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Coming up in Wisconsin, they could train
anywhere in the world, but these Olympic
hopefuls choose a player.
Water levels in Lake Michigan continue to drop
with dramatic consequences and the dance of the whooping
crane returns to our state.
It's all ahead in Wisconsin.
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
Every week we travel throughout the state to bring you a
variety of stories about life here in Wisconsin.
Tonight we start in O'Clair.
That's where two long distance runners from Kenya have
decided to do their training for international competition.
From Kenya to O'Clair, sounds like an odd choice,
but the two aspiring Olympians have compelling reasons
for choosing to move here.
Reporter Andy Sof has their story.
Maybe your grandfather told you stories of
walking miles to school.
That's how Vince Tamu and his training partner
Larry and Boge grew up.
But that was in Kenya, and they didn't walk.
They ran.
Miles from home to school.
They've kept running on a course that has
brought them to O'Clair and will lead they
hope to the Olympics.
Olympics is a big event.
Olympics are big.
It's big.
It's way, way, way big.
That's the goal for everybody.
That's the dream.
That is the way Tows of Athletics.
So you go to an Olympics, you gotta be the best.
That's why we want to be the best.
That training has taken place in the parks and
countryside around O'Clair since the pair moved
to Wisconsin from the Twin Cities last spring.
When we drove down here on our way to Green Bay,
I just fell in love with this because it was
like a countryside and it kind of reflected the
African kind of setting where we train back at
home. It's almost like this.
Western Wisconsin's rolling hills may resemble
their Ken in home, but the lifestyles
are worlds apart.
Being that we live in the hills, there's no pumping of water.
You have to go down there, either fetch some
water, up up the hill.
Once you're done with the water, you need some cooking water.
So that kind of lifestyle, we grew up with that.
So one way or the other, we were doing some gym,
some weight lifting, which is now a gym here.
The gym here is a big part of their training today,
but it was the rural Ken in way of life that
conditioned Temu and Emboga and so many of their
countrymen to excel at running.
The way we were brought up, the way our lifestyle, the culture,
the food that we eat, which is typically ripe
food right from the farm, which is almost common
to what is in Wisconsin.
You're getting basically everything fresh from the farm.
So that kind of lifestyle kind of builds up for what
we're experiencing right now.
Kenya has built up a tradition of winning races
in a ranking of the last centuries top
athletic dynasties, sports illustrated put
Ken in runners ahead of Lombardi's Packers.
They wrote, "It started with the Ftali Temu, Vince's father."
"My dad was the first African, Dwin and Olympic gold medal.
The first Kenyan."
And Mexico City's 1968 Olympics, he won the 10,000 meters.
Those games are remembered for this bold gesture of black
power by two American sprinters.
But Nafthali Temu's victory for his newly independent nation
also signaled a changing world.
During those old times, the fame was the best.
You are faster than anybody.
And you are doing it for your country because
you are a Kenyan.
You are proud to be a Kenyan and you are proud
to run as a Kenyan.
But for Vince Temu, his father's legacy is bittersweet.
Nafthali Temu's achievement was largely forgotten
until his recent death.
"When my dad did what he did and nothing was done to him,
or was done to those like him who put the country
into the global map, it's like you see, it kind of
discouraged those old guys, the old athletes who did
a lot for the country, unlike we, the young guys
who are coming up doing a lot for our ups, because
we're running for money, we're not running for
the fame of the country.
Right now, that's the focus of one Americanian athlete."
In this country, athletes are usually advised to
get an education for a career to fall back on.
But in Kenya, where unemployment is sky high,
even among college graduates like Vince and Larry,
for some competitive running becomes the fallback career.
"We are from a very poor economy.
Then someone shoots from that poor economy by running.
Then he becomes like the Tiger Woods."
So Kenyan runners are training all over the world,
and using the worldwide web to find races
that offer cash prizes, like the Fox City's
marathon, where last year, Taemun and Boge finished
one, too, earning a couple of thousand dollars.
But not many runners would choose to declare to train.
Most head to the mountains, where high altitudes forced
the body to work harder.
But for these two, it's about attitude, not altitude,
and they welcome the cold weather, another
way to adapt the body.
"Winter is a poor man's altitude.
And you don't need to run hard.
You just run, you know, just any way you want.
You just run for down, run, for down.
That's it.
It's fun."
"Bun and very hard work are what life is about
for these two Kenyans.
And it seems, oh, Claire, is the place to live it."
"People are so welcoming, they're really encouraging.
America, starting with, with concern,
will always give you the opportunity.
