[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of Alliance Energy who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliance Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
[Music]
Hi, I'm Patty Low.
Welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm here at Parfrees Glen State
Natural Area in Sauc County.
We'll bring you more from the Glen throughout our program.
We'll take you halfway around the world to a
country where some Madison residents are sharing their
time to make a difference.
We'll also introduce you to a man who'd like to see changes
made in one of the state's more popular tourist destinations.
But first, Parfrees Glen is certainly a scenic area, but
could you depend on this wooded area for most of your food?
The Ashland County man in our next story would
see this landscape as a virtual smorgasbord.
[Music]
What do you see here?
To most people, it's just a tangle of green mess.
[Music]
I don't see a tangle of green.
I could just look around and then 15 seconds I identified
35 different plants, and it's not even conscious.
I couldn't, you know, think of the names that fast.
This is Red Mulberry.
Growing here among the Poison Ivy
is a plant called Hoppness.
This is a bass wood.
Sam Thayer's life is rooted in the landscapes of Wisconsin.
A walk in the woods is old home week for him.
Thayer can see the trees for the forest, in the
forest, and not just trees.
Sam Thayer is one of Wisconsin's best foragers.
Yeah, because this is the kind of place where I kind
of expect to find him.
When Thayer looks at the woods, he sees food.
This is an old specimen of chicken of the woods, or sulfur
shelf, which is a pretty well-known edible mushroom,
but this one is way too old to eat.
You want to get them really in the first day
or two, they come up.
It'll be bright orange on top, bright yellow underneath.
It's pretty hard to mistake them for anything else.
It's not just any old dinner, but a special kind of
fine dining, equal parts sustenance and spiritual quest.
To start, let's go back to that bass wood and see what
Thayer sees when he looks at that tangle of green.
But the young leaves of basswood, when they
first come out, are incredibly good salad plant.
The basswood flowers are good for present honey.
There's the little seed or nut of the basswood, which tastes
like a sunflower seed, and on the wood of a basswood tree,
there is a layer of kind of slushy material that
looks like sauerkraut.
And if for some reason you were peeling, you had to cut
down the tree, you could peel that off and scrape it
off with a knife or a spoon.
And it's delicious.
It tastes like kind of cucumberish, but sweet, and
it looks like sauerkraut.
It's remarkably good, and people are just, they're like, I
can't believe I'm eating some stuff scraped off of a basswood.
One tree turns light, and water, and soar into a smorgasbord.
Our forebearers used to know this sort of thing.
And part of Thayer's quest is to remind us that this
ancient art of foraging was one second nature for all of us.
And it seems that people today think about foraging for
wild food, and it scares them.
Because they see this as a complex tangle of green matter,
where in fact every single item can be instantly recognized,
and that's part of the complexity of the human
brain is being able to look around the landscape, and
just by these visual images, recognize this is that point.
This is that point.
And I'll keep my eyes open for hog peanut.
And it makes a lot of sense because through most of the
history of humans, that's all we did for a living,
every single one of us.
And so we are designed to be perfect in that
application of our brains.
We were designed for this.
The hog peanuts being elusive today.
To forage.
To look for plants that feed us.
That's the bean.
They taste just like beans there.
From hog peanuts to hackberries.
They found hackberry remains in almost every continent.
And in fact, one of the original site
of Peking Man or Java Man, homo erectus, there was hackberry
seeds from 500,000 years ago.
There is Wisconsin's wizard of wild foods.
Self-taught, he is a high school graduate who has published
an international journal on foraging conducts classes
and is now writing a book on these foods of the wild.
I've been doing this wild food stuff my whole life.
It makes me happy to realize that there's
food all over the place.
I mean, there is no place you can go where there is
not something edible close to you once you know what
that is and how it's used.
So is a salad of wild greens as good as store bought?
They are suspects.
It's even better.
The vast majority of the plants out there have not been tested
for the nutritional qualities.
But those that have been have been shown to be on average
two to two and a half times as high in vitamins and minerals
as similar domestic foods.
And that's really significant.
So what does they are eat?
What does he gather?
On a day and October, the first food he forged for
was not too surprising.
What was a bit surprising was his method of retrieval.
See what this does.
Q the nut bat.
If there's more acorns up there, you can sometimes you
get down a good like four or five hundred and one throw.
And what they are new about collecting.
