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 besid