To live lightly on the planet.
In these times of uncertainty, our accomplishments are not going to be achieved in a linear fashion.
Curt Meine:The Driftless Area is a landscape, because of its peculiar history and geology, stands out from the rest of the Midcontinent, really.
Tamara Dean:My name is Tamara Dean. I'm a fiction and nonfiction author, and my latest book is Shelter and Storm at Home in the Driftless, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Children's Storm is a collection of 12 essays, each of which pursues a mystery while weaving together facts about nature, history, and science. And the book invites readers to consider how we tend the earth in times of uncertainty, what we owe our neighbors, and ways we can thrive in community. And the essays take place in the Driftless area of Wisconsin, which will be a big part of our conversation on the podcast today.
Tamara Dean:I'm thrilled to be joined in conversation by my friend Kurt Meine.
Curt Meine:Well, thank you, Tamara. It's great to be with you and to have this opportunity to chat about your new book and to explore the ideas that you bring in through the book. I'm just delighted. I had a great time reading it, and I'm really looking forward to talking with you. So, yeah, to introduce myself, my name is Kurt Meine, and I live in the Driftless Area, actually on the very edge of the Driftless Area, Northwest of Madison, Wisconsin.
Curt Meine:I'm a conservation biologist, sometime historian, sometime writer, and full time advocate for the region we love here. I guess I should add that I edited a book called The Driftless Reader. I kinda became a student of the literature of The Driftless as much as the land. And so, Tamara, I'm really delighted to talk with you about your your contribution to that body of work.
Tamara Dean:Thanks, Kurt. Well, I definitely appreciated and admired your anthology and your other writing too, in particular, all your work on Aldo Leopold. You've lived in the Driftless area longer than I had, and I'm very curious to know what you find special about the place and its inhabitants. What features and wonders have really struck you since you've lived there?
Curt Meine:Well, as as as you bring forward in your own book, Tamara, I mean, it's multilayered. Right? Just the most visceral is just visually because it's not like the rest of the Midwest. It's not flat. The Driftless area is rugged.
Curt Meine:It's corrugated. It's full of twisty roads that don't meet at 90 degree angles as they do in most of the rest of the Midwest. It's a landscape because of its peculiar history and geology, stands out from the rest of the Midcontinent, really. And so that's kind of the the first level you come at it with perhaps is just like you're driving along or walking along and you say, wow. It's different here.
Curt Meine:But that superficial reality of the the topography of the landscape has meant for generations, centuries, millennia even, different kinds of human cultural expression and life on the land. And so once one gets accustomed to the place, one begins to pick up the signals of that history and that culture and see the quirks of this landscape. And it's just endlessly interesting. There's always something new around literally around the corner, and and so it entrances.
Tamara Dean:Yes. I mean, I fell in love with it as soon as I drove through the area, and it seemed so impossible because I didn't really understand what driftless meant at the time even though I had lived in Madison for quite a while, which is sort of on the edge of the driftless area, only some miles away. I didn't understand what driftless meant. And I should say, in case listeners don't know, that driftless refers to the absence of drift, which is the sediment, the silt, and the pebbles that glaciers, carry along with them and leave behind when they recede. And driftless means that the glaciers, maybe dozens of them, never reached this area, which encompasses 8,500 square miles of Southwestern Wisconsin mainly, but also a little bit of Northwestern Illinois.
Tamara Dean:So the topography isn't flattened like the rest of the Midwest. It's you know, it has these sharp, steep limestone bluffs and these narrow river valleys. And because of that topography, I mean, as you said, it's been a refuge, for millennia for the Ho Chunk people who were pushed Southwest from the Green Bay area, what's now Green Bay, toward the Driftless area as, you know, the glaciers came down, they founded a refuge. Then people ever since have also founded a refuge, as have some endangered and threatened animal and plant species.
Curt Meine:Yeah. People have always recognized that there's something different about this landscape, this kind of divot in the edge of the continental glacier. Even going back into prehistory, of course, one of the things I have wrestled with a lot, it does provide refuge, but there's kind of a paradox to it. It both encompasses you, embraces you, and a lot of people talk about how they feel tucked in right into the Driftless because of the valley and hill landscape. But there's also a countervailing urge among people who grow up and live in the Driftless of sometimes you gotta escape.
Curt Meine:You feel confined. And I find that tension fascinating, between feeling both simultaneously almost confined and comforted in the hills of the Driftless.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. That's such a great point. It attracts a lot of newcomers. And, meanwhile, a lot of the people who've grown up there do move away. But I also noticed when I lived in Southwestern Wisconsin in the Biola and Viroqua area that, people came back.
Tamara Dean:A surprising number of people who had left right out of high school were coming back to establish either farms or schools or other small businesses, there was something that attracted them even after they left.
