In the first third of this century, Wisconsin still had a frontier, not of farms or range land but of forests: the North Woods. Lumbering was the major industry of the northern part of the state, and there were still substantial stands of virgin pine and much larger areas of second-growth birch and aspen that supported a paper industry. On the southern fringe of the forest, the north-central portion of the state, much of the cleared land had been sold for farms, where poor, mainly Polish, immigrants scratched out a living raising potatoes and milking dairy cows.
Since the boy's father was an enthusiastic fisherman and a lover of the outdoors, the family spent a number of their summer vacations in the North Woods, living in rented cabins on the shores of one or another of the beautiful, isolated, deep lakes of the area. His father's paid vacations lasted exactly two weeks. The boy looked forward to these tripsthe early ones by train (the first trip was in 1925), later ones by
automobileespecially to the clear lakes, the dark surrounding forests, and the possibility, by a ten-minute walk or a short pull at the oars of a rowboat, of achieving complete isolation from the rest of mankind.
The small boy treasured isolation during the day, but not at night, when the forest could be not only lonely but also menacing. It was inhabited by wolves, whose grim howls often broke the peace of the cold
nights, and by bears. Of course, the wolves stayed well clear of human invaders, and the peaceable black bears were seen only rarely. But the boy had a good imagination, easily stimulated by sudden noises in the woods, especially at night.
The boy learned to fish, but never seriously. Probably patience was lacking, for he did enjoy gathering in the easily caught pan fishbass, perch, and sunfishthat could always supply a dinner. The more elusive game fish, the pike and pickerel, the trout and muskies, that required patience
and craft, he left mostly to his father. He was glad enough, however, to row the boat when his father trolled. That did not interrupt one's thoughts and enjoyment of the scene. And getting to the day's fishing spot often meant rowing to the next, even more remote, lake by way of a stream that had been partially blocked overnight by the persistent dam-building beavers.
In a rowboat one could stalk the loons that would dive deep as the boat approached and reappear in a few minutes a quarter-mile away. Their mad, raucous cries, less menacing but as lonely as the wolves' howls, echoed from the lake in early morning and at evening.
On the cool days of late summer, whitecaps advanced across the deep blue lake, driven by a sharp wind that twanged the ropes on the tall flagpole near the dock and rocked the moored rowboats in cadence with the twanging. It, too, was a lonely sound, warning of the coming winter when this whole scene would be deserted.
Hiking Trails and Canoes
What the North Woods cultivated in the small boy was a general love of the outdoors, and especially of wilderness. He treasured Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages, which provided him with an exciting tale of out-of-doors adventure and a compendium of camping lore, and helped tide him over during the city-bound winters. When he joined the Boy Scouts, at twelve, he quickly acquired the skills needed for hiking and camping, and his knowledge of plants, birds, animals, and insects grew. Soon, he was camping and backpacking with his close friend Syd Kalmbach, and often with a third boyLewie Wrangell or George Johnston. One trip took them to Sheboygan; another to Door County, where he visited Washington Island for the second and last time, hitching a ride on the combined mailboat and fishing trawler. The island was filled with Syd's Icelandic relatives, so the boys were well received. West Harbor had completely silted in and the resort was gone.
A more ambitious hike began at the Wisconsin Dells, headed down through the Baraboo Range to Devil's Lake, then turned west to Mount Horeb and the Blue Mounds. (These names will mean nothing to most readers; I mention them for the sheer pleasure of hearing them once again, and seeing the scenes before my eyes: canoeing through the Dellsthereby providing local color for the tourists in the excursion steamers;
hiking on a hot, dusty gravel road bordering a tobacco field on the sandy plain north of Baraboo; climbing across the tumble of great granite blocks on the west shore of Devil's Lake; discovering just below the Blue Mounds a family of
wary hillbillies, only a track leading up to their rough, lamp-lighted cabin.)
