Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them. John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (1998)
The last of the Pleistocene glaciers did not trample through this area, and the glacial deposits of rock, clay, sand, and silt—called drift—are missing. Hence its name, the Driftless Region. Singularly unrefined, it endured in its hilly, primitive form, untouched by the shaping hands of those cold giants. David Rhodes, Driftless (2008)
I loved my villages, my cornfields, and the home of my people. I fought for them. Black (Sparrow) Hawk, Sauk Nation, Farewell speech (1838)
That beautiful Sauk Prairie is bounded on the east and south by the Wisconsin river, ¼ mile in width, dotted with islands, and its east bank bristling with jagged bluffs presenting their bald rock faces smiling upon the flower carpeted prairie. On the south and west by the Honey Creek marsh and timbered bottom lands behind which are still taller bluffs, cliff fronted and juniper hooded. On the west, Otter Creek bluffs of the same character. On the north, by the canyoned Baraboo Mountain bluffs. Sauk Prairie in a state of nature was like a handsome picture set in a beautiful frame. William H. Canfield, Outline Sketches of Sauk County, Wisconsin (1896)
How this principal stream came to be called Honey Creek is not positively known; but it is conjectured that it was owing to the large amount of wild honey that used to be found through this portion of the country by the bee-hunters, who, at one time, made a regular business of gathering it for the market. The obtaining of that kind of sweet cost less in experiences, money and labor, than the subsequent manufacture of sweet by the people here, and paid better dividends in the end. The History of Sauk County Wisconsin, Illustrated (1887)
To live in this country is to be marked by its still unfolding history. Life marks seen and unseen. From my circumscribed pinpoint, I must try to trace what marked me. The way traverses many forms of memory and silence, of a people as well as a single person. Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (2015) I am the darkness of a cave shaft in a Driftless karst landscape. Water has dissolved and tunneled my bedrock. Distant drippings plink into a chilled pool of water, and stalactites grow