Curt Meine:Yeah. That's part of the pattern as well is the, feeling as one goes through one's life of being a product of this landscape, feeling a need to sometimes escape it, and then feeling that urge to come back. There's a lot of examples of that. I'm thinking right now of Ben Logan, the writer Ben Logan, born and raised in the Driftless, wrote his wonderful book, The Land Remembers, about growing up in the 1920s and thirties. Went away, was a soldier during World War II, was a journalist and publicist with a successful career out east.
Curt Meine:And in his late years, he purchased his family farm back, returned to the Driftless. So there is that narrative too of he had this dynamism of coming and going and finding something in this landscape that is compelling.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned Ben Logan. I have been thinking about him lately too. I wanna switch to a related topic, which is what do you wish people understood better about the Driftless Area, or what misconceptions would you like to correct?
Curt Meine:I'll answer it, but I want you to help me because you've written about that in in in a subtle way, I think, in in your new book. And, but I'll give you my thoughts and see what you think. Well, it is again, it's an attractive landscape visually, and so it tends to draw people who have who have a sensitivity toward the the beauty of the landscape, and yet it can be also a very harsh, demanding, and increasingly uncertain landscape to make a living in and to live in. And you write about this. You write about particularly the changes that are coming with climate change and increased incidence of flooding that we've seen continuously over the last twenty years, especially.
Curt Meine:This is not a place for for for, superficial tourism. Let's put it that way, maybe, or superficial visitation. This is a place that requires a commitment in a sense. Doesn't mean one is gonna always be here, you know, and your story bears that out. But if you're gonna respect this place, this holds true, of course, everywhere, in our relationships with land.
Curt Meine:But in the Driftless, you know, the sensitivity of the landscape to change, social and environmental change, makes it a demanding place to be. Some of the poorest counties and communities in Wisconsin are in the Driftless because you can't have the great big monster farms that you see in Iowa or Illinois, the great big corn and soybean empire farms, you know, you can't quite depend on that if you're a farmer or in agriculture to provide you with a secure and stable life. And that's true again everywhere, but in the Driftless, the landscape doesn't permit that kind of large scale intensive agriculture.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. That's a great point. So it does foster smaller and often organic farms, family farms. That makes the area unique because of the topography, that large scale agriculture doesn't work as well. I think one of the misconceptions we might have had when we moved out there is that we could make a living farming.
Tamara Dean:I thought that that was possible. I came from farmers as far back as records go, and I knew it wouldn't be easy, but I didn't understand the system of subsidies that really favor the commodity crops like corn and soybeans, wheat, and cotton, which, just aren't as well suited to that topography. And, also, I didn't anticipate the floods. Although, to be fair, I don't think that even people who had anticipated the kinds of floods that started happening. Around the time that we built our house, 2005 to 02/2007, we lived through seven of the worst floods on record.
Tamara Dean:Everyone would be worse than the previous one. And by 2018, that flood was called by some locals, some old timers, a thousand year flood. And the Wisconsin was it the initiative on climate change? Has said has predicted that Southwestern Wisconsin will have heavier and more frequent rain events. So I don't think that that 2018 record is going to hold for a long time either.
Tamara Dean:And that's why we need to come up with, you know, systems of local resilience.
Curt Meine:Yeah. And we have another interesting feature of the Driftless Area is that we have a track record on this. And, of course, we can go all the way back and talk about indigenous forms of agriculture, small scale and diverse and, resilient. But to skip ahead to the European experience, Euro American experience, the settlers who came to this region didn't weren't prepared for it. Let's put it that way.
Curt Meine:And so particularly as you get closer to the Mississippi River, one of the quirks of the Driftless Area is that when you're in Wisconsin, the closer you get to the Mississippi River, the steeper and deeper the valleys become. And the thicker the layer of lush soil, the windblown soil from off the glacier, was deposited, and and so it was highly erodible. And the history of conserving soil and water in the Driftless is really a story not only significant here or not only in The US. It's a globally significant story. Why?
Curt Meine:Because by the nineteen thirties, the loss of soil due to poor farming practices, they weren't ill intentioned. It was just that a lot of the farmers just didn't know how the rain worked. They were used to the gentle rains of Northern Europe. Right? They weren't accustomed to the these, extreme precipitation events even back then, and this is before climate change gains momentum.
Curt Meine:So the the kind of poster child for this, of course, is the is the Kickapoo Valley and the and the Coon Creek Watershed right adjacent to it. And it was in that landscape, of course, that the very first watershed scale conservation and restoration project anywhere in the country was undertaken in the early 1930s. So we have a history of learning and adapting and reforming our our ways and and and, you know, overcoming tradition in some cases to make a more resilient way of life on the land.
Tamara Dean:Right. And the contour farming that was sort of, experimented with and proven in the Coon Creek Watershed in particular has become a standard in the Driftless area. I saw it all around where we lived, and yet, now some farmers have reverted or are not adopting that. And it makes me think of Aldo Leopold's warning about farms becoming food factories and that, you know, farmers will die of their own too much, he said, not because the farms would, not because they're bad for wildlife, but because they're bad for farmers. But he didn't believe in government mandates or subsidies.