The boy also took a lengthy canoe trip with Syd that started near the headwaters of the Rock River, at West Bend, and continued down through Lake Koshkonong and the great marshes surrounding it, almost to the Illinois border.
These were not wilderness trips; we traversed mainly farming country. Because backpacking was not a common sport in the Midwest before World War II (and perhaps not even now), the boys were objects of some curiosity, the curious sometimes including the local sheriff or constable. The hikers always managed to convince people that they were not vagrants and to find comfortable campsites in woods or pastures.
When offered the hospitality of the Mount Horeb jail for sleeping quarters, they politely declined.
At some early time, and out of some undefined impulse, the boy acquired a strong affinity for the numerous tamarack bogs that dot the glaciated terrain of southern Wisconsin. They, along with the Wisconsin lakes, are the products of the most recent glaciation, which has not left time to develop drainage channels for all the rocky depressions it produced. The shallowest of these depressions gradually accumulated great beds of peat and a covering forest of tamarack trees with a dense
undergrowth of plants of every variety that would flourish in that wet, acid soilladyslippers and Jack-in-the-Pulpits and other rare flowersas well as a splendid display of insects, including, unfortunately, an unextinguishable supply of vigorous Wisconsin mosquitoes.
But it was worth fighting off the angry mosquitoes. Forcing your way into the borders of the marsh, you were almost instantly surrounded by a lush dark jungle, in every shade of green, pierced here and there by pencils of bright sunlight that were intercepted at every moment by darting dragonflies. If mountaintops were Arctic wastes, tamarack bogs were tropical forests. The dense growth around you took you wholly out of your familiar world.
The boy spent many hours in the bogs, collecting plants and insects, and just enjoying their beauty and the sense of his own immersion in it. Complete insulation from the world had a special meaning for himand for the man he grew into. The fascination with isolation carried into his reading preferences. Green Mansions, by William Henry Hudson, was a favorite story, and even more, Hudson's tales of his life on the Argentine pampas, recorded in Far Away and Long Ago. Admiral Byrd's story, in Alone, of his three months of solitude in the Antarctic was another favorite. In dark moods the boy resonated also with Ole Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth, the story of loneliness and isolation among the Norwegian settlers of South Dakota.
Wilderness and Mountains
By the time the boy experienced the genuine wilderness, he was already a young man, that is to say, he had become me. In 1936, Syd and I took a wilderness trip by canoe down the Flambeau from Park Falls to Ladysmith, shooting all the rapids but one. On one dark rainy morning, after a soggy night in which we had suffered several minor disasters, including breaking the eggs that were bundled in our mosquito netting, we went to the riverbank to scout the rapids that lay just below us. There we found a large granite rock with a brass plate affixed to it, memorializing the canoeists who had drowned there a year or two before.
We portaged our canoe around those rapids.
My other principal wilderness experiences came later, in the Sierra Nevada. In 1941, the summer before the U.S. declaration of war, Dorothea and I hiked with Dan and Louise Arnon and two mules into
Evolution Valley and up into Evolution Basin. The calendar indicates that our daughter Katherine was conceived there, an excellent place to start a life. In Evolution Basin, nestling beneath the Darwin Range, I found myself for the first time not only above timberline but completely surrounded by mountains and cut off from the lowland world. It is the nearest I shall come to visiting the moon.
In 1963, we had a second Sierra trip with a somewhat larger group. And I have found myself atop other mountains (reachable without rock climbing), mainly in Colorado. I remember especially a very cold, foggy morning with my son, Pete, atop Mount Audubon, huddling behind some rocks to shield us from the wind until the fog was blown off sufficiently to let us view the surrounding peaks and valleys.
Mountain peaks make the spirit leap. Leaving a peak, losing foot by foot the altitude that has been gained so strenuously, is always sad and even a little depressing. I take each step reluctantly, almost resentfully.