We'll always give you the environment.
They'll make you grow.
They'll like, there you are.
We support you.
Go ahead and do it.
As long as it's the right thing for you to do,
and as long as you know you can achieve it.
Go ahead and achieve your goal."
The two will be working to achieve their next goal.
At the end of the month, that's when they compete
in the Fox City's marathon.
Well, let you know how they do.
Still to come, a Madison artist folds paper into art
and shares an international message of peace.
That's ahead in Wisconsin.
In 1986, a Wisconsin Public Television crew
chronicled the problem of shoreline erosion
along Lake Michigan.
That erosion was the result of record high water levels.
17 years later, times have changed.
Now, Lake levels are heading for record lows.
Reporter Art Hackett recently retraced that earlier trip,
revisiting Lake Side landmarks then and now.
[music]
At the present time on Lake Michigan, we have water levels
that have not been experienced for this time of the year
in the last 125 years.
In 1986, the people who lived along Lake Michigan
were warring with the water.
The water was winning.
At Whitefish Dune State Park, there was no beach.
Before we had some nice flat sandy areas
and it just came up probably a couple of feet
and washed out to the sand.
[music]
Because the angle of the beach, of course, is so slight there,
it doesn't have to drop very much to make quite a difference
in the amount of beach that it exposes.
But the water level in Lake Michigan has dropped a whole lot
over the past 17 years.
According to the US Army Corps of Engineers,
the Lake level is 4 and a half feet below 1986's
record high watermark.
For our situation here at Whitefish Dune,
it really doesn't hurt us because it just
gives us more beach, more room for people
to move around.
And conditions are better for wildlife, too.
Water resource specialists say the fluctuating water levels
are actually good for the wildlife habitats
along the shore.
Right now we would be and we are in a period of our rejuvenation
of these wetlands.
Many coastal wetlands along the Great Lakes,
particularly here on Green Bay, were lost during years
of extreme high water and particularly when the
water level is persisted at high levels for many years.
But as the water has receded in recent years,
the landscape has changed.
Some of the places we visited in 1986 were
now hard to recognize.
A boat ramp doesn't look like a boat ramp if it's
stranded on dry land.
Along Green Bay near Swamico, the water used to be
nearly even with the road.
Today what used to be part of the bay is now
a field of captails.
Jack Schmidt's boat ramp leads nowhere.
I can't use my boat ramp or whatever.
No, I like it where we got the water.
And now we're starting to get the weeds growing again
that the carp took out nicely for us.
The beach is nice, but it ain't going to be if
the water stays down this low.
The water is so low you can see some springs on the Bay's floor.
Schmidt's has seen the other extreme,
this 1973 photo taken from almost exactly the
same place we took hours, chose about a foot of
water across the road.
No, I like the water about two to three feet higher
than it is right now.
That's ideal.
But statistics show that if you live next to Lake Michigan,
you better learn to live with changing water levels.
The Great Lakes typically rise and fall by
about five feet or more on a long-term average.
And we're just at the low end of the cycle,
which we have not been at for almost 30 years.
The lake level has dropped nearly a foot
in just the last year.
Why? There have been dry winters in the past few years,
and they were also warmer than usual.
That meant more lake surface was without ice cover,
allowing the water to evaporate.
Evaporation can reduce the lake levels by as
much as an inch per week in cold weather
in the wintertime.
And that is a far greater drop in a much shorter period of time
than you would experience from any diversions.
That can amount to something like 780
billion gallons of water just by lowering the
lakes by one inch.
While the current conditions annoy homeowners along the lake
and cause economic pain for those who operate
late-going freighters, the high water brought
pain of its own.
In 1986, the village of Cleveland was worried
their sewage treatment plant would be inundated
by rising water.
They moved the plant.
But the lake moved back too.
Now there's just a shallow stream running past the point
where the plant used to be.
Village officials were also worried about the
stretch of county road LS falling off the bluff.
Though the waters receded, the road is still at risk.
Wave action ate away the base of the bluff years ago.
But the other problem is water attacking the bluff from within.
Expresses itself at the face of the bluff.
And it's acts like a lubricant.
And over time, if there's too much weight
and not enough support below it, it'll slide or slump.
The question is whether it's better to stabilize the bluff
or just admit defeat and move the road further back.
No one knows whether the lake levels will go back
up or go further down.
Seagrant Researcher Victoria Harris says she's
betting on further down.
The predictions, long-term predictions with global
warming are perhaps of more concern because
it's predicted that it's possible we will have
more of these alineal events, which could drive
the lake levels even lower than we have seen them in human
history here on Green Bay.