Tamara Dean:He thought that educating farmers would lead them to understand that their farm is a whole life supporting system, and they would take pride in creating that, and affect their neighbor farmers. And what do you say to that? What would he think of the situation around agriculture today? And are there places and ways in which his optimistic vision about farmers treating their land as a whole life supporting system are are becoming a reality?
Curt Meine:So among my other hats I wear, I'm a a scholar of Alder Leopold's work. I've always just had a kind of a policy never to answer questions that start, what would Aldo Leopold think about
Tamara Dean:Oh. It's kind of it's sort of a
Curt Meine:joke, but it's also somewhat serious in that you never quite knew what he as an innovative thinker would say. But I feel very comfortable answering this question in this case. Like, that quote you alluded to, it's one of my favorites too, Tamara. It comes from a talk Leopold gave in 1945 about the future of farming and conservation. Yeah.
Curt Meine:And he said, incredibly prescient now to read this, but, at the end of of World War two, he's looking ahead and realizing that the wartime industries were gonna spawn a whole new wave of industrialization on on American landscape. And so he said, yeah. We have a choice to make between the farm as a food factory or the farm as a place to live. And we can see how that, fork in the road has played out in most of the country. However, in the driftless, this is again what makes it so fascinating here in the hyperindustrial agricultural Midwest.
Curt Meine:Their driftless has resisted a lot of those trends. And it has attracted innovators and experimenters and back to the landers and to try to make a different narrative out of our relationship with land. So one of the characteristics of our landscape, and you know this, Tamara, is we have a lot of really interesting experiments going on with different types of agricultural systems, with a local food movement and food processing systems, with thriving small towns unlike so much of rural America, not everyone, but at least examples in cases of where the local food economy has taken root. So whether that we're talking about Organic Valley up in Lafarge, Wisconsin, or my neighbors down the road at the Savannah Institute who are working on how to get trees and woody shrubs back onto the farm landscape through agroforestry practices. Or we can look at all the variety of bakers and brewers and fermenters and all those out in the driftless who are figuring out ways to not follow the the typical path.
Curt Meine:And this is really an important characteristic. We have been a proving ground for innovative food and agricultural systems for generations. And partly, that's been driven by these environmental and social needs, but it's also just pure creativity and people wanting to make a go at trying to try and own something a little different.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. That's what we saw around us too in Viroqua. And we made a few steps, some inroads into different projects, including establishing WDRT, the community radio station in Viroqua, and community support for that was really strong.
Curt Meine:Yeah. I mean, we talk about the food systems, but of course food systems are just part of the general cultural innovation that goes on in our driftless towns and landscapes. And they feed on each other, no pun intended. They contribute to one another. And so anytime I head toward La Crosse and come into the Kickapoo Valley and I can start to pick up WDRT, I'm there.
Tamara Dean:Well, it's funny you say that the food systems come around because Organic Valley was one of our early sponsors and, really supported us, getting on the air.
Curt Meine:Well, what an improbable story Organic Valley is. Right? Almost anyone in the country can go into their store now and buy half gallon of organic valley milk. And, you know, think of this starting with seven farmers in the late 1980s and how I don't know if it could happen in any other landscape. There's plenty of other organic dairies, most of them large ones now.
Curt Meine:But where else but the Driftless could we have fostered such an experiment that proved to be such amazingly successful. And not only that, but how it helped shape a shift in the culture of the Driftless at a time when farmers were facing such terrible crises economically. It provided an alternative, provided a different pathway for smaller and midsized dairy farms to, to, again, make a decent living.
Tamara Dean:Exactly. They had a big vision and, utter commitment to that vision. And part of that was supporting small farmers around them. Mhmm.
Curt Meine:Yeah. Well, I'm gonna turn around and ask you a question, if I may, Tamara, because as I was leafing back through the book and now you connect so many dots, within the 12 essays, but, the connection between agriculture and water is the one I'm kind of thinking of right now, that you've been so devoted to caretaking of Wisconsin's water in your personal life and in your professional commitments as well and the connection to the food systems. And that's something that is a little hard to explain to people sometimes and certainly is difficult to to deal with because of the built in economic barriers and whatever. But how did your experience maybe being on the land, help to shape the way you thought about your your commitment to safeguarding our waters?
Tamara Dean:Well, I lived on the West Fork Of The Kickapoo River, which is a spring fed stream, a cold stream, prized by trout fishermen from around the nation. You know, there are fishing guides who think of the West Fork Of The Kickapoo as their favorite spot. And I understood that the water had to be clean for trout fishing. I didn't understand what the, threats to the water quality were. And I had become a volunteer water monitor through Valley Stewardship Network, which is a stewardship organization headquartered in Viroqua and serves landowners from around the region, helping them understand habitat improvement and ways to create maybe buffer zones for improved water quality.
Tamara Dean:And that was my first introduction to the topic. I realized that up and down the river, up river of us and down river of us, there was a significant problem with runoff. And this happens when, you know, a flood happens and manure has just been sprayed on a field, especially in the spring when the field is frozen, the manure just runs off and into the stream. And when I understood this and how freely farmers were allowed to apply these nutrients to their fields, I sort of scratched my head and looked into it more. They do have nutrient management plans and that's regulated by the state DNR.
Tamara Dean:But it also seemed that if there was an accident, for instance, one of these runoff events, there wasn't really a consequence for the farmers. And we could tell that when downstream we checked our water quality, we would know if the dissolved oxygen is lower, for instance. We would know if there had been a runoff event. So that got me started in concern about water quality. And I joined the the board of the River Alliance of Wisconsin, which is a statewide organization whose mission is to empower people to protect water, basically, which made me understand the whole web of water.
Tamara Dean:I mean, water makes us neighbors. It connects us far and wide, within a watershed and even beyond from the rain that falls to the water that's running off a field or down through the bedrock. So another factor in this consideration of water quality was the floods. And with the flood came all kinds of, perils, including bacteria in the water, not just from farms but from industry and, municipalities. It's a big topic.
Tamara Dean:It's really, like I said, connects us in a web like way that we don't often think about, particularly if we live in an urban area where we just turn on the tap and count on clean water. But in reality, a lot of places in rural Wisconsin don't have clean water even from the tap because the wells have been contaminated. And it's up to the owner to check their well water. The state really doesn't have any regulations around that, and a lot of people don't. Most people do not check or test their well water, and it it's too bad.
Curt Meine:As I was listening to your comment there, I was thinking about and it's come really comes through in your essays, how being where you were and having the stream right outside your door, I mean, it sensitizes you to the to the dynamic nature of water. And so it's so immediate. And in fact, that's your phrase. I think your phrase is water's dynamic reality. And so we have these issues everywhere, you know, groundwater contamination, surface runoff, etcetera.
Curt Meine:But in the driftless, there there the feedback loops are immediate. You know? Mhmm. And so maybe it's in that sense, again, to use one of your words, it's a bellwether region for for these trends that are affecting us.
Tamara Dean:Right. And we had, put in a rainwater cistern when we built our house, and it was, sort of an experiment, sort of an impulse, maybe a bit of intuition. That rainwater was filtered a couple of times through a centrifugal filter for particulates and then through a UV filter as it entered the house. And we sent our water to a state hygiene lab, for testing, and they said, we've never seen water this clean. But it was kind of accidental.
Tamara Dean:You know, it was lucky on our part to have such clean water. So we didn't rely on a well, but I found out later that the well for our neighbors just down the road, had been contaminated by E. Coli. And it's true that that could have come from, you know, human waste or a faulty septic system, but in that area, it's more likely it came from runoff from fields. Yeah.
Curt Meine:And it also makes me think about, again, going back to what we were talking about how the Driftless has always fostered innovation and experimentation. We've seen in the last twenty years since your experience on the land, but, is the the rise of watershed groups led by farmers themselves. And instead of thinking of us versus them or, you know, they're causing the problem, and I'm the one suffering, whatever, it's it's all all of us recognizing we live together in watersheds because water does fundamentally connect us. And so farmers have taken the lead in so many parts of Wisconsin. But, again, in the driftless, I'm thinking of, well, the Creek Watershed Council was kind of reinvigorated and created after those floods in 2018.
Curt Meine:Or over here by Spring Green, the Lowry Creek project that I'm really familiar with, and how they have banded together up and down the course of their watershed to to voluntarily, you know, do the work. And all of us benefit from it, and then all of us have also an opportunity and obligation to help support them as they do that.
Tamara Dean:Right. And maybe that's an example of what Aldo Leopold was talking about. Because in those watershed groups, like the Coon Creek Watershed Council, which is a great example, the farmers are coming together in community and in conversation to solve problems together with nobody, you know, presuming to be the expert, but they're trying out methods and sharing information with each other. And it seems like, the best kind of ground up solution for this problem facing our water quality.
Curt Meine:You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna, again, ask you a question because as I I was thinking about, first of all, your experience of, again, when you were in in the Kickapoo and and experiencing these dramatic flood events. But then later on, you became involved in the in the post flood effort to try to help people come to terms with what we are all experiencing in the Driftless, and that's through the another group that you helped to initiate with the Driftless Writers Group and the storytelling process. Could you talk a little bit about you you saw it from both sides. You saw it as one experiencing, but then you saw it as one listening and sort of bearing witness as others were sharing their stories. Those are two different perspectives, and I'm wondering how you how you think about that.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. It's a project still close to my heart. For the 2018 floods, I woke up before dawn, and I heard this ocean roar. And I thought, oh, no.