But the first rule of acorn collecting is that you never
ever collect an acorn to eat that has the cap attached.
That means that that is a spoiled acorn.
The October harvest also includes a plant that they are
collect from the Mississippi River called the Arrowroot.
This is top side.
Down below, it grows a tuber called Wapato.
Some call it Indian potatoes.
It is plantable.
If you look out here, you can see there's about three
or four hundred acres of wetland here and about two
thirds of that is Wapato.
And I mean pure stands of Wapato.
So what do you do with Wapato?
I peel them and then I'll boil them and mash
them to make like a mash.
It's very much like mash potatoes.
This is what Wapato looks like.
You go into the Wapato marsh.
It feels nice and a hot day like this.
This is how you get it by hand.
Or flip.
You kick around in the mud and you'll work down to the
level where the tubers are.
Because they are usually about 12 to 18 inches
underneath the mud.
And then when you get down to the tubers on, you fan
the mud and the mud that clings to these you fan
it off and they float up.
All this work and a very tangible reward.
Foraging takes time.
This is no quick trip.
It's one eight from the world of fast food and
that's fine with them.
I do it because I like to do it.
I don't worry or fret too much about how much time
I'm spending doing it.
It's always disturbed me a little bit when I talk to
people about collecting wild stuff that they seem almost
obsessed with the amount of time that it takes to be.
I have never talked to a deer hunter who was upset that he
spent so much time in the woods.
I have never talked to a fisherman who said darn it, it
takes so long to get a walleye.
I mean, that's just doesn't enter their mind and it
doesn't enter my mind.
To me, food is kind of the essence of life.
Food is what connects you to the landscape that you live on.
Try to get away.
It's the same kind of satisfaction that people
get when they go hunting or fishing or that they get out
of picking apples, the pick your own experience that are
orchard or in their garden.
I mean, it's that same connection to what really
matters because sometimes people seem to forget
that food really matters.
What really matters?
Food really matters.
And in this age of convenience and speed,
the work is a sweet reminder that food is about more
than consumption, that the harvest connects us to
home, our original home, this planet that feeds us.
[Music]
Our next story extends the Wisconsin connection almost
2,000 miles across the globe.
Last June, a group of teenagers from Crossroads Church and
Madison traveled to Southern Bay Lees, not for vacation,
but to extend a helping hand.
[Music]
Me and 35 other people from Crossroads Church went on a
youth group mission trip to Belize Central America and did
vacation by old school and built pews in a church in the
Southern District of Belize.
[Music]
Belize is located on the Caribbean coast of Central
America right next to Mexico and Guatemala.
And they speak English because it's a British
Commonwealth. It was once a British colony, but in 1981,
the British left leaving their English language there.
[Music]
We met here at Crossroads Church at two in the morning.
There were 36 people that went along, 2016's and 10 adults.
And we all piled in the bands of all the people signed in
at the airport and got on our plane and we had to fly down
the Charlotte North Carolina.
And we took another plane down to Belize City.
We got off the plane and it was just like a heat wave hit us.
And you know, then you have to go through customs
and you're thinking, "What am I doing here?"
Because it's nothing like America.
There's the customs you have to wait
in line and there's three tables to get through.
And after that we had a six hour bus ride down to the
place that we were staying, which is in Southern Belize,
over pretty rough roads.
[Music]
Probably an hour and a half into it.
It started rain so we had to close up all the windows.
And that got really hot.
So it was pretty much just sleeping and
it was quite packed.
[Music]
When we got there, you know, we had to go get our
beds ready and we had to sleep in mosquito netting.
[Music]
The next day we got out to the villages and you saw the
people in that screwfuts and these little 20 by 10 huts.
And they had almost nothing and it just made you open your eyes.
I think the thing that surprised me the most
when we got here was the people's living conditions.
I knew that it wasn't going to be anything like in the US.
But especially when we got here just to see how little they
had but yet how happy they were.
Well the thing that surprised me the most when we got there
was how nice the people were.
We really didn't expect to be welcomed that warmly.
[Music]
Face screw it here and screw it there.
We were building pews for two churches which that
changed the three churches.
But we had gotten all the lumber and Jeff and Con
were our builders and then we started building the
pews for these churches and some of the kids helped.
[Music]
And the wood we would get with.
I went to school bus that we had and we'd stack it in the school
bus and have to unload it.
It was a lot of work.
