[BELL RINGING]
Sunrise. On Wisconsin's rustic
road, number three, in St.
Croix County.
There are many roads that will get you there.
Few that can take you to this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Wisconsin's rustic roads.
It is the only road system of its kind in the country.
[BELL RINGING]
Over 70 roads that have been set aside, set apart because
of their natural beauty.
They're scenic wonders.
They're historic significance.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Join us as we hit the road.
Wisconsin's rustic roads.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
On a Sunday afternoon, October 15, 1995, a crowd gathers on
Highway 61 in Grand County.
On behalf of the St.
Louis Township and the Louis Town
Board, I guess we'd like to welcome everybody here.
Thank you for coming.
And I guess it's quite an honor where the first one in Grand
County for the rusty-growing.
They are here to dedicate a road.
These backtown roads, no matter where you go, each
road is unique in its own individual characteristics.
Not a new highway, an old road, Liberty Ridge Road, a new rustic
road, rustic road number 70.
A local resident, Cheryl Buddha, postmaster of
the town of Stitzer, was designated ribbon cutter,
which befits a rustic road for it is local residents,
folks like these, who begin the process to
nominate a road as rustic.
As befits a rustic road, it was a somewhat casual affair.
The ribbon was cut a total of three times so that
everyone could get a shot.
OK, one more time.
How much practice do you need?
And afterwards, everyone drove the road.
The rustic roads can be paid.
[Music]
Rustic roads can be paid.
Gravel, dirt, or sand.
Road sites, not surfaces, are what matter.
[Music]
These roads are a way to preserve Wisconsin's lightly
traveled county roads for the leisurely enjoyment of bikers.
Hikers and motorists.
These are the leisurely enjoyment.
The top speed, allowed on rustic road,
is 45 miles an hour.
On these roads, the journey itself is the destination.
File building.
[Music]
Over 70 roads that crisscross the state.
This is Wisconsin's rustic road system.
[Music]
This is what you might see off and on these roads.
[Music]
Rustic roads 62 in Price County.
It passes by Tim's Hill County Park, the highest
point of land in Wisconsin.
Rustic roads 62 in the rain.
[Music]
He invited five Wisconsin authors,
Dem Logan, Bill Stokes, Jean Faraka, Norbert Bligh,
and George Fakalek, to explore this state treasure,
to write about the rustic roads, this way back into our past.
Wisconsin, as it once was, in places like Paradise Drive,
the road to Cobb Town, and a road called Honky Dory,
Wisconsin, as it once was.
[Music]
The rustic roads assigned to me are cradled in a narrow
band that wanders north and south, never far from
the west coast of Wisconsin, and Mississippi River, which
has always seemed to me to cut our nation into hells, the
older east and the backening west, with its lingering
promise of the frontier.
[Music]
In the Drexless area, the unglaished hill country
of southwestern Wisconsin, the crooked kicker pool
held both its way to the sand barred Wisconsin,
which flows to the Miami Mississippi.
I carry that image of rivers with me to each rustic road.
Rivers and roads have an aura of destiny, of diverse people
traveling, searching for something beyond what they know.
As though trying to return for a familiar place,
they have never found.
[Music]
RESTIC ROAD #56, Inverning County, a classic country road.
Rural, quiet.
One of the rustic roads in the western part of the state
assigned to author Ben Logan.
Each road has its own story to tell.
Of course the road itself is not the starting point, you
are. Rustic roads are for those willing to transform themselves.
At first the habit of speed still weathered,
we drive slowly, only because these are narrow,
crooked, up and down roads.
Soon, if we are lucky, we find ourselves driving
slowly, even where we could drive much faster.
That begins to happen when you join the world you
are traveling through, turning on your ability to
see, hear, smell, touch.
Each rustic road takes us to a miniature universe.
There are awesome panoramas, yes, but more important are
the storytelling details.
[Music]
A little hilltop that says stop, comes brawl on your back here
and find pictures in the clouds, or just look up and look at all
the different shades of blue.
[Music]
The careful, soil-saving contours of corn and alfalfa.
A single red leaf suspended in the air.
Here you can stop and watch it whirl, spiral,
tumble, swoop from side to side, colors changing as it
reverses from top to bottom.
Always reminding me of naturalist Hal Borland,
who told us if we pick up one scarlet leaf, we can
hold autumn in our hand.