Tamara Dean:I knew it had been raining all night. I didn't know how bad it had been, but 13 inches of rain had fallen on a village north of us, and a reservoir was draining because a dam had broken. And it was all heading downstream, and the sheriff was, you know, evacuating people right up to our house almost. And so there was sort of this emergency sense. But we were lucky and the floodwaters receded by the end of the day.
Tamara Dean:It had filled the whole quarter mile wide floodplain across from our house tarps and other debris were hanging in trees after it did recede. Even so, we were marooned and couldn't get anywhere for quite a while. And once we could, when the roads were clear of water and debris, we wanted to do something. So we went to the nearest village on the river, which was Viola, and helped clean. You know, I carried all kinds of mud covered canned goods and choir robes from the basement of the church, which doubled as the local food pantry, carried away sandbags and other things.
Tamara Dean:And I ran into friends there, who also had escaped the worst of the flood but wanted to help out, and some of them were friends from the Driftless Writing Center board. We all agreed that we wanted to do more than just carry these soggy items out to dumpsters. So we conceived a project called Stories from the Flood, and really it was based on the research we knew about from James Pennebaker and other scholars about how storytelling helps us after a trauma to recast our experiences and feel more empowered and, resolve and heal. So our Stories from the Flood project was imagined as, a writing project where we would invite survivors of the twenty eighteen flood to write about their experiences in response to prompts that we offered. But honestly, it immediately became apparent that not everybody enjoyed writing as much as we did.
Tamara Dean:And, you know, from the first gathering we held at a local library, we decided to instead record people telling their stories. And that's what we did. We collected about, well, over a 100 stories. I'm not sure what the final tally was. But I listened to dozens of stories from people who had survived the flood.
Tamara Dean:And I was humbled by their trust in me when they told me about their tragedies. When, you know, a woman said that she sat in her car on the highway as the water rose above her, it came to her ankles and then to her knees and then to her waist. And the fire department, crew had told her to just stay put, so she did with the faith that her neighbors would come and save her, and they did. And then another person told me about lying on his bed and just waiting for the flood to rise because he knew that it was so strong it was just going to demolish the buildings on his land. He said, Well, if the house goes, when I asked him if he didn't think about moving to the Second Floor, he said, There's no point going up stairs.
Tamara Dean:And he survived. Luckily, nobody was killed in that particular flood. But livestock was lost. Buildings were lost. And I would say too that I lost a sense of safety in the landscape.
Tamara Dean:I felt a bit of betrayal. I thought, you know, all these previous floods, they were record breaking, but, they didn't come as near. This one came to within 20 feet of my back door, and the next one, who knows? So when I was asked to be interviewed for the Stories from the Flood Project, I thought, Well, I don't really have anything to contribute because I didn't suffer like other people did. The students who interviewed me because, we did have a wonderful group of students at the University of Wisconsin Madison help us with the story collecting.
Tamara Dean:These students brought out, some of that fear and sense of betrayal that I had now felt about the landscape since the flood.
Curt Meine:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it goes back to that earlier exchange we were having about, you know, the Driftless having a bit of a paradox paradoxical character in that it is a place of comfort, and one feels at ease, but it also can be ominous under these changing circumstances. And that's a kind of a theme that repeats itself through all of your essays. I'm thinking about how all these different themes that you touch on, whether it's, tornadoes or, again, floods or looking at fire and the role of fire in restoring lands, You're kind of doing a dance here between your commitment to the place, but also learning the harder realities of the place in the process.
Tamara Dean:Yeah.
Curt Meine:Yeah. And so I'm wondering, what was that? What I was going to get at is, was that sort of the, as you were putting the book together or as the book evolved, maybe, that a conscious choice, or was it a pattern that emerged as you were as you were developing the book?
Tamara Dean:I would say it's a pattern that emerged through my life there, and I captured it because I was first a fiction writer, and I hadn't really thought about writing essays about our time in the Driftless Area until all these wild things happened. You know, it seemed as if any given day I could walk outside and some dramatic occurrence, perfect for an essay, would, strike me. I I was glad for the material, but it was sometimes difficult. And then these themes of, really building shelter or finding home there and then withstanding storms, came together in most of the essays. You know, I like to write essays as I would write short stories beginning with the question or the mystery that brings the reader along to find out how it's resolved and along the way sort of amplifying tension and deepening meaning.
Tamara Dean:And I took those opportunities based on what had happened to me. Truly, I had more essays and more material, but, they didn't seem to come together like the ones that are now in the book.
Curt Meine:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Tamara, as I was, again, looking back, through the essays in preparation for joining you right now, I was, I was wondering how it did come together as a collection. Did you have a couple already in the in the bag as it were and and then you tried to fill it out, or did you just keep writing?