Of course, they are just predictions.
But it appears that we could go lower by two to four feet,
perhaps, in the Great Lakes over the next 30 years.
If those predictions come true, the days when
men with heavy equipment built walls of rock to protect
cottages from crashing waves will fade into memory.
When people see the rocks, maybe they'll
assume they were put there to control drifting
sand dunes instead.
Like Michigan's water level needs to drop only
another seven inches to reach the all-time
record low set in 1964.
In other environmental news, whooping cranes are making
a return to our state.
There were only an estimated 21 wild cranes at one
time in the entire world.
Now the birds are making a comeback with a few dozen of
them calling Wisconsin home.
Get ready to take flight and enjoy the dance
of the whooping crane.
[Music]
In a farmer's field in southern Wisconsin on a day in June,
witness something remarkable.
[Music]
A return, the return of the whooping crane to Wisconsin.
The whooping crane is one of the rarest birds in
the world at one time.
They numbered only 21 birds in the wild.
Laraphonda of the International Crane Foundation tracks
Wisconsin's population of whooping cranes.
[Music]
Today in this field, that's six birds out of the only
36 or so that migrate in and out of the state.
But call Wisconsin home.
Worldwide, the birds numbers are small.
There are only 400, including those in zoos,
free-flying whooping cranes, number less than 200.
[Music]
The birds themselves are massive.
They are definitely not sparrow-sized.
The whooping crane stands up to about five feet tall.
It has snow white feathers and black primary wing tips.
And it has a black triangular mask across its space and a
red patch on top of its head.
They are distinctive, hard to miss, trucking
across the landscape.
But not so easy to find.
It's a typical migration day.
They can fly up to about 200 miles a day,
but it can depend on what kind of tailwind they have,
what kind of thermal activity they have to soar on.
This is Alfando, Spencer Days, tracking the whoopers as
they fly through the skies, and noting their social
behavior on the ground.
Take the subject of the bird's dancing, the meaning of which
may be much more than social.
They dance when they're nervous, too.
Dance can mean several different things.
They can dance to be aggressive
or dance to relieve stress and things like that.
So it's just dependent on the context.
The context here may be one of territory.
The whoopers sight arrival, a pair of sandhill cranes, and
then react to the intrusion.
And dance at the conclusion.
[Music]
Fondo's fieldwork is part of a reintroduction project that
has been years in the making and will last many more.
The project includes a flock of state and federal
agencies, one of Fondo's collaborators, Molly Mel, of
the Nacita Wildlife Refuge.
Our long-term goal is to have 125 birds migrating between
Nacita National Wildlife Refuge and Chazooid's Ghan
National Wildlife Refuge.
A flock of about 125 again, with 25 breeding pairs.
Of course, we'd be happier with more than that.
We'll be monitoring this for at least another 10 years.
In danger to Nacita, the cranes may be forced to confront
civilization during the long migration from here to Florida,
or in this day's pursuit of bugs in a farmer's plowed fields.
But the researchers ask, "If you see them, stay a
distance away.
Keep them wide."
[Music]
And enjoy their remarkable return.
I'm Gibson Bird.
I hope you're not be excited to see this creature
that we thought we were going to lose altogether.
And now it's back and so far so good.
We hope it will thrive.
I mean, we're watching history and the making, and we're
part of something that's going to have a planetary impact.
I mean, it's reintroducing and trying to save the
species for the world.
[Music]
Last week, we reflected back on the way the world has changed
since September 11, 2001.
There have been many memorials organized in the two years since
that terrible terrorist event.
One especially striking tribute idea was created by 12-year-old
Laura Hermanns of Racine.
Here is Hermann's memorial to peace as told in her words.
[Music]
We wanted to find some kind of way we could show that
we cared about everyone that had died and a way to
help people sort of heal.
So we got our idea from a story called, well, the
Thousand Paper Cranes.
It came from Japan about a girl who folded a thousand paper
cranes because in Japan, the gods would grant your wish
if you folded those cranes.
So we used that as our symbol and we started, we got
churches, schools, all places, all over the scene to come
and help us fold these cranes.
We had lots of different materials used to
make the cranes.
Regular paper, we've had netting, wrapping
paper, all sorts of stuff.
And what some people did was they would write a
prayer on the paper that they used to make the crane.
They would fold it out so actually on some of the cranes
there's prayers inside of the cranes that we wanted to share
with the people in New York and people who had lost someone.
[Music]
Laura Hermanns, peace crane exhibit, traveled throughout New
York and is now on display at the Racine County Courthouse.
You can see it there until the end of the month.
The peace crane may be the most well-known type of
origami, but some even take the paper artist step further.
We'd like to introduce you to a Madison artist who folds paper
into delightful, surprising and sometimes healing creations.
[Music]
Folded paper frogs create a symphony of sound in this fun
origami fantasy by Madison artist Ruth Ann Besman.
For Besman, the process is just as enjoyable as the end product.
It's just a wonderful feeling that one has in
the experience of folding.
The waltzers demonstrate the dynamics possible with
what is, after all, an inanimate object, paper.
It's folded out of one piece of paper without
the use of scissors.
And there's a lot of movement to it.
I think that's probably one of my favorite.
It's very hard to do.
[Music]
The dinosaur skeletons also, a favorite, he's the
hardest model I've ever done.
There are 21 sheets of paper, squared pieces of
paper, individually folded and then connected together.
Puer origami boasts no scissors or glue, but there's
another type of folding.
It's called Kira-gami and allows
for splitting the paper.
This technique makes it possible to fold figures that
retain tiny paper connections.
So that if I were to unfold all of these cranes and the
mother crane in the middle here, we would still have
a square piece of paper.
They're still connected.
[Music]
Bessman has traveled to many countries, including
six trips to Japan, to learn from origami masters.
Her favorite teacher, Toshia Takahama, designed origami
dolls made with layers of paper.
If you notice on the Empress here, there are five different
colors, different sheets of paper that have been used
and they've been layered together and folded together
to make the completed model.
For instance, the hair is black, the face is white, coming on
down to the undergarments of red and green, and then the
kimono paper, the colorful washi pattern paper on the outside.
To see how they all have been folded together, we
can just quickly open up the sleeve a bit and you
can see all the separate layers of the paper and the
different colors of the paper.
After years spent perfecting the execution of other
people's designs, Bessman came up with some of her
own. Her three-dimensional greeting cards won an
International Award in Japan.
And then they're on display in the world origami
exhibition in Japan and they now have a museum where
they place all the winners.
We are going to use scissors and we aren't going to use glue.
All we're going to do is use a piece of paper and our fingers.
In addition to learning new techniques and creating her own
designs, Bessman loves to bring others into the origami fold.
That's the magic of being able to share that moment
with everybody and the excitement that's generated
and the idea that it's possible, anybody can do it.
And I see that we have all kinds of students here,
different ages from, I don't know how the youngest is and
not how the oldest is, but I see a lot of you out here.
So I'm going to be the only teacher that will ever
tell you that it's okay to copy your neighbor's paper.
All right, because we share what we know with one another.
Historically, the origami crane was seen as a symbol
of good luck and long life, but after the devastation
of the atomic bomb in Japan, it took on a new meaning.
A young Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki added a wish
for world peace in exchange for folding a thousand cranes.
She died of leukemia before completing her
task, but her classmates finished them for her.
And there is a wonderful statue of Sadako holding this crane
above her head in Hiroshima.
It's called a Peace Park and today thousands of
children send thousands of cranes promoting peace in
hopes for a better world.
Besmen took inspiration from Sadako's story.
In a project she created for children at the University
Hospital in Madison, she helped young hospital
patients put together an origami peace tree, decorated
with a thousand cranes.
We had about 44 kids participate in the project.
Most of them were terminally ill and they
had to fold a thousand cranes.
They folded different size cranes, different papers
they used, some with the design, with the Mickey Mouse
on it, some with foils, some out of wrapping papers.
There was a girl who had folded only one crane and it
happened to be the red crane.
And then she died soon after she made that crane.
So I thought we should only have one
red crane for this girl and we would highlight that crane
with the stories around it.
I'd like to think that origami became something
special in their last years.
That was meaningful for them and the enjoyment that they had.
So I need some helpers to help me pass out the nap.
I always love your help.
You had the first hand up.
You too.
Thank you.
And you are over here.
Thank you.
I'd love if you help out.
For Besmen, the enjoyment of origami is about more than the
finished object as a chance to create common ground and
connect with other people.
But when we get together, we're sharing and we're just
enjoying that moment.
And that's what it's all about.
You can learn more about origami or any of our stories tonight
by checking out our website.
Our address is wpt.org/inwisconsin.
Thanks for joining us.
We hope to see you again next
week. We leave you now with a walk through Pewitt's
Nest in Sock County.
I'm Patty Lo.
Good night.