[Music]
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
Each week we bring you stories about the
people and issues in our state.
This week...
You're to place it to hunt for us.
Ordinary places in Adams County.
And there are two times the hunting
atoms, ordinary times, and when the tamer acts are
smokey gold.
Celebrate the words of Aldo Leopold
as his classic book finds voice with young and old.
Join members of the Molec Chippewa tribe as they
battle to save an ancient tradition and travel with
Wakashaw residents bringing aid to the tsunami ravaged
area of Samatra.
We'll have all that plus an
update on a couple of stories about owls and
lucky monkeys in Wisconsin.
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of a
lion's energy who bring safe, reliable, and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods, and
life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lion's energy offering energy saving ideas
on the web.
It's been just over two months since the
earthquake and resulting tsunami devastated many
areas of Southeast Asia.
Last month, Elmbrook Church in Wakashaw County
set a group of five missionaries to help in the
tsunami relief effort.
The group spent two weeks in
Banda Ace, a city in Samatra, only 100 miles from the
epicenter of the earthquake.
In Wisconsin producer assistant Lindsay Weiss brings us
their pictures and first hand account from
that ravaged area.
For about probably seven or eight months we had been
planning to go over and just work in the area of
Samatra. As you're well aware, everything changed.
The morning of December 26th in Ace province and
several other places in the world with the earthquake
and resulting tsunami.
So our task changed from coming along and working
alongside people that we've known over there for years to
one of doing not rescue but relief work over
in the Banda Ace area of Samatra.
Getting there, I realized that this place was
really hit with an earthquake and then I was told five
minutes later this wave coming in the speed of a jet
just covered almost more than half of the city
and it was overwhelming.
My expectation was to to work with survivors.
To meet people who survived, to hear their stories, to help them
hopefully through grieving and things in that order.
What really surprised me was how a month later very
little was done to the city.
Only because there's just nobody there.
And we also went along the coastline and saw
just entire areas wiped out, no population and that
surprised me.
I thought I would see more survivors.
It's just overwhelming what they
experienced and the loss was obviously not coming
back. They can rebuild some homes but when you lose your
spouse and your children or your parents or siblings
it's a a whole different matter.
Almost every single man I talked to had
losses, wife and children except just one man in
particular as a fisherman but he was in his village
and he had about a four-year-old boy with him and
that boy was really hanging on tight to his dad.
Apparently the wave came in and it sucked him back
out into the ocean and it sucked him back on
shore then back out into the ocean and he said this was
like three four kilometers out in the ocean and finally
there's a suck back and they held on to a tree.
How about his entire family?
Russ's family perished.
I met a man on a bus one day who had lost 130 of
his 142 family members, brother-loss cousins, etc.
extended family including his wife and children were gone.
A child six-month old was caught up on the top of a palm tree
and stuck and held there by his diaper and lived.
The stories are incredible.
Every family's got these
stories. Entire family were wiped out.
Entire extended families because
in that age and culture many of them lived together.
You know, grandpa's, grandma's cousins and things
in that order and to see literally probably hundreds
were miles of this city just leveled and then the
sea, the the debris that was pushed into the other section
of this city and people were caught in that entrapped
and then the sea, these little signs everywhere.
Corps, corpse, corpse, corpse, you know, you know that
it was just overwhelmed and our team was quiet.
When you're going around the
city it wasn't a chatty thing.
It was a time it was just everybody was just
quiet and introspective and later we had to talk
about it and we all cried.
We were kind of searching for analogies when we got
there. What could we compare this to?
Nothing we had ever seen.
We had seen historically where in Hiroshima
80,000 people died instantly.
Well it turned out to be about three times that many
in a very short time frame.
In the Ache province.
There's very very little standing
up probably half a dozen buildings in a in an area
of many square miles that we're just part of them.
We're still vertically standing other than that it's just
two-dimensional flat and full of small things like we
found there are small bracelets of children, flip flops,
other personal effects of families where
they used to live.
They're broken VCRs TV sets silverware curtains clothing
and just things as if one of our houses was labeled.
And then when the wave came it wasn't a Hollywood wave
where this one wave comes and destroys everything.
We were told that this wave
came back and forth for eight hours and it just kept
chewing up everything and tearing up everything.
You know one village would walk through there about
a thousand people lived in that village.
There were 237 survivors.
They have not yet found about 35 of the bodies of their
village so the villagers don't want to work their
fish ponds because they think there's a
might be a body in it.
They don't want to rebuild the dams and dicks because
you know they they want to make sure they get that all
cleared before they go back.
Situations like this always take me up a level faith-wise.
It teaches me that life is indeed a
hey it can be a tenuous string it can be a mist that
appears for a while that's gone and it can happen
to hundreds of thousands of people in an instant.
I love people you know working where I work but you
can get so caught up in the busyness of everything
every day.
I realize how important people are
and they help them.
The other thing is how precious your family is.
They're precious.
They can be gone any minute so you
appreciate them as you're there with them and
they're very important.
We change gears now for an annual Columbia
County celebration.
The citizens of Lodi gather during the first weekend
of March to read author Aldo Leopold's a San County
Almanac. They read the entire book out loud at the
public library.
Producer Joanne Garrett discovered
that Leopold's fans used the weekend to honor a state
hero who forged many of the principles of wildlife
management and wilderness preservation.
It's the first weekend in March.
And in a large barn in Lodi these people
are building benches.
No if you just kind of make it as level as you can.
Not just any old bench.
This is a Leopold bench.
Such as you might find at this place the shack.
Humble and ram shackle it's one of the most
revered sites in Wisconsin.
Reveered because the shack and the surrounding landscape in
soft County served as the inspiration for this man.
Aldo Leopold who wrote this book a San County Almanac.
It's a classic in conservation, a classic
in American literature.
And it served as an inspiration for this man.
Tom Heberline of Lodi was created a
classic event in Lodi around Leopold.
Nice to be here.
Every year on the first weekend in March they read Leopold.
I'm reading September the choral cops.
By September the day breaks with little help from birds.
A song sparrow may give a single half-hearted song.
Every year the words of this Wisconsin author
find voice as the city of Lodi reads all of Leopold's
a San County Almanac.
But one may hear the chorus of the quail.
Those lyrical words that recall the sounds and shapes
of Wisconsin's landscapes.
Every year Lodi reads the book out loud over three
days at the public library.
They read the book to each other a special way
to savor those lovely words and the landscapes they conjure.
So smokey gold.
There are two kinds of hunting,
ordinary hunting and rough grouse hunting.
There are two places to hunt grouse, ordinary places,
and Adams County.
And there are two times the hunting Adams,
ordinary times.
And when the tamer acts are smokey gold.
This is a kind of book I ought to read once a year.
It's one of the most influential books in my life
as a young man when I went to the University of
Chicago. I found myself in the south side of Chicago
looking out of my dorm window at a brick wall.
I was so homesick for these marshes and oaks of anas.
And somebody sent me this book and I grew up in Portage
and Leopold is writing about the marshes and the geese.
And I'm convinced that's the thing that got me through
my first year of college.
This is written for those luckless ones
who have never stood, gone empty and mouth the
gate to watch the gold needles come sifting down.
So what was the path from one man's love of Leopold
to hundreds in Lodah reading and listening to
Leopold? Well, five years ago, Heberline had an idea.
When would it be nice if somebody
would read this book to me?
You know, how can I con people into reading this book to me?
And so the first year we got 40, 40 some readers.
The idea and the audiences have grown all the result
of Heberline's motto, "Lobility"
His manifesto, spread the word.
It's hard on such a day to keep one's mind on girls.
Spread the word.
Any way you can.
No matter how small.
Too early.
Getting up too early is a vice
habitatual and horned owls.
Stars, geese and freight trains.
Getting up too early is a vice habitatual or
habitual in horned owls.
Stars, geese and freight trains.
CJ Kotter will remember these words written by
Leopold over 50 years ago.
They still resonate.
They still find an audience.
One that Heberline is determined to grow.
It's one of the reasons we have kids reading.
Bringing in the grammas, the rampas, the aunts
and uncles, people that have no idea who
all the Leopold is.
Give them a book, have their kid read it,
and the child starts to talk about Leopold and then we
start to expand the vision.
To expand the vision.
At present, a banner for the Rotary Smelt Fry, rain supreme
over Main Street in Loda.
The Leopold banner is off of Main Street
and much more modest.
But that may change, not just in Loda, but across Wisconsin.
First weekend of March should be a weekend to
celebrate all the Leopold.
That's not just a good idea.
It's the law.
Yes, Heberline took it to the state.
It's official.
As of year 2004, there is an official
Leopold weekend in Wisconsin.
Leopold and his family purchased his property in 1935.
They were avid hunters and had been up hunting in this
area and kind of fell in love with the landscape.
Reading his books is not the only way to
tell Leopold's story.
Sarah Lloyd of the Aldo Leopold Foundation used a nature
hike and a tour of the shack as the means to spread the word
to tell the story of Leopold's contribution to the concept of
wildlife ecology, another way to use the weekend.
We find that it's at the Aldo Leopold Foundation
that it's really a wonderful kind of rallying point for,
you know, people to take some time to think about
their relationship with the land, spread the word.
Another major sponsor is Fessence Forever.
They gave us a thousand dollars worth of San County
hominacs, almost over 350.
Please thank them for their support for Lodi, Rees Leopold,
and these books are now like the Gideon Bibles in some of our
hotels and motels.
And they asked in the motel they said,
"Well, what if people steal them?"
He said, "That's great."
There are countless ways to celebrate, to spread
the word.
Consider the benchmaker, Gary Labe.
Once you see the true bench made, you just automatically
hook it up to Leopold.
And I think more and more people should realize who
this Leopold guy really is.
[Music]
The sixth annual Lodi Rees Leopold Readathon happens
on Saturday, March 5th at the Lodi Public Library.
You can find more information on our website at
www.wpt.org/enwisconsin.
[Music]
Our next story also deals with a desire for
environmental preservation.
It takes place in Forest County, where the Moleg
Chippewa tribe is struggling to save a tradition
that goes back for generations.
Independent producer Michelle Danforth has the story.
[Music]
Chippewa oral tradition dating back to the 1800s
tells of a prophecy that the Chippewa people were to
travel west from the northeast to where the food grew on the
water. The food was wild rise.
Eventually, many Chippewa tribes stayed in northern
Wisconsin. The Sakaghan tribe settled near what is now called
Rice Lake.
Native Americans regard wild rice or manoman
as the sacred gift of their chosen ground.
It said that wild rice has always been generous
to those who gather and use her in a respectful way.
Wild rice was and still is an important element
of the Sakaghan Moleg Chippewa tribe.
Each summer, the rice chiefs
check the condition of the rice beds and then decide
in August which lakes to open for harvesting.
And then when we get them harvesting, we take our
wild rice in this year.
We take and we put it out to dry.
We dry it in the sun.
We usually leave it for a couple of two or
three days and when it's once dried, then we fan
it out with the birch bark baskets.
We get them fanning it, then we park it.
We park it over the fire and stir it until it starts to
pop a little bit like pop.
Then we'll take and fan it again, then we'll put
it in the tub and we'll get it out, get on it,
and we'll roll on it with our feet to get the hulls off.
The Rice Lake Harvest is a tradition that goes
back for generations, a tradition now in trouble.
It used to be the whole thing used to be just full of rice
by 60 tall all the way across.
According to the chiefs, in recent years, the rice crop has
diminished to only 30 percent of what it once was.
The rice chiefs and the tribe's environmental
department were looking for answers and turned to a
biologist to see if a solution could be found.
They were complaining that the rice lake wasn't
producing as much rice as it had in the past and
specifically that we're losing rice to the lily
pads. I took and looked at a lot of historical
aerial photographs of this lake probably over
the past 50, 60 years.
A couple of things started
jumping out.
The size of where the lily pads were
growing was getting a lot bigger.
The other thing was that the Kattill stand
where Swamp Creek enters the lake had expanded in
size and it looked to me that it was blocking that
flow and diverting it straight out the channels.
Swamp Creek is a small stream that feeds into rice lake and
mole lake tribal biologists Justin Paleteer believed
that the flow of water from the creek was crucial
to the lake's rice crop.
To prove the theory, biologists recreated a
water study from 1977.
Bio-degraedable fluorescent dye was poured into Swamp
Creek and Paleteer then took to the air to see
how the dye flowed into rice lake.
Water samples at locations around the
lake were taken throughout the week to see if the dye
would register.
There's a huge difference between
the health of the wild rice
that had flow was a lot healthier than the rice that
showed their no effects of the flow from Swamp Creek.
Based on the results of the study, the tribe set
into motion a plan to restore the flow of water
from Swamp Creek into rice lake.
We decided to cut that Kattill channel through the
Kattill stand and hopefully restore that flow like
it was in 1977 and hopefully we'll get the
rice bed back to historically high levels in the 50s
where this lake was probably 90 to 95 percent
covered with wild rice.
The tribe also removed both veaver and concrete
dams from Swamp Creek
and began the delicate process of manually cutting
lily pads one by one and hauling them off the lake.
In June of 2004, the tribe repeated the water
study. This time there was evidence that the dye was
able to travel through Swamp Creek and into rice
lake. Evidence that the flow from the creek to the
lake is on its way to being restored.
One thing about wild rice it's a
season by season.
It's a weather to cooperate with
everything and should the rice really take
hold. It's like now today.
Is that I'm well satisfied with what I'm seeing on
here. It's really for us elders to see something
like this here is that we will believe in something
behind once we leave this earth and hopefully that
we have people that carry on the responsibility.
We'll bring you the latest on the health of the
rice like rice crop after this year's harvest.
Before we leave you a few updates on some stories we
brought you last week.
Producer Joanne Garrett told us about a rare incursion
of great gray owls from Canada.
Earlier in the winter the owls were cited searching
for food in our states northern counties but now the owls
have been spotted as far south as Jane'sville.
And in another story reporter
Art Hackett followed a woman's curling team from
Wisconsin through last week's Olympic qualifying
trials. When we last checked in team Lucky Monkey
was headed for the semi finals and indeed they made
it all the way to the final game.
Art picks up the story from there.
Team Lucky Monkey led by Debbie
McCormick of Rio got into the finals by beating a
team from Bemidji, Minnesota led by Cassie Johnson.
Maureen Brun of Portages also on the team and
thanks to the outcome of the second chance playoff
bracket Lucky Monkey had to play Team Johnson
again on Saturday.
As the trials wound down the whole
Lucky Monkey thing was starting to get out of
hand but on Saturday Team Lucky Monkey fell behind.
They were down one going into the final end in regulation.
Johnson's last throw in the 10th denied McCormick what
would have been the winning point.
The game goes to an extra end.
These two teams have spent nearly
four years building towards these trials which will
determine which one will become the US Olympic
curling team.
Four years grinds down to two stones.
McCormick's final throw with lots of help from
the sweepers winds up close to the center.
It's protected by three others.
Cassie Johnson's last rock will have to come
in behind McCormicks.
At first it looks as if she's thrown too hard.
The sweepers stop sweeping.
It looks as if it's going to
fly past the house and Lucky Monkey will win.
At the last second without
any help from the sweepers, the stone curls.
They do call this curling and
stops near the center.
Team Lucky Monkey's look has
gone out.
If we would have gone another couple
of these extensions that might have not been there.
I think as we look back the game doesn't always hinge on the
very last shot.
It always is an opportunity missed earlier
in the body of the game.
It was a changing of the guard.
A team full of veterans of previous Olympic
trials came in behind four women ranging in age
from 20 to 24 and it was a change of place.
The center of the Olympic curling
universe has moved from South Central Wisconsin
to Bemidji, Minnesota.
You can find much more about the curling
team Olympic trial competition by going to our website
at wpt.org/inwisconsin.
Once there you can also find more information about
the great, great owl sightings.
You won't find us on the air during the next few weeks.
We're taking a break while Wisconsin Public
Television features some special programming
but we'll be back with another new episode in three weeks
on Thursday, March 24th.
When we continue our look at the governor's
state budget proposal.
Until then, thanks for joining us.
We leave you tonight in Lake Geneva with
a look at another sport that takes place on ice.
Ice boat racing.
As videographer Bush Sotenga
found, it's a sport not for the faint of heart.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patti
Lowe. Have a great week.
Stop flagging.
Major funding for in Wisconsin is provided by the people of
a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lion's energy offering energy
saving ideas on the web.