Curt Meine:Or was there an overall outline you followed, or was it more organic than that? How did it how did the book as it as I read it now come together?
Tamara Dean:It was definitely organic. The essays included in the collection span about twenty years in the writing of them. So, I hadn't planned on a collection twenty years ago when I wrote the first one, but they did come together, as I said, along with a few others that aren't included in the collection. But these seem to, complement each other. And I arranged them, at least to frame the experience from the very start of our time on the property to the very end when we left.
Tamara Dean:In between, they skip around a little bit and are related more by theme from essay to essay. But, no, there was no grand plan at any point.
Curt Meine:You know, we can't do a a a discussion about a book without reading it a bit of it. And I'm not gonna ask you to read anything. I'm gonna read something to you. I'm gonna read your words back to you. Maybe that maybe it'll provoke something when you hear your words.
Curt Meine:This is from your, actually, your chapter called Shelter and Storm. It gives the title to the book. And I I was just it's just a paragraph, that I wanna read to you, and it comes midway through the essay, and you're you're pausing a little bit to think about the your move to the to the Driftless and and the contrast with your neighbor in this case. But I'll just read it to you and and and I and see what you think. The dream of living on your own terms attracted hundreds of couples to our area in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.
Curt Meine:They built homes, started alternative schools, established food co ops, and founded what would become the nation's largest organic farmers' cooperative, Organic Valley. Susan, a talented weaver who lived up the road, and her husband were part of that migration. They planned to build a home and have children they would raise in the peace of the country. But within days of starting construction, she told me they learned they couldn't work together, couldn't bear each other in that context. Before, they hadn't known.
Curt Meine:So she did things besides construction, and they stayed married, unlike many couples who have tried homesteading. Quote, obviously, what we thought we came here to learn was not what we actually came to learn, she told me. And I like that paragraph because it in some ways, you're quoting her, but you're also in in doing so, you're reflecting on your own experience, and that comes through in the whole book of coming to the place as a latter day back to the lander and learning lessons that you didn't anticipate you were gonna come to learn.
Tamara Dean:Absolutely. I love Susan, and I love that quote. And when she told me, it was very early on after we had moved there. And I thought, That's curious. She had also told me that her neighbors knew things about her before she did.
Tamara Dean:In other words, they would come up to her at the store and say, Oh, I see your peas are ready to pick. And that struck me, too, because that was born out in our experience as well. Truly, all the essays in the book are representing an aspect of our lives when I learned something after setting out to learn something entirely different. And Susan captured that so well with her advice to me or her comment on her own experience, which felt like advice.
Curt Meine:Right. Now the phrase that comes to me in thinking about that, her quote, your experience and sort of the pattern you display in the book, it's nonlinear. Like the Dirtless, it's nonlinear. You're you're you're not going you think you're going one direction, and you're not sure you're gonna end up where you think you're gonna go. And that's, again, unlike a lot of the straight lined 90 degree angled Midwest is what makes the Driftless so quirky.
Tamara Dean:I love that you call that out. That's such a great observation. And I think when it's iterated multiple times, that's the direction I grew in, which was don't expect things to be linear. Don't expect things to happen on your time schedule. For instance, with the prairie restoration and the fire, it had its own rhythms and I didn't understand those.
Tamara Dean:I had ideas about how it should grow or, you know, how fast or in what way, and it just wasn't going to happen according to my plan. That was proven over and over again from, you know, building the house to dealing with the floods and the tornado and building the radio station, and really being part of community. And I think what it led me to was a greater appreciation for the wisdom all around me, you know, and the need to be open to that and curious. The wisdom from the land, from my neighbors, from the communities. Where is that collective wisdom held, and how can I tap it while honoring it and perhaps even adding to it?
Curt Meine:And, how much we need that right now. Right? How much in times we find ourselves in at this moment, uncertainty is all around us, and things that were taken for granted are at risk and how a linear response to that is not gonna help us much, that we need that kind of creative and innovative way of responding. Again, you don't wanna read too much into the into how a landscape determines behavior. It's not deterministic, but how it allows for different ways of thinking and being.
Curt Meine:I'm I'm I'm thinking back to a book, a wonderful book done back in the nineteen fifties or sixties called Order Upon the Land. It was done by a woman named Hildegard Binder Johnson, a professor up in Minnesota. I highly recommended it. She focuses on the Driftless Area. Her whole book is a study of how land use and land planning differs in the Driftless.
Curt Meine:And she shows how the regular pattern of land survey crids laid out in the early to mid eighteen hundreds in our region, up until the eighteen sixties. How that's those square blocks of land you're so familiar with if you ever fly over the Midwest, you don't see them in the Driftless, at least not to the same degree because it doesn't fit. And and so here we have this region that that almost demands different ways of being and thinking, and I think that's what you illustrate so well. But now I'm curious, you know, since you did make the decision that you had to pursue a different path and go away from the Driftless, not too far, thank goodness, but now you've revisited it in your head and in your writing in the book. And that's gotta be an interesting experience in itself, kind of looking from within the Driftless out, but also now a little bit looking from outside the Driftless back in and back to another part of your life.
