History revealed in what the saw sees

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com


The great thing about history is it doesn't just live in books. Sometimes, history is just hanging there on the wall.

Setting out from Newport Park.
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In the best of the essays in his must-have classic work "A Sand County Almanac," pioneer environmentalist Aldo Leopold tells the story of he and wife Estella sawing through a large, old oak tree. He uses that event to frame the natural history that was happening as the tree was putting on the growth rings they are transecting with the two-man crosscut saw.

As we paddled down the Wisconsin River on June 21 as part of the Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Paddle series, I was describing the essay to fellow paddler Daren Barrett in more detail than you would expect to be tolerated by someone who easily could accelerate away from me. Barrett was unfamiliar with Leopold and how his environmental legacy was tied so closely to Wisconsin history, but was genuinely inquisitive about it.


The trip was 11 miles from a first-rate launch site at Newport Park in Lake Delton to Pine Island, just upstream of Portage. Our planned lunch stop was at "The Shack," the weekend getaway for Leopold and his family when he became the University of Wisconsin's first professor of wildlife management beginning in 1939.

A two-man crosscut saw hangs on the wall at Lepold's Shack.

As I told the group of about 40 kayak and canoe paddlers before we launched, I consider Leopold a minor god for his writing skill and early insights into the science of ecology.

In the essay "Good Oak," Leopold tells us there are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm: "One is the danger of supposing breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other is that heat comes from the furnace."

The Good Oak had been hit by lightening and, so, was being turned into firewood.

This is just a short sampling, but Leopold takes us on a journey back from the tenancy of the bootlegger who owned the farm before the county took it for back taxes, to the arrival of the state's first starling in 1923, to the ill-advised draining of Horicon Marsh for farming in 1910, to the harvesting of 25,000 prairie chickens in Spooner in 1896 and the shooting of what was then Wisconsin's last wild turkey in 1872.

The signs of nature being able to heal itself — given half a chance — were all around us. Most notably in the form of the bald eagles cruising above the river or screeching from a treetop. Turkey vultures floated on the slight wind and turtles sunned themselves on the ends of snags jutting out from the water. Even white pelicans flew in formation above us, unusual visitors for the area because they were displaced by high water elsewhere.

Swollen by the frequent rain, the river was running at more than twice its normal flow for June and gave us a generous 2 mph push. We arrived at the shack ahead of schedule, landed on the sandy bank and fed the mosquitos as we waited for our guide from the Aldo Leopold Foundation just up the road.
During her tour, guide Kate described how the family of seven lived in the converted chicken coop on their weekends away from Madison. The pump was outside. So was the outhouse, known as the Parthenon. They slept side-by-side on a length of snow fence, strung up like a wood-slatted hammock.

Then she pointed to the wall, where there hung a two-person saw. It was one of two on the property, so there are even odds that Aldo and Estella were tugging at this very saw when he was conceiving of his masterpiece of storytelling and environmental history. The other is in the Leopold Center, so either way I've seen it.

We spent about an hour in the presence of Aldo's spirit and then loaded up again for the couple of miles to the takeout. When I caught back up with Daren, he was happy to have made the stop and gotten the history lesson.

I was an unenthusiastic student of history back in high school, but this bit of the past spoke to me. A simple saw makes so real the close presence of one who changed our view of living with nature from one of domination to membership in a community.

—David Horst's nature column appears here regularly. Email him or view past columns at www.uponthesandhill.blogspot.com.

NEXT UP
July 19, Park-to-Park Paddle: This is the 13th annual group paddle on the Fox River from Shattuck Park in Neenah to Lutz Park in Appleton. Typically, more than 200 paddlers take part in the 8.5-mile trip that includes a brief venture into Lake Winnebago, passage through the Menasha Lock, traveling the length of Little Lake Butte des Morts and cruising between two banks of the Fox. Fee is $10 per participant, under age 16 free with an adult, including shuttle. Fill in registration forms in advance at wisconsinpaddlers.org and pay fee at the launch.