people, had the land to themselves for roughly 10,000 years. They clearly considered it special, leaving a mutely eloquent record of effigy mounds and rock art along the river. The whites who displaced them took a more utilitarian view. They called the most scenic stretch of river “the Dells,” a vaguely French term for a fast stream in a narrow canyon, and they turned it into a highway. During the last half of the 19th century, when Wisconsin was a world center of the lumber trade, prodigious quantities of wood, both loose logs and rafts of finished lumber, floated through Wisconsin Dells from the northern pineries to mills and markets in America’s developing heartland.

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Previous page: Mark Brautigam, Bluff, 2018. Archival pigment print, 52 x 39 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

Mark Brautigam’s Dells photographs are imbued with a sense of nostalgia. They emphasize the enduring appeal of the area’s natural offerings, despite its pervasive, man-made commercialism.

This page: H. H. Bennett, The Narrows, Dells of the Wisconsin, 1900. Albumen print on blue-tinted paper, 17 x 57¼ inches.

Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS–64334.

Late in his career, H. H. Bennett experimented with photographic scale, creating superb panoramas of the Dells by seaming together three images with an unknown technique that continues to confound photographers and curators.

Even in those days of rapacious lumber barons and rowdy lumberjacks, the area’s spectacular scenery was not overlooked. As early as the mid-1800s, promoters were showing off the wonders of the Dells, usually by rowboat. One of them was Leroy Gates, a former raft pilot who doubled as the Dells’ first photographer. Gates reportedly made his customers row while he provided commentary from the stern. The flow of visitors began to accelerate in the late 1850s, when Byron Kilbourn, the most aggressive of Milwaukee’s founding fathers, built a railroad across the state. Kilbourn’s goal was to connect his adopted hometown with the Mississippi River at La Crosse, thereby guaranteeing Milwaukee—or, more specifically, his west side of Milwaukee—a dominant role as the state’s handler of grain, shipper of livestock, and supplier of finished goods from the East. His La Crosse & Milwaukee Railroad crossed the Wisconsin River between the Upper and Lower Dells in 1856, on precisely the same route the Empire Builder follows today. The result was a town, which the entrepreneur called, with characteristic panache, Kilbourn City. So it would remain until 1931.

Wisconsin Dells, which remained in general use as the name for the scenic riverbanks, was suddenly just hours away from the booming cities of Milwaukee and Chicago. Opportunity knocked, and a legendary figure answered the door. Henry Hamilton Bennett was a gifted photographer, a superb technician, and a tireless promoter who did more than anyone to put Wisconsin Dells on the map. Bennett moved from Vermont to Kilbourn City in 1857, when the village was all of one year old. A carpenter by trade, he left home to fight in the Civil War, seeing action at Vicksburg. An accident

with his own musket crippled Bennett’s hand, effectively ending his carpentry career. When he returned to Kilbourn City, the young man decided to enter the photography business. He quickly mastered the craft, and the local landscape became his particular passion. In 1875 Bennett built a state-of-the-art studio on the town’s main street that remains in operation as a state historic site.

Wisconsin Dells served H. H. Bennett as both muse and meal ticket. Hauling accordion-sized cameras up canyons and down ravines, he created a photographic record of the Dells that is still without equal. His images, artfully composed and razor-sharp from edge to edge, were turned into prints, guidebooks, and stereo views that he sold by the thousands. One of the photographer’s lasting contributions, and a key to his success, was his penchant for naming the various formations. Stand Rock, Witches Gulch, Boat Cave, Fat Man’s Misery, Cold Water Canyon, and Artist’s Glen are all Bennett designations. Naming the rocks humanized them; raw wonders of nature became objects of fancy, even fantasy. A later generation of promoters would make that transformation complete. In today’s Dells—the home of Poseidon’s Rage, Scorpion’s Tail, and the Howlin’ Tornado—a particularly frenetic form of fantasy reigns supreme.

With Bennett’s superb images as their introduction, thousands of the region’s urbanites wanted to meet the Dells in person. Here were diversions of a different nature from anything they could find in the city. Pushed by growing congestion and pollution at home and pulled by the prospect of fantastic scenery in an increasingly approachable wilderness, visitors flocked from Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Minneapolis-St. Paul in greater numbers every year. They invari-

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ably arrived by rail, and Byron Kilbourn’s bridge put them in the middle of the action. After settling into one of the area’s growing number of hotels, tourists headed to the excursion steamers—the first 300-seater hit the water in 1876—for guided journeys up and down the Dells. Along the way, they absorbed a blend of fact and fancy delivered in a practiced patter by their captain. Nearly 6,000 people visited Wisconsin Dells in 1874; by 1904 the number had grown to 60,000, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Midwest.

H. H. Bennett was in the twilight of his career by that time. He died in 1908, one year after a power dam below the railroad bridge drowned some of the formations he had chronicled with such loving care. Still the tourists came. The boom sparked by Bennett and his contemporaries continued through changes in public taste, a revolution in transportation, and cataclysmic events in the outside world. A growing number of visitors came by private automobile after 1900—the last excursion train ran in 1908—but the Dells’ appeal was unchanged: affordable, family-oriented fun in a natural setting within easy reach of major population centers. Tourism was the community’s leading industry—in fact its only industry of any size—through the tensions of World War I, the roar of the Twenties,

This page: John A. Trumble, Motel Pool, ca. 1971.

Archival pigment print, from original negative, 12 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS–143124.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, John A. Trumble made his living photographing the attractions and lodgings that catered to the postwar influx of tourists.

Opposite page: Kevin J. Miyazaki, Michael Adeniya, J-1 Visa worker, Nigeria, 2018. Archival pigment print, 20 x 16 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

Kevin J. Miyazaki invited tourists and townsfolk to have their portrait taken in the historic H. H. Bennett Studio. The resulting images capture a cross-section of the contemporary Dells: vacationing families, foreign workers on summer-long J-1 visas, and tourists from far-flung corners of the world.

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and the depths of the Depression. In his 1937 travelogue, Alluring Wisconsin: The Historic Glamor and Natural Loveliness of an American Commonwealth, Wisconsin writer Fred Holmes affirmed the Dells’ power to attract visitors even during an economic collapse: “Today it is a vacation land, widely advertised and highly commercialized. Get on a highway that leads in the general direction of Central Wisconsin and follow the cars bearing out-of-state license plates. Where the pilot stops is the city of Wisconsin Dells.” It goes without saying that most of those license plates were attached to cars from Illinois.

It was in the years after World War II that Wisconsin Dells began to assume its present character. Weathered rock formations may have satisfied the Victorian appetite for the picturesque, but their appeal faded in the postwar generation. The formations were basically a low-density garden of sculptures, objects of passive wonder and admiration. They were deemed insufficiently kinetic by the new crop of tourists, who had begun to seek more dynamic diversions in their leisure hours.

Local promoters gave them what they wanted. The first Army Ducks, amphibious landing craft developed for the World War II effort, came to the river in 1946. They added a note of adventure to

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the standard Dells tour and quickly assumed the role once played by stately excursion steamers. In 1952 Tommy Bartlett, a Milwaukee -born, Chicago-based entrepreneur, brought his Water Ski and Jumping Boat Thrill Show to Lake Delton, a flowage just off the main river that became the major expansion zone for Dells-related attractions. Saturation advertising soon made Tommy Bartlett and Wisconsin Dells practically synonymous. The Ducks tours and Tommy Bartlett’s extravaganza were still oriented to the water, but the next wave of development crested on dry land. Storybook Gardens opened in 1956, featuring tableaus of The Three Bears, Humpty Dumpty, and other nursery-rhyme figures. Fort Dells, a Disney-inspired Wild West experience, followed three years later, and in 1961 Biblical Gardens opened in a wooded canyon, depicting scenes from the life of Christ. Kitsch had made its grand entrance.

Storybook Gardens, Fort Dells, and Biblical Gardens all closed around the turn of the 21st century, pushed into oblivion by a massive wave of new development, one that approaches in scale the post-glacial deluge that formed the Dells in the first place.

Commerce has always come to roost at the gates of exceptional places, from the Taj Mahal to Niagara Falls, and Wisconsin Dells has long had more than its share of t-shirt shops and fudge emporiums. But the most recent surge, which began in the late 1970s, dwarfs anything that came before. Resorts, roller coasters, and themed restaurants share the landscape with condominium developments, golf courses, and escape rooms. Amplifying the fantasy theme that runs like a thread through Dells history, the resorts often bear names—Polynesian, Kalahari, Caribbean, and Aloha Beach among them—that evoke locales with few obvious connections to

Part exhibition, part historical monograph, and part cultural exploration, Among the Wonders of the Dells: Photography, Place, Tourism tells the 160-year history of Wisconsin Dells. The exhibition, which opens June 1 at the Museum Wisconsin of Art, and the forthcoming book of the same name feature more than a hundred photographs by eight artists who witnessed the transformation of this remote natural wonder into the “Waterpark Capital of the World.”

In developing the exhibition and book, I encountered a surprising variety of cultural factors that contributed to this transformation. My research took me down unexpected yet intersecting research channels: the lumber, lead mining, and railroad industries in 19th-century Wisconsin; the Ho-Chunk Nation’s history of removal and resistance; 18th-century theories of “the Picturesque;” the quotidian goings-on of yesteryear as reported by newspapers; 19th-century photographic technology; sociological studies of leisure in America; and historical documents from the Wisconsin Department of Tourism.

Of course, this project also involved looking at photographs—thousands of them, from freshly printed contemporary images to flaking tintypes and fading albumen prints. In the age of the smartphone, professional photographers in the Dells have become almost as anachronistic as the raft pilots who once brought lumber down the Wisconsin River.

Nevertheless, MOWA commissioned three contemporary photographers to capture images of the Dells as it is today. Each photographer—Mark Brautigam, Tom Jones, and Kevin J. Miyazaki—was chosen for an abiding artistic interest that placed them in conversation with the history of Dells photography.

I’m pleased to share some of the photographs from Among the Wonders of the Dells, along with the book’s introductory essay by historian John Gurda, in this issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas.

Special thanks to the Wisconsin Historical Society for their loan of photographs and gracious assistance in the archives, and for preserving the photographic legacy of the Dells for future generations.

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Tom Jones, Moccasins, 2018.

Archival pigment print, 32 x 40 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

As a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Tom Jones turns his lens on the sites and signage of a Dells tourist culture that has appropriated Native imagery, often without regard for authenticity and economic parity.

central Wisconsin. Waterparks have become the Dells’ particular specialty. The first opened in 1978, and they have since multiplied to the point that in 2005 Wisconsin Dells trademarked itself as the “Waterpark Capital of the World.” It all adds up to very big business.