Tamara Dean:Yes. It was a profound part of my life. It was such a great learning experience. And as I said, it taught me to be more open and curious, in particular, about the landscape and community. And I think in these times, as you mentioned, we're going through a period of uncertainty where the structures that we understood as firm don't feel as firm as they used to, though weather in is part of that, but also our communities and governments.
Tamara Dean:I think that this way of approaching life could be a helpful tool, for others if we can recognize that our accomplishments are not going to be achieved in a linear fashion and that it's helpful for us to be open and curious, I I wonder if that might bring some people solace.
Curt Meine:Yeah. And it kinda leads me now to think about I think my favorite chapter it's hard to choose. Of course, it always is, but I really, really enjoyed the the last chapter on the slow blues. And, you know, when you read something and you really like it and you read it quick, you're like, I really liked it, but then you have to say, man, I gotta go back and reread it because I liked it so much. I read it too quickly.
Curt Meine:So I I was it again here and seeing how you play off these two small critters, how you play off ticks and the fireflies. And that how you do that, of course, reveals that pattern again that there are things to be concerned about in any landscape and things to celebrate and it simultaneously. And, again, how do we find, you know, the beauty around us and the wonder? The that's, again, the theme of that chapter for me is the wonder you you in your exploration, in your search for this blue flashing firefly that takes you to these different places and these small adventures, but how that plays off your your increasing concern about the the threat of the landscape in the form of of Lyme disease. And that just seems so timely.
Curt Meine:Right? We're dealing with both threat and beauty simultaneously all the time. Maybe we always do in our lives.
Tamara Dean:Well, first, I wanna say thanks for the title, Kurt, because I remember us talking over coffee one day, and I was telling you about my experiences searching for this firefly that only existed in the Driftless area. I said it's called slow blues, and you said, well, there's your title.
Curt Meine:Don't remember that, but I'm glad I was present for the moment.
Tamara Dean:But to me, yes, it represents both the threat and the wonder of nature. Also, the influence of climate change is enhancing the possibility of thriving for one of those species and decreasing the possibility of thriving for another. So the slow blue fireflies, because of their life cycle, spending a couple years underground, they're not going to be able to migrate north fast enough if their current habitat, niche that they're in, warms too much. While the warming is definitely, benefiting the ticks, they're moving in greater numbers farther north, and they're really proliferating. I think occasionally of Robin Wall Kimmerer's quote, all flourishing is mutual, I think, I'm not sure that applies to ticks and other beings.
Tamara Dean:But, I'm sure you understand that and could unpack that a little bit more than I could.
Curt Meine:That's a pretty profound challenge. I'm not sure if I'm up to it this time of day, but, but it is what we wrestle with. It is, you know, how do we deal with, sometimes I'll say it this way when I'm giving a guest lecture talking with students is, look. We live in a time of unprecedented rapid accelerating social and environmental change unlike anything the human race has ever, you know, experienced. And if you feel anxious and un disoriented, there's a good reason for it.
Curt Meine:And I actually did this just last week. I was giving a lecture at the UW La Crosse in the heart of the Driftless area, and it was, in fact, for a mutual friend of ours, Marco Higgins, teaching a course on the Driftless area. And the gist of that lecture was, you know, what what does the Driftless area offer the world in these times of rapid and disorienting change? And we've touched on a lot of that already, food systems and the ability to understand how change occurs, how plants and animals respond. But again, we experience this in any landscape.
Curt Meine:But in the Driftless, we have certain opportunities and histories to draw upon that help us to navigate these uncertain times. And I think you've really captured that so well in in in the book. I'm looking forward to, recommending it to lots of my friends and, carrying on the conversation into the future.
Tamara Dean:Thanks. I appreciate that. Well, I wanted to ask you about your interactions with university students. You spend a lot more time with them than I do. And if they ask you for reasons to hope or possibilities for action, do you offer them anything specific, or what kind of advice do you give?
Curt Meine:Yeah. Great question, and it's related to the place we are and the place we've been talking about. You know? I never expected I'd spend as a good portion of my adult life living here in the Driftless area, but that's how life have has happened. And out of this landscape, I've certainly drawn a lot that if it doesn't give me hope, it gives me perseverance and a sense that you can make a difference.
Curt Meine:And I think that's the most important thing to share with our our younger friends, relatives, colleagues, students is if you're feeling anxious and you're feeling that the world is going in a direction you don't think is very healthy for any of us, go do something. And in the Driftless, you're in landscape at a scale where you can see the differences you make, whether you're doing hands on restoration work, whether you're involved in your community, whether you're helping your neighbors clean up after the flood, and I did the same thing in that flood of twenty eighteen. This is an area that you can invest yourself in and not feeling feel like you're fighting against the global forces all the time even though you are. I tend not to use the word hope, but the determination to to apply ourselves to making positive change. This is a this is a particularly welcoming place to do it.
