Richard Quinney’s
Elegy for a Family Farm
Fighting the Formidable Flying Foe Mosquito research in Wisconsin
Mayana Chocolate Riders • Grimm & Litherland Christmas Bird Count• •Freedom Hard Cider • Future Possible Madison
Telling Wisconsin’s stories. Wisconsin Public Television wpt.org
WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Augusta Brulla • Head Gallery Attendant, James Watrous Gallery Chelsea Chandler • Director, Environmental Initiatives Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Angela Johnson • Exhibitions Coordinator, James Watrous Gallery Bethany Jurewicz • Business & Events Manager Matt Rezin • Data & Office Systems Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Associate Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Nikita Werner • Administrative Assistant OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Tim Size • President Patricia Brady • President-elect Linda Ware • Immediate Past President Rich Donkle • Treasurer James W. Perry • Secretary Richard Burgess • Vice President of Sciences Marianne Lubar • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters Andrew Richards • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Ashley, Sauk City Kimberly Blaeser, Burlington Malcolm Brett, Oregon Frank D. Byrne, Madison Roberta Filicky-Peneski, Sheboygan Joseph Heim, La Crosse Tom Luljak, Milwaukee Jane Elder, Madison Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Bernie L. Patterson, Stevens Point Kevin Reilly, Verona Nathan Wautier, Madison Marty Wood, Eau Claire
Editor’s Note At the Academy holiday party I found myself in a conversation about rural healthcare with our board president, Tim Size. Because Tim works as the director of a rural healthcare cooperative, he is keenly aware of disparities between rural and urban communities when it comes to healthcare access and affordability. As I recounted stories about the farming community where I grew up, I noticed his eyebrows rise. Tim chided me, “Did you realize that you prefaced what you said with the phrase, ‘I grew up in the middle of nowherew It’s not nowhere—especially for the people who live there.” Even if I hadn’t meant to denigrate my experience of growing up in unincorporated Lind Township, my comment implied that a rural community is defined only by its proximity to a city or town. In doing so, I had dismissed the richness of my childhood experience: Mom and Dad’s drafty old farmhouse and sweet-smelling barn, tranquil forests and marshes in which I wandered without care or concern, friends and neighbors who made me what I am today. Embarrassed, I apologized to Tim and made a mental note to never again use that phrase—and try to remember what I value most about the place I still call home. Working with photographer and author Richard Quinney on “Elegy for a Family Farm,” I was reminded how our connections to the places we call home transcend easy categorization and are often wrought with contradiction. But this doesn’t make these connections any less meaningful or powerful. In this issue, there are many examples of what we value most about the landscape that defines our common experience, that makes Wisconsin our home. Look for them along a quiet road outside Blanchardville, between the apple trees of Ela Orchard, on a narrow strip of land between two lakes, at an old farmhouse in the middle of somewhere. TJ Lambert/Stages Photography
The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters
OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Andrew Richards • Foundation President Jack Kussmaul • Foundation Vice President Rich Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Freda Harris • Foundation Secretary
Jason A. Smith, Editor
FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark Bradley Patricia Brady Jane Elder Arjun Sanga Tim Size Linda Ware
Wisconsin Academy Steenbock Center Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-263-1692 • wisconsinacademy.org
On the cover: Photographer and author Richard Quinney at his family farm near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Photo by Alec Thompson/Stages Photography.
WINTER 2018
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CONTENTS TJ Lambert/Stages Photography
04 From the Director 05 Letters 07 Happenings Wisconsin Table
10 Wisconsin’s Hard Cider Renaissance
Candice Wagener
Essay
14 Field Notes from a Christmas Bird Count
Max Witynski
Innovation
Steven Potter
Essay
26 Elegy for a Family Farm
Richard Quinney
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John Miller/Yahara 2070
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20 Seeing with the Brain
VOLUME 64 · NUMBER 1 WINTER 2018
Jason Weckstein
14 @ the Watrous Gallery
34 Future Possible: Imagining Madison
Jody Clowes
Fiction
42 The Rescue 3rd Place Fiction Contest Winner
Ann Zindler
Poetry
50 Honorable Mention poems
from our 2017 Poetry Contest
Kathryn Gahl, Annette Grunseth, Dominic Holt, Paulette Laufer, and Mary C. Rowin
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 magazine has been a trusted resource for people who care about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin. Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works from our visual artists and photographers, and covers science and environmental issues that affect Wisconsin’s people, lands, and waters. Copyright © 2018 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.
WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS JASON A. SMITH editor
Book Reviews
JEAN LANG copy editor
JODY CLOWES arts editor
55 The Word We Used for It, by Max Garland Karla Huston
MAX WITYNSKI editorial assistant CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader HUSTON DESIGN design & layout
Wisconsin Thought and Culture Become an Academy member and support programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/membership.
facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/Watrous Gallery
From the Director
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or many of us, 2017 was a year of rapid and unsettling change. Seemingly solid foundations, from core cultural values to venerable American institutions, shifted dramatically. Absorbing the news of the day and sorting out the right response can be an exercise in exhaustion. And exhaustion invites the temptation to just “check out,” which poses a dilemma for concerned participants of our democracy: If we check out, aren’t we part of the problem? Instead of checking out, I seek temporary refuge in a good read. Seeing things through a thoughtful perspective, exploring an imaginary world, or savoring a potent phrase all create space to think, reflect, and, yes, escape. Stories can help us move beyond the mental work of synthesis and critical analysis to enjoy the ride of a wellspun tale. Our brains are wired to embrace stories; and stories, in turn, can help our minds find new ways to consider subjects that take us beyond the realm of fiction and into our daily lives. Just as stories help us understand motivations for the ways in which people behave, well-composed essays and solid journalism provide context to help us navigate everyday life. In this way, writing is central to the development of rational thought. However, it should be noted that reason takes more than 280 characters, and good writing is more than a splash of adrenalin on the keyboard. Reasoned writing—based on diligent research, fact-checking, and documented sources—is essential to our democracy and should be supported and celebrated rather than denigrated.
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I find it hard to carve out time to read, as “really busy” seems to be the default setting in my life. But, over the last year, I’ve been grateful that my short list of good reads has included Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land, and The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church. Sprinkle in a few “beach novels,” Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, the daily newspaper, and an entire issue of The Atlantic devoured on a turbulent flight, and I realize that, yes, I did carve out time to read. Some content was ephemeral; some left lasting impressions; some challenged my assumptions. All made life just a little bit better, a little more interesting, and a little more grounded. Not everyone has the capacity and means to enjoy a good read. Knowing that it is a privilege makes the moments when I enter a writer’s world something for which I’m profoundly grateful. I’m glad that my parents encouraged us to read when my brother and I were young, and for all those childhood trips to the local library that helped open up a world of ideas for me. These experiences helped to sow the seeds of critical thinking and provided me with permission to seek the pleasure of a story on the page. If refuge and respite found in written works enriches your life, consider ways you can make this gift more widely available by supporting literacy programs, local libraries, and education. Certainly it is important to read to a child, just as it is important to champion the work of writers who wrestle ideas into cohesive arguments, intriguing plots, and moments of clarity. Among these writers are the truth-sayers and chroniclers of our times, and we need their voices now more than ever.
Jane Elder, Executive Director
Member News
NEWS for MEMBERS American Dream in Wisconsin Series Starting in February we will host the final three talks in our American Dream in Wisconsin series. Join us in person or online as we explore how healthcare, mindfulness, and the next generation are shaping our hopes and dreams for the future. For more information about registration and/or how to watch online, visit: wisconsinacademy.org/AmDreamWI. Poetry & Pi(e) in Madison & Milwaukee Please join us in Madison and Milwaukee for Poetry and Pi(e), our annual celebration of everyone’s favorite mathematical constant with a poetry reading and delicious pie. Mark your calendars for Wednesday, March 14. More details and tickets will be available soon at wisconsinacademy.org/2018PoetryandPi. 2018 Fellows Awards Ceremony Save the date! On the evening of Friday, April 6, we will be inducting our newest class of Wisconsin Academy Fellows in Madison. More details about this event and our new class of Fellows are available on our website at wisconsinacademy.org/2018FellowsAwards. 2017 Annual Report Available Learn about how the Academy is advancing ideas and strengthening Wisconsin thought and culture. Download our 2017 Annual Report, which covers programming from July 2016 through June 2017, online at wisconsinacademy.org/2017Report. Keep In Touch If you have questions about your membership or would like to leave a comment, e-mail members@wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-263-1692. We’d love to hear from you.
Letters I left your Clean Energy Mobilization workshop at the Platteville Public Library (November 7, 2017) feeling energized with the new knowledge I acquired. Because of the workshop, and with the urging of presenter Megan Levy, I sent an e-mail to [Focus on Energy's] Ryan Sprauge in regard to an energy saving-project we recently completed at our church in Platteville. We expect to save over 50% in energy costs from this project. We are a small congregation, and I can only hope there may be grant money available to help pay for this project. I would never have known funding was available had I not attended the workshop. All three presenters did an excellent job. The workshop was well organized. The handouts are much appreciated. Great pizza, too! Well done.
Bob Harding, Property Committee Platteville First Congregational Church of Christ
I recently had the pleasure of attending an Academy event, the American Dream in Wisconsin series talk, Whose Dream Is It? at Overture Center for the Arts in Madison (November 4, 2017). In addition to a dramatic performance and an informative panel discussion, we took in the Writing in Stone show of panelist Terese Agnew next door at your James Watrous Gallery. It’s refreshing to think larger thoughts and to be in settings where others help expand understanding.
Keri Olson, Sauk County
The reading event for the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2017 Fiction and Poetry Contest (November 3, 2017) was really great. I loved meeting the other writers and listening to their words in their own voices. I am excited for the Winter 2018 issue of the magazine, so that I can read Ann Zindler’s piece, and I am on high alert for Nicholas Gulig's book to come out in the spring. That last poem Nick read really grabbed my friend Angela, and I am going to send her a copy when his new collection is published. My thanks to editor Jason A. Smith for his hard work on the contest and for his encouraging words—and a pint of beer—after the reading. It really means a lot.