In 2017 the Dells drew more than 4 million visitors who spent a total of $1.16 billion. That represents nearly 10% of Wisconsin’s annual tourism revenue—in a community with fewer than 6,000 yearround residents.

There are some conceptual links, however tenuous, between the community’s past and its present. Water created the original Wisconsin Dells, and waterparks have, in large measure, created the Dells of today. Nor is it an inconceivable leap from the shapes promoters professed to see in the rocks—Navy Yards, Sugar Bowl, Grand Piano, Hornet’s Nest, Giant Arrowhead—to more exotic creations like Noah’s Ark, the Lost Temple, and Mt. Olympus.

Although they are near neighbors in the realm of fantasy, there is no denying that the new Dells has supplanted the old. The tail now wags the dog; the graft has outgrown the rootstock. A tourism platform based on natural wonders now supports a colossus born of human artifice.

Away from the fudge shops on Broadway and the carnival atmosphere of Dells Parkway, nature holds its ground. The formations of the Upper Dells are largely in the public domain, and the craggy terrain along the river supports such a diversity of plants, some exceedingly rare, that it has been declared a state natural area. The river itself conveys a hint of immortality as it winds between the

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pillars and walls its ancestor carved 14,000 years ago. Beyond the rocks a busier world beckons. There are still visitors who enjoy the original spectacle of the Dells—the tour boats are often full, and kayaks abound—but a far greater number see the stream, if they see it at all, as a backdrop for diversions of a different nature—in this case, human nature.

John Gurda is a Milwaukee-born writer and historian who has been studying his hometown since 1972. He is the author of twenty-two books, including histories of Milwaukee-area neighborhoods, industries, and places of worship.

In addition to his work as an author, Gurda is a lecturer, tour guide, and local history columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The common thread in all of his work is an understanding of history as “why things are the way they are.”

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Share your memories.

Vacation like it’s 1967.

Opening Party: Saturday, June 1

Take a photographic trip through

On View: June 1–September 8, 2019

150 years of the Wisconsin Dells.

West Bend, WI | wisconsinart.org/dells

SPRING 2019 John A. Trumble, Tommy Bartlett Show Pyramid, Photograph, c. 1967, Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-143121

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DRONES IN DAIRYLAND

BY STEVEN POTTER

F

rom a hundred feet in the air, Moriah Rataczak inspects the fields of Gumz Farms in Central

Wisconsin. Soaring through the sky like a hawk, she weaves back and forth, looking down over thousands of acres of mint, onions, potatoes, corn, and soybeans. It’s early spring, and Rataczak is checking for new growth in fields throughout Adams, Columbia, Marquette, and Sauk Counties. “I’m looking for crop emergence, seeing how the potatoes and onions are coming up,” says the

Cassie Smith-Krebs

22-year-old precision agronomist.

Moriah Rataczak uses her Phantom 4 quadcopter—more commonly known as a drone—to monitor field conditions for Gumz Farms.

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Drones are often equipped with special technology such as infrared cameras for thermal imaging, LiDAR for topographical mapping, or sensors that can detect methane gas levels in the air.

Later in the growing season, Rataczak’s mission changes. “That’s when I’m checking for overall crop health across the field,” she explains, adding that even from a hundred feet up, “I can tell the difference in how a crop is doing based on the different shades of green, so I’m looking at how the crop’s growing or if it’s deficient and needs more nutrients.”

For her work, Rataczak prefers a view from above to one from the ground. “I can and I still do walk the field,” she says. “But I can’t see everything that I can from above. So if there’s something wrong, I might miss that spot.”

To capture the all-encompassing, elevated perspective that she’s come to rely on, Rataczak isn’t inside a plane or helicopter—she’s using a drone.

Her drone isn’t like the fixed-wing, airplane-shaped devices used by the military during the war on terrorism and later popularized by battlefield-based TV shows. Instead, Rataczak uses a DJI brand Phantom 4, a consumer-grade drone purchased for about $1,000.

The drone, known as a quadcopter because of its four whirling blades, doesn’t fly so much as it hovers. It’s outfitted with a pivoting camera to capture high resolution video and images. “The drone can see far more than a human,” she says. “It’s like another pair of eyes for me—it’s my aerial eyes.”

As she pilots the remote-controlled aircraft from the ground, Rataczak instantly sees what the quadcopter camera captures through a connection between it and her iPhone, which is connected to the aircraft’s remote control. The drone also saves higher quality

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video and images to an on-board computer that she can download later.

Rataczak learned how to fly the drone and use it for her work by taking agriculture classes at Fox Valley Technical College and by getting her Federal Aviation Administration drone pilot certification. She says that this method of surveying the fields is far superior to using satellite images that lack the level of detail and real-time data found in her drone-based images.

“I can take my drone up and have the pictures in a matter of minutes,” says Rataczak. “It’s an incredible tool.”

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griculture is just one of many industries that have fully embraced the versatility, relative ease, and speed of drone image, video, and data collection over the past few years.

“Drones have absolutely exploded on the scene in the last five years,” says Chris Johnson, an Air Force veteran and director of the UW Flight Lab. Johnson, who is an airplane pilot and flight instructor as well as a commercial drone operator and consultant, lists just a few of the industries utilizing drone technology.

“Everyone from agriculture, construction and insurance to utility companies and public safety agencies is using them.” he says. “And don’t forget news media and entertainment.”

In 2016, the FAA estimated that the number of commercial drones in the skies would increase more than tenfold—from 42,000 to 442,000—by 2021, and that the number of hobbyist drones flown

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Video- and sensor-equipped drones can search for mineral deposits underground, inspect windmills and other large machinery for defects or corrosion, track inventory in huge warehouses, and even monitor wildlife activity.

While drone technology and application are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Johnson notes that the science and analytics behind drone-collected imagery and other multispectral data are also driving the growth of the industry. “We’ve really only scratched the surface with their utility,” he adds.

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hris Bergeron began using drones for his video production clients not as an added service, but as a necessity.

“We started out doing commercials for businesses and other organizations,” says the owner of Bergeron Media, which is based in Madison. “And we just kept getting requests for drone work, so I thought, ‘Wow, I guess I should look into it.’ ” That was about three years ago. “Now, I’d say about 70% of our work incorporates a drone,” he says. “The drone has really become the bread and butter of the business with photography and video— and I’ve even recently got into mapping with it.”

So far, his quadcopters have taken Bergeron around the Midwest to work for some diverse clients. He’s captured video footage and still images of a fish hatchery in Palmyra, whitewater rafters in the upper peninsula of Michigan, the demolition of the General Motors factory in Janesville, numerous construction projects, and the top of an unfinished hotel in downtown Chicago.

“What I like about it is it’s never the same job twice,” says Bergeron, noting that operating a drone is “easier than you’d think— it’s basically just two thumbsticks” on the remote control that control either the vertical or horizontal movement. “As a [video] gamer who grew up playing Nintendo, I was able to grasp it pretty quickly. The first time I flew, I was like, ‘Okay, this is like playing Xbox.’ ” But just because you have a drone and the skills to use it doesn’t mean you can operate it professionally or commercially. For this, you need to be FAA certified.

In the summer of 2016, the FAA established the Small UAS Rule (Part 107), which mandated that everyone who wants to use a drone for business must first must pass a sixty-question test to obtain his or her Remote Pilot Certificate. (Certified airplane pilots can receive a waiver that exempts them from taking the test.)

This test covers knowledge of numerous flying rules created exclusively for drone users as well as general flying restrictions and safety procedures. The major rules for commercial drone use include not flying above four hundred feet or beyond the operator’s sightline, not flying at night or over groups of people, and not drinking alcohol at least eight hours before operating (drone operators can receive a fine or face legal action if their blood alcohol level is over .04%). Commercial drones must weigh less than 55 pounds, and they may operate in certain airspace near airports only with prior permission from the air traffic control tower.

These rules are the same for hobbyists who do not need to take the test but still must register their drones with the FAA for a $5 fee.

Neither commercial operators nor hobbyists are required to take an operator’s test—as one must do to obtain an automobile driver’s license—to earn a drone pilot’s certificate.

In addition to the FAA, individual states, counties, and municipalities can also pass laws regulating drone use. Though, in Wisconsin, there is a law that blocks any county or municipality from enacting laws or restrictions that are contrary to or inconsistent with federal law, meaning that no prohibitions can be established beyond those already in place at the state and federal level.

State Assembly Representative Adam Neylon says that Wisconsin began putting drone laws on the books back in 2013.

Neylon, who represents the Village of Pewaukee and surrounding Bryce Richter/UW—Madison Communications

for fun would jump from 1.1 million to 3.5 million over the same fiveyear period. An analysis from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs estimates that commercial companies and government agencies will spend $13 billion on drones from 2016 to 2020, while hobbyists are on track to spend $17 billion over that same period.

Even the federal government is expecting big things from these small flying robots, noting in a recent U.S. Department of Transportation announcement that by 2025 “the potential economic benefit of integrated unmanned aerial systems into the nation’s airspace is estimated to equal up to $82 billion and create up to 100,000 jobs.”

Johnson, who also teaches a drone piloting and entrepreneurship course at UW–Madison, expects such growth and interest to continue. “The skies will be just as busy as the roads in ten to twenty years, because drones will be our worker bees out there collecting data,” he says.

One benefit to having these “worker bees” rather than humans collecting data is that drones greatly diminish the threat to human safety. Take building inspections, for example. It’s a lot safer to use a “consumer grade drone with a fairly good resolution camera to capture imagery of damaged homes as opposed to putting a human on a roof,” explains Johnson.

Video- and sensor-equipped drones can search for mineral deposits underground, inspect windmills and other large machinery for defects or corrosion, track inventory in huge warehouses, and even monitor wildlife activity. Sweden has even begun testing emergency drone delivery of a defibrillator to the site of someone suffering cardiac arrest because it is faster than sending an ambulance.

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Bryce Richter/UW Madison Communications

Wisconsin’s public safety agencies are ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting drone technology.

With 56 drone-capable public service agencies,—up from only 18 the prior year—Wisconsin ranks third in the U.S. ( just below Texas and California, with 67 and 58 respectively).

Drone use by these agencies is contagious and has “a multiplying effect,” says Dan Gettinger, co-director of the drone center at Bard College. “There are clusters of agencies in certain geographical areas that have all adopted this technology,” he says.

“A police agency might say, ‘Well, you know, those guys over there got one and they loved it, so we got one too.’ ” And, he adds, drone use among public safety agencies is also popular for another reason: it works.

One recent case of a drone aiding law enforcement and preventing a potentially harmful situation occurred in Eau Claire County last August when a 68-year-old man went missing. Overnight, local deputies searched for the man, but couldn’t find him due to darkness and fog. The next morning, they called the state Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Investigations, knowing the department had a drone with thermal imaging capabilities. Soon, the missing man’s heat signature led authorities to his location in a field near his home. The man’s rescue illustrates how “having access to [drone] technology … has been an extremely valuable asset,” said Eau Claire County Undersheriff Joel Brettingen in a statement following the incident.

Over the years, police, fire, and sheriff departments in Wisconsin have used drones to map crime scenes, assess damages after accidents, and, in the case of the Husky Energy oil refinery fire in Superior last spring, help firefighters devise a defensive plan to battle the massive blaze.

Drone expert Chris Johnson (in background) teaches an “Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems” class at UW–Madison that covers drone safety and ethics while providing FAA certification and ideas for technical applications.

area in Waukesha County, says that drone legislation since then has included laws stating that “you couldn’t take audio or video of people where they had a reasonable expectation of privacy [and] you couldn’t weaponize a drone.” Other laws include prohibiting flight over prisons or interfering with emergency medical or public safety agency work, and requiring law enforcement to get a search warrant to use a drone for surveillance or evidence gathering.

Johnson, the professional drone operator and instructor, calls this “probably the most favorable drone legislation in the country.”

Neylon, who calls himself “a huge advocate of the commercial application of drones,” wants the state to continue on the path of fewer restrictions. “We should be looking at ways we can promote commercial drone use [while also] having a healthy regulatory climate for the drone hobbyist,” he adds.

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n addition to commercial and hobbyist drone users, however, there’s another large group of users who are taking full advantage of this new technology: public safety groups, specifically local law enforcement agencies.

A report released in May 2018 by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York estimates that “910 state and local police, sheriff, fire, and emergency services agencies in the U.S. have acquired drones.” Further, the report continues, “the number of public safety agencies with drones has increased by approximately 82% in the last year. … All told, there are now more than twice as many agencies that own drones as there are agencies that own manned aircraft.”

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lthough many people appreciate the varied ways in which drones may be of service, some fear the expansion of drone use and see the flying cameras as nothing more than ubiquitous, ondemand surveillance. Chief among most people’s concerns is who’s at the controls and how the data, video, or images are being used.

Kathleen Bartzen Culver of the UW–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication says that media outlets who utilize drones in their coverage should develop a policy for drones and their use, and make the policy available and transparent.

“The public is open to these tools being used. But we have to be very, very careful as news organizations about our openness,” explains Culver, who studies drone use and technology-driven data collection by news media as part of her work as director of the school’s Center for Journalism Ethics. “Are you labeling when a piece of video was taken by a drone? Do you have a drone policy posted on your website to allow people to comment on that policy and make a challenge when you’re using it?”

“The citizens that I’ve spoken with were skeptical about how often drones should be used [by news outlets],” adds Culver. “Just because something would be better video was not enough for them.

They wanted to know the real purpose, what was the public interest being served by using the drone?”

Gettinger, co-director at the Center for the Study of the Drone, says that these concerns about drones reflect larger concerns about video surveillance technologies in general. “As with any video technology that’s being used in the domestic space, whether it’s body cameras or traffic speed cameras, there are a lot of questions about how ... data is being used, how it is being stored, and in [what] context it is going to be put out into public space.”

According to Gettinger, such concerns may be alleviated with education and transparency. “A lot of public safety agencies are recognizing that when they’re starting a drone program, they have to accompany it with a major public messaging campaign that tells people how this technology will be used,” he says.

Both proponents and critics of drone use agree on one thing: the burgeoning technology is here to stay and use will continue to expand as new applications emerge.

“I believe we’ll see more complex operations,” including flying beyond line of sight and a lessening of current restrictions, says Gettinger. He says to expect “more experiments with drone delivery” from companies such as Amazon, Google, and even Walmart that continue to develop their own drone technology in order to better serve their customers.

Here in Wisconsin, UW-Madison’s Johnson is working with Rep. Neylon and others to create an Unmanned Aircraft System Center of Excellence. Neylon would like to see some space in rural Wisconsin designated just for drone research and training so that Wisconsin could be a hub of commercial drone activity.

“There are plenty of Drone 101 courses out there, but this would go beyond that,” says Neylon, adding that the center could “form partnerships with different industries [to foster] a training ground for commercial and professional drone pilots.”

May 4–September 22, 2019

Free admission 227 State St mmoca.org

Tyanna Buie, Peace Lily, 2018.

Steven Potter is a reporter who began his career in Milwaukee but now lives in his hometown of Madison. Potter’s work has appeared in Isthmus, Milwaukee Magazine and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, among many other publications. He’s currently a journalism graduate student at UW– Madison with a focus on multimedia reporting and data visualization.

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BRIDGE TO DISCOVERY

BY ALLEN M. YO U N G

W

hile the phrase scientific research often conjures images of tech-

nicians in white coats holding glass tubes, a sizable slice of the scientific endeavor actually takes place outside of the lab in what is known as “the field.” Field research can be a powerful tool for expanding human knowledge and understanding, yet few non-scientists understand how it works. This is because field research generally involves observation or data Sherman Gessert/Milwaukee Journal

collection that happens under difficult conditions and over long periods of time.

The road to the Tirimbinia Reserve runs across a rickety suspension bridge over the Sarapiquí River.

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Eric H. Erickson

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Allen M. Young conducts research near Siquirres, Costa Rica, in 1984. Here, a cotton ball soaked in cocoa flower scent is used to attract cocoa-pollinating insects to a McPhail trap.

Various media such as public television do a great service in educating people about biodiversity and other scientific subjects related to field research. However, what are often missing from these media are the challenges and obstacles encountered by scientists during their field studies. While the slow-motion video of a hummingbird lapping up nectar looks fantastic on screen, the painstaking efforts to acquire knowledge of that specific hummingbird’s behavior—essential to capturing the shot in the first place—are largely invisible.

As a “whole-organism” biologist exploring the life cycles, behaviors, and environments of insects, I spend a lot of time in the field. In my over forty years of research, I have done lab work with chemical ecologists and other lab-based scientists. But, more often than not, I am observing insect-plant interactions. From 1968 to 2004, I spent several months each year conducting field studies on the natural history of cicadas and butterflies, and the pollination of the flowers of the cacao tree (the source of cocoa beans and chocolate) in the tropical rainforests of Central America.

My real start in insect natural history began, however, when I was a kid, growing up in the village of Briarcliff Manor, New York. I raised field crickets, native butterflies, and giant silk moths. Sometimes the spark of curiosity can turn into a flame, and a visit to nearby New York City to see the Hall of Insects at the American Museum of Natural History ignited in me a passion for fieldwork.

The exotic species I saw there, mostly from the tropics, impressed upon me a sense of mystery and a desire for exploration that remain to this day.

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The 1960s was a time when university and natural history museum scientists (the latter called curators) spread out across the globe to conduct myriad research studies in their areas of expertise.

This was the life I craved: not behind a desk, or in front of a class or amongst museum collections; but, rather, pursuing the challenge of knowing the unknown.

After receiving my PhD in Zoology from the University of Chicago and beginning my field research in 1968, I quickly learned that this challenge came with more than a little risk. On my very first day of walking through the La Selva forest in Costa Rica, I was stung multiple times in the face after bumping into a palm frond that concealed a large hornet nest. Years later, while crawling on my hands and knees collecting the cast-off skins of cicadas in Costa Rica’s Sarapiquí River Valley, I narrowly escaped being bitten by a deadly Fer-de-lance pit viper (I still always look twice before stepping over logs).

Living in a wooden shed with no electricity and cohabiting with bat colonies, shaking out scorpions from boots, and escorting from the premises the occasional boa constrictor, are likely riffs on a familiar theme repeated by other field researchers spread out over the equatorial belt. Of course, many had it worse than I. Years ago, a doctoral graduate student was killed by a swarm of Africanized honeybees in the Guanacaste tropical dry forest of Costa Rica, and Alwyn Gentry, a famous tropical botanist from the Missouri Botanical Garden, died in 1993 in a small plane crash while surveying rainforest sites in South America.

Still, whether or not I ever fully understood the dangers involved in my work, I found that as I moved deeper into my field studies of butterflies and cicadas my fear of mortality began to evaporate.

Sometimes, this evaporation was the product of intense study; other times, it was the product of sheer boredom.

At the outset of a field research trip to Costa Rica, I would visit the capital city of San José to fill my Toyota Landcruiser with cans of tuna fish, jars of peanut butter and jelly, loaves of bread, blocks of cheese, jugs of water, and a large block of ice. My main research locality for several years was four hours away: Finca La Tirimbina (now the Reserva Biológica Tirimbina) in the Sarapiquí River Valley region of northeastern lowland Costa Rica. I stayed—sometimes with grad students from Lawrence University, sometimes by myself—in a simple wooden building with a cement floor and a corrugated metal roof.

During the early 1970s much of our fieldwork, funded by the National Science Foundation, focused on cicadas. I would rise at 6:00 am to the sound of roosters from the houses of nearby farm workers (half of the 1,500-acre Tirimbina reserve was a rubber, cacao, vanilla, and spice farm) and a breakfast of cheese and bread.

The research consisted largely of crawling on my hands and knees in the understory of the rainforest in pre-marked plots and collecting the cast-off skins of cicadas. These insects spend many months— and for some species, years—underground as nymphs, sucking sap from tree roots before tunneling to the surface. They then climb up tree trunks and cast off their skins, emerging as winged adults.

Each year our group collected skins in our plots and later classified them with the goal of determining seasonal emergence patterns of individual species over several years (prior to this, there were very few long-term studies of neotropical cicadas).

Essay

Whether or not I ever fully understood the dangers involved in my work, I found that as I moved deeper into my field studies of butterflies and cicadas my fear of mortality began to evaporate.

Allen M. Young

Both lunch and dinner consisted of tuna salad or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and, as the field station was powered by an unreliable gas generator, dinner was most often eaten by candle light. A makeshift water tank that collected rainwater was rigged with a pipe for showers so we could wash the off that sweat, dust, and debris we earned from a hard day of crawling on the forest floor. At dusk we would adjourn to a veranda-like porch to listen to cicadas and watch toucans foraging in nearby cecropia trees. Some evenings we would treat ourselves to a cold beer or a touch of scotch while waiting for the cooling rains to arrive from the east.