Well the main thing that really surprised me when we
got to the least was all the bugs and all the moss
crawling all over in our beds.
And the bathrooms, they were crawling with things that
we didn't even know and salmanders and translas and
really really gross stuff.
Well probably halfway through the week I really started
craving some fast food because all we had was a kitchen and
just food down there which wasn't high quality or anything.
So we had oatmeal for breakfast and peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches for lunch.
[Music]
Every day we had drive-out to the villages and get
the kids to come which the first day we had to go door
to door and get the kids.
But as the week progressed we had, they saw our van coming
and they, because there's not much traffic they knew
it was us and they came running down to the church.
But then every day we would have a story and a craft for
them and we would be the story and they'd all be sitting on
these little benches probably five or six with 50 kids.
And we would hand out a craft and they'd all be
crowding around you trying to get part of the craft and
you could tell that they appreciated what we were doing.
[Music]
Every day we did singing too before we did the stories and
we'd have two or three people lead it and like a tar usually
and all the kids we would try to figure out songs that they
knew and then all the little kids would sing along with it.
[Music]
I think almost everything we did in the villages
was an accomplishment just in the way we did it.
I mean the generator that we used to help build a church
wasn't working when we got there and Jeff, our builder,
worked on it for two days and finally got it running.
So without that we would not have been able to build a
church and without doing BBS we wouldn't have found out that
the church needed to be built.
So I mean it all came together very well.
We worked so hard and sweated so much and the people
that I work with I'll always remember working with them.
[Music]
We had dentists come down and they set up a little dentist
station in a little hut behind the place we stayed
and they had a dentist chair and a light and that was it.
So they had to bring down their own tools and everything and it
was like bare bones dentistry.
[Music]
On the road to one of the villages there was a waterfall
that we could go swimming at and most of the days that
we had time we would stop at the waterfall and pool our.
[Music]
Kids of Belize taught me humbleness because you know
you step out of the bus and they have just a bunch of
huts and they're their homes and their homes are the size
of maybe a bedroom and they have almost 10 people staying
in one of those little huts.
And I mean it just teaches you that you should be
grateful for what you have.
[Music]
Like the folks who traveled to Belize the door county man
in our next story is also trying to make a difference.
Norbert Bligh is using the written word to sound a warning
against over development.
[Music]
The rest of the countryside in door county inspires
writer Norbert Bligh.
A sunsad walk across Timberline into the field
toward Gus Beehives.
I stopped to take in the stone fence running beside
the purple fizzle, the queen Anne's lace, the field of it.
In all of it touched in the falling orange light, moving
as only stone fences move, cradling purple fizzle and white
lace to the round forms, the openings of laughter and size.
Bligh moved to Ellison Bay near the tip of door
county, 35 years ago.
He came here for solitude and quickly fell in love
in love with the land and the people who live here.
This is a really tough land, a very poor land and I hate to see
those fences desecrated anyway because they're such symbols
to what this culture was like and what these people
had to do to survive.
In one essay, Bligh remembers the words and elderly
neighbor related to him.
We had dances around here then.
Jenny would play her mandolin and one of my friends
would play the concertina.
I can't remember his name anymore.
We had good times right here in the house.
They'd get up on the kitchen table to play and we'd dance.
I was a good dancer.
All the woman wanted to dance with Charlie.
Most of us is gone now.
She was, I miss them.
Well Charlie Rutt was one of the first people I got to know.
He was very lonely and lost his wife.
I think about him almost every year because, especially
on this time of year, because I would come out
in the morning and that by the door would be a
quarter of strawberries or a few weeks later
raspberries, you know.
And he would just quietly leave him there and go on his way.
Bligh holds up and has converted chicken coop to ride.
He now has 17 books in print.
Stores that bring to life, people in places.
In Chicago, his boyhood home.
And more recently, his adopted home, Door County.
His stories have burned him a reputation.
I remember I had one guy come here at five o'clock
in the morning and he was yelling on a driveway
for me to take down his story.
He came all the way from Sturgeon Bay.
And he was standing on the driveway yelling,
"No, no, no, no, no."
And what the hell?
And my wife at that time was all upset.
And I said, "No, no, he just wants to talk."
Over the years, Bligh has seen changes in Door County.
Changes he feels have destroyed the rustic
beauty of the peninsula.
At first, he kept his observations to his books.
The Cathedral of Trees had been destroyed.
Trees that had once lifted and cradled had been
chained soar down to ragged and smooth stumps.
They have torn open the entire roof as it were and
destroyed the privacy and soft light of the road.
Bligh's books didn't seem to hit people hard enough.
Didn't slow down the pace of development.
So he returned to this roots.
He began his writing career as a freelance columnist for the
major newspapers in Chicago.
This time, the newspaper he chose was the
local shoppers guide.
A free newspaper distributed countywide.
A little light bulb went on and I thought, "Why not
write for the shopper?"
Which goes into every mailbox in the county.
You're going to be in there whether they like you or not.
And yet I like the idea of the circulation and
I like the audience.
It wasn't long before Bligh had a new reputation.
That of social critic, which put him at odds with some
residents and business owners.
I wasn't not writing just about the wonderful people
and the wonderful landscape.
But I was beginning to say, "Hey, everybody's not
wonderful here and hey, you're screwing up this place."
"Scruing up this place."
To Bligh, screwing up this place means both the
silly and the significant.
Silly in the form of tourist attractions taken to an extreme.
Yesterday I was driving down the road and thinking of what's
the latest thing that I've seen.
That's different here.
I think I got to do an essay on rural surreal because
suddenly surrealism has entered the landscape here.
But I mean, there's somebody who's got two bird houses
that are dressed like two people standing under road.
Yeah, this is surreal.
This is rural surreal.
And the tourist is flocked and is crappy.
Their cameras are out there.
I'll say, "Hey, it's just goofy."
Now I see my old favorite garage in Harlem,
Elsen Bay, Gus Clinkies.
They've got an old truck sitting out in front of there.
An old pickup truck filled with geraniums
and the bed of the truck.
Now that is not Gus Clinkies.
The last thing Gus Clinkies would have had in this
truck out there, you see.
So that to me is rural surreal, too.
A more significant problem to Bligh is uncontrolled grow.
Grow epitomized by the proliferation
of expensive condos.
But as the wealthy come in, they redefine the landscape and give
it a whole different culture.
And I began to see the real threat of the loss
of the way of life here.
Through these condos cropping up, people coming in, living
for just a part of each year and then going off the
Florida for the winter.
People never really understanding the community
or the way of life.
Bligh's column was sometimes caustic and often used
satire to make a point.
He once suggested sealing off the north end of
the Sturgeon Bay Bridge and ripping up all the
roads into our county.
Sentiments, newspaper advertisers, took seriously.
We should break up these roads, we should go back
to dirt roads, we should go back to gravel and dirt.
And that'll keep the BMWs out of here and that'll keep
all these people out of here.
? Hell in my be the highway to heaven ?
? Headed my be the road to where ?
? But this is the song for strangers in the country ?
After a few months, Bligh was back to writing books.
The newspaper canceled his columns.
Everywhere in America, almost every in America, there
is censorship in a sense.
There are very few papers that allow a writer to
say what's on his mind.
I love this quote to a very golden freedom of expression
and the first amendment apply only if you own the newspaper.
And that's the truth.
But Bligh was widely.
Instead of accepting rejection,
he took a different tent.
Bligh submitted his column under a pen name, the coyote.
And the coyote is the author eagle.
He's going to say whatever's on his mind.
He's a primitive.
He lives here up in the rural.
He comes and goes when you at least know it.
And he was a wonderful vehicle for me to get criticism out.
Writing as the coyote, Bligh attacks what he calls the
county's gross growth game, led by the Chamber of Commerce.
But soon the coyote was censored too.
Today, he can only be found howling on the web.
But Bligh plans to get the last word.
He says that one day he'll finish his novel, which has
been ten years in the making.
A novel about the foibles of fictional characters in a place
Norbert Bligh calls the county of conspicuous consumption.
Where all the men are rich and all the women play golf and
all the children are confused.
And all the land grieves in memory of what used to be.
Norbert Bligh also teaches a week-long
writing class each summer.
You can find more information about that and all of our
reports by logging on to our website at www.org-in-wisconsin.
You can also find more information there about
parfrees-glenn and other natural areas in Wisconsin.
Thanks for joining us for this special summer
edition of In Wisconsin.
We leave you now with more scenes from parfrees-glenn.
I'm Patty Low.
Good night.
[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the
people of Alliance Energy, who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliance Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web.
[Music]