Hansa Kerman Pistotnik, 2nd Place Winner, Wisconsin People & Ideas 2017 Poetry Contest
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THE AMERICAN DREAM IN WISCONSIN
Happenings
A series by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters
How do we define life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Wisconsin today? The American Dream in Wisconsin is a series of public talks presented by the Wisconsin Academy in Overture Center for the Arts and online through Facebook Live with broadcast support by WisconsinEye. We invite you to join us in an exploration of how changes in healthcare, education, and the science of mindfulness are shaping our hopes and dreams for the future. 2/27/18 Healthcare Access & Reform Donna Friedsam, UW–Madison Population Health Institute Greg Nycz, Marshfield Family Health Center Lisa Peyton-Caire, The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness
3/20/18 The Pursuit of Happiness Richard Davidson, Center for Healthy Minds
4/10/18 Dreams of the Next Generation
Michael Johnson, Boys & Girls Club of Dane County
Information and advance online registration: wisconsinacademy.org/AmdreamWI Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following series sponsors:
American Family Insurance–DreamBank • Isthmus Publishing • Quarles & Brady University Research Park • UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies TrustPoint • Broadcast support provided by WisconsinEye
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WATCH THE AMERICAN DREAM IN WISCONSIN SERIES AND ARCHIVE ONLINE Visit wisconsinacademy.org/live to watch videos of these talks live and view archived presentations with downloadable discussion questions from Fall 2017. ALSO WATCH AND DISCUSS AT: #AmericanDreamWI
Happenings
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Jerry Apps On a warm and hazy morning in late August of 1939, a five-year-old farm boy full of anticipation walked the country mile to the Chain O’Lake School, one of thousands of one-room schools in Wisconsin. Almost eighty years later, celebrated historian and author Jerry Apps (2012) recounts his memorable educational experience in Wisconsin Public Television’s Jerry Apps: One-Room School, which debuts at 7:00 pm on March 6, 2018. In One-Room School, Apps shares in vivid and humorous detail stories about the annual community-wide Christmas program, the technological magic of Wisconsin Public Radio’s School of the Air, the way students and “green” teachers shared the responsibilities of maintaining and operating the school, the softball games on a field that used trees and an outhouse for bases, and observations that will resonate with others who shared the one-room school experience and perhaps surprise those who did not. Love r s of g re a t l i t e r a t u re g a t h e re d i n Nove m b e r 2 0 1 7 t o honor Woodland Pattern executive director Anne Kingsbury (2008) and celebrate her retirement. Kingbury and husband Karl Gartung founded the nonprofit community center and bookstore in 1979 and together cultivated a strong and vibrant poetry community in Milwaukee’s Riverwest Neighborhood. Today Woodland Pattern is a respected noncommercial bookstore that boasts a collection of over 25,000 small press titles and annually hosts readings by dozens of writers from across the globe. Kingsbury is also a fine artist whose hand-beaded “drawings” and absurdist alphabet will be on exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery from May 4 to June 28, 2018. A recently published book by Richard J. Davidson (2004) and Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, 2017), is garnering positive reviews for the way it outlines the promise and perils behind the recent global interest in meditation and mindfulness. Unveiling the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them respected authorities on mindfulness, Goleman and Davidson’s book describes in clear language what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it. The authors also reveal the latest data from Davidson’s Center for Healthy Minds that point to a new methodology for developing a broader array of beneficial mind-training methods. Learn more about Davidson’s science-based approach to mindfulness at his talk for our American Dream in Wisconsin series at 7:00 pm on March 20 at Overture Center for the Arts in Madison.
A new anthology published by the University of Wisconsin Press features stories, essays, poems, and images that provide fascinating perspectives on the ancient unglaciated region of southwestern Wisconsin (as well as parts of Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa) known as the Driftless Region. In The Driftless Reader, editors Curt Meine and Keefe Keeley have complied a treasure trove of historical and contemporary writings as well as paintings, photographs, and maps that provide visual representations of the distinct culture and geography of the region. The more than eighty selected texts include historic writings by Black Hawk, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ben Logan, and Aldo Leopold as well as contemporary essays and stories by Patti Loew, David Rhodes, Catherine Young, William Cronon, and many others.
Keefe Keeley
Curt Meine Meine and Keeley pay particular attention to incorporating Native American voices in this 350-page collection and include essays that consider the massive, animal-shaped effigy mounds as well as Native etymologies of place names and first-hand historical accounts given by Native people. Meine, a conservation biologist, and Keeley, director of a sustainable agro-ecosystems nonprofit, are both clearly impressed by the natural beauty of the Driftless Region. Yet their selections for this comprehensive collection also underscore the sometimes harsh difficulties of traversing this hilly country, making a living from it, and getting along with others trying to do the same, making the book a thoughtful examination of the cultural and geologic histories of the region.
Jason A. Smith
Fellows are the best and brightest of our friends and colleagues. Learn more at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.
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COLORING BOOK Artist James Steeno’s A Creative Coloring Tour of Milwaukee features black-and-white line drawings that invite the colored-pencil touch of amateur artists. Known for his Midwest-themed watercolors and art maps that combine history and geography, Steeno has rendered landmarks from his hometown—the Harley-Davidson Museum, Mitchell Park Domes, the Art Deco Wisconsin Gas Building, and more—in bold, attractive lines that allow colorists to explore the city’s unique architecture as they work. The popularity of Steeno’s recent book and a prior one, A Creative Coloring Tour of Wisconsin, reflect a growing interest in coloring books made for adults. While these coloring books provide a fun creative outlet, many adults find that they also provide relief from hectic work and family schedules. Steeno’s books in particular draw on local landmarks and locales to inculcate a sense of Badger pride in colorists. “My works are about where I live and the interesting things found nearby,” says Steeno, noting how “local variations give art a sense of place.”
Max Witynski
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A new documentary produced by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ) and Twelve Letter Films called Los Lecheros (Dairy Farmers) explores the intertwined lives of Wisconsin dairy farmers and the undocumented immigrants who work for them since the election of President Trump. WCIJ director Andy Hall says that “Los Lecheros builds upon our previously published reporting [by WCIJ journalist Alexandra Hall] on immigrant dairy workers and offers a look at dilemmas faced by undocumented families who worry about deportation and farmers who worry about their ability to retain a workforce.” Hall notes that the nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organization is widening the lens of its storytelling to embrace production of documentaries and independent, in-depth multimedia reports to share Wisconsin stories with national, even global, audiences. Los Lecheros premiered in November 2017 at the Meet the Press Film Festival in collaboration with the American Film Institute in Washington DC, and then was shown at DOC NYC in New York, the nation’s largest documentary film festival. Its third scheduled appearance is at the Durango Independent Film Festival in March 2018. While the 21-minute film offers no easy answers for how to create a more equitable and sustainable model for the $43 billion Wisconsin industry, it does provide insight into the lives of the people who work hard to put milk on tables across America and beyond.
Jason A. Smith
15th Anniversary
2018
In Support of Student Artists
UW-Stevens Point Noel Fine Arts Center
artsbash.com
tickets.uwsp.edu or call 715-346-4100
Partnering for Success
.
Friday, April 27 at 6:30 p.m.
UW-Stevens Point Michelsen Hall
Noel Fine Arts Center
As long-standing partners in Wisconsin’s business success, our attorneys are dedicated to helping clients face important issues, execute sound strategies, and achieve business goals—all while building lasting relationships.
uwsp.edu/music or 715-346-3841 for tickets
Visit uwsp.edu/cofac
reinhartlaw.com ⋅ 608.229.2200 MILWAUKEE ⋅ MADISON ⋅ WAUKESHA ⋅ CHICAGO ⋅ ROCKFORD ⋅ DENVER ⋅ PHOENIX
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Wisconsin Table
WISCONSIN'S HARD CIDER RENAISSANCE BY CANDICE WAGENER
I
n a state known for cheese and beer, a new product with similarly deep roots is on the rise: hard cider.
With more than a dozen small producers popping up across the state, Wisconsin is joining a growing movement to revive this once-popular beverage.
Paul Asper and Lissa Koop from Restoration Cider Company represent a new generation of craft hard cider brewers in Wisconsin. They came up with the name for their brand as a way to highlight their love for Wisconsin's natural beauty and as a platform for raising awareness of water quality and land use issues. To this end, they also donate 5% of their profits toward stream restoration projects.
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Kaia Calhoun Photography
Wisconsin Table
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Annie Ela
Wisconsin Table
John Ela
John Ela is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite who started a hard cider business using apples (such as these Golden Russets) grown at his family orchard in Rochester.
Hard cider gets its alcohol punch from the yeast-fueled fermentation of sugars (mainly fructose, glucose, and sucrose) found in fresh apple cider. Sugar levels vary greatly between varieties, and tarter apples with high levels of acidic tannins are often used to add complex flavors to ciders. Cane sugar or honey can be added to increase the level of fermentation and alcohol production, as well as to balance out tart or bitter flavors. Europeans have been making cider for centuries, and dedicated cider orchards are commonplace throughout the continent. The first ciders are thought to have been brought to America on the Mayflower, and many dedicated hard cider orchards once dotted the landscape. Because the fermentation process kills many kinds of harmful bacteria, cider was an extremely common beverage in the days before refrigeration. For early Americans, cider was often safer to drink than water. (There was even a less alcoholic version, called ciderkin, for children to drink.) An influx of immigrants with a taste for beer and the subsequent rise of the Temperance Movement contributed to the decline of hard cider in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the cider apple trees were replaced with sweeter eating apples to help farmers make ends meet. To this day, the apple industry in the United States is dominated by eating apples. According to the U.S. Apple Association, fifteen popular varieties—familiar names such as Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, and McIntosh—account for almost 90% of all U.S. apple sales.
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Ela Orchard in the small town of Rochester has been growing these and other eating apples since the 1930s. Located in southeast Wisconsin in Racine County, the orchard is the quintessential familyrun farm. John Ela, a cousin of the current orchard owners and the man behind Ela Cider Company, has fond childhood memories of picking apples and playing in the hay barn. Ela says his mom had the idea to venture into hard cider after decades of producing fresh cider. “If it’s good fresh cider, it equals good hard cider,” says Ela. So, in 2014 Ela and his parents formed a branch of the orchard called Ela Cider Company. While the trio had no formal brewing experience, other than a couple of batches of home-brewed beer, they had plenty of apples and a willingness to experiment. Working with fermentation expert Paul Asper of Restoration Cider Company, the Elas developed their first hard cider, Stone Silo. Pressed from a blend of cultivars like Jonagold, Golden Russet, Golden Delicious, Stayman Winesap, Ida Red, and McIntosh, Stone Silo is an off-dry, lightly carbonated cider with fresh fruit flavor and intriguing depth. Ela says that adding a small amount of fresh cider when the fermentation process is complete is the key to delivering just a hint of sweet apple flavor while countering the natural acidity that comes with fermentation. The second cider that Ela Cider Company developed, Barn Cat, is totally dry, rather tart, and a “little funkier” than Stone Silo, according to Ela. In fact, it doesn’t taste at all like apple. Ela notes that people who are familiar with traditional European ciders are very drawn to Barn Cat. Ela prefers older varieties of apples such as Golden Russet— named for its slightly leathery, brownish-green skin—which has
Wisconsin Table
a zippy and aromatic flavor. The Jonathan apple, a sweet-sharp variety that dates back to the mid-1800s, is a staple in Ela hard ciders. According to Ela, Gala, Red Delicious, Honeycrisp, and other eating apples don’t have much character and should be used sparingly in cider production. Still, the cider operation uses some cast-offs from the thirty or so eating varieties the orchard grows. Ela’s apples are picked at the peak of ripeness, usually in October. Two weeks in mid-November are then dedicated to mashing the apples and pressing the mash through cheesecloth to separate the pulp from the juice. The juice is then put in five-gallon pails and frozen until it’s time to take it to Restoration Cider Company in Madison so that Ela can collaborate with Paul Asper on the fermentation process. Asper and wife Lissa Koop produce hard cider under the Restoration Cider label. Asper notes that he wasn’t much of a cider drinker until he and Koop went to Spain and fell in love with traditional European cider. When they came back to America and couldn’t find any European-style ciders, Asper started making his own in their basement. “Batches were turning out pretty good, so we thought we could go into business and give people a real product made with local apples,” says Asper. Hoping to expose more people to European-style ciders, in 2013 the two founded Restoration Cider. Asper and Koop run all aspects of the business, from marketing to product development, while balancing other professional careers with raising two daughters. Using traditional and organic heirloom apples from orchards in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Asper makes three kinds of cider. Sugar River is a classic apple cider, made with Wisconsin apples. The cider comes out semi-dry, with just a hint of juice added back in after fermentation to provide a subtle sweetness and to give it a thicker consistency. Asper’s Primrose Bitter Pear is made with pears imported from Normandy. Grown for making a champagne-like beverage, these pears have a very high tannin content, making the cider a little more complex, with an amber color and a semi-dry feel. Restoration’s third cider is Badger Mill Cherry, made with Wisconsin apples blended with cherry juice from Door County orchards. Asper says the tart, semi-dry cider has a very subtle cherry flavor. The fermentation process at Restoration Cider begins with huge, antique dairy tanks full of fresh cider. While there are hundreds of yeasts to choose from, Asper adds white wine or champagne yeast because he feels these give the cleanest flavors and really let the fruit shine through. “It’s really hard to maintain the clear flavors of ciders,” says Asper. “Apple juice is not a very nutritious substance. It doesn’t have protein and nitrogen and things that yeast like to reproduce
and grow, so it can be really hard to make cider in general and keep it really clean and fruity without getting any off flavors.” As the yeast consumes the sugar from the apple juice, carbon dioxide and organic acids are naturally produced. After about two weeks of keeping the cider at a stable temperature and stirring constantly “to keep the yeast floating around and happy in there,” the fermentation process is complete. When the yeast starts to run out of sugar, it’s important to remove it immediately. The cider is filtered to remove the yeast, then put into another tank, chilled, and carbonated. According to Asper, the carbonation gets those apple aromas into your nostrils to produce a nice, fruit-forward drink. The finished product is bottled or placed in kegs to be sent off to various restaurants and stores. From start to finish, the process takes about a month. Just as wine has a distinct terroir, Ela says there is definitely a regional aspect to cider as well, where the cider takes on the characteristics of the area in which the apples are grown. Ela uses apples only from Ela Orchard, but says that a cider made in a similar way with apples from a different orchard will have a totally different flavor profile. Both Ela and Asper agree that hard cider is back in a big way. Asper thinks people are growing tired of the really sweet, soda pop ciders that have been in production for a while and that there is a growing interest in a lighter alternative to India pale ales and porters. Ela notes that the gluten-free movement has also added momentum to the rise of hard cider. “I think it’s a really cool product because Wisconsin grows great apples,” says Ela. “I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg right now as far as the potential for what cider can be. … As we get different apples and different methods, you’ll start seeing a lot of really unique American cider.”
Candice Wagener is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Brava, Isthmus, and Wisconsin People & Ideas. Wagener lives in Middleton with her husband and two rambunctious boys, who make her laugh every day.
Learn more about the innovative foods and beverages produced in Wisconsin that end up on our tables at wisconsinacademy.org/WItable.
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Sue Feldberg/iStockPhoto.com
Essay
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Essay
FIELD NOTES from a
CHRISTMAS BIRD COUNT BY MAX WITYNSKI
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t’s 5:30 am on a Thursday, a week before Christmas. The four of us stand under a starry sky on a country road a few miles
outside of Blanchardville, peering into a darkened stand of white pine with our hands cupped to our ears. The temperature is near zero, so this is as much to keep our ears warm as it is to amplify the subtlest of sounds. After a minute or two, we hear the call we’ve been waiting for: Hoohoohoo … hoo-hoo.
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Essay
Kevin Swagel
We silently nod to one another and climb back into the station wagon, frost already forming on the hood. “That’s the third owl,” someone says from the back seat. “We’re doing pretty well this morning.” Cake donuts and a thermos of coffee are passed around as the car glides down a hill into a wide valley where trees border a frozen stream. “Nice spot.” “Let’s try it.” This time, the only sound is the ticking of the engine as it cools, though we see a skunk slowly make its way across a field in the moonlight We prowl back roads—Yankee Hollow, Rocky Knoll, Horseshoe Bend—stopping the car every mile or so to step out and listen. By sunrise we’ve found two more great horned owls, a barred owl, and a screech owl. As the sky brightens, small birds flit across the treetops, hungry after the chilly night. Invigorated by their energy, we move quickly up a hillside toward a house with a bird feeder. From the hilltop, a view of the Driftless landscape unfolds below with muted tones of winter field, wood, and sky punctuated by flashes of color from cardinals and blue jays. Lingering near the hilltop feeder, we quickly double the number of species we have observed since daybreak: black-capped chickadees, dark-eyed juncos, a flock of cedar waxwings. Like thousands of others participating in the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, we spend the entire day outdoors, documenting every species of bird we can find and recording their numbers. To do so, we visit a variety of habitats: unfrozen water for kingfishers and ducks, fields for hawks and buntings, and deep woods for nuthatches and woodpeckers. On foot and by car, we move through wide valleys of oak savanna, over winding streams, and past red wood and sandstone barns, always on the lookout for the next bird.
Above: Scanning for birds at sunrise. Right: (top) Dave Willard in his secret "snipe spot" near Yellowstone Lake. Blanchardville bird count finds include (bottom, clockwise) a house finch, cardinal, and a rarely seen meadowlark.
T Learn more about citizen science programs that support our lands and waters at wisconsinacademy.org/citizenscience.
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he annual Christmas Bird Count—or CBC for short—is one of the longest-running citizen science projects in the world. Established in 1900 by bird conservation pioneer Frank M. Chapman, the CBC today is an annual bird census with more than 2,500 participating communities across the United States, Canada, and Latin America. An author of many books on ornithology and long-serving curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, Chapman developed an interest in birds as a teenager growing up in West Englewood, New Jersey. He came up with the idea of a Christmas bird census as an alternative to the “side hunt,” a popular holiday activity in the late 19th century in which people competed to shoot as many birds as possible. Today, anyone can initiate a new Christmas Bird Count or join an existing one by contacting the National Audubon Society or, in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. All Christmas Bird Counts are conducted within a fifteen-mile diameter circle
Essay
Kevin Swagel
on a single twenty-four-hour excursion between December 14 and January 5. Because there is a lot of ground to cover in one day (177 square miles), a person called a compiler divides the circle into sections and assigns one to every group of participants. The compiler is generally responsible for recruiting participants, coordinating coverage, compiling all group observations, and sharing them with the National Audubon Society. By covering the same territory during the same period, year after year, CBC participants provide standardized information on bird population size and density. The aggregate data from the many decades of the count help inform scientists about long-term trends: declines in grassland birds wintering in the Northeast, for example, as agricultural practices change; or annual variation in the distribution of species known as boreal irruptives, which move great distances from Canada and Alaska into the contiguous United States based on food availability. CBC data are also available to the general public for personal research and record keeping. While the CBC is an important conservation tool, for many Americans it is a holiday tradition as meaningful as a trek to the Christmas tree farm or a New Year’s Eve toast with old friends. Christmas Bird Count culture is especially strong in Wisconsin, which is one of only three states with more than a hundred CBC circles (the other two—Texas and California—have much larger geographic areas and human populations). Participation in Wisconsin CBC circles ranges from a hundred or more people in Madison to a dozen or so participants in smaller communities like Florence (near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) and Friendship (in the Central Sands region).
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n Blanchardville, about an hour southwest of Madison, the count is organized by CBC veteran Dave Willard. Dave has participated in 47 consecutive counts in Blanchardville since first joining the group as a graduate student in 1971. Dave grew up in Madison during the 1960s, the son of a UW–Madison chemistry professor. His interest in birds, sparked by a childhood encounter with a variety of colorful species feeding on fruit at his family’s apple orchard, developed into a life-long passion. Despite living in Chicago for the last several decades, Dave feels as though he has never really left Wisconsin when it comes to birding. “I’ve still never done a Christmas Bird Count in Illinois,” he notes. I met Dave while in high school, through mutual friends and a shared interest in birds. Since then, Dave has become a friend and mentor. This year, I’m participating in my sixth Blanchardville Christmas Count. Our tradition starts the evening before the count, when half a dozen cars with Illinois license plates (my own excluded) assemble in the parking lot of the Chalet Landhaus Inn in New Glarus. The majority of the ten to fifteen people who come together for the Blanchardville count are Dave’s friends and colleagues from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. They aren’t all professional ornithologists like Dave, who retired after a long career as the manager of the Field Museum’s massive bird collection. Some are graduate students, curators, specimen preparators, paleontologists, or field biologists, while others are retirees from teaching and other professions who, like Dave, now volunteer at the museum.
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Following greetings in the Chalet Landhaus lobby, we walk briskly along empty streets to the warm lights of the New Glarus Hotel Restaurant. Clad in sweaters and blue jeans, we enjoy rösti, spätzle, schnitzel, and, of course, New Glarus beer while speculating on what birds we’ll see and listening to stories about prior counts. Dave jokingly attributes the decline of house sparrows within the count circle to the absence of John Fitzpatrick (now director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), who in years past would knock on the doors of area farmhouses for permission to count in manurecrusted barnyards. Someone else recalls the time we had pulled over in a small valley near Darlington when an Amish boy about twelve or thirteen drove up to us slowly in a wagon. “Are you hunting squirrels?” he asked. “No, counting birds.” The boy simply nodded and flicked the reins. Typically we are among the restaurant’s only patrons; the salad bar seems to have been set just for us, and the waiter has time to share jokes and take a group picture. After dinner, sated by beer, meat, and potatoes, we turn in early in preparation for pre-dawn owling.
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t the dam near the outlet of Yellowstone Lake, we find a winter wren in a cliffside tangle of trees. Something about this sheltered spot suits winter wrens, and the tiny, cheerful birds are found here almost every year, despite appearing nowhere else in the circle.
Like the winter wren, other species turn up year after year in the same spot. Where the road dips and rises on a series of small hills, we almost always find a rough-legged hawk. Because he is a dark morph—solid black, as opposed to the more common light morph, which is black and white—we suspect it is the same individual bird. Every autumn, he makes the same journey from the high Arctic to spend the winter in our circle. While it is comforting to see the regulars, the real excitement of the CBC comes from the anticipation of surprises. Once, while walking down a narrow, snowy path near Yellowstone Lake, we spotted a group of robins in a patch of buckthorn. With them was a varied thrush, a beautiful black and orange visitor from the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest that appears in Wisconsin only a few times a year. Small groups of tree sparrows and juncos flush from the roadside as we pass by in the car. Dave says these birds often gather on the side of the road to eat the salt and fine grit. As we drive, he points to places—a bend in the road, a stand of trees, a farmstead—where the group has seen a rare bird during previous counts. “Right there, under those pines, is where the red crossbill was,” he says. A glance at the data sheet on our clipboard, which has the complete count summary going back to 1971, shows that this particular bird made its only appearance in 1987. While this landscape is familiar to Dave, in many ways unchanged in the over forty years he has participated in the count, the last decade has seen more warmer, even snowless counts. The group has recorded an increasing number of waterfowl staying later into the season due to easy access to open, unfrozen lakes and streams. Some less hardy southern species, like the Carolina wren, have begun to appear more frequently in the count circle, despite not appearing at all during the 20th century. The documentation of changes such as these is what makes the CBC so valuable to conservationists. At noon the groups convene for lunch at the Viking Café in downtown Blanchardville to share observations from the first half of the day and take a break from the cold. Pinochle players look up from their cards as we noisily move chairs around a large table. Noting
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Essay
Josh Engel
our heavy coats and gloves, the waitress asks us if we’ve been out snowmobiling. Like the Amish boy, she is satisfied by a cursory explanation. “Ah, well that explains the binoculars. Now, what would you all like for lunch?” Over hamburgers and fries we talk about the morning: the birds, the weather, the challenges and triumphs. “Big flock of snipe—probably a new record.” “Lots of red-headed woodpeckers.” “Sandhill cranes again.” “Did you see the hoarfrost this morning? Beautiful.” “This deep snow—brings the birds closer to the road to eat the salt. Hard to walk in, though.” “We called AAA twice! No, we weren’t stuck. Just locked the keys inside.” “Checked every stand of conifers for a long-eared owl. Finally got one.” After lunch, the light begins to wane and the wind stiffens. Usually in the afternoon we spend more time in the car and add fewer new species of birds—maybe a northern harrier, or “gray ghost,” cruising over the fields, or a small group of Lapland longspurs in the roadside stubble, but not much else. We stop in crossroad towns with a church, a bar, and a handful of homes near which we look for feeder-frequenting species like finches that we missed in the woods during the morning. Groups of sparrows huddle together in the bushes and chatter, but without the vigor they had at daybreak. By 4:30 pm there is very little light left. So we break the circle and head back toward Madison and Chicago. Conversation in the car is sparse as we settle into the warm afterglow of a job well done. “That was a good count for siskins.” “Now, it’s been almost twenty years since a grouse was seen.” By the time we have the city lights in view, we are already thinking about next year’s count. “Will the lake be frozen?” “Will there be another crossbill?” “Will the regulars be back again?”
Max Witynski is a Madison native and graduate of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is interested in ecology and science communication. In his free time, Witynski enjoys birding, cycling, and cross-country skiing.
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SEEING WITH THE BRAIN BY STEVEN POTTER
Six years ago, an attack left Andy Fabino blind. While visiting his family in Chicago, Fabino was beaten so severely that he was in a coma for fourteen days. In addition to leaving him physically debilitated, the beating damaged Fabino’s optical nerves beyond repair. He spent almost two months recuperating in the intensive care unit at West
UW–Madison researcher and Wicab Inc. founder Paul Bach-y-Rita showcases his tongue display unit, a sensory substitution device that helps profoundly blind patients with orientation, mobility, and object recognition through electro-tactile stimulation.
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Phillipe Psaila/Science Photo Library
Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois.
Photo Credit
Innovation
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The Chicago Lighthouse
Fabino’s recovery was incredibly difficult. “I had to learn how to walk and how to use my hands and arms again,” he remembers. “And then, I had to deal with the fact that I was blind.” But today, thanks to an innovative device developed here in Wisconsin, Fabino knows when his one-year-old granddaughter comes toddling into the room. “I’ve never seen her with my eyes but when I put the device on, I feel her little hands and little round face. … I know it’s my granddaughter Aniyah,” he says, his voice rising with pride. “Can I see her? No. But I can feel that she’s there.” The way Fabino can “feel” objects and people around him is through the BrainPort V100, a vision-aid device developed by a Middleton company called Wicab Inc. The BrainPort V100 helps profoundly blind patients with orientation, mobility, and object recognition through electro-tactile stimulation to the tongue. The device is composed of sunglasses with a built-in camera, an intra-oral device (which users have dubbed “the lollipop”), and a handheld remote that controls the level of electrode stimulation as well as contrast and zoom functions on the camera. The camera digitizes and translates the world around the user by passing electrical current through hundreds of tiny electrodes on the lollipop that trace translated patterns onto the user’s tongue. White, light-colored, or bright areas picked up by the camera translate into strong stimulation in the corresponding electrode pattern on the lollipop. Dark or black areas create no stimulation, and gray levels register as medium levels of stimulation. BrainPort V100 users report that it feels like pictures are being painted on their tongues with tiny bubbles. “It’s a vibration, just like how your phone vibrates, but very gentle,” says Patricia Grant, Wicab’s director of clinical research. Users “can increase or decrease the sensitivity, [and], depending on how close an object is, you’ll feel a larger portion of your tongue covered.” The current and first model, the BrainPort V100, received approval for consumer use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June 2015. Wicab sold its first unit the following September. Originally, the device cost $10,000 but has since dropped in price to $7,995. To date, Wicab has sold seventy BrainPort units. While the device is, by all means, cutting-edge technology, it’s actually been in the works for almost twenty years. And the primary theory behind why the BrainPort works has been around even longer.
Andy Fabino (above) navigates an uneven path with the help of a cane and a BrainPort V100 (inset).
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Innovation
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Wicab Inc.
r. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a New York City-born medical doctor and pioneer in the fields of sensory substitution, rehabilitation medicine, and neuroplasticity, founded Wicab Inc. in 1998. “He developed the idea of sensory substitution and brain plasticity—where the brain can evolve and adapt to its environment—back in the 1960s,” says Bill Conn, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. Conn adds that Bach-y-Rita’s work is regarded as the first experimental evidence for brain plasticity and the pursuit of sensory substitution. Bach-y-Rita first saw the brain’s amazing ability to adapt after his father Pedro, a poet and scholar, suffered a stroke. The stroke left Pedro paralyzed and unable to speak. Bach-y-Rita’s brother George, a psychiatrist, developed a routine of simple tasks—sweeping and scrubbing pots—for his father to do to aid in motor-skill re-training. With the help of George and the rest of the family, Bach-yRita’s father eventually learned how to walk and talk again. Pedro’s recovery became even more remarkable when, after his death, an autopsy revealed that the stroke caused irreparable damage to a large portion of his brain stem. This revelation was formative in Bach-y-Rita’s understanding of the brain’s amazing ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. Bach-y-Rita began his life’s work while at the Smith-Kettlewell Institute of Visual Sciences in San Francisco and returned to his research in neuroplasticity in the 1990s as a professor of rehabilitation medicine and biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Initially, Bach-y-Rita’s research led to the creation of a device that transmitted visual information from a camera to a blind individual through a vibrating plate worn on the back. But, in the late 1990s while at UW–Madison, Bach-y-Rita identified the tongue as an ideal interface to the brain not only because of its hypersensitivity but also because a moist environment enhances electrical conductivity. Early versions of the BrainPort were much larger than today’s, and the attached hardware required a cart. Over time, technological advances in both camera and computer miniaturization led to many—and smaller—redesigns, making the device much more portable. Bach-y-Rita, who passed away in 2006, never got to see the current iteration of his lifelong research. The BrainPort name, however, makes more sense when you consider the inventor’s favorite saying: “You don’t ‘see’ with your eyes; you ‘see’ with your brain.”
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Discrimination tests such as this help BrainPort V100 users to better understand how images are “painted” on their tongues. Large-pixel digital displays show researchers what users are “seeing” through the device.
icab’s main office and research facility is located in a neighborhood of modern-looking office buildings just outside of Middleton. It’s here that they host clinical trials for the BrainPort, providing subjects with up to ten hours of training. Some user training includes things like item discrimination tests. For these, the user will be presented with a ball, a box and a banana and they must “reach out and grab the banana deliberately without tapping around the other objects,” says Aimee Arnoldussen, a consultant for Wicab who works as the technology assessment program manager for UW Health.
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Research director Patricia Grant says that it is “really up to the individual how proficient they’ll become with it.” She compares it to learning a language, noting that, to become fluent “you have to work at it all the time.” Grant notes that the device can be just as effective for those who are born blind as for those who have had sight for some portion of their life. “Everyone assigns their own definition of what things are,” she says. “So, whatever you perceive a banana to be is enough— whatever your own perception is, it’s enough to identify it again. We’ve proved that visual memory does not need to be there.” Grant and Arnoldussen both say that the learning curve for most new BrainPort users is relatively short. “There’s definitely an a-ha! moment [and that happens] pretty fast. In the first hour, the person understands orientation—up, down, left, right,” says Arnoldussen. “What we found was that the more fun the person is having, the quicker they are to learn, and that will help them do more and ever-challenging things.” According to Arnoldussen, some users are trained and tested on how to “navigate hallways, be aware of turns, or follow a path that we had mapped with masking tape on the floor.” At one point she even made a maze of sorts. “I hung tires from the ceiling that people could try to throw things through or avoid as an obstacle [to understand] how people could do these novel tasks that they couldn’t do with a cane or a guide dog.” It is the stories of the BrainPort’s use in the field, especially in situations that they could never test in the lab, that stick with Grant and Arnoldussen. “I took someone out on a BrainPort sightseeing tour in Chicago, and this person was able to see a waterfall and describe to me the pattern of the water,” says Grant, adding that she heard some users even watched last summer’s lunar eclipse using the BrainPort. Arnoldussen says that one of her favorite descriptions of the BrainPort experience comes from a user who likened it to sitting in the back of a car. “You’re not driving and you’re not paying attention to everything, but you’re seeing things that are out there and you’re aware of it,” Arnoldussen explains. “She didn’t have to know what everything was, but it gave her context and [told her] where she should direct her attention.”
Research, the National Science Foundation, and Angel Investors, among others. The U.S. Department of Defense recently funded a trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the BrainPort in a discrete traumatic brain injury population: Armed Forces combat veterans. In addition to the DOD trial, Conn says that the U.S. Veterans Administration also has begun purchasing BrainPorts. People and organizations alike are beginning to learn about the efficacy of the BrainPort, just as Wicab is also set to release a new version of the device in early 2018: the BrainPort Vision Pro. Instead of utilizing sunglasses, the device is “a headset-style product [with] user controls built into the headset itself. Users can put it on and take it off very quickly,” says Conn. Wicab engineers are also investigating smartphone apps for the vision device, specifically one for reading everyday signs such as those for stairwells and restrooms. Grant notes that there is unlimited potential for this technology to grow. “Think about driverless cars,” she says. “That is what we want the BrainPort to be. If a car can drive itself, a person can navigate down the street by using the BrainPort V100.” The Wicab team is even reviving another of Bach-y-Rita’s earlier ideas, the BrainPort Balance Plus, which also uses the lollipop interface to help people suffering from balance issues caused by stroke, Parkinson’s disease, or vestibular disorders. “It’s an electronic-training aid that provides real time feedback about the user’s head and body movement when they’re doing balance training exercises,” explains Conn. “When they’re leaning to one side or the other, they may not realize it. This product will prompt them to bring their head back to the center.” All of these new technological advancements capitalize on the brain’s amazing ability to reorganize itself and help patients to help themselves. Andy Fabino sums up the transformative power of Wicab’s BrainPort: “It does not replace the cane, it does not replace vision. [But] it aids in the everyday living,” he says. “I feel confident now. Empowering is not a strong enough word. This provides a little bit of light in an otherwise really dark place.”
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ince the BrainPort V100 received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, Wicab has been focused on getting it into the hands—and onto the tongues—of more users. While there is currently no competition for similar devices on the market, vice president of sales and marketing Bill Conn notes that the cost of the device is a significant barrier for people. “Our market, which is profoundly blind people, for the most part, don’t have a lot of money, or they tend not to be working, or are a small part of the labor force,” says Conn, adding that the company is undergoing a “big push” to get the product approved by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance companies. Over the years, Wicab has relied on a variety of funding sources for research and development, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Google, the Pennsylvania Office of
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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 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.
Innovation
Ideas That
SAVE Lives. Ideas That
SAVE LIVES.
Junhong Chen, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, pioneered a low-cost sensor technology that can detect lead and other contaminants in
water. His sensors are being tested with water from Flint, Michigan, and ultimately could
help protect the millions of Americans who still get their water from systems with lead pipes.
uwm.edu/research
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Elegy for a Family Farm ESSAY & PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD QUINNEY
The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. —Thomas Gray, from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
For some people, there is only one story that carries them through an entire lifetime. A long time ago, in a far-away place, John Quinney and Bridget O’Keefe sailed to the New World. Fleeing the potato famine in Ireland, they settled in Yonkers, New York, and married in 1850. They moved to Walworth County, Wisconsin, in 1859.
Richard Quinney, 2017. Photo by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.
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After renting an acre or two of land south of Millard, in Sugar Creek Township, they bought the land a few miles south that would be the beginning of the 160-acre family farm. John and Bridget Quinney built a sturdy frame house on a hill overlooking the marsh. On the hillside, an orchard; at the bottom of the hill, a pond. They had five children: Katherine, Thomas, John, William, and Mary. My father, Floyd, was born to John and my grandmother Hattie Reynolds. He married Alice Holloway, and two sons were born, myself—Earl Richard—in 1934 and Ralph in 1936. The family farm, my ancestral home, has been the center of my imagination, my consciousness, from the earliest time I can remember. I clearly recall my grandfather John, the aging son of John and Bridget, walking across the field from the old house. My father and I were standing east of the barn and watching as John slowly made his way toward us. I was startled into consciousness by my father’s exclamation, “Here comes the old man,” and I knew immediately that I was part of some special purpose in this world. I realized that I would remember this moment all of my life and tell others about it. I became, at that moment, the one who would be like the ancient mariner, the teller of tales to anyone who will listen. My story is of the family farm, a place that has held all of the meaning and mystery I have needed for an entire lifetime.