Nestled in the rainforest, the field station at the Reserva Biológica Tirimbina (now called the Robert Hunter Field Station) where I spent three or four months each year is accessible only by a dirtand-gravel road punctuated by a series of makeshift wooden-plank bridges across mountainside streams. On one dark and rainy night, my four-wheel drive Toyota Landcruiser became bogged down in deep mud as I tried to conquer the last big hill before reaching the field station. As I pondered making the two-mile slog up the hill on foot, a farmhand appeared out of the inky darkness. I explained to him my dilemma in Spanish. Off he went, returning a half-hour later with a pair of oxen to help extricate the Landcruiser. He would not accept any money for his good deed.

In addition to the smaller bridges, I had to cross a large, steel suspension bridge dangling fifty or so feet above the raging rapids of the Sarapiquí River. This bridge was quite different from the little ones farther down the dirt road in that it undulated under the weight of a vehicle. For some strange reason, I had never been bothered by

The unpaved road from San José to Trimbinia was usually more mud than gravel.

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Essay

Allen M. Young

the prospect of crossing this bridge: Upon approach, I would proceed cautiously, squaring the Landcruiser’s wheels with the cross planks to take advantage of the extra support.

A few miles from the steel bridge the narrow road curves sharply downward to reveal a small wooden bridge with no side railings over the Quebrada San Ramón. As in Joseph Conrad’s depiction of the African river journey in Heart of Darkness, this is where the rainforest truly begins. A cocoon of thick, buttery air envelops visitors with the incessant, The dreaded bridge over the San Ramón ravine. almost deafening, buzz of the cicadas ensconced in the tangle of trees overhead. Hidden by dense foliage and neck, I would always sigh with relief when I reached the other side. always in shade, the bridge was always coated with moss and jungle On some occasions, folks on horseback even came out to watch me— decay. el gringo famoso de la puente—cross that bridge.

One evening, in a hurry to get to the station before dark, I It is hard to imagine a field scientist who hasn’t had to cross a approached this bridge with less care than usual. The Landcruiser challenging bridge, real or metaphorical. Field research, much like swerved violently to one side, and I braked very hard. In a moment, the the dirt road to the Tirimbina field station, is a process in which one vehicle came to a rest with its front wheels dangling over the edge of bridge leads to another. My time in the Reserva Biológica Tirimbina the bridge—another foot or so and I would have tumbled over the edge and my nearly fatal incident over the Quebrada San Ramón will and landed in the stream with the Landcruiser on top of me. Shaken, I always remind me that field research is not about arriving at a slowly opened the door and carefully wobbled off the bridge, thankful destination. Rather, it is about adding another plank on the bridge to be alive. to discovery.

I soon realized that there were witnesses to the incident. At first, I hadn’t noticed the handful of cocoa farm workers standing on the opposite side of the bridge. Working together, we righted the Landcruiser, and I continued on my journey to the research station. My close call, however, quickly became grist for the local gossip mill. For a while after the incident, the locals joked about my fear of el puente across the Quebrada San Ramón.

Though, to me, it was no joke: The thought of crossing that bridge again riddled my body with spasms of pure panic. Of course, I had Allen M. Young is Curator Emeritus of Zoology to cross it in order to continue my daily research. So I returned to at the Milwaukee Public Museum and one of the scene to study the bridge and found a patina of clay-like dust on the founding board members of the Tirimbina the planks. The dust, harmless in dry weather, had with the frequent Rainforest Center in northeastern Costa Rica. rains formed a slippery film as hazardous as glare ice. I had driven too He is the author of several books, including The fast onto the bridge and then braked too hard, causing the top-heavy Chocolate Tree (Smithsonian Institution Press, machine to spin out of control. I was lucky to be alive.

2007) and Small Creatures and Ordinary Places: Thus, I created a new ritual. When coming to the bridge, I parked Essays on Nature (University of Wisconsin Press, the Landcruiser at the crest of the hill, got out, and walked down the 2000), and the author or co-author of more than grade to inspect the quality of the planks. Assured everything was 300 scientific papers and popular articles. Young structurally sound and not too slippery (at least by jungle standards), was named a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2002.

I then slipped the Landcruiser into first gear and edged my way slowly across the bridge. Feeling lightheaded and with sweat rolling down my

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2019 CELEBRATE WATER SUMMIT

I BOUGHT A RAINFOREST

• JUNE 4-6, 2019 • L A N D M A R K R E S O R T, E G G H A R B O R

WITH CHARLIE HAMILTON JAMES

Celebrate Water Door County’s 2019 Water Summit will present a line-up of local, regional, and continental speakers, all wellversed in various topics surrounding water.

Our goal is to provide topics of interest and concern that enhance a new understanding of water and its necessity to all communities.

TUE, APR 30, 7:30 PM

©PHOTO CHARLIE HAMILTON JAMES

MEET THE ARTIST POST SHOW Q & A

Jill Heinerth

Dan Egan

$35/person includes: 6 of 12 educational sessions, three meals, keynote presentation, and luncheon (*Optional field trips at $20 additional fee, includes transportation)

©PHOTO PAULA LOBO

The Summit features keynote, cave diver Jill Heinerth, author Dan Egan, and a number of speakers who will cover topics on farming, fishing, sustainability in tourism and industry, water ethics, water basics and more.

BALLET HISPÁNICO

Underwritten by Joe & Mary Ellyn Sensenbrenner

THU, MAY 9, 7:30 PM

For more information and to register, visit celebratewaterdoorcounty.org

MEET THE ARTIST POST SHOW Q & A

FRI, JUN 14, 8 PM

SPONSORS: We proudly present the Water Summit with the help of….

Special thanks to:

Door County Medical Center • Bay Ridge Golf Course

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@ Watrous Gallery

Lynne Railsback, Crown Vetch (Securigera varia).

Watercolor on paper, 16¾ x 19¾ inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

UPROOTED PLANTS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

BY LYN N KELLER

W

hen we consider the impacts of global climate change, we tend to think of spectacular disasters fueled by

extreme weather—deadly fires and mudslides in California, flooding from Hurricane Sandy—or of massive environmental transformations—glaciers calving in Greenland or coral bleaching on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Conscious of these dramatic phenomena, people sometimes overlook the incremental changes happening here in Wisconsin and miss the ways in which climate change is altering our local environment. We might not notice, for instance, what is happening to our plants—not just to annual crops affected by a particular year’s drought or flooding but also to the trees and shrubs, grasses and flowering plants that constitute our forests, savannas, wetlands, and prairies.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Helen Klebesadel, Vanishing Prairies I. Watercolor on paper, 50 x 40 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Climate science tells us that the impact of climate change on plant communities is complex and depends on multiple interrelated variables. For instance, warming temperatures and more irregular rains can make some trees particularly vulnerable to insect pests. At the same time, increasingly warm winters can cause a spike in harmful insect populations. Introduced plants as well as native species that can tolerate warmer temperatures may become invasive, putting greater pressure on valuable native plants whose habitat is already compromised.

While scientists are tracking how Wisconsin’s plant communities are affected by climate change, artists, too, are observing and recording these changes. Recognizing the power of art to deepen our attention, engage our emotions, and focus our imaginations, the James Watrous Gallery developed Uprooted: Plants in a Changing Climate, a collaborative project that brings visual artists skilled in representing plants together with botanists and naturalists to explore climate change in Wisconsin. The project began when Watrous Gallery director and curator Jody Clowes noticed that among the artists responding to a 2016 call to exhibit was a group of painters and print makers with strong botanical influences: Cynthia Brinich-Langlois, Helen Klebesadel, Bethann Moran-Handzlik, Katie Musolff, and Lynne Railsback. The artists, each from a different part of the state, were creating works that reflected knowledge about the plants associated with their particular regions.

Considering the Wisconsin Academy’s science-based work in addressing climate change, Clowes thought that a group exhibit with these artists could underscore how art, too, can focus attention on and show concern for our multi-species environments.

Pairing the artists with botanists and naturalists, Clowes believed, would enable the artists to learn more about the ways in which climate change is altering their particular regions— and, therefore, their particular subject matter. In 2017, Clowes put the artists in touch with naturalists Susan Carpenter, Christy Lowney, and Bradley Herrick of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and Evan Eifler, a PhD candidate in the UW–Madison Department of Botany.

The artworks resulting from these collaborations, shared in the Uprooted exhibition, reflect the different ecosystems the artists are drawn to as well as the diverse perspectives they bring to the issue of climate change.

While scientists are tracking how Wisconsin’s plant communities are affected by climate change, artists, too, are observing and recording these changes.

H

Barb Eijadi

elen Klebesadel is a watercolorist who grew up in rural Wisconsin and spent many years in academia, first teaching studio art and chairing the Art Department at Lawrence University, then serving as director of the UW System Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium. Working from her Madison-based studio, Klebesadel is best known for creating environmentally themed and women-centered works, often rendered in vivid colors.

Her paintings for Uprooted accurately group together plants found in native prairies, though she intensifies their colors so that the life force of, for instance, butterfly-weed or rattlesnake master almost vibrate on the canvas. Joy and wonder shine from Klebesadel’s brightly hued images, though that joy may be tempered when the viewer learns that the prairie white-fringed orchid whose

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@ Watrous Gallery

Collaborating with scientists and being aware of working alongside other artists in a group exhibition such as this has generated a sense of renewed and strengthened commitment among the artists in Uprooted.

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delicately carved petals dance in the foreground of one painting is endangered in Wisconsin.

In another painting a glorious network of roots conveys not only the deep-rooted character of prairie plants but also their intricate symbiosis with underground mycorrhizal networks (threads of beneficial fungi) that assist in nutrient uptake. Such preoccupation with beneficial biological interdependency recurs in many of the artworks created for Uprooted.

Lynne Railsback, another watercolorist, generally employs a far more muted palette than Klebesadel because she enjoys rendering the shapes, colors, and textures of plants in autumn and winter.

A noted botanical artist who trained in graphic design, Railsback lives in the Williams Bay community on the shore of Lake Geneva.

For Uprooted she created marvelously exact watercolors depicting damaged and half-dried burdock and bull thistle, invasive plants that threaten native prairies. She rendered crown vetch, another problematic non-native species, not in autumnal decline but in all its lavender-flowered strength. Introduced to Wisconsin from the Mediterranean region in the 1950s to control erosion, this trailing beauty reproduces rapidly and is difficult to control; it smothers and shades out native vegetation and alters the chemistry of the soil.