My most recent mountain experience was in the Alps. Finding that I would be in Geneva on my sixth-fifth birthday, I decided to spend the next week in the Valais, taking the train to Sion and a bus to Arolla in the Val d'Herrens, as my starting point. I no longer aspired to wilderness backpacking, with a forty-pound pack, and I reasoned that the Alps, where I could stay overnight in an inn and need not carry food or bedding, would be less strenuous.
I omitted only one crucial fact from my calculations. Once in the high country of the Sierra, you can camp at 10,000 feet, and climb only an additional thousand feet to cross the next pass. In the Alps, where the highest
inns are typically at 7,000 feet, you awake in the morning with the prospect of an all-morning climb to the 10,000-foot pass. When this dawned on me, and when I saw that there was still deep snow in the high passes, I revised my itinerary, but spent a delightful solitary week in the Val d'Herrens and the high country surrounding it.
Rockmarsh*
To understand Rockmarsh, you must keep in mind the bookish life I have led. I have sailed through the Strait of Magellanin a book. I have climbed Nanga Parbatin a book. I have swum the Hellespont, with the popular traveler-writer Richard Halliburton. I have been terrified by the cinematic dinosaurs who
inhabited the Lost World; I have tilted at windmills with Don Quixote; and I have bound myself to the mast with Odysseus.
After adventures like these, any that occurred to me outside my study or the movie theater have been tame indeed. To be sure, I reached mainland China in 1972 shortly after the Nixon visit. And, aside from the hiking and canoeing already mentioned, I spent my sixty-seventh birthday with Dorothea and friends at Qifu, the birthplace of Confucius, and, in Greece, explored with Dorothea the Spring of Sybaris at Delphi and the Corycian Cave, sacred to Pan, on Mount Parnassus, where we ate a picnic lunch. In India, we flew in an elderly plane across the Western Ghats into Aurangabad to see, during the festival of Holi, the caves at Ellora and Ajanta. We drove the unpaved mountain roads of Montenegro to find Durmitor, the wartime hideout of Tito, and listened to a contest of Yugoslav troubadours at Zabljak, a nearby market town. We crossed the southern Andes in a torrential rainstorm on the mountain route from San Carlos de Bariloche to Porto Montt, and spent Christmas Eve 1970 at the border inn of Peulla amid German
Christmas carols,** the only guests apart from one couple from Lima. New Year's Eve that same year we spent in the public square of Cuzco, and the next day and night among the magnificent ruins of Machu Picchu. In June 1989, I spent three days in Beijing just after the tragedy at Tiananmen.
I could go on almost endlessly with this list of mild adventures and, had I been a photographer (I almost never carry a camera on my travels), could
* The experience I am about to relate, together with experiences at the University of Chicago, all occurring in the period from 1932 to 1937, transformed the boy into a young man, and then into an economically Independent married adult. Since I can no longer
distinguish his identity from mine, I will continue the tale in the first person.
** Much of western Argentina and southern Chile was settled by German immigrants.
undoubtedly have prepared myself for a second career as a traveloguer. None of it sounds like a best-seller; none of it, in our world of seasoned travelers, would keep readers on the edges of their chairs, or perhaps even awake.
The real adventure of my life was Rockmarsh. It was real to me, perhaps surreal, for the same reason that Don Quixote was real to Cervantesmore real than the Battle of Lepanto that cost him an arm. It was real because it existed in the imagination. Do not misunderstand me: Rockmarsh does exist in the everyday world; so did Maurice Davis, who imagined it, and Hank and George and Shockey, who toiled in it. You can find it on a Wisconsin map, and I can give you directions to get there by car.
The story of Rockmarsh must begin with a geology lesson, because that is part of the imagined scene. A portrait tells the truth only if it reveals the bones under the flesh. The foundation of the state of Wisconsin is formed of ancient Laurentian granite. Above it (except where the granite is exposed, in the northern part of the state) lie alternating layers of Cambrian and Ordovician sandstone and limestone. And above these, a long, calcified, curved spinal column of Silurian limestone runs from eastern Wisconsin up and around the Great Lakes, accounting for many of their familiar features. Its sharp outer edge is called the Niagara Escarpment, and it first makes its appearance above the glacial debris just south of the entrance to the Door County peninsula, the ''thumb" of Wisconsin that separates Green Bay from Lake Michigan. It is a great ridge, running north and east through Door County to provide Green Bay with its steep eastern shore.