[Music]
I can only give you such glimpses of what reached
out to me along these roads.
I cannot say what you will find.
Travelers must make each one their own.
[Music]
My first road, Rustic Road 56 near Ontario, is stored
most firmly in my mind because it taught me how
to behave on a rustic road.
I came from the north, the steep climb leading me to misdivuse
of the Kickapoo Valley.
[Music]
Nearby we're sleeping reminders of earlier days.
A lone standing silo, a falling tobacco shed, a windmill
decapitated by the wind, a cluster of lilacs that told me
where a house must have been.
Then a working farm with a fine round barn.
John Fish and his steps on Wayne rebuilt the barn, an
act of love for a building dating back to 1910.
An act of love that sparked an interest for gale fish
in saving other round barns.
These icons from Wisconsin's rural past.
So how many are in Vernon County?
There were 16, one fell down over the winter and another 15.
So now is the time to get the history of it.
Yeah. Crossroads signs were a lesson in early
history. No weagen valley, Irish Ridge, Dutch Hollow.
[Music]
An intersection sign told me to turn both right and left.
I turned right and then came back.
Because of that I saw a beaver, knowing on an Aspen tree.
Detours and getting lost often mean adventure.
Proving that life is quite accidental anyway.
I was thinking of Aldo Leopold, the ecological
prophet whose life and being were such gifts to us.
Pasities from his book, a San County Almanac, are precious
companions for any journey that takes one as rustic roads
do across the Wisconsin land.
By land Leopold said, "Is meant all things on,
over, and in the earth."
Just as we have tended to see a road simply as something that
takes us where we want to go.
Leopold believes we have seen land as a commodity which we
own rather than what it is, a community to which we belong.
[Music]
Aldo Leopold and Ben Logan were once walking together
down a Wisconsin country road.
Together they saw what was then a very rare sight.
Three sand-deal cranes flew over and at that time they were
a really endangered species.
And he said, "Take a good look.
You may never see another one.
Voice full of emotion."
The sand hills were saved.
Years later, just off rustic road 19, you can see them
crowd together in a cornfield, dancing on a June day.
[Music]
The treasures to be found along rustic roads take many
forms, some like the sand hills, graceful and gliding.
Some like the spuffalo, not so graceful and stationary.
Hi, Garth.
Come up here.
Garth. Oh, Garth, you're so cute.
Yeah. South of La Crosse is the top of
the world road, rustic road 26 at surprises with its glimpses
of the Mississippi River and Mormon Cooley Critt Valley.
Lower down is an old mill, solid stone building that
looks as if it will stand there by the stream forever.
It is easy to imagine a creaking water wheel and horse and oxen
drawn wagons waiting online with wheat to be ground into flour.
[Music]
Not far away, a root seller was long ago, hewn into the stone.
Nirit lives a woman who was proud of that seller and might
be pleased to show it to you.
She was pleased to show it to us.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's over 100 years old.
The woman is Lily and Janelle, who has lived along this
rustic road all her life.
Yes, sure.
We got, well, we kept all their stuff
in the field like I said, just the bulls and horses.
The rich lady?
Well, there's a date in the local look at that.
1876, July.
Yeah, somebody put an awful lot of work big in this thing out
in the old pic-acts and shovels.
With a pic-ax and a shovel.
As Lily and Janelle's brother said, someone spent a lot
of time, months probably, carving out this root seller.
It was a place to store foodstuffs at a cool and
constant temperature.
Years ago, everyone had a refrigerator like this, walk in
with a hundred-year warranty.
It still works.
And how cool do you think it is in here?
Or it goes down to about, at least about 40 degrees,
I think, maybe 35.
But nothing ever freezes.
Nothing ever freezes now.
Very bad.
But the potatoes not soft?
No, it's too hard.
16, alright, you don't get salt in here.
You know, you're particularly fresh and never have to
worry about going in the will of potato to peel.
You know all the peel.
[Birds chirping]
Near Maiden Rock, Rusty Road 51, startled me with its feel
of isolation and the past.
[Birds chirping]
The rock that gives a town its name rises
sheer above the river.
And then he and Maiden, being forced to marry
a man, she did not love, is said to have leaked to her
death from the high bluff.
[Birds chirping]
Whether it is history or a romantic legend
does not seem to matter.
The story lives.
[Birds chirping]
I began all this by telling myself to avoid thoughts
of destination and just celebrate the journey.
On these rustic roads, our destination is ourself.
[Birds chirping]
Rustic Road #19 The walker is writer Bill
Stokes, who has ambable long many of the rustic
roads of southern Wisconsin.
[Birds chirping]
I think maybe one of the reasons that I like them so much is
that I sort of grew up on one.
And I walked back and forth to a country
school on a rustic road.
And this so once I get on this kind of a place, I
am taken back to those wonderful childhood days.
These rustic roads remind us of another time, a
certain place in our past.
Old roads gossip.
They pass along secrets about where lovers park and which
settlers sleep the long sleep in country church yard and who
lives on the homesteads now.
[Birds chirping]
Their spectral voices rise like family whispers,
pushing and confidential.
The traveler who pauses to listen is caught up in the sweet
harmony of nature and time.
[Birds chirping]
The sweet harmony of nature and time, the slow push
of the glaciers, creating kettles and marines, smoothing
over mountains, leaving masses of rock from which
new mountains are formed.
Cleaving out rivers, shaping the landscape, nature carving
and reclaiming in each season, adding and retreating.
On a rustic road just south of Madison, there is an
old field that has reverted to big blue stem, a tall
delicate native grass that once covered vast curries.
No matter the season, the wind speaks exquisitely
there of time and cycles.
[Birds chirping]
Time and cycles, change is the constant here.
Buildings from before the time of the Civil War take the place
of deer trails on the prairie.
Fonds and western settlement, bring cattle paths to
walk the animals to water.
Replacement and renewal.
Horse trails, give way to highways.
[Birds chirping]
The system of agriculture is what really built the rustic
roads, and they mean they were servicing small farms,
small family farms, and all that is changing very rapidly.
Fear is the texture of time passing.
Of changes, seasons and survival.
I read something just recently, another, or something
probably by Jerry Apps about the barns are gone and going.
[Birds chirping]
Fear they hang on, the red barns, blue barns,
old barns, round barns.
They tell a story that still continues, a story that
can be read from the road.
If you spend some time on them, you can hear some of these
voices and some of the things that just kind of soak into
the roads and are there until we decide in our wisdom to.
Take the curbs out of them and do bad things to them.
[Birds chirping]
Rustic roads retain their curves.
They are not generally the shortest
distance between two points.
They were built for comfort, not speed.
They follow a different path.
They are man-made, but they are spin-offs of natural things.
They tend to follow the hills and the valleys, and they
are not dictated by the need for high speed and tremendous
safety considerations.
This is not a place of speed and straight lines.
This is a place to get to, not through.
That's true.
You can chant, drive a rustic road without
stopping. You have to stop.
That's what they're for.
You have to stop.
You have to slow down to see,
or you might miss this.
[Birds chirping]
It is quiet in the wild heart of Wisconsin.
The wind rises and falls in the aspers and
pines of the Great Marsh.
It is so quiet, you can sometimes hear a leaf fall.
People who live here say it is like an empty canvas, clean
and white.
Sounds enter one of your time.
Lay down like paint.
[Birds chirping]
It is a simple sand road that runs through a
marsh, the Great Marsh.
So what part of the Great Marsh are we in right now?
We're on one little branch of it, one tiny
corner of it.
Got it.
It is a landscape that Faraka came to appreciate through
the lessons of her friend Michael Gough, who homesteaded
here over 20 years ago.
He has been her guide, a kind of marsh mentor.
Well, it's dry.
He has grown to love this landscape
and has passed along that regard to Faraka as
part of their friendship.
So when Faraka was asked to write about rustic roads,
she chose number 50, the old marsh road, to let other
travelers in on this secret.
The mysteries of this often maligned, little
understood landscape, Wisconsin's Great Marsh.
Lesson number one.
Listen.
[Birds chirping]
The first thing I noticed was how beautiful the sound
was. You hear it?
It's just beautiful.
It's so quieting.
And it brings with it this wonderful sense of calm.
[Birds chirping]
It's always here.
It's very abiding.
And I love that right away.
So that, of course, I said, "Well, what is the sound?
Where does it come from?
Why doesn't it have this quality?"
You know, one question leads to another.
Jack Pine Wind.
That's what it is.
The Jack Pine Wind.
It's a sound that is peculiar to the marsh road.
Because Jack Pine's and Jack Pine's and Marsh
road together and go together.
They're both tough, scrawny, unpopular creations.
Unpopular, perhaps, but very special to those who
listen, who choose to see.
It is all electric and singing.
This body of light and air and grass and
water that sways before us.
We are walking on water.
Is it wet?
No. It's just, as I said, we're just, you know, we never,
we're never very far away from the water.
I think if we had a shovel and we did one
shovelful, we'd have a puddle.
The very logs are soft as sponges and covered with
electric green mosses.
Everything is green and making a loose weave of wind and water.
Here is communion and community.
No wonder Whitman called his great pan to democracy leaves
of grass.
Where do we find the gallitarianism in its
original form, if not here, in the grasses of the marsh?
You can't help but be affected by it.
Of course there's sometimes a year when you
couldn't do that.
You'd fall in.
That's part of the lesson.
Watch where you're going.
Pick your steps with care.
It's a great teacher.
It seems very much like a bird.
To wet a wet meadow.
Leopold tells the story about how farmers used
to burn this every year.
In order to keep the earth, in order to rejuvenate it, make
better grass, make better hay.
What he called those the "Archadian days" when farmers
and cranes could live together on the marsh, prior to what he
also called the drainage dream at the turn of the century.
The marsh has been raked so many times.
Stripped, gouged, drained and burned,
in the effort, inevitably hudel to make it serve.
But nothing works.
It's very uselessness, protection.
There at squats, in the middle of
the best derri land in the upper Midwest, a foul-haired,
wrapped in a greasy shawl, who chooses to reveal her
glories to only a select few.
Lujes! It starts with the road,
of course.
All journeys start with the road.
But it is off the road.
Into the heart of the matter.
On this road, the great marsh, where the lessons are revealed.
Most of us, as we drive along in a car and see
this, we say, "Oh, I'm not going to walk this."
Let it bugging it.
It's murky.
But look at the experience.
How would we know that?
How would we hear the crackle of
this dry moss?
This defendant's grass and watch the wind blow.
If we didn't get out of here, we didn't look at it closely.
A closer look.
It's possible to speed past a rusted
road. Look what you'd miss.
[Music]
I speak of Wisconsin's green and gold fields, maple and
pine woods, gentle hills, red barn farms, and the solace
of water, which gives any road another incomparable
spiritual dimension.
[Music]
Silence becomes prayer, stories make their way.
I am both lost and on the road
again, on another journey.
Unlike black elks, red road, the sacred road
where harmony is restored.
[Music]
Fly has been a frequent traveler over the years,
but Wisconsin is home.
He remains rooted to this land.
He owns the details that are revealed to
the long-time resident.
Sites that are sharpened by repetition and time.
[Music]
I depend a lot on these roads, rustic and otherwise back
roads, roads that I don't even want to tell you about,
you know, that I can find.
That I would love to go to at this moment, at this
time, and this kind of light, because of the very
thing of finding a sense of what solace and movement.
[Music]
What you will find, what you come to know, those
special gifts that accrue over seasons, over years.
To know a road intimately, I think, is to know it
for years and to know it through all seasons.
And probably to drive, to experience another
form, but really to walk, to know what that will.
So much so that you can even remember the angle
of the sun of a certain time of the day, you know.
You want to go to that road at this hour, because
you know how beautiful it is, in all seasons, do it.
[Music]
The Rustic Roads program, they carried a seeds of its
own destruction, and it's very celebration of that
wish we wish to preserve.
It encourages more traffic.
[Music]
How to preserve, how to share.
How to share.
How to save these roads as rustic, a treasure
that is sometimes only seen in retrospect.
I spent a few summers in my boyhood and Michigan,
my grandmother had a farm out there, and all of
that comes back to me when I see these roads here.
I think again of that, and I think of what boyhood was.
I was alone, and this exploring roads like this, they were
all around, none of them were developed, you know.
And they found favorite spots.
If you happen to be walking a road that suddenly
went alongside a creek, I mean that was a marvelous
discovery, a miracle in itself.
And all those things stay with you.
It's important for kids to have that experience too,
I think for young people to know these places.
[Music]
In the end we are all left with those roads, real orally
remembered, at Carrias Hall, back to the nature of our cell.
Roads perhaps public, but essentially private, like
Kiwani counties, rustic road seven, which leads
inevitably to the solitary quest of self-discovery.