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his is the farm that was started in 1868 by my great-grandparents and farmed by the generations that followed. My father died in 1969, and my brother Ralph and I inherited the farm when our mother passed away in 1999. We tried to keep it going as a
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working farm, even as we moved to other places and pursued other ways of living. Ralph once told me that, in the 1960s, he and my father talked about his staying on the farm and concluded that a small farm could not support a growing family. Ralph continued his education, eventually becoming a banker in a town two hours to the north. I cannot remember ever entertaining the idea of being a farmer; in fact, my father discouraged such a thing. I became a professor of sociology in universities far away from the farm. As our father and mother neared what would be regarded as retirement age in most other occupations, they began to reduce the number of milking cows and other livestock on the farm. New requirements for milk production were being administered, and they avoided the changes that would be needed to upgrade the farm by selling off the herd. My parents still continued their involvement in farm organizations and farm-related activities in the county. But, without the dairy herd to care for, they had time to travel more often and took a few trips to places beyond Wisconsin. They flew in airplanes for the first time, visiting my family and me in upstate New York, Kentucky, and New York City. I still recall the tears that came to my father’s eyes when he saw men sleeping in doorways as we walked the streets in the Bowery. My father died at the farm on a November day, while walking between the machine shed and the tractor. My mother lived by herself in the farmhouse for the next thirty years. I moved back to the Midwest to be near the farm and my mother. My family and I drove regularly between our home in DeKalb, Illinois, and the farm. At the farmhouse, I held my mother’s hand during the last moments of her life.
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After our mother died, Ralph said that we should sell the farm, perhaps subdivide it into parcels for the building of houses. My desire was to keep the farm intact and to improve the land through organic farming. Until we could come to a decision, we agreed to rent out the land, first to the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute and then to agronomist John Hall, who pastured some of the acres and grew organic crops on others. A portion of the farm eventually became home to a successful community-supported agriculture project even as the wetland and woodland became wilder with the passing years. Yet Ralph and I kept returning to a question for which there was no answer: What is a family farm if there is no family on the land to farm it?
Ralph and I kept returning to a question for which there was no answer: What is a family farm if there is no family on the land to farm it?
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s my brother lay for days in a hospital bed, I whispered to him several times to be consoled by the memory of our farm, to remember how fortunate we had been to grow up there and to have the loving parents that we had. Looking back, I hope that these were comforting thoughts. He was losing his life and the farm that had formed him from the beginning of life. For several years, I had been on the verge of asking Ralph, “How can we prepare for the future of the farm—or how can we prepare for its ending?” But to pose the questions to Ralph as his health declined was to confront impending death. We were avoiding the end of things. Certainly wills and trusts could provide for the inheritance of the farm, but decisions about its future were being passed to the next generation without any guidance. We who remain hope that decisions about the farm will be grounded in compassion for the land, for the legacy of our family. I am certain that Ralph wished, and prayed, for the best. I do still. It’s long been my dream that the farm could be a demonstration of sustainable agriculture, that it could support a family. I had a vision of an oasis in a landscape that is becoming less natural, less agricultural, and more residential. Perhaps the acres of the farm, including the agricultural land and woodland and wetland, might become an open space, a natural area, for the public to enjoy. This land, our land, could be a place where children explore and have grand adventures, as I once did.
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he physician’s assistant displays the x-ray image on the computer screen. My right hip joint presses against the socket; all the cartilage is gone. This leg has served me well. It has taken its share of stress and wear through the years, from kicking the pedal of the Oliver tractor when I was young to forcing a shovel deep into the ground while planting trees in my retirement years. When I was in first grade, my leg was broken in two places when I slipped on a frozen pond during recess. Several years ago, the leg was further weakened when I had a brain hemorrhage while cutting wild grape
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vines from the oak tree at the bend of the road at the farm. With advancing arthritis, a hip replacement became necessary. I hoped to be able to again walk the land. A sense of mortality is part of the wisdom of aging. You hope that as you grow older, you will come to terms with your own mortality and develop a greater perspective on the nature of all things, animate and inanimate. All things are made of atoms and particles and energies that have existed since the beginning of the universe, and perhaps before. Nothing is lost, and all things are in the process of becoming something else. The human body is a temporary entity that someday will become matter and energy, returning to the universe from which it came. Where were you before you were born? Perhaps the human mind is not capable of knowing the true nature of existence. I recall one winter day, after a weekend at home from college, when I was ready to return to school. A huge storm had filled the driveway with snow during the night, and, the next morning, my car got stuck before reaching the road. My father maneuvered the tractor into place and used the log chain to pull the car free. I shouted into the morning-cold air, “I’m leaving this Godforsaken place and I’m never coming back!” I still regret saying those words to my father. I wish I could thank him for clearing the snow, for helping me leave home yet another time.
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y brother might have become the farmer. He had the natural inclination for the work. I knew from an early age that I would become something other than a farmer. After each of us pursued different careers, after the farm became ours through
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inheritance, it was I who argued most strongly for the farm to be continued in some way. My desire was based on nostalgia for the farm, certainly, but I wanted also to prove how sustainable agriculture and organic farming could enrich the land, make it better. Yet, it was Ralph who had the expertise needed for managing the farm. I was left with the farm. But, without my brother to help, I am left with my dreams. On Sunday afternoons, my brother and I would take our ice skates and walk through the fields to one of the frozen ponds on our farm or another farm. Neighbor kids often accompanied us. Sometimes we took our hockey sticks and a puck for playing a game or just knocking it across the ice. One afternoon, Ralph fell through the ice and vanished in the water below. We located his hand and pulled him back through the hole and onto the surface of the ice. His clothing froze to his body as we made our way home. The thought of losing sight of him under the snow-covered ice frightens me to this day. We recognize the possibility of loss, even when we are young. As we sat in the hospital room on the last night of his life, Ralph motioned to the nurse for paper to write on. With a black marker, he wrote, “I want to terminate life. I love everyone.” He had been through several years of increasingly poor health. The operation for an aortic valve had been successful, but for years he suffered bouts of pneumonia that left him weak and debilitated. His family had cared for him over the several years of his various illnesses. Ralph knew that nothing more could be done to save his life. Still, what courage it took for him to write that note to us. I uttered my last words to him—that he was brave, that we were fortunate for our life together. Surrounded by family, Ralph had his life
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support removed by the doctor. His breathing became quiet, then ceased. My brother was right. The farm that we once knew is gone. Nothing in this world could bring it back as we knew and experienced it. The family farm essentially ended with the deaths of our father and mother. Only the memories can remain, Ralph would tell me. Keep the memories … and sell the farm. The notion of possibility, of mystery, gives me a certain remove that would otherwise make the demise of the family farm a prospect too tragic to contemplate. I welcome the mystery, the uncertainty, of the land’s future and the place of the farm on the land. There is much that is beyond my vision and my control. The farm is a lesson, and a practice, in letting go.
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he winter was a time to think about the future, a time to plan for spring, when another year of farming would begin. The land was slumbering under the cover of snow, icicles grew longer each day along the eaves of the barn, and the cows went outside in the warmth of a sunny day. Early each morning, we dressed warmly and made our way to the barn to milk the cows. The radio on the shelf in the barn brought the daily news. We went to town most days, ordering baby chickens at the hatchery, purchasing seed corn at the mill, and watching and waiting as the blacksmith sharpened plowshares. I listened as my father and mother sat at the kitchen table making decisions about farming the land for another season. All these years later, I sit at the same table, now in my dining room in town, and contemplate what the next season might bring. I could have gone back to the farm to live. Maybe I would have built an efficient little house overlooking the marsh. But I am in my
eighties now, and I don’t think that I have the energy—or the advantage of years—to begin a new project and a new life on the farm. If I were to move from my home in the city, it would be to downsize, to move into an apartment, or a small house, perhaps in a town near the farm. These are uncertain times, mysterious and magnificent times. On my thirteenth birthday, I wondered about the meaning of life and of death. In my imagination, I walked out of the driveway at the farm and went down the road to the Old Place of my ancestors, the original house of John and Bridget Quinney that overlooked the marsh. After a night of resting in the foundation where the house once stood, I entered a passageway that led into the marsh. For a year, through the seasons, I had several adventures with the creatures and spirits of the marsh. A voice in the marsh asked questions and spoke words of wisdom. For the rest of my life, the mystery of the marsh was my inspiration and the center of my spiritual life.
I
write to think about how I am living. The writing becomes part of the living. This form of life I learned growing up on the farm. Born any other place, any other time, I would have become a different person. My life is that of a farmer who plows and tills with pen and ink rather than with horse and tractor. My hours are of solitude, looking to the far horizon as I go back and forth in the field. The words that come to me are more easily committed to paper than spoken. I am very much myself when I am by myself. I am free of expectation, and my thoughts and feelings are rendered without judgment. Oh, how I would like to explore the marsh and the woodlands again on a Sunday afternoon.
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The glaciers, and the weathering after the glaciers with drift and outwash, made these few acres that comprise the agricultural land as well as the wooded highlands and lowland ponds and marshes. Others, the native peoples, were on this land before we settlers from the old country claimed it. We imprinted the land with the artifacts of our livelihoods. The millions and billions of years before human habitation, before our human existence, are beyond our daily comprehension. Still, we attempt to hold on to what we think of as ours through a series of deeds and mortgages over a mere 150 years. Someday all of this will return to what it was in the beginning. Planet Earth will fly away. We humans will return to matter and energy in the things and forces that our science calls protons, neutrons, quarks, dark matter. Our lives in human form, as individuals, are very brief. Rather than death, let us think of our individual ending as being a return to origination. We are of the universe, or what we conceive to be a universe. In truth, we don’t have a clue, for a clue must come from the mind’s ability to know ultimate reality. We are much more than we conventionally conceive; we are everything. There is nothing to lose. And maybe there is a memory of us on the edges of the universe. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. This dear little family folds itself into bed and whispers a few words into the night. In the morning, they will rise to do the chores and then gather around the kitchen table for breakfast. Work and play will follow the seasons. Each day will end with another night. I pray the Lord my soul to take. I never felt as close to the farm or as removed from it as I did on a wintry morning at LaGuardia Airport. My parents had been visiting us in New York, and as we were bidding farewell, my father took my hand in his—I cannot recall this gesture with my father before that morning—and said goodbye. I was wearing my smooth yellowish-brown leather jacket, which I realized separated me even further from my father, as he and my mother were waiting for the flight that would take them back to the farm. That was the last time I saw my father alive. He must have known that he had only a few more days to live. At the funeral, I would not look into the casket, wanting instead to imagine him still holding my hand. We sold the family farm to a neighbor during the spring of 2017. I was not, however, able to completely let it go. Not after a lifetime of knowing that the farm and I are one. My dream had been to keep the family farm as a monument to the generations that made it. Not being able to keep the farm in the family, to preserve it, I had a surveyor mark and secure a five-acre portion of the farm that includes the Old Place, the pond and the grove of trees at the bottom
My life is that of a farmer who plows and tills with pen and ink rather than with horse and tractor. My hours are of solitude, looking to the far horizon as I go back and forth in the field.