Temporarily submerged beyond the north end of Door County and Washington Island, the ridge reappears as part of the Lake Michigan coastline of the northern Michigan peninsula, then swings eastward near the junction of Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron. The Niagara limestone then turns southeast, forming the islands and peninsula that divide Lake Huron from Georgian Bay. Continuing across the tip of Ontario, it turns east near Hamilton, intersecting the Niagara River on its northward flow from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario to form the great falls. Still continuing eastward, it defines the south shore of Lake Ontario and finally disappears again somewhere near the western edge of the Adirondacks.
In Wisconsin, a lobe of the glaciers scoured out Green Bay to the west of the hard ridge of the Niagara Escarpment; another lobe excavated the basin of Lake Michigan to its east. The interglacial moraine, a rugged hilly ridge of glacial gravel, follows the line of the escarpment after the limestone has disappeared below the surface south of Green Bay. The east branch of the Rock River drains the west slope of that moraine, running mainly west through the little town of Theresa, and continuing until it joins the west
branch of the Rock near Horicon, whereupon the waters continue south and west to flow into the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois.
Thus the great ridge of the Niagara limestone impresses its form on the entire landscape from east central Wisconsin to the east end of Lake Ontario in central New York State. Throughout almost all its course, it is clearly visible from the air. It is the spinal cord of my native land.
The upper courses of the Rock River, both east and west branches, are marshland: great bogs of peat that forms in many places a layer twenty or more feet thick above the glacial gravels. At the head of the west branch of the river is the famous Horicon marsh, for more than fifty years reserved for hunters (during the season) and game birds (out of season), both of whom flock there in enormous numbers. The marsh at the head of the east branch, which was to become Rockmarsh, was smaller and less well known, although it attracted many local hunters, too.
Rockmarsh, originally covered with a heavy growth of the swamp-loving tamarack, became part of a land grant to the Soo Line Railroad. At some time, the timber was harvested over most of the marsh and the land fell idle, its ownership residing in the estate of a lumbering family. It extended over some 3,000 acres, nearly 5 square miles, most of it now open peat land, marshy, and largely flooded each spring, rimmed almost solidly by a dense border of willow and alder brush. The two-thousand-acre portion of it owned by the estate was the site of my adventure. For me, it was a sacred place that focused in one spot the great forces that had made the land: the Niagara limestone, the glaciers, the ancient granite Laurentian Shield underlying all.
The adventure took place mostly during the summers from 1932 through 1936. It began when Maurice Davis arrived in Milwaukee in the depths of the Great Depression, probably in 1931 or 1932. Davis was a man in his late thirties or early forties, slight of build, rather dapper, balding. I know only a little about his origins; perhaps my father and his friends knew more. He had been an officer in World War I, and had been shell-shocked. After the war, he had spent some years, in an undefined capacity, around several state agricultural experiment stations. There he had made the acquaintance of a tall marsh pasture grass, reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacia), and had built a careful plan around that grass.
The plan was to purchase a large tract of marshland not too far from Chicago, plant it in reed canary grass, purchase yearling beef cattle, grow them, and ship them to Chicago for resale and finishing. The cheapness of the land and its proximity to the marketsaving the cost of transporting the cattle from the Great Plains and avoiding the danger of their losing weight while being moved to market over long
The plan was to purchase a large tract of marshland not too far from Chicago, plant it in reed canary grass, purchase yearling beef cattle, grow them, and ship them to Chicago for resale and finishing. The cheapness of the land and its proximity to the marketsaving the cost of transporting the cattle from the Great Plains and avoiding the danger of their losing weight while being moved to market over long