The Beaten Trail
As a young adult, my consciousness of glaciers is quite new although I have lived around their influences all my life. Five years ago I spent a week with my great uncle Bill, or as his cohorts know him, Wild Bill from West Bend. He has devoted much of his time to acquiring and preparing lands for the Kewaskum Segment of the Ice Age Trail. On the Trail, Uncle Bill, then about 74, walked briskly along and didn’t flinch as the mosquitoes tried to bite through his flannel shirt. He merely lifted his tall walking stick and pointed out what was there.
I never realized how much glaciers were a part of life here. I grew up in a house built on a drumlin near Horicon. My father, the son of a dairy farmer, was a physician’s assistant at the local clinic and made house calls to shut-ins. “I remember your mother,” one lady told him. “We used to play together.” I can imagine my grandmother in the yard of her childhood home, built by German ancestors with the abundant stone deposits beside the Horicon Marsh. During her lifetime, she has seen the marsh damned, drained, burned, and restored to habitat for waterfowl as originally designated by the sheets of ice. I can imagine Grandma with her big brothers scaring geese into the air like a storm as my friend James and I did.
My father’s parents ran a farm outside Eden near Fond du Lac, which hosts Lake Winnebago, another remnant of glacial meltwater. While planting corn in a marsh, my grandfather ran into a huge erratic poking through the soil. As he and his sons dug and dug, something glittered around a piece of granite, and he stopped, popped it in his overalls and later sent it to a local lab to be tested. It came back positive for fool’s gold, iron pyrite. Only the geologist and the glacier would know why Grandpa never found gold. And why he couldn’t reach the bottom of that erratic to blow it out with dynamite. It is probably still moored in that field.
I inherited farm culture from my father. I milked his goats in a barn built around 1860, the beams and boards of which were timber harvested from nearby lands prepared by glaciers. Now most of those trees have long since departed with the farming and lumber industries. And I climbed or built tree houses in the few box elders that graced our yard and wood lot. The new glacier, European immigrants, changed the face of the land.
In the summers, my father took us fishing on the Rock River. Les Manthey, a divorced seventy-year-old man who drove around a beat-up Grenada, frequented its banks. He gave me an ancient Zebco, with which I caught a record number of bullheads and a few respectable crappie on outings with my brothers and sisters. On the morning of my first communion, my father took me out alone. That glacial waterway served as a rite of passage, a marker on the road to adulthood. I was proud sitting with my pole watching the great blue herons wade.
Eastern Wisconsin was my birthplace and home, but at the age of ten we moved away when my father found a better paying job. I moved from drumlins, kettles and moraines to bluffs, sandy plains and ridges. The ground was no longer roly—poly. It didn’t make your stomach sink riding in the car. Now there were sharp turns, steep ups and downs, and long flat stretches of road. I had left the abundant farmland of the east and entered the ragged Driftless Area along the Mississippi River, a land untouched by glaciers.
The magic and adventure I had found on drumlins and in marshes didn’t end, but I would never have a chance to find arrowheads. How was I to know that sandstone wasn’t suited for spear and arrow points? I didn’t touch my first stone artifacts until Uncle Bill drove me to a friend’s farm along the Fox River to show his collection of everything from hoops to axe heads heaved by frost and turned over during spring plowing.
Later Uncle Bill took me up to his childhood home near Ladysmith in Rusk County, a land once completely overrun by glaciers, where Grandpa, Dad and other family had often gone deer hunting. He told stories about logging, saw mills going up in flames, moonshine for 25 cents a quart, milking cows, and skipping school to read magazines at the local gas station. Uncle Bill also took me to an open pit where copper, nickel and gold were being mined, thousands of years after the Neolithic Copper Culture, all gifts of glacial movement and pressure. He opened my eyes to local history intertwined with the geological history of the land.
The next year, I started my first summer at Mill Bluff State Park, one of the designated Ice Age National Scientific Reserve Units near Camp Douglas. Mill Bluff hosts famous Cambrian sandstone bluffs that formed offshore islands of Glacial Lake Wisconsin. The mastodon and giant beaver frequented its shores, and now, its empty basin is home to deer, bank beavers, fox, coyotes and all sorts of birds. Last year I saw a stray black bear lumber across the road. The ice age has become a recurring theme in my life.
Five years later at the close of another park season, I sit in the unheated log cabin office. The wind blows through the white, red and jack pines. The oaks turn bronze. I wait patiently for winter, the seasonal ice age that covers the north, when the keltered snow always takes me to that house atop a drumlin some hundred miles away, just off the beaten trail.
A version of this story first appeared in the Spring 1999 edition of the Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation magazine. It evidences the source of my early writing. Much of that world has gone. And on a 2012 visit back to Wisconsin and a train ride to the West Coast, I witnessed how the fine glacial sand deposits from both the Mill Bluff and Ladysmith areas was being shipped by rail to Williston, ND to be blown under the plains in the fracking process.