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of the hill, and the hill with prairie flowers and grasses. This parcel of land will be a nature preserve and wayside park at the side of Quinney Road in Sugar Creek Township. This Old Place where my great-grandparents settled in 1868, a few years after fleeing the famine in Ireland, now remains for future generations to cherish, to honor the lives of our ancestors, and for anyone who passes by to appreciate and to explore. And family descendants, those of the future generations, will know this place as the source of their beginning in the new world. May they find spiritual sustenance and happiness in these few acres of land made sacred by their attention and meditation. And may the Old Place be for the sustenance of all people who seek repose, reflection, and renewal. Let this be our country churchyard. When you have been born on a farm—and have lived in the shadow of the Old Place—your life has been uniquely shaped. For a lifetime you have walked the fields and explored the woods and wetlands. You have ridden the tractor back and forth in the fields, looking to the far horizon. At night, after all the chores have been done, you have listened to the soft voices of your mother and father and brother as the day ends and the night of sleep is about to begin. You have known neighbors and seen the lights in their windows across the fields. You have heard the wind blowing through the trees that surround the farmhouse. In winter, a blanket of snow has covered the land and the trees have dotted the landscape. All of this has stayed in your mind—in your imagination and your soul—the whole of your life. You will tell the story of this farm and the generations that made it. This will be your elegy written for a family farm.
Richard Quinney is author of several books of autobiographical writing and photography, including A Lifetime Burning, Where Yet the Sweet Birds Sing, Of Time and Place, Things Once Seen, Sketches: Childhood Remembered. He founded the independent press Borderland Books after a career as a professor of sociology and author of many titles on the subject. He lives in Madison.
A version of this essay appears in the online journal Qualitative Inquiry.
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W
hether you are a longtime resident, UW student, or someone who only sees Madison on the nightly news, you probably have an image in your mind of what the city looks like. Now try to imagine Madison 75 years from now. How has it changed, how is it still the same? Looking back, what were the decisions we made, the dreams we had, that made Madison a place where future generations thrive? Certainly by 2093 Madison will be different. While it’s likely we’ll be grappling with the effects of climate change and population growth, the rapid pace of technological change adds a level of complexity that defies linear thinking about the future. Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will all converge, even intersect, in unanticipated ways. The long-term impact of these elements on the planet, never mind one Midwestern city, seems impossible to predict. Yet that very impossibility also opens up space to dream. It gives us permission to push past today’s apocalyptic headlines and imagine pathways toward a better tomorrow. In this spirit, we invited a group of artists, architects, and designers who know and love the city to share their vision for its future in Future Possible: Imagining Madison. We hope the exhibition will inspire you to reflect and conjure up your own vision for the Capital City of 2093.
—Jody Clowes Director, James Watrous Gallery
Future Possible: Imagining Madison at the James Watrous Gallery is supported by a grant from the Madison Community Foundation, as part of the Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Year of Giving.
MEET THE EXHIBITING ARTISTS & ARCHITECTS
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SEE THE EXHIBITION On view at the James Watrous Gallery
FEBRUARY 16 – APRIL 15 Join us for these related events:
ARTISTS RECEPTION
(free and open to the public)
oto
by Sarah Stanke
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16 • 5–7:00PM with informal presentations in the Wisconsin Studio beginning at 5:30PM
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GALLERY TALK
with Helen John, Madison Design Professionals SUNDAY, MARCH 11 • 2–3:00 PM
ART@NOON TALK
with Jeremy Wineberg & Anders Zanichkowsky FRIDAY, APRIL 13 • 12–1:00 PM
Future Possible: Imagining Madison is supported by a grant from the Madison Community Foundation, as part of the Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Year of Giving. We appreciate the powerful investments the Foundation is making in the community by encouraging creative thought and imagination.
Thanks to Academy donors, members, and the following Watrous Gallery sponsors:
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ANDERS ZANICHKOWSKY Visual Artist Anders Zanichkowsky is an artist and activist who uses print media, video, and performance to record and respond to experiences of wilderness, from people surviving homelessness in Madison to his own travels in the Arctic. His studio work, public art, and curatorial projects have been shown in local, national, and forthcoming international exhibitions, and he has been funded by a BLINK! grant and Individual Artist Grant from the Madison Arts Commission. Zanichkowsky’s activism for housing justice, prison abolition, and queer liberation fuels his art, including his piece for Future Possible addressing the question of racial reparations. “I used biodegradable materials in this work to invoke the union and authority of two invisible crowds we can imagine watching over the land, and over us, as we plan for Madison’s future: One is our ancestors, of the recent and the ancient past. The other is the generations of our immediate and enduring posterity,” he says, adding, “What debts are owed to them? How will we measure these? And how do they measure against what we can repay?” Zanichkowsky expects his work will raise more questions—about land and value, about labor and violence, about power and time— than it will answer. But, he notes, “asking for reparations declares that the past has a presence in the future. It demands that justice move forward, and also reach back.”
@ Watrous Gallery
Jeremy Wineberg is a designer, educator, and artist whose work stretches imagination and experience by connecting everyday observations in unexpected ways. He uses elements of mapping, synesthesia, psycho-geography, divination, accumulation, and storytelling to open up new points of view. Wineberg has received several grants for his public and collaborative work, including his piece Inverted Lakes in 2007 and (with artist and co-curator Rachel Bruya) the street-side Little Galleries in 2013. Working with silhouettes cut from reflective Mylar, Wineberg is creating an installation for Future Possible that he hopes will become “a platform for imagining, one that draws on the shapes embedded in our past and the contours and lighting of the gallery to help focus aspirations and apprehensions about the future.”
JEREMY WINEBERG Visual Artist
Wineberg reached out to friends and community members to learn about their experiences in Madison before beginning this project. He envisions the result as “a stage for absorbing, reflecting, and projecting, a map of sites and experiences, some from the past, some anticipated in the future, some personal, some universal: a psycho-geographical mixing station.”
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Amanda E. Shilling
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by Michael Kien
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Kate Stalker has a passion for environmental sustainability, especially as it concerns promoting a public supply of clean water for generations to come. Stalker is best known for her work as Project Architect for the City of Madison’s Allied Drive neighborhood redevelopment (now known as Revival Ridge), and as Project Director for the Resilience Research Center on Badger Road, which houses the Madison offices of Will Allen’s Growing Power and Badger Rock Middle School and utilizes 60,000 gallon cisterns to store rainwater and snowmelt for irrigation in its gardens. She also recently served on a team of consultants hired by the City of Fitchburg to complete a fifty-year master plan anticipating future needs. In consultation with experts from the UW–Madison Center for Limnology, Stalker is creating a series of collages for Future Possible
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KATE STALKER Landscape Architect
that outline “where we are today and what we can do as individuals to mitigate the degradation of our water supply.” With this work, she hopes to share her vision of a Madison “where the citizens of today did everything they could to leave our grandchildren a healthy environment, one in which they are unafraid to swim at our beaches, have reduced need for autos, and never worry about the quality of their drinking water.”
@ Watrous Gallery
ASHLEY ROBERTSON Artist & Urban Planner
Ashley Robertson received her Master’s Degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She moved to Madison in 2013 to work as a city planning consultant, but is currently pursuing art full time, creating unique 3D cityscapes, portraits, and drawings that blend Afrofuturist narratives and fantasy with bold architectural linework and urban forms. A recent artist-in-residence at the Madison co-working space
100state, Robertson took advantage of a brainstorming session with 100state members to kickstart her project for Future Possible. Her work has shown in venues throughout the Midwest and East Coast, including a solo exhibition at Strivers Gardens Gallery in New York City. She is currently traveling across the United States to explore and gather inspiration from the diversity of American cityscapes. The colorful triptych Robertson has created for the exhibit reflects her belief that communities across the world are overdue for a transportation revolution. “This work anticipates that how we innovate this system will have the greatest impact on reshaping our built environment and redefining the meaning of ‘hometown,’ ” she says. In addition to highlighting transportation advancements, Robertson’s paintings as reflect “a culmination of possible scenarios that blur the line between future and fantasy in housing, urban greenspace, and logistics innovations. From modular skyscrapers and elevated greenways, to complex networks of versatile drive/fly pods, this work prioritizes connectivity, sustainability, and biomimicry in its vision for Madison 2093.”
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@ Watrous Gallery
MADISON DESIGN PROFESSIONALS Work Group
Madison Design Professionals (MDP) is comprised of a dozen talented urban planning and design professionals with expertise in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, historic preservation, and real estate development. Since 2012 the workgroup has done essential pro bono visioning for the City of Madison.
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Recently, MDP unveiled their vision for a park that connects downtown Madison with Lake Monona by creating a roof-deck park over John Nolen Drive, improving the Blair Street intersection, and building a boathouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1893. For the Future Possible exhibition, members of MDP will share details of this project, which they’ve dubbed “Nolen Waterfront” (pictured above) in honor of pioneering landscape architect John Nolen and his work for the city. “It is hard to imagine Madison’s future without acknowledging its past, especially as it relates to our past culture and architecture,” says architect and MDP member Carol John of Ross Street Design. “Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright’s final design for Monona Terrace juxtaposed with his first, a grand boathouse surrounded by a beautifully landscaped waterfront park along the shores of Lake Monona. Originally the intent of Frank Lloyd Wright was to have the boathouse be visible and align directly off of the Capitol Square along King Street; ideally future developments will provide the vistas intended alongside a beautiful waterfront park to provide Madison with a location Frank Lloyd Wright would be proud of, and a place for all to enjoy.”
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Photo Caption
LOU HOST-JABLONSKI Architect An architect with Design Coalition Inc. of Madison, Lou HostJablonski has always practiced socially conscious, public interest architecture. His areas of professional focus are resource-efficient design and planning and environments for children, and he frequently lectures and teaches workshops on ecological design and construction practices. Host-Jablonski has designed multi-family and co-housing homes, childcare centers, community centers and playgrounds, and home modifications for persons with disabilities and chemical sensitivities. He has also served on many City of Madison commissions and committees, including the city’s influential Urban Design Commission for twelve years, and helped to craft Madison’s GreenPrint as chair of the City’s Sustainable Design & Energy Committee. Host-Jablonski’s project for Future Possible envisions the creation of “living architecture,” lovingly grown over decades into a permanent structure. “My proposal is an act of community creation — the selection, dedication and nurturance of a grove of trees and its transformation into a sacred space. I am developing a step-by-step sequence of drawings to show the progression from community-chosen site throughout on-going community use, to a finished community-created space. Although sacred implies different things to different people, Host-Jablonski notes that he thinks of this project “in the civic and inclusive sense of the word,” adding that, “all of the arts of civic life will be employed over the 75 years required to grow this space.”
The Madison area is home to so many unique cultural assets, including the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters and the James Watrous Gallery. That’s why Madison Community Foundation is proud to support the Future Possible: Imagining Madison exhibit as part of our 75th Anniversary Year of Giving. The $25,000 grant to support Future Possible is one of twelve major monthly gifts to the community totaling nearly $1 million. The Year of Giving is a reflection of what’s possible when we come together as a community. Madison Community Foundation’s vision is that greater Madison will be a place where all people thrive. Gifts our donors give today, and the legacies they leave for future generations, enable us to work toward realizing that vision. In addition to Future Possible, here are just a few of the Year of Giving grants we’ve announced so far and the impact they are having: • Dreamers and visionaries are re-imagining the Nolen Waterfront as a new city park in the heart of downtown Madison. • Librarians from the award-winning Bubbler at Madison Public Library are introducing innovative learning experiences to children at area community centers. • Young journalists of color are gaining valuable experience through paid internships at Madison365 as part of the storytelling project “I Am Madison.” • Students will learn the history, culture and sovereignty of the First Nations of Wisconsin through new educational materials near effigy mounts and heritage sites. Follow the next four months of Year of Giving grants, and learn about all our grants, at madisongives.org/75.
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imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo
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THE RESCUE BY ANN ZINDLER
The wrong side of the tracks. That’s where he was from. Run-down properties, running from the rent man, and his dad running in and out of jobs. It was the alcohol that caused it. That, and too many kids. Bennett was the oldest of eight. Now, at seventeen, he was driving his boss’s car, a car he wouldn’t get back until tomorrow, to fish his girlfriend’s father out of the bar. Oh, the irony.
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Victoria had run to fetch Bennett from the filling station where he worked, her blonde fly-aways falling from her ponytail, eyes swimming with worry. She knew Bennett would fix whatever bothered her—would do anything for her. Right then he was working with the hope of saving enough money to go to college—to be the college man Victoria’s mother hoped for. And he was making it, too. And high school basketball—that was going so well a coach from Wayne State was coming to catch his next game. He would be in the graduating class of 1950—first class of the new decade. Victoria believed Bennett would make it in this world—rise above poverty and move to the proper side of town. For her. She was right. Only all she wanted now was for him to go into the bar and get her father out. Her mom apparently wanted to “just die” when she found out where he was. Dinner was burned on the stove and Victoria’s mom had locked herself in her room. So Victoria came for Bennett. Victoria’s father, Alan Lamere, wasn’t the drinking type. Lots of guys who worked in the auto plants stopped off for a beer after work. Some went in the middle of the week; some were just the Friday types. Bennett’s dad was the always type. The father of the perfect family seemed to be having a fall from grace, and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks was heading out to rescue him. Bennett knew—Mrs. Lamere wasn’t so much worried that Mr. Lamere was suddenly becoming a raging alcoholic; she was simply worried about being judged. ALEX BLEDSOE Worried about people seeing their new Buick that she had bragged so much about, their “second car” that they built a garage for, sitting in the dirt lot at “The Rescue” is a coming of age story that Duffy’s. She would hate for people to think that Mr. Lamere was just a regular stands just to one side of the expected guy. plot line. I kept thinking I knew where it And she hated Bennett, hated his father and his family’s constant problems. Mostly, she hated that he was dating her daughter. He didn’t know if he could was going, and it kept surprising me. This ever prove himself to her, but maybe this expedition would put him in her good story has a strong sense of place, and graces. If he could just get Mr. Lamere out of the bar and back home before too characters who both embody what you’d many people saw their precious car—before too many people could judge her expect and have enough originality to right back for all of her better-than-thou notions. Duffy’s was on the south side of town. Once Bennett pulled into the lot, he make them vivid individuals. looked around for the new Buick. There it sat, under the oak tree, dead leaves still floating in the winter breezes now stuck to the windshield. He parked nearby, locked the car, and thought about which bus he’d have to catch to get this car back in the morning. He pulled open the tavern door and gave his eyes a chance to adjust to the dim lighting and smoky air. The bartender gave a wave. “What can I do for you?” Bennett approached. “I’m looking for someone.” Two men were sitting up at the bar, their work uniforms untucked, one man rubbing his five o’clock shadow, both staring blankly as they sipped their beers. Beyond the right side of the bar were a few dark booths. In one a small group sat playing cards. In the other was a sight Bennett expected to see. His dad was slumped, gray head drooping like a broken toy, his hand still wrapped loosely around the nearly empty beer mug on the table even as his eyes were closed. “You look familiar. Do I know your dad or something?” Bennett looked back to the bartender. “No.” “Oh, I thought maybe I knew you from one of the guys.” The bartender gestured around at different groups of men. Bennett shook his head—no. “Wait, have I seen you in the paper? You a basketball player?” Without thinking, Bennett smiled. “Sure you are. You’re the leading scorer in your conference. There was just a nice little article about you.” The bartender continued rambling about how he follows high school sports, especially basketball. Bennett was in a hurry now to find Mr. Lamere and get out. The establishment
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had the shape of an L and wrapped around the left side. In the back he could see a group of men, standing and talking, loud laughter echoing through the room. “Wait a minute, didn’t Carson over there say the kid in the paper was his son? Hey, Carson. Head’s up, man.” The bartender chucked his rag over to the booth where Mr. Carson was nodding off. It landed sloppily on his head then slid down his shoulder. The two men at the end of the bar laughed as the rag drooped off Mr. Carson’s shoulder and fell to the floor. “No, sorry, sir.” Bennett said. “Wrong family.” “I figured the old man was lying. Damn drunk. I gotta get him outta here.” Bennett looked to his dad, oblivious to the rag that just smacked him and to the fact that he was being mocked. Oblivious to the fact that his son stood just feet away. To the bartender he said, “I’m actually looking for Alan Lamere. He here?” “Oh, sure. He’s in the back.” “Thanks.” Bennett waved to the bartender and tucked his hands into his pockets, trying to look cool as he walked around to where the group was drinking. As he moved closer, he caught snatches of their rancor, could hear they were blowing off steam. “That guy, he’s so tight he squeaks when he walks. You don’t want to work with that son-of-a-bitch.” The men threw their heads back, guffawing at their own jokes. Mr. Lamere, a thin man with a curved back from years of hard work, slammed his beer mug on the bar, “Damn straight I don’t. If I go work with those nosebleeds upstairs, I’d be as tight as them.” A smaller guy in a greasy down jacket spoke. “Hell yeah, boss. It’ll be better on the production floor, with us.” “Somebody just go to my house and … and …” Mr. Lamere began laughing so hard he could hardly get the words out, “tell that warden of a wife of mine that I’m not going to ever bring home the big bucks.” The men laughed uproariously; as if this was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Bennett knew that Mr. Lamere lost his patience sometimes with his wife’s pretentions and social climbing, but he’d never heard him speak of anyone this way. “I’m living in Alcatraz with that woman.” The raucous laughter continued to build. “You see this?” He turned clumsily to put his back to the guys, then reached a finger over his shoulder to point. “See those tread marks on my back? She used the very tires we make, on the vehicle I bought her, to ride rough-shod right over the back of me.” He was like a stand-up comedian. A man Bennett had never seen—or heard—before. If it wasn’t so out of character, he may have joined in the laughter. As Mr. Lamere turned back around to face his friends who were bent double, he caught sight of Bennett. Like a practiced expert, Bennett slipped into the routine that he knew so well—his ‘how to handle a drunk’ routine. “Hey, Mr. Lamere!” Big smile. “Nice to see you!” “Bennett …” Mr. Lamere’s mouth slacked a little as he seemed to be trying to take in the sight of him, so out of context. He reached a hand to his head to smooth his graying black hair. “I was running some errands for my mom. Saw your car out front.” Mr. Lamere straightened upright. “Just stopped off after work here to treat these boys to a few beers. I work with the best, ya know?” “That’s what I hear.” Bennett knew his inflection needed to sound agreeable. Dealing with a drunk can be a lot like fishing. You can’t let the fish know you want to catch him; you have to be careful about how you dangle the bait in the water. Bennett took his time. The men were smiling, so Bennett reached out a hand. “Nice to meet ya. I’m Bennett. Mr. Lamere is, well,” not sure if he should share their connection, Bennett hesitated, “about the best man I ever met.” The men took turns pumping Bennett’s hand. “Great man right here,” the greasy-jacket guy said. “Not that any of those fools down at the plant know it.” “I appreciate that, fellas,” Mr. Lamere said as he reached for another swallow. Tilting back his mug, he discovered it was empty. “Well, lookie there. How did that happen?” He was answered with more laughter. Bennett subtly waved off the bartender. “I’ll bet you’re hungry, Mr. Lamere. Would you mind getting a burger with me? I got a few things I been needing to talk to you about.” The bait was lowered.
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Mr. Lamere wobbled forward a little and squinted his eyes to look closer at Bennett. He seemed to be deciding if this was a good option. His eyes softened and he reached a hand up to place on Bennett’s shoulder. “Been meaning to talk to you about a few things too. Let’s get that burger.” The fish was on the hook. Fumbling, Mr. Lamere put on his coat. They said goodbye to the fellas who patted Mr. Lamere on the back, “Chin up, man.” “Screw those bastards.” Other words of solidarity followed them to the door. Just as they reached the exit, Bennett could not stop himself from taking a look back at the booth where his father sat, the booth that likely held him night after night. Mr. Carson appeared exactly as he had a few minutes before, only someone had picked up the dishrag. Bennett pushed the door open and guided Mr. Lamere out. “I see your Buick is parked over here. I’d sure like to drive her—she’s a beauty!” Bennett hoped Mr. Lamere wouldn’t put up a fight as his dad often did. “Yeah, okay. I hear what you’re saying.” He gave over the keys. “Give it to me straight, Bennett. How bad is it?” The walk in the cold seemed to have a sobering effect. “It’s bad, sir. I guess Mrs. Lamere’s been crying. Locked herself in her room.” Bennett started the Buick and was pulling out from the parking lot. “Man can’t even go out with the guys and have a beer.” Bennett nodded, playing along. “That ball and chain. She’s had me by the throat too long. The house has to be perfect, the lawn must look just so for the neighbors. Have to keep the cars shined up. And the money!” What had seemed to be a shtick for laughter in the bar was brewing into an anger that was real. Mr. Lamere’s voice got tighter and louder as he went. “There’s never enough money. Now she thinks she should have a fur coat for winter because that woman Beverly Schneider got one. Does she understand what Beverly’s husband does for a living?” Bennett continued to nod as he drove, but kept silent. That usually worked best with his dad. “Her husband made Vice President for Buick last year.” He stretched out the word vice in drunken exaggeration. “Yes, sir, Vice President. But can she understand that? No. She just asks why I’m not Vice President for the tire company. Unbelievable.” “Sir, I’m sure she means well.” Sticking to his role as Savior, he tried to keep the peace. “That woman don’t mean well. She may have once, but I hardly remember that girl.” “You can’t mean that. It’s the booze talking.” Bennett was rarely honest with his father when he was drunk and wasn’t sure what had inspired him to be so straightforward now. “The booze? Is that what you think is going on here? This is the truth—God’s honest. Now where is this burger place you wanted to go to?” “You know, sir, I’ve been rethinking that. We ought to get you home quick.” “Get home. For her? Forget that.” “Well, sir, I made your daughter a promise that I would bring you home. And I sure hate to see Mrs. Lamere upset.” “Well aren’t you sweet? Defending her. Remember I said I was needing to talk to you? Here’s how it is, Bennett. My wife will never…and I mean never,” he put up both hands for emphasis, “let you marry our daughter.” Bennett winced. It had never been said out loud. “And that ain’t the booze talking either. She says it all the time. She will practically lay down her life before she lets a Carson marry her baby girl.” “Sir, I know she doesn’t approve of my father.” His mind scrambled to defend. “But you’ve been like a second father to me…I’m sure you’ve told her, we’re good.” Bennett braked, almost too late, as a stoplight turned red. “It’s true, we’ve been like family. You’ve been a great friend, a role model even, to our son. But marry Victoria? There’s no way.” “You can’t say that. Me and Victoria, we’ve been together since we were in diapers.” Bennett struggled for clarity. “You have let us be together all our lives. How can you say this now?” Mr. Lamere’s slicked back hair flopped down onto his forehead as he shook his head.