Railsback was surprised to learn from Susan Carpenter, the Wisconsin Native Plant Gardener at the UW Arboretum, that some of the plants she had begun to paint were not only alien but were in fact pushing out native plants. Her exchanges with Carpenter deepened her understanding of how the longer, warmer growing seasons we are experiencing with climate change are allowing non-native species to overtake native ones. Indeed, large areas of Wisconsin have shifted from hardiness zone 4 to the warmer zone 5 over recent decades.

Katie Musolff ’s contributions to Uprooted present carefully rendered plants removed from their busily inhabited outdoor surroundings. Musolff, who grew up near Milwaukee and studied painting at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, now paints full-time in the village of Stoddard on the Mississippi River. Her works typically display specimens, often from wetlands, arranged on a light-colored surface.

In her diptych portraying a stalk of native milkweed in different seasons, shadows on the pale background help create the illusion of remarkable depth. Even without the rest of the ecosystem visible, the diptych tells a story of biological interdependence complicated by climate change, as Musolff depicts a crowd—properly termed a kaleidoscope—of monarch butterflies fluttering near the milkweed on which the species’ survival depends. Higher carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are causing chemical changes in milkweed, resulting in lower concentrations of the toxins that help protect monarchs from predators and some parasites.. Additionally, higher temperatures may be pushing summer breeding areas further north, thereby increasing the length and difficulty of the butterfly’s annual migration to southern wintering grounds.

Musolff underscores the themes of multi-species interdependence and the transnational impact of environmental changes reflected in the painting. “As the monarchs flow through the piece, they carry with them the realization that they exist as a network stretched, literally, across the planet,” she says, noting that, “when one piece … breaks down, the rest will collapse as well.”

@ Watrous Gallery

Bethann Moran-Handzlik, Shared Solitude (Lady’s Slipper/Moccasin Flower, Florence County). Oil on linen, 12 x 9 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Lynne Railsback art Katie Musolff, Here They Come. Watercolor on paper, 30 x 23 inches.

Musloff art

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@ Watrous Gallery

Katie Musolff, There They Go. Watercolor on paper, 30 x 23 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

FEATURED ARTISTS

Cynthia Brinich-Langlois

Helen Klebesadel

Bethann Moran-Handzlik

Katie Musolff

Lynne Railsback

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An artist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin– Whitewater, Bethann Moran-Handzlik often paints en plein air, whether she is rendering sweeping landscapes or small botanical specimens. To produce Shared Solitude, her painting of a moccasin flower (or pink lady’s slipper) for the Uprooted exhibit, she sat, knees bent in front, on a small braided rug among the ferns. Her palette, with a small easel attached, lay between her feet. Moran-Handzlik, who trained in philosophy as well as graphic design and painting, says she hopes to convey her intimate connection to the woodlands through her artwork. “I sit in the landscape; I am in my subject: the same changing weather and light. Animals and insects are always nearby. The audience then gets to ‘sit where I sat’ within nature.”

Shared Solitude was informed by reading done for the project that introduced her to the symbiotic relationship between the moccasin flower and a fungus on which it depends because orchid seeds, unlike most seeds, do not carry their own food supply. “The fungus breaks down the seed and attaches to the seed, passing on food and nutrients. When the plant is older the fungus draws nutrients from the roots of the plant,” explains Moran-Handzlik, noting how she is “repeatedly surprised by how true John Muir’s quote rings, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ ” For her, as for the other artists in this exhibit, a growing awareness of climate change injects an urgency into communicating our multi-species connections and interdependencies.

Just as Lynne Railsback had not initially recognized some of the plants she painted as non-native invasives encouraged by planetary warming, we, too, may find climate change in its less spectacular, gradual manifestations difficult to see—even in an exhibit devoted to the subject. Asked what she learned from participating in this collaborative project, Katie Musolff mused, “I learned that climate change is hard to pin down. It’s so big, yet it’s difficult to see in day-to-day activities unless you really pay attention. … I know there are plenty of concrete charts and graphs, but they don’t touch down to the human level unless you find yourself in the middle of a crisis.”

At once acknowledging and countering this near-invisibility of ongoing climate change, Cynthia Brinich-Langlois employs a visual technique that overlays the shadow of future transformation upon present landscapes, enabling viewers to glimpse future ecosystems and their difference from present ones. Brinich-Langlois, who grew up in a small Alaska town on the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, studied environmental biology as well as studio art at Kenyon College. She got her MFA in printmaking from the University of New Mexico and today teaches printmaking and digital art at UWM. For Uprooted Brinich-Langlois worked with Christy Lowney, a Research Specialist at the UW Arboretum trained in forest ecology, to better understand how climate change will affect forest composition. Drawing on information concerning current species distribution and maps of projected future habitats, Brinich-Langlois developed a series of watercolor drawings that illustrate elements of an established pine forest; these are encased in Plexiglass on which she printed images of species expected to become more common due to climate change. In her informative and haunting images, the encroaching species cast a faint shadow over the familiar forest plants beneath.

@ Watrous Gallery

Cynthia Brinich-Langlois, Trembling (detail). Watercolor on paper (quaking aspen and highbush cranberry), screen-print on acrylic (black locust), 11 x 8 inches.

A

n interest in producing art that might inspire action to counter environmental degradation, including the damaging effects of climate change, is not new to the Uprooted artists. Yet collaborating with scientists and being aware of working alongside other artists in a group exhibition such as this has generated a sense of renewed and strengthened commitment among them.

“Painting in the field is enormously solitary,” observes Bethann Moran-Handzlik. “I felt the collective support of this invited community. We were each pooling our energy and skills to work toward a common goal. … It has been very fulfilling.”

For Helen Klebesadel, this sense of solidarity expanded beyond the Uprooted artists to include Evan Eifler, the doctoral student in botany with whom she was paired, as well as the community of people she met who are working on prairie restoration. She reports having gained “a much deeper appreciation of their actions to preserve and restore the important native prairies wherever

possible. I found a powerful sense of renewed hope by this demonstration that people will work to save what they love, and a renewed commitment to the importance of introducing children and adults to the natural world so they can learn to love it too.”

These statements from the artists provide heartening evidence that people gain renewed energy for their own forms of activism when they feel that their work sustains their community. In this moment when the environmental challenges and the political obstacles we face can feel overwhelmingly large, when individuals can easily be daunted by a sense of powerlessness, the benefits of collaborative projects such as Uprooted clearly go well beyond the exchange of knowledge or the sharing of perspectives.

Yet that sharing of perspectives is also valuable, particularly because science and art are often imagined to be at odds with one another. In fact, the two are complementary; art may be enriched by accurate knowledge and science by the aesthetic and emotional

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@ Watrous Gallery

Bethann Moran-Handzlik, Neither Earth Nor Sky (Karner Blue Butterfly, Lupine seedling, UW Arboretum). Oil on linen, 12 x 9 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

power of art. More generally, creativity can foster new scientific insight as much as it may release new artistic perspectives. Attention and a willingness to see beyond received conventions are crucial to both good science and good art. When it comes to climate change awareness, the emotional reach of art can sometimes break through our defensive impulse to look away from what alarms us.

While maintaining a clear sense of artistic freedom from necessarily realistic and exact rendering, the artists participating in Uprooted expanded their appreciation of the commonalities between their enterprise and that of their natural scientist collaborators: they remarked that both artists and scientists cultivate our ability to think creatively in order to make connections; and they noted in the two groups’ observation and recording of natural phenomena a similar tenacity, curiosity, and respect.

Working in alliance with climate science, contemporary art may convey the stakes of environmental threats or environmental injustice in ways that strike people’s emotions or simply catch their attention. Botanist Evan Eifler remarks, “it’s refreshing to see paintings of a plant community that are botanically accurate— with the appropriate species depicted together. … There should be more art like this so we can educate the public on many levels, directly through science education and indirectly by training the eye through art and aesthetics.”

Eifler’s comment highlights the importance of drawing upon all possible ways of knowing, seeing connections, and allowing meanings to resonate in order to address climate change. The challenges we face and the changes we need to make will require all of our resources.

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

UPROOTED:

PLANTS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE APRIL 26 – JUNE 23 Please join us for these related events:

ART BITES: UPROOTED

Sunday, April 28 • 10:30am–12pm Three-course brunch in the gallery with the artists and exhibition experts $20 General public /$15 Academy members

OPENING RECEPTION Friday, May 17 • 5–7:00 pm

Featuring a panel discussion with exhibiting artists at 5:30 pm (free and open to the public)

NATURE JOURNALING WORKSHOP

Sunday, May 19 • 10:00 am–1 pm at the UW Arboretum visitor's center ($25 per person/$35 per person with lunch)

Lynn Keller is the Bradshaw Knight Professor of the Environmental Humanities, an honor awarded her as the Director of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, and the Martha Meier Renk Bascom Professor of Poetry in the English Department at UW–Madison. Her most recent book, Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene (University of Virginia Press, 2017), examines 21st-century poetry that addresses some of the urgent environmental challenges we face today. Her current project concerns recent ecopoetic explorations of plant life and its significance in the Anthropocene.

POETRY, PLANTS, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Sunday, May 19 • 2–3:30 pm a lecture by Lynn Keller at the UW Arboretum visitor’s center. Free and open to the public.

Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following exhibition sponsors:

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Fiction

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listair and I do our homework at the island in the kitchen while, at the stove, Mom stirs pasta fazool. The smell of onions and garlic makes my stomach growl and almost tricks me into thinking things can be the same as they were before Mom lost her job three months ago and started going to see Mel-the-reiki-guru.

The door from the garage swings open. “Make way!” Dad is carrying two giant bags from Flanners’. He’s wearing what Mom calls “that kid-in-a-candy-store-look.” It usually precedes news about an impulsive purchase that will lead to under-their-breath arguments about credit card penalties and living within our means. Alistair and I push aside our books and calculators to make room.

Mom sighs and turns down the burner. She gives dinner one last stir before putting the cover on the pot.

I look at Alistair and mouth, “Here we go again.”

He replies with a grin that says, “Who cares?” and slides his notebooks into his backpack.

Dad pulls boxes out of the bags. “I had the world’s best idea today …”

Oh, no.

“We’re going to make the first real reality TV show.” He opens a box with a picture of what looks like a book light on it.

“Micro-cameras.” He pulls out a gadget. “This one is so small I can put it in a plant, and no one’ll even know it’s there.”

