Wisconsin Flows: Rock, Water, Seed

Wisconsin is a fine place to orient ourselves.

In a time of rapid and bewildering change, it is good to consider where we are and how we got here. We are here, and we are now. But the here and the now are nested within wider circles of space and time, fashioned by geographic and historical forces that have created our reality. In tracing these forces, and all our connections through them, we may understand how they still shape our experience and identity.We can dwell on all that divides us, but we all dwell within landscapes that connect us.

Our MDW Atlas contributors reinforce those connections. Geologists Marcia Bjornerud, Eric Carson, and Rudy Molinek, and graphic artist Roxanne Aubrey Molina, will describe and illustrate our common foundations of deep and layered time. Poets Kimberly M. Blaeser, Dasha Kelly Hamilton, Max Garland, Angie Trudell Vasquez, and Catherine Young will call us together to honor the vital waters that define Wisconsin. Seed keepers Elena Terry, Jay Salinas, and Venice Williams will gather to offer the gift of new beginnings and life’s continuity.

Rock.

Water.

Seed.  

Curt Meine

ROCK
It felt as if the layers or strata, and the fragmentary nature of bedrock, were very similar to the layers of human life and the fragmentary nature of our histories, and of our memories. - Lauret Savoy

Wisconsin is layered by time.

Three main geological periods present themselves across the state. Old: Glaciers moved across the land repeatedly through the Pleistocene, beginning their great last melt-back just twenty-one thousand years ago. Geologists, noting the prominent marks of the glaciers on our landscape, named that last episode of continental ice expansion the Wisconsin glaciation. Older: They also named the exception to the rule of glaciers. Southwest Wisconsin, unburdened by the Great Ice and its residues of sand, gravel, and boulders, is the heart of the Driftless Area. Paleozoic sandstones, limestones, and shales laid down under ancient seas 250 to 550 million years ago are exposed in the Driftless, and underlie much of Wisconsin from Eau Claire to Kenosha, La Crosse to Green Bay. Oldest: Billion-plus-year-old basement rocks of the Precambrian, hard and dense and resistant, extend into Wisconsin from Canada, cover the northern third of the state, and surface in a few outlier outcrops.

Seemingly solid, Wisconsin rocks flow through time. They well up from deep Earth furnaces. They boil and harden, crust over, melt again, re-form and fold themselves over. They break and crumble down to bits, drift in sea waves, deposit themselves flat and even, compress and surface, erode again, and flake away under the force of moving waters. Ice plows them over, transports them, tumbles them over and over into smooth round cobbles, leaves them high and dry on ridgetops, drops them down into kettle bowls.  In a few places, Wisconsin's three layers of deep time appear side by side by side.  In such places, such as southern Sauk County, the three voices of Wisconsin geology—old soprano, older tenor, and oldest bass—sing, and keep time together.

Curt Meine

WATER

And sometimes in our water dreams
we pitiful land-dwellers
in longing
recall, and singing
make spirits ready
to follow:
bakobii.*
*Go down into the water.
Kimberly Blaeser

 Wisconsin is washed by water.

Waters move over, under, and through the land. Ancient waters seep slowly through fine cracks of granite and tight pores of sandstone. Cold springs surprise the surface of Driftless slopes, and seep forth through the glacial sands and gravels. Thirty-four inches of annual rain slow, for a spell, in 15,000 lakes, 32,000 miles of stream and river, and 5 million acres of wetlands. Deep waters pool up in the great lake basins of Superior and Michigan before draining east, Atlantic-bound. Other streams run gulf-ward from the Mississippi’s high headwaters. Water courses through our pipes and ditches, our demands and dreams. Water bears our burdens and warns us, through flood and drought, of changing skies. Water hydrates our bodies, gives us life, and floats our hopes.

What may we give in return? A gesture of respect, perhaps, to begin with, a voicing of creeks and rivers and watersheds: Kickapoo, Kinnickinnic, Menominee, Chippewa, Flambeau, Milwaukee, Amnicon, Oconto, Peshtigo, Baraboo, Black, Pecatonica, Sugar and Honey, Rock, Pine and Willow and Popple, Cranberry and Clam, Pigeon and Mink, Fox and Elk and Wolf. And Wisconsin, the river that gave the land its name. From the Miami Meskonsing, “the stream flowing through red rocks.” Historians and linguists no longer accept an alternate translation, the “gathering of the waters,” however poetic. But we may still gather poets here to speak of their home and heart waters, and to flow together through words.

Curt Meine

SEED
A seed is really something spiritual as much as it is something material. It contains a life spark that allows the regenerative process to happen. We need seeds because they are the physical manifestation of that concept that we call hope. - Gary Paul Nabhan

Wisconsin is a seedbed.

Take rock, add water, give it time to turn to soil. Glaciers recede. Plants return to green the land, and people come to reimagine its life. More than twelve millennia of shared stories, songs, ceremony, tools, practices, and protocols, bonding people to place. Some 2,500 years ago, people began to cultivate and garden: maize, squash, maygrass, sunflower, little barley, tobacco. Beans and wild rice came into the diet. Ridged fields, garden beds, and corn hills begin to dot the floodplains, prairies, and oak savannas. Late-arriving trappers and traders came to take the furs before missionaries and settlers brought their foreign seeds. The ancient bonds of Native seed to native soil stretch to the breaking point, attenuated over the last century by the transnational power of hybrid corn and engineered soy.

And yet, still and again, seeds pass from hand to hand with hope across the land. From Ho-Chunk seed-keeper to rural farmer to urban gardener, back and around and around again, from Milwaukee to Mąą Wakącąk (Sacred Land), life flowing from culture to culture to culture, growing shared hope for healing from seed. Packages of potential life are sanctified in the passage, and in the promise of nourishment and neighborliness, despite all. Our sacramental seeds are shared and cropped, to great effect. Our sacramental needs are met as we feed our communities.

FLOWING FORWARD

Wisconsin is a place of deep divisions and amplified anxieties. It is a land of tensions between moving ice and hard rock, green land and blue water, prairie and forest, Native and newcomer, progress and reaction, city and country. 

Wisconsin is also a place of reconciliation and renewal. It is a good place, as good as any, to consider all that connects us. No matter how detached we may seem, or believe ourselves to be, we are yet bound to one another and to the land that defines us, nourishes us, and finally receives us.

In Wisconsin we may work through connections, take a breather, and go with the flow. We may roll with our rocks, rock with our waters, and grow forward through our communities and cultures.

Curt Meine is the July Editor for Wisconsin, selected by Wormfarm Institute.

Special thanks to Philip Matthews for administrative support.