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“There’s kids at school who are steady, but they’re just fooling around. You know that Victoria and I…we’re different.” A car honked behind them as the light turned green. Bennett tried to focus on the accelerator and began driving again. “You’re different alright,” Mr. Lamere argued. “And it’s going to stay that way. Different. As in, not a whole lot in common.” Bennett couldn’t allow him to spout these alcohol-soaked lies. “We’ve got our whole childhood in common.” “Maybe, but not your future. You kids aren’t thinking the same thing.” “Of course we are. We talk about it all the time.” Bennett tried to swallow over an angry lump hardening in his throat. “Bennett, be real. Are you going to college? I’m not talking in a few years after you work hard, and I know you will work hard. I’m talking this fall, will you, honestly, be packing it up and heading to college?” “Well, sir, I don’t know for sure right now. I’ve got a good chance…if some things fall into place.” “Exactly. Which is another way of saying you’re not going. Now I respect you, Bennett. You understand hard work. Hell, you’re more like me than my own son is…and that is the problem.” “You’re not making any sense. Of course I’m just like you. Isn’t that what you’d want for your daughter?” Mr. Lamere wagged his finger. “Not good enough. Not good enough for my wife, and she’s got a strong hold on that wide-eyed daughter of mine.” “What are you trying to say?” “This young love? Enjoy it for the next few months, but you both have some growing up to do.” Mr. Lamere dropped his head, looking down to his lap, “It’s not going to last.” “I knew Mrs. Lamere was saying things about me.” Bennett shook his head as if it would erase the conversation. “I knew she was saying things about my dad. But you too? I can’t believe this.” “Listen to me, ’cause I don’t know if I’m ever going to get the chance to say this to you again without my daughter around.” He reached across to place his hand on Bennett’s shoulder. “This isn’t easy for me because despite my wife I’ve loved you like a son. When we just left that bar, we walked past your dad. Past your own father.” He rubbed his calloused hands over his face and released a defeated sigh. “I’m a hair’s breadth—one whisper away—from being just like your dad, Bennett. There’s got to be better for you. Better for Victoria. This is about both of you. Look at me.” He paused and shook his fists. “Pull over the damn car and look at me.” Bennett did as he was told, easing the car off to the side as they approached the next red light. “You’re looking in the mirror. If not me, then him, back there at the bar.” He leaned in so close the stench of the beer on his breath caused Bennett’s stomach to flip. “If you stay in this town, if you don’t get away from that family that weighs around your neck like an anchor, you will not advance enough to take care of anyone. You will end up in a job that’s not good enough, with your resources spread too thin, with a wife who’s never happy, looking for a bar where you can get away for what is supposed to be a little while but becomes much more.” Bennett fought the tears that threatened, felt his body begin to tremble. Nothing had prepared him for such words from the man he most admired. “I see you going fishing so there’s meat in your freezer. I see you down at the station pumping gas like you’re saving money for college when everyone knows that money is gone as soon as your dad doesn’t make it to work on a Monday. It’s a trap, Bennett. And as much as I respect you, I have to agree with my wife, only because I want more for you, and,” he pursed his lips together then dropped his shoulders as if giving in to the truth, “if you love Victoria, you’ll want more for her too.”
Bennett fought the tears that threatened, felt his body begin to tremble. Nothing had prepared him for such words from the man he most admired.
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Fiction
Through gritted teeth Bennett tried to calm his voice. “It will be different for me.” He gripped the steering wheel. “I’m not my father.” “Then you’re me.” He jerked both thumbs back to his chest. “Does this look much better? And here’s something else I know. Your father is going to get fired Monday. Heard Human Resources talking about it when they called me in to tell me I didn’t get my promotion. They gave it to some punk fresh out of college. Your dad’s been coming in late and dragging from the drinking. I want you to know—I didn’t report him. Probably why I didn’t get my promotion today—they said I’m too soft. But your dad’s production is down. I couldn’t hide that.” Both men settled back into their seat, nothing left to say. Bennett stared numbly down at the steering wheel while Mr. Lamere looked straight ahead through the windshield. Finally, Victoria’s father took a deep breath, seeming to fortify himself. “You’re coming up on graduation. With your dad unemployed, there’s no way you’re leaving your mother with all those brothers and sisters of yours in the near future. Like I said, it’s a trap.” Bennett’s heart hammered in his chest. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to cry or hit someone. He trusted Mr. Lamere. He knew Mr. Lamere understood him in a way Mrs. Lamere did not. He had seen him as an ally in this battle to win a future with Victoria and had never doubted it. Today, he had dropped everything at work and sped to bring this man home. To impress Victoria. To win over her mother. To make Mr. Lamere grateful—to be seen as his son. Bennett swiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his Varsity jacket, the wool rough on his face. He needed to get away from this man. He needed to think. He checked the lane to see if he could pull back out onto the road and waited as a car came up alongside them, stopping at the light. He would have to sit until the light turned green to allow this car to go before he could pull away from the curb. Not willing to look at Mr. Lamere, Bennett noticed the car beside him. It was a police cruiser. Maybe out of habit, maybe as a distraction from the tension, Bennett twisted a bit to look in the back of the police car. He gulped air as he made eye contact with his father. Bennett looked through the glass, across the space between the two Read more award-winning stories from vehicles and into his father’s tired eyes, the slack wrinkles of his face pooling emerging and established Wisconsin at his jowls. Mr. Carson lifted his hand in a wave. He was broken, that was true. writers at wisconsinacademy.org/fiction. But Bennett felt a reinforcement then. He felt the same unconditional blood running through his veins. He lifted his own hand and waved back. His father had no idea what Bennett was doing or that he had been with him in the bar just moments before. But Bennett knew that if his dad had known, he would forgive him. As the light turned green, Bennett eased the car away from the curb and traveled behind the cruiser. Both cars bounced over the railroad tracks that separated the north and south side of town. After a few blocks, the cruiser turned toward the city jail where Bennett would rescue his father in the morning.
Ann Zindler is a teacher of seventh-grade reading and writing. She has been a writer herself since the third grade. Zindler lives in Waukesha with her husband David, her two daughters, Josie and Isabelle, and the family dog, Oreo.
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Poetry
New Wisconsin Poetry Honorable Mention Poems from our 2017 Poetry Contest
My Mother’s Kitchen Beneath the butcher-wrap paper lay Formica of gray with black flecks, and after my mother and her side-kick Anita finished wrapping T-bones, round steaks, sirloins, blade roasts and pot roasts, they lugged in a 20-gallon pail of ground chuck and slapped and laughed the meat into patties, placing thin squares of paper between each patty for ease of separation when the burgers would go from freezer to frying pan, before they taped an outer wrap and dated it in black—my father’s job would be to rotate packages in the freezer, designate which heifer in the barn could not be bred or milked or sold but by next year would up end dead in my mother’s kitchen while she and Anita yakked and yakked, grateful for the homegrown kill, the time to restock the freezer for ten mouths, slaving till sweat circled their arms, the little caves between their bellies where they found space to gossip about the sweltering summer, the upcoming dance with a polka band, a shotgun wedding, I Love Lucy, and the growing pains of children none of whom had yet gone vegetarian.
Kathryn Gahl, Appleton
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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS
Poetry
The First Time I Enter a Ladies Restroom with My Daughter When you were three years old, I knocked on the men’s room door, and taking your hand, opened the door cautiously. I’d never been in a men’s room before. Urinal against the wall, a small white cake of air freshener down in the porcelain, only one stall with a door, stainless steel, no pink wallpaper, no silk flowers in a vase on the vanity. I felt awkward while you felt proud to go on your own, still needing help, right there in the men’s room. Thirty years later, you have transitioned from man to woman, tall, with long curly hair touching your shoulders, a hint of blush on high cheek bones, pink lips, a necklace of crystal beads resting on your collarbones. After lunch you don’t think twice when we head to the ladies room. I wonder—do you feel tentative like I did long ago in the men’s room? But you look like you know where you are going. I scan the room to see if other women are looking at you, at us. Surely, someone will notice. But they don’t. Ladies keep fixing their hair, checking their teeth for lipstick, fumble for lip gloss in their purses. We wash and dry our hands, fluff our hair, you tuck in your blouse, we reach for the door, I re-enter the world with my daughter.
Annette Grunseth, Green Bay
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Poetry
When the Great War As my mother tells it, when the Great War came my Great-Grandmother Guarneschella lied. Dates are relative. Domenico wouldn’t be 16. Wouldn’t be conscripted. Didn’t matter. Ran away with his cousin to the front at 14. Earned him a bayonet gash he would boast a lifetime later. No one else in his unit survived. Once, I touched that smooth valley in his right shin, looking, wondering all the while what he could not tell us. Dominic Holt, Monona
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WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS
Poetry
Daily Reminders You need to remind the mind over and over again to come back to quiet, to the dark hollows of where words and no words are found, like hunting morels in a forest. Be patient. It’s not an easy task. The mind doesn’t want to go there. It would rather grab the handlebars of a ten-speed bike, play catch, move. We all never grew up. It’s hard to sit still once you know the word recess. There could be a playground just out of mind’s eye. The water faucet drips. The light flickers. The refrigerator hums. There is always something to be done. Do nothing. Stand on the flatbed of a swing. Grab hold of the ropes. Feel the itch of it in your hands. Blue overhead. Clouds float like glacial ice in the sky sea. Before you move, stand still. Paulette Laufer, Sturgeon Bay
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Poetry
On the Anniversary of Her Son’s Suicide So tell your story, each version more distant and yet … still fresh, never finished. No matter whether death was sudden or a gradual decline, devastation wraps itself as a binding and time is a geometry of fractals, repetitions smaller … smaller … an intricacy that never becomes smooth, each iteration unique, a barb you can touch.
Mary C. Rowin, Middleton
Read more award-winning poems from emerging and established Wisconsin poets at wisconsinacademy.org/poetry.
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BOOK REVIEW
The Word We Used for It by Max Garland University of Wisconsin Press, 78 pages, $14.95 Reviewed by Karla Huston
I find it difficult to review a book of poems by a poet whose work I admire. There is a tendency to gush—Wow, OMG!—and pump my fist and say, “Yeah, this is why I love poetry!” So, I’ll take it slow. My first encounter with Garland’s poems happened in 1996 at a Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets conference in Middleton. He was one of two featured readers. Being a new writer and teacher of creative writing, I knew that reading widely was important. So I purchased his first collection, The Postal Confessions (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), which won the Juniper Prize for poetry. I still have it—a bit dog-eared—and I frequently read it to my student writers to show them that poetry doesn’t need to be about personal angst. “Poets writing now,” I would say, “use the thing—‘No ideas but in things,’ wrote William Carlos Williams—to express the idea. You can even write about the muffins in the display case at Perkins.” Then I would share Garland’s poem, “The Muffins.” I also used to share “The Nap Situation” from The Postal Confessions because I like the opening line, “I wake with the intelligence of moss.” Twenty years later, Garland has given readers another volume of poems to savor, to consider, and to read and re-read. The Word We Used for It, the winner of the Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press, is full of poems both elegant and soothing, like a familiar hymn in church. Garland praises art and nature and provides meditations on the wonder of this complicated world. While not religious, per se, there is reverence here and resonance— as well as singing. Garland’s poems are as intelligent as they are graceful. There is a confluence of art and science, of love and memory. While writing about art at the Uffizi Gallery in “At the Opening of an Exhibition,” he speaks of the cones and rods of vision, about how once he thought he saw “the pigment slightly tremble”: All I know about looking at art is that it takes a lot of movement to keep a painting still.
He writes of bees and April snowfalls and squirrels, of hollyhocks and the stars, of the nightly news. In “The Best Things in Life Are the Most Expensive,” Garland observes:
So expensive, hardly less than unaffordable are the best things— time and memory and forgetting, water wearing over rocks that took half the life of the planet to form, and wishing you could hear it more deeply and longer and also silence.
There is no mistaking Garland’s voice. His lines move like music, a slow love song to what is important to him. His voice is sometimes unmistakably Kentucky, where Garland was born and raised. In his poem “Joy,” Garland deftly weaves geologic time, arctic cold, and daguerreotype photography together into a contemplation of eternity and our brief role within it (Wow, OMG!), Just to know how it felt I stood under the red pine. It was 10 below and the sun was not quite up and the moon not quite down, and the air so cold … from deep in the glacial instant of my one and only life, which hurt a little, like joy, by which I mean the edge of joy where it sharpens itself for the work it has to do.
Here, as in other poems in The Word We Used for It, is appreciation for the natural world, of the landscape of his home state as well as the one he has adopted as his own.
Karla Huston is the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2017–2018. She lives in Appleton.
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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