Cameras. This shouldn’t surprise me. We spent our early years SU H R with the eye of Dad’s camcorder in our faces and recent ones with a phone pointed our way. He titles all his videos The Smiths Go to … followed by the vacation destination. Sometimes I think he enjoys embarrassing us by showing them to the relatives every Thanksgiving. I have had enough with Dad’s cameras, and I tell him so.

He doesn’t listen. “We’ll never really know when we’re being filmed. Eventually, we’ll forget about the cameras and start acting natural. No network, no crew. Real.”

Open Book, he wants to call it. “You guys put everything on social media sites anyway. How is this any different?”

“Well, for one thing, we’re posting it ourselves,” I point out. “Someone else isn’t secretly filming us.” His expression tells me he doesn’t see the difference.

Later that night, we complain to Mom, but she just takes a few cleansing breaths and says, “I am giving you a gift by not interceding here. Your relationship with your father will be stronger for it.” This is how she talks since she started seeing Mel. I’m tempted to say, “What about your relationship?” but her expression is so peaceful I stop myself. It looks like Alistair and I will have to derail the project ourselves. We decide on sabotage as our first line of defense.

At first, we talk directly to the cameras, trying to taint any appearance of “reality.” We enunciate extra clearly. “Hel-lo, Alis-tair. What is that you are having for a snack this afternoon?”

“Why, Corrine, I am having some goldfish crackers. Would you like some?”

“Oh, no, thank you. I think a banana would be more to my liking.” The more artificial and boring, the better.

One night, Mom apparently forgets herself and follows our lead. She threatens to serve Ginger-a-la-king. We feign horror that she is going to kill our golden retriever, Ginger, and serve her in a light gravy.

That night, Ginger gets her own chair at the dinner table. She eats off Grandma Harrington’s bone china, while Alistair pretends to be Ginger narrating her day: “I was

OPEN BOOK

BY KI M

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Fiction

going to settle in the middle of the living room to lick my butt, but there’s a camera in there, so I went to the laundry room. I figured, who would want to watch someone doing laundry?

That must be a dummy camera, so I went in there. It sure felt good to have some privacy for a change. Gwen, could I get a little more chicken? This is delicious!”

Later, we joke about Dad’s camera picking up footage of Ginger throwing up her dinner all over the family room couch. Dad smiles. “Even the fake stuff is real, you know.”

A

fter a few days, I sneak into Dad’s study and find his password list under the folder in his desk drawer and log in on his computer to see what he has gotten so far. I find the Open Book file. It contains a bunch of clips of the most boring stuff imaginable: Mom filling the washing machine, Alistair playing video games, Ginger sleeping in the hallway. There’s no way any of this will become one of Dad’s film projects.

Then, in the last folder, I see a shot of my bedroom doorway, from inside the room. Alistair walks in, closes the door behind him and goes directly to my underwear drawer, where I keep my dummy journal. I know he’s been sneaking into my room to read it for years. He disappears from the frame to sit on my bed while he reads the last entry I wrote, completely fictional, about spying on him and Madeline Engleberger kissing behind the equipment shed by the tennis courts at school.

Then I realize what I’m looking at: film footage taken without my knowledge, in my bedroom. My bedroom. I try to remember everything I’ve done in my room that would have been in the camera’s view. Every morning, I dress in the bathroom after my shower. At night, I change into my pajamas near the hamper in my closet. That’s way off screen. In total, the camera can see the edge of my dresser and the door. I wonder what Dad thinks he is going to catch from that angle. This time he caught a kid reading his sister’s diary. It’s not much, but he obviously thought it was important enough to save.

I search through computer files for other footage, but all I can find are the old The Smiths Go to ... videos labeled by location and year. I close out the windows I opened and slide the folder back over his passwords.

In my room, I stand in my doorway and try to see the camera in the ceiling fan. He’s hidden it expertly but not completely. I stand on my bed and reach up to rip the thing down, then think again. Dad’s a teacher. He’s all about learning. Maybe I can teach him something.

At the end of the school day on Monday, I slide up behind Jack and put my hands over his eyes. “Guess who?” We have been best friends since preschool, so I can do this sort of thing without any rumors starting about us hooking up.

“Why, Manny, what soft hands you have,” he says, pretending I’m his locker neighbor. Not everyone knows Jack has a sense of humor.

“Very funny. I need your help.”

On the way home, I tell him about Dad’s project. Jack, a believer in the benefit of the doubt, offers reasons Dad might put a camera in my room. “You said yourself, he had it focused on your door. Maybe he’s going to speed up the film and show you coming and going out of your room, like bees in a hive.”

“Seriously?”

He shrugs. “Well, at least you said the camera can’t really see anything.”

“Yup, it’s what the camera can’t see that will make our footage interesting.” I fill him in on my plan.

When we get to my house, I let us in through the garage door and grab a baseball cap hanging on a peg. “Put this on.” I don’t want Dad to recognize him.

We drop our bags and head upstairs. I open my bedroom door and act like I’m sneaking him in. I close the door behind him. “Keep your head down,” I whisper as I put one hand on each shoulder and try to make it look like I’m kissing him.

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Pretending to take off my shirt, I walk toward my bed, which is outside the camera’s view.

When I turn around, Jack almost runs right up my back. We sit on the bed trying not to bust out laughing. I don’t think there’s a mic in here but I can’t be sure.

We shift our weight to make the bedsprings squeak. He tries to hold in his chuckle but ends up letting out a snort, which makes me laugh. I try to turn it into a moan like in movie sex scenes.

I am tempted to purr, “Oh, God!” but know that if I try to make words, I won’t be able to keep from laughing. We sit back-to-back to get ourselves under control. When we’re breathing normally again, I check my watch. We’ve been here exactly two minutes.

On our way home, we decided we should take at least twenty minutes to make our “encounter” seem real. I show Jack my watch. His face says what I’m thinking: what are we going to do for eighteen more minutes?

We lie on our backs with our legs dangling over the side of the bed and stare at the ceiling. I let my eyes follow a crack in the plaster from the light fixture to my closet door and back again.

I count how many clock ticks it takes for each of Jack’s breaths.

Four in. Four out. I close my eyes and think about how lucky I am to have a friend like Jack. Who else could I tell about Dad’s crazy project much less talk into a pretend sex scene?

Before I know it, my body feels like it’s in a free-fall, and I land on my bed with a jerk. I feel like I’ve been asleep for an hour, but it has been only five minutes since the last time I checked my watch. Long enough.

Jack’s eyes are closed, but it doesn’t seem like he’s sleeping. I nudge him and point to my watch. “Let’s go,” I mouth. He gives me a thumbs-up. He puts the cap back on his head and pulls it extra low. I wish I could see Dad’s face when he watches this footage. We stop at the door for one final pretend kiss.

Downstairs, we find Jack’s backpack, and I put the cap back on its hook. “Hey. Thanks again. I’ll let you know how it turns out.” As I close the door behind him, I notice the camera on top of the fridge is missing. I look for the one next to the picture on the mantle. Gone. I run up to my room knowing what I’ll find before I get there. The camera is nowhere to be seen.

I’ve acted out a pretend sex scene with my best friend for nothing.

Cameras appear in different places then disappear again.

We never do forget about them like Dad hoped we would, but we do seem to stop caring about what they might catch while we’re living our “real” lives.

C

ameras appear in different places then disappear again. We never do forget about them as Dad hoped we would, but we do seem to stop caring about what they might catch while we’re living our “real” lives. In fact, I use every opportunity I can to let Dad in on things I want him to know but would never tell him to his face. I tell him how I miss the time right after dinner when he used to rebound my free throws in the driveway while Mom and Alistair cleaned up the dishes, and how he’d make up word games to play while we hit the badminton birdie back and forth in the side yard.

One day, I talk directly to a camera planted in the basket on the kitchen counter and tell him I think he’s addicted to his computer, that it’s his fixation with technology—not getting laid off from her job—that led Mom to start going to Mel. Then I stop midsentence because there’s no way to know if Dad actually hears any of my confessions. So far, it doesn’t seem like he has. Everything is exactly the same. He disappears into his office every night right after dinner. Alistair and I get stuck doing the dishes, while Mom stretches out with her laptop on the living room couch.

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Fiction

Come to think of it, Mom seems to be fostering her own relationship with the computer since she started working from home as a consultant. When I walk past, she quickly opens a new window but not before I can see she is on Facebook. I settle into the chair across from her, log into my own page and search for her hyphenated last name, “Harrington-Smith.” No dice. Maybe her account is under plain “Harrington.” Nope. I know it would be worthless to search for her using Smith. Finally, reasoning that all mothers want access to their daughter’s Facebook world, I ask her if she wants to be Friends.

“That’s sweet dear. But we really need to have our own,” she searches for the word, “circles.” At first, I think she’s kidding, but she isn’t. “You need privacy from me, and …” She doesn’t need to finish. My own mother rejected my Facebook Friend request. In person. I wonder if she did the same thing to Dad and that’s why he moved on to his reality TV project.

N

ow I can’t sleep. I’ve tried lying on my right side, on my left, then on my back again. I flip over my pillow hoping the other side is cooler. I decide to get a cool washcloth and a drink of water.

On the carpet runner, my footsteps are so quiet I can hear the tap of fingers on a keyboard alternating with mouse clicks. The clicking stops. I peek through the half-open door of Dad’s study and realize he’s wearing earbuds. His t-shirt hangs over the arm of his chair. It’s weird to see him sitting at his desk in no shirt and his sleep shorts. Even though the fan blows straight at him, he needs to wipe the sweat off his face and the back of his neck with his t-shirt. From this vantage, it looks like he’s editing video. I stretch my neck to try to see what it is, even though I sense I really don’t want to know.

He leans back giving me a full view of the screen. At first, I don’t know what I’m looking at.

Girls who seem to be my age are strutting around in school uniforms, dark blue and red plaid skirts, knee socks, and navy blazers with an emblem on the left front pocket. I immediately think of the private school in Lake Mills, but their uniforms are forest green and maroon.

These girls look like they’re trying to seduce the cameraman.

The frame zooms in on a blonde girl running her tongue over her shiny, red lower lip. I clench my jaws together and breathe through my nose like Mom tells me to when I am sick to my stomach. The blonde leans over to show her cleavage, squeezes her breasts together like she’s offering them up as an appetizer. I close my eyes, wanting to run straight back to my room. Instead, I am paralyzed, a line of sweat running slowly down my spine. By the time I open my eyes, Dad’s body is blocking the screen again. I go back to my room without the washcloth or the drink of water.