Curt Meine:And that's what I told the students last week. It doesn't mean you're gonna like, as with your in your case, you didn't end up spending your entire life in the in the place where you you invested so much, but you drew so much from it, and you gave so much to your community in doing that. So no matter where you go, you're carrying those lessons forward. So, and action is the antidote to despair.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. I love that. I wonder what you're acting on or writing about pertaining to the Driftless lately.
Curt Meine:Oh gosh. Well, I think a mutual friend of ours, Kevin Koch, down there in Dubuque, just asked me to he invited me to help him on a little joint essay project writing about the bedrock of the Driftless area. So he assigned me the job of writing about sandstone, which I had great fun doing and trying to relearn all my layers of geology. And lately, I think we talked about this when we had a cup of coffee recently. I've been utterly taken for some reason with the phenomena of the the goat prairies of the Driftless, the dry hillside prairies that you see so prominently, but also that we are seeing the changes that we've talked about affecting them as well, these rare remnants of prairies that pop out in the hillsides of the Driftless area on south facing slopes that colloquially we call goat Prairies.
Curt Meine:I'm fascinated be them because they are kind of these islands of of wildness in the middle of our more domesticated landscape. So you just never know when you're living in this region, pops into your head as something to write about, and you've you've shown that yourself, of course.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. And I think that's something I've taken from living in the Driftless area too, which is that there, it seemed obvious and hard to avoid stepping outside and seeing something wondrous or having something strange happen to me. But, of course, it happens anywhere if you're staying alert.
Curt Meine:Yeah. Maybe going all the way back to how we started this conversation when you asked me, you know, what what you find here in this region is that it's the spontaneity of seeing things and and being provoked by them. I'm literally looking out my window now, and I'm looking to a bluff with a lot of red cedars on it, which is a sure sign that it could be a goat prairie, but it's overgrown. I'm looking to a hedge of lilacs planted probably a hundred years ago to calm down the sandy soil here and keep it from blowing away. I'm looking to my neighbor's cornfield, which is sort of on the floodplain, and he's been having challenges keeping that cornfield going in a productive and profitable way.
Curt Meine:So every place has lessons to teach and interesting stories to tell.
Tamara Dean:Yeah. So true.
Curt Meine:As I was reviewing what you wrote, I was struck by how many of the chapters involve resistance, involve people with quirks, these kind of iconoclastic people, these people who are defying norms and trends. You see this popping up in your neighbors, in the historical figure that you explore. And and I'm just curious if you found yourself maybe becoming more of a nonconformist than you anticipated and, how that serves you now.
Tamara Dean:Wow. It's true there were a lot of characters surrounding us in the Driftless region, and I think maybe the area attracts them. You know, it's possible to live on very little in a very unusual way out there. At least in our township, there was no zoning for a long time. So you can make your house out of tires or bottles or whatever you wanna try, and that does attract some iconoclasts.
Tamara Dean:But your question about how it changed me, I think I became just more flexible to all those ways of life. I mean, I thought I was a little bit counterculture or open to experimentation when I got there, but I did have to confront my conventional views and break those down somewhat. So it might be fair to say that I became more of an iconoclast while there.
Curt Meine:You're living in Madison now, but I expect you still make regular I know you do because you come to visit me now and then. But when you make your visits back into the Driftless, are there particular spots or a place you like to revisit that kind of refreshes you or brings you back and reconnects you?
Tamara Dean:I'm still struck by the impossible beauty of the place. So I enjoy driving those small country roads where I first fell in love with the place. But I have to say that what brings me to the Driftless area most strongly, what attracts me are the people because I had such a community there. I still have so many friends there, and it's such a wonderful feeling to go to, you know, a cafe or the local food co op and just bump into people I haven't seen in years and have just to pick up the conversations right where we left off. Again, I'm so grateful for your influence.
Tamara Dean:Over the years, our conversations over coffee have really affected me, in particular, your thoughtful emphasis on community and connection between people and and the landscape. It's really given me a lot of food for thought. So thank you.
Curt Meine:I really have appreciated the chance to talk writing with you. Let's continue these conversations. Good luck with the book. Congratulations. And, I can't wait for the next set of stories that are gonna come out of the experience of going around with the book.
Tamara Dean:Thank you, Kurt. Yeah. I'll definitely see you around the Driftless area soon. I wish you all the best with your writing too.
Curt Meine:Thanks so much. We look forward to seeing you again soon.
Tamara Dean:Take care. Bye. Bye. This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Shelter and At Home in the Driftless by Tamara Dean is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Tamara Dean:Thank you for listening.