Here is one of the few partially gravel roads, so
reminiscent of the past.
Find yourself on this road and you're on your way.
[Music]
A road of whole pine, thistle farms, a field-stolen barn, and
a small bridge crossing a creek, cut in with trees, a flower
mill, a saw mill, wild laparue, wild grape, wild astor, wild
and real and old Wisconsin.
[Music]
A road that transports, but also lifts us beyond the surfaces,
to places almost inferior.
[Music]
This is the road we are always searching for, this one leading
us into and beyond ourselves.
[Music]
Time to break out the dirt evils.
[Music]
If you just took all the roads up here, that in my
view, I rustic, no people.
People, possibly with the ghosts of the past, the old loggers,
the old Indians, the old resort people, the old hunters and
fishers, you could fill a book.
Author George Vukaylek, filled many of them, writing about
Wisconsin's natural world.
He made his home in Madison, but
the North Woods, Wisconsin's great North Woods, always held
a special place in his heart.
[Music]
It can't be any more.
[Music]
They are pieces of our past, these roads, reminders, a way
to remember landscapes like the storied North Woods, this
place of escape and enchantment of retreat and renewal.
[Music]
Edith Friedrichsen has lived here in Star Lake in the
North Woods all her life.
On a cool day in the fall of
1994, Vukaylek came to visit.
[Music]
Edith Friedrichsen has lived here for the past 60
years. My father got in in '35 and he worked as long
as he could and my mother.
I came down here in '54.
She and her sister have run the place since 1954, a
fixed point all those years.
For the fishermen and women and tourists who make up
her trade.
There's so many people come back and say,
"Oh, you're still here."
It's a two-way street.
Visitors come back.
They even send drawings and paintings,
reminders of good times.
Are you in the picture?
Where are you?
With a red on there.
That's my sister in the doorway there.
Friedrichsen can paint a picture of the times when all
the roads up here were rustic.
I don't know.
It's a lot different than the old days.
How was the road in the old days?
Well, the roads weren't like this.
They were just old sand roads and just narrow roads
so hard and get through.
She can paint a picture of the logging days.
The times when railroads, not
roads, were the principal means of transportation, of
escape during a forest fire.
That was years and years ago when the milltone was here.
They had the trains hooked up ready to take people out one
time when the forest fires were bad, but they saved the town.
What would you like to happen to this place when
you don't run it anymore?
Well, I don't know what will happen to it.
It's just none of our family, you
know, to take over and it'll probably just sold them.
The end of it.
Season's journey.
Time passing.
[Music]
In the woods here, we'll find perhaps an old axe, perhaps
old bones, perhaps an old box saw, and always in this
country because it is rendered.
We will find tree stops.
We're loggers obviously had come through and just cut
these old giants leaving the stops but leaving markers,
leaving if you will, a remnant, a remnant of a past.
[Music]
Some people will come to it on wheels, be disappointed.
Hey, just another road.
Trees, you know, there's no McDonald's, nothing to do,
there's no casino, and they may not come that way again.
Other people will sense there is something here, maybe they will
park their cars, shut off the engine, and walk a block or two,
maybe a mile, maybe the walk off the roadway into the woods.
And within 40 yards of the road be in not only another
place but another time.
[Music]
You spend enough time in the woods and it'll grow on.
At first you fight if you're alone,
and then eventually you try to do that feeling because it's
like being alone in a church.
You are very aware that there's something here
bigger than all of us.
[Music]
This would be Vukalik's last fall in the north woods,
Winter came and Spring, and the following summer George
Vukalik died on the eve of his birthday.
He was 68 years old.
[Music]
It's negative, it's all that kind of stuff.
So we busier ourselves to keep
our minds off what we really should be thinking about.
We should be thinking about why we're here, why others were
here, what this rustic road means, what this renders mean.
We should be thinking about things I think that
are bigger than anything we've ever thought about.
Vukalik's writings about Wisconsin's rustic roads were
among his last published works.
Words and thoughts about roads and how to live that he
summed up one cool day in fall.
Park the car, walk, listen, listen to that wind.
Think about this place eight
weeks from now.
I think that gets you started.
[Music]
Where the road will take you.
Through the seasons, over time.
If you're looking for something more than simply
the shortest distance between two points, something that
can only be found when you slow down and look around.
Try rustic roads, Wisconsin's rustic roads.
[Music]