W

hen I finally go downstairs the next day, my eyes feel like someone has gone at them with a piece of sandpaper. My skin feels like it’s covered with a sticky film. Dad is eating a sandwich at the island in the kitchen tapping on his phone. He looks like he always does—so much so that I start to think maybe I imagined the whole perverted thing. But then he picks up his napkin and wipes sweat from the back of his neck, just like he did last night.

Dad is always telling us we can talk to him about anything, especially the important things, and I can’t see anything more important than what’s happening in this house right now.

“Dad, can we talk?” I have no idea what I’m going to say, only that I need to say something.

He holds up one finger and keeps scrolling and tapping the screen. I know he thinks only a few seconds have passed, but, when the silence lasts into the second minute, I remind him I’m here. “Dad?” “What? Oh, yeah. Okay.” He makes one more swipe of his finger and three more taps, puts his phone on the counter next to him, face up, takes another bite of sandwich and talks with a full mouth. “What’s up?”

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“Open Book,” which won honorable mention in the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2018 Fiction Contest, is from a collection of stories by Kim Suhr published later that year by Cornerstone Press called Nothing to Lose. Drawing on the rich complexity of the American Midwest, Suhr peoples her debut book of fiction with characters whom we know, carved out of the Wisconsin land-

I don’t know how to come right out and say, “I know you’re watching and maybe even filming porn movies. School girl porn.

It’s disgusting, so stop.” But I don’t get a chance to go any further because his phone buzzes.

His eyes jerk to the screen to check out the number even though he keeps his face pointed at me. “It’s not important.” He pushes the phone two inches to the right as if it really doesn’t matter. “I’ll call them back later. Now, where were we?” The phone buzzes once more to tell him he has a missed call and then one more time to show a text is coming in.

“Forget it.” I open the refrigerator and look inside. “It’s nothing.”

“Corrine?”

I know he won’t leave me alone until I say something, so I say, “I was just wondering when I could get a new phone. I think mine’s dying.”

“Sure thing.” He smiles as he picks up his phone. He’s swiping and tapping again. “It’ll have to be next Saturday though. Your mother and I have a wedding to go to this afternoon.” I realize I’ll have to find a different way to let him know what’s on my mind.

I pour Fruit Loops into a bowl and head back up to my room. After I finish eating, I doodle awhile and then stare at the David Beckham poster over my desk. Every time my thoughts go back to the image of the girl in the school uniform, I try to imagine explanations for what I saw last night. Maybe he didn’t film that footage at all. Maybe he’s doing research on Internet porn or looking for clips to splice into a documentary about human trafficking. A group in my social studies class did a project on it for their final exam. Horrible. I hope extra hard that this is the real explanation. Deep down, I know it’s not.

I send Jack a text: Tell me again my dad isn’t a perv. His phone must be off because he doesn’t answer.

scape and caught between expectation and desire. An Iraq war veteran stalks the streets of Madison. Four drunk friends hunt deer outside of Antigo.

A mother tries to save her son. A transplanted New Yorker plots revenge against her husband. A man sobers up and opens a paintball range for Jesus. A woman with nothing to lose waits for her first kiss. Personal and powerful, Suhr’s Nothing to Lose shows us a region filled with real people: less than perfect, filled with doubts, always reaching.

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I

spend the rest of the day trying to think of what to do. I consider going to Mom but can’t imagine what I would say. I start to write each of them a letter, but when I try to put this whole mess into words, I sound like an overdramatic teenager on a stupid sitcom.

By the time they leave for the wedding, I decide to talk to my dad in his own language. This time, I’m going to get it right.

I walk down the hall to his office and wiggle the mouse to wake up his computer. I log in and start sifting through his video clips trying to find the footage I saw last night. Like a detective getting into the head of a perp, I ask myself what he would do to cover his tracks. It occurs to me he might disguise his dirty-movie files as The Smiths Go to ... videos, but those turn out to be exactly what their titles say they are.

I decide to check Dad’s Internet history, hoping there’s nothing resembling an online porn site, that I dreamed the whole sordid situation. But there it is: sexyschoolgirls.com. At the place in the video where I closed my eyes, the girl sits on the teacher’s desk and pulls up her knees and spreads them apart. No underwear.

Disgusting. I click the pause button. The filmmaking doesn’t look

Fiction

like Dad’s usual work. This was filmed on equipment far more advanced than Dad has. At least the equipment I know about.

Alistair comes home from his soccer tournament. I put the computer into sleep mode and go downstairs to see how it went. He takes a container of yogurt and bag of chips into his room. With Mom and Dad gone, he’ll play video games until he falls asleep or our parents come home, whichever comes first.

Back in Dad’s office, I make use of all the skills I learned making films for social studies through the years. I copy and cut video clips from his projects, then record a scene from sexyschoolgirls.com using my phone. It’s weird to say, but I like the gritty effect of a video of a laptop screen. Makes it feel “real.”

I

rearrange the scenes and add transitions, effects, and background music. The result surprises me: a two-minute video that clearly sums up the past few weeks in our crazy house. I add footage of me talking directly to the camera and burn the project to a disk. I title it Corrine’s Open Book.

Downstairs I put the disc in the DVD player and turn down the volume on the TV, so Alistair can’t hear it. The video begins with footage from when I was four: The Smiths Go to Glacier National Park.

I have fallen off a pony and knocked out my front teeth before they are ready to come out. My mom is holding me on her lap, a blood-covered washcloth stuffed in my mouth. She’s rocking me back and forth, trying to get me to stop crying.

“Shh. There, there,” she’s saying even though her voice is drowned out by my sobbing. She’s stroking my forehead and kissing my temple, but her eyes are shooting daggers at my dad behind the camera.

“Put that thing away!” She shifts her body on the bench, so he has to move if he wants to continue to take the close-up of my bleeding mouth. I can’t remember the last time she stood up for me like that with Dad. The next clip I shot over my mom’s shoulder with my phone when she was absorbed in an online exchange with Mel-the-reiki-master. You can’t see what she’s typing, but when she looks up and finds me watching her, she ends her conversation immediately and reminds me about the importance of respecting each other’s privacy.

Next, the scene cuts to the shot of Alistair sneaking my journal out of my drawer.

Something about the freeze-frame makes me feel like I’m not the same person as the girl in the picture who has carrot sticks poking out of her ears and an orange wedge in her smile where her teeth should be.

W

hile the camera stays on the dresser, I give a voiceover. “Dear Diary, I learned something really creepy about my dad today. When he’s not splicing together film clips to embarrass the hell out of his family, he’s watching porn on the Internet. Teenage girl porn.”

The film switches to the classroom scene with blondie on the desk. I cut it right after she shows her cleavage, just in case Alistair should accidentally see the DVD. He doesn’t need to see anything more than that.

The final scene is me looking straight at the camera. “Here’s what I think,” I say. Even though my voice sounds confident, it is clear from the way my neck muscles clench and my eyes have a hard time settling on the camera that I really don’t know what I want to say.

I deliver the lines I practiced before I turned on the camera: “This is a wake up call. There’s

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creepy stuff happening in this house and Alistair and I are too young to deal with it. Figure it out, will ya?” Even though I don’t cry on the video, I have to wipe my face as I watch myself.

I push the power button on the DVD player, and the room is silent again.

I walk over to the bookshelf where we keep the photo albums and turn on the light, keeping the dimmer turned low. I sit on the floor with one of the albums on my lap. The book is so thick, the binding creaks when I open it. Looking at photos, I don’t get that nauseated feeling I get when Dad plays our travel videos. Something about the freeze-frame makes me feel like I’m not the same person as the girl in the picture who has carrot sticks poking out of her ears and an orange wedge in her smile where her teeth should be.

Then there is the photo of me wearing Mom’s wedding veil. It was taken four years ago on a snow day that kept us all cooped up in the house. Mom had decided it would be a good day to clean the basement and get rid of the toys we’d outgrown. At first, we enjoyed sorting through things, but soon we all got a little restless. Mom Read award-winning fiction from new was trying to talk Alistair into getting rid of his Kinex set when Dad turned and established Wisconsin writers at around from sorting through the old dress up bin. A pink boa was draped around wisconsinacademy.org/fiction. his neck. He wore bright green star-shaped sunglasses and a clown’s rainbow-striped wig. “Yoo hoo,” he waved the boa like he was flirting with us, his voice as high as a girl’s. “What’s all the fuss about?”

Pretty soon Mom was marching around with an eye patch, Mardi Gras beads, and a Happy New Year 2007 glitter-covered tiara. Alistair found a matted auburn beard at the bottom of the trunk and topped off his getup with a sparkly gypsy vest and pink high heels.

I held up a bent beaded circle with a fluff of white netting on the back. “This looks like the thing on your head in your wedding picture.”

“It is.” Mom set the band on my head and fiddled with the netting. “Look at that, Charlie.

Isn’t she beautiful?”

It was hard to take him seriously in his clown wig, but Dad’s voice was sincere. “She’s the spitting image of you, Gwen.” He pulled her toward him. “What do you think? Would you marry this clown all over again?”

“In a heartbeat.” She smiled. “Arrrr. Got a kiss for Captain Jack?”

Remembering the scene brings back the feeling I got when I was a kid and my mom and dad were kissing. Half of me didn’t want to watch because I thought it was gross. The other half wanted to linger in the moment because the kiss meant our family was solid.

I slip the picture from the album and prop it next to the DVD player and find a piece of scrap paper next to the phone. “Mom and Dad: Push Play” I draw an arrow pointing down and tape it to the TV. My hands are shaking. I guess I know that what they’ll see could demolish whatever bit of family we have left. Still I can’t know what I know all by myself. That’s the job of the parents. I turn off all the lights except the lamp near the TV and go up to bed.

Kim Suhr lives and writes in southeastern Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Midwest Review, Rosebud, Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere.

She holds an MFA from the Solstice Program at Pine Manor College, where she was the 2013 Dennis Lehane Fellow for Fiction. Suhr is the director of Red Oak writing and a board member of the Wisconsin Writers Association.

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Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry Family Night Peer into the satchel of fabrics Plush and dark Soft and unforgiving, Hand to hand, pass stitched and muffled suffering We lay down our best attempts at Aligning ourselves, random and divined Our tiles slide one over the other Puzzling our perspectives Into crossword intersections of a truth Your pain

His persecution My pride Her privilege

We manage our vowels Test our best guesses Conjure an inevitable sorrow We commit to the rules by redefining our conditions for a win One stern shake shuffles the tiles Our independent vocabularies anchored to our common arrangement of consonants We continue in the round Immersed in the play of being alive, on our own. As a unit.

We snap into place familiar combinations and wounds Until we each exhaust the bag The versions of ourselves Sip at the sweet drinks. Munch the snacks.

Tease and laugh at the follies Tally our attempts at triple score bonuses Leave the game winning and defeated Together

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

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Life in Motion I see you Trying to snip yourself Free from the clash of fabric patterns Outsize the outline of your fierce and stunning soul Coast be not ocean Edge be not your end I smell the salt water in your conversation A slow leak of truth from the corners of your grin I see you Fumbling to wrap yourself In the wind But I know a costume When I see one You carve your journey through fire Blaze ash compacting in your chest Footsteps forged into scorched Earth rising like breaths of sage Glancing backwards will always be an inclination Forward is your instinct

D a s h a Ke l l y H a m i l t o n i s a nationally respected writer, artist, and social entrepreneur who has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is a former writer-in-residence for the historic Pfister Hotel and a founder of Still Waters Collective, an arts education and community-building initiative.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University.

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I see you Hobbling together a truth of your own Reconsidering the broken pieces Polishing the gemstones in your scars You are incomplete and you are the universe You are an ever evolution Ever evolution You. Are.

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

Poetry

Woman at Pottery Shop Gift Wrapping a Teacup

—Hyogo-ken, June 1991

Because her hands drifted in a pantomime of flight rising and floating in one sweeping arc unspooling the paper across the spotless blade that ran the length of the roll, because the paper rising along with her hands above the wooden counter was like sign language for kite enfolding and carrying air until each perfect crease and corner point erased the light from cup and box, her deed became the gift.

The cup still in its box, the box never unwrapped.

The paper fades and corners wear.

I see her hands rising, rising through the air with years.

Mark Zimmermann is author of the Pushcart Prize-nominated collection Impersonations (Pebblebrook Press, 2015).

H i s p o e m s h a v e a p p e a re d in New Letters, Cream City Review, Verse Wisconsin, New Verse News, The Writer, and Vocabula Review. Zimmermann 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.

Mark Zimmermann

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BOOK REVIEW

The Milwaukee Anthology edited by Justin Kern Belt Publishing, 226 pages, $20.00 Reviewed by Alexander Shashko

Southeastern Wisconsin is the western boundary of the “Rust Belt,” a phrase popularized by presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984 to describe a sizeable chunk of America that was—and still is—facing an uncertain post-industrial future. Highway 26 is arguably the symbolic line in Wisconsin that divides regions to the west, built around agriculture and resource extraction, from the cities built upon the foundations of the Industrial Revolution: Janesville, Beloit, Sheboygan, and Milwaukee.

So it makes sense for Belt Publishing to assemble an anthology of Milwaukee-themed essays and poems in its quest to restore the tarnished image of the Rust Belt region. In prior anthologies Belt Publishing has focused on Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, unquestionably the heart of the Rust Belt. With The Milwaukee Anthology the Cleveland-based publisher has arrived at the region’s perimeter.

In The Milwaukee Anthology, writer and reporter Justin Kern has assembled 59 works by longtime residents, newcomers, expatriates, poets, and journalists eager to share Milwaukee’s story—its charms and burdens—with the world.

The result is a story of borders. Milwaukee’s class and racial divisions are two of The Milwaukee Anthology’s recurring themes.

Writer Lauren Sieben, for example, recounts taking a bus tour that reveals how two centuries of “redlining,” a practice of covert housing segregation, continues to divide the city today. Another border lies between past and present, with sharp portraits of a city that treasures its history, as in Edgar Mendez’s tribute to the neighborhood taverns that are slowly fading from the city’s landscape.

The Milwaukee Anthology shines brightest when contemplating Milwaukee’s borderlands, energetic communities that defy the city’s stolid reputation. Neighbors gather to paint murals in Tia Richardson’s hopeful essay about Sherman Park, a community grappling with the complex relationship between law enforcement

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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and people of color. Volunteers broadcast from a low-power radio station in Zack Pieper’s funny biography of station owner Xavier Leplae and his ever-changing Riverwest neighborhood. Swimmers wade into the long-taboo Milwaukee River in ecologist Cheryl Nenn’s darkly comic story of the river’s environmental challenges and recovery. It is in these places, where people of different classes, races, religions, and generations mingle, where the city uneasily but often joyfully charts its future.

The Milwaukee revealed in this anthology is a complex, vibrant place, a counterpoint to the stale typecasting in too much of our state’s public discourse. “So what is Sherman Park? Is it the ’hood or is it Urban Mayberry?” writes Laura Richard Marshall. “I don’t think either description fits. I think this neighborhood is more like art, in progress. And the people who live here are artists, responding honestly to the underbelly we’ve seen and creating a culture that is beautiful, honest, and worthy.” Marshall is writing about Sherman Park, but she is describing Milwaukee, too.

Alexander Shashko teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

BOOK REVIEW

Beginnings: The Homeward Journey of Donovan Manypenny

by Thomas D. Peacock Holy Cow! Press, 188 pages, $15.95 Reviewed by Thomas Davis

Few books pace themselves with the resonance of truth telling.

These rare books can be fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, but within the story being told is a heart beating in time with constant universal rhythms. Thomas D. Peacock, a resident of Red Cliff, Wisconsin, and a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, is the author of one such book.

A writer of award-winning books about Indian education and Ojibwe history and culture, Peacock is one of the country’s most important American Indian educators. In his first novel, Beginnings: The Homeward Journey of Donovan Manypenny, Peacock steps out of his comfort zone to compose an honest exploration of the meaning of Native cultures in contemporary American society. In a country wracked with racial tensions and deep cultural divides, the need for such an exploration from a powerful American Indian voice is perhaps obvious.

In the novel’s early pages we meet Donovan Manypenny, a young Red Cliff boy living with his traditionalist grandparents. His mother has run off to Minneapolis, yet he is not alone: Donovan is immersed in his grandfather’s wisdom, steeped in his grandmother’s love, and surrounded by the stories and spirituality of his ancestors. When his mother, grandmother, and grandfather all die, leaving him without close relatives, he loses everyone and everything he has known.

Indeed, loss—of family, tribe, and culture—is one of the major themes of the novel.

After a period during which young Donovan is bounced like a pinball through social service and foster home systems, he is adopted by a white couple, Tom and Mary Pederson. The Pedersons are wonderful parents and human beings. Manypenny is raised white, as he later says, and becomes a special education teacher who helps student after student find his or her way in life.

When Donovan marries a white woman, Jennifer, and they have a daughter, Genevieve Mary, he finds the same joy he saw in his foster parents’ marriage.

Still, the losses Donovan has experienced never fully disappear, and, in some ways, they are passed down to his daughter. After Genevieve has grown and graduated from college, she begins to learn more about her Native heritage. While living in New York City, Genevieve convinces her father to attend a teaching by two Red Cliff elders in Washington DC. Donovan has almost forgotten he is a Red Cliff Indian, a people with a long and powerful history.

But, after a conversation with the elders, he starts a journey that lets him experience the historic route, known as “the wolf trail,” that his ancestors took when they migrated from the east coast down the St. Lawrence Seaway to Lake Superior and eventually to the place where the earth began—Madeline Island.

The sweep of history within Donovan’s journey of selfdiscovery is part of what gives the reader the feeling that this is a story revealing important truths about those removed from their cultures and traditions. However, that is only part of what Peacock’s tale has to offer: there are also spiritual explorations, revelations about our contemporary society and its clang and clatter, and an examination of the interrelationship between contemporary and ancient cultures—both American Indian and European American. In the end, Beginnings: The Homeward Journey of Donovan Manypenny is a story about human beings, our relationships with each other, and the poetic song of our journeys through history and into the truth of ourselves.

Thomas Davis is the author of Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit (2000), a study of the Menominee Indian Tribe and how it has sustained a 230,000 acre forest in ways that have enhanced rather than degraded the environment, and is known for his work in American Indian education. His forthcoming novel about an African-American fishing community on Washington Island before the Civil War will be released in 2019 by All Things That Matter Press.

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BOOK REVIEW

In Light, Always Light

by Angela Trudell Vasquez Finishing Line Press, 35 pages, $14.99 Reviewed by Mark Zimmermann

Spectral presences flit in and out of In Light, Always Light, Milwaukee poet Angela Trudell Vasquez’s first chapbook. Ghosts appear with purposeful messages, the voices of dead ancestors echo, and human remains float over a city. But In Light, Always Light is at the same time a very corporeal book, rich in the experiences of friends and family cooking and eating, planting and harvesting, working and playing, and, of course, dying. Trudell Vasquez is a careful observer of transformational moments both personal and cultural.

Midway through the book, her poem “Sea Burial” recounts the time when the poet and a companion traveled with only “backpacks… [and] a week of groceries” to an isolated island. There is “no hospital / for 200 miles” and “no wheels” available to quickly cover the great distance. Looking back on what can only be described as an early-term miscarriage, Trudell Vasquez writes of being comforted by “Female island ghosts” who spoke to her: “sit in the water let life wash out and back / cool stone slabs your throne. We know.” The way that Trudell Vasquez relates the experience makes for an intimate and stoic vision in which females have the last word, even if they are ghosts.

From this collection’s early pages, the poet’s acute socio-historical awareness is on full display. For instance, in “Arboretum” the lives of the poet’s family and forebears are considered in terms of the broad historical forces that excluded, even exploited, them: Mexican bones bodies who built railroads with broken backs, raw hands.

An 1880 census conceals us These are the same people who attend to “an arboretum of sweet pink light. / Whose perfume carries itself uptown.” Their malefactors may not have included them in the census, but these people counted then—and, the poet reminds us, they count now. Their senses of beauty and purpose shine in Trudell Vasquez’s poem.

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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Similar concerns animate “What Sea Tentacles Did Not Tangle,” with its civilians trapped in war zones and dead refugee children washed ashore. Their “blood floods psychic landscapes ” while “world leaders” (Trudell Vasquez encloses these two words in scare quotes) pursue “piles of gold or oil” with their “store bought arms manufactured in the U.S.” Trudell Vasquez speaks for those who have no voice, and her wellcrafted poems face injustices both global and personal. Readers can feel the weight of deep moral center at work in this collection by a fine poet who deserves their regard.

Mark Zimmermann is author of the Pushcart Prize-nominated collection Impersonations (Pebblebrook Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in New Letters, Cream City Review, Verse Wisconsin, New Verse News, The Writer, and Vocabula Review. Zimmermann 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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