(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone, welcome to our summer season
in Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lo.
We're here at Ulbrich Gardens in Madison
bringing you some of our favorite stories
about the people and places in Wisconsin.
This week, see how an Ashland County man turns the forests
and lakes into his personal grocery store.
Chippewa Falls residents hit a high note
building this cultural treasure and hitch a ride with
a gang of cyclists that don't let a little thing
like age slow them down.
We'll have all that, plus we'll introduce you to a sculptor
who makes the spirit of wood come alive in Wisconsin.
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's energy who brings 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.
And by the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center, providing cancer research,
education, and treatment, UW Comprehensive Cancer Center,
comprehensive as designated by the National Cancer Institute,
information available on the web.
- Ulbrich Gardens certainly offers up a lush landscape.
In this section, the herb garden,
plants could serve a dual purpose, beauty, and dinner.
Could you imagine depending on a much wilder version
of this garden for all of your food?
That's exactly what a man in Ashland County does.
(soft music)
- What do you see here?
- To most people, it's just a tangle of green mess.
I don't see a tangle of green.
I could just look around and then 15 seconds
to see if 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 basswood.
- 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,
not just trees.
Sam Thayer is one of Wisconsin's best foragers.
- Yeah, 'cause this is the kind of place where I'd
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.
Do you wanna get them really in the first day or two?
They come up, it'll be bright orange on top,
bright yellow underneath.
Pretty hard to mistake them for anything else.
- And 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 basswood
and see what Thayer sees when he looks at that tangle of green.
- But the young leaves of basswood,
they first come out are incredibly good salad plant.
The basswood flowers are good for producing 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 had to cut down the tree,
you could peel that off and scrape it off
like with a knife or a spoon and it's delicious.
It tastes like kind of cucumberish but sweet
and it looks like sauerkraut and 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.
- It seems that people today think about foraging
for wild food and it scares them because they see this as this
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 plant.
This is that plant.
- And I'll keep my eyes open for hogpina.
- 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 hogpina is being elusive today.
- To forge, to look for plants that feed us.
- That's the bean they taste just like beans there.
- From hogpina 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 environments
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 anchovies up there,
you can sometimes you get down a good like four,
five hundred and one throw.
- And what they're new about collecting.
But the first rule of acorn collecting
is that you never ever collected 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 guapatou.
Some call it Indian potatoes.
It is plentiful.
- 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 guapatou.
And I mean pure stands of guapatou.
- So what do you do with guapatou?
- I peel them and then I'll boil them and mash them
to make like a mash, it's very much like mashed potatoes.
- This is what guapatou looks like.
- You go into the guapatou marsh.
It feels nice and a hot day like this.
- This is how you get it by hand.
- A foot.
- You kick around in the mud and you'll work down
to the level where the tubers are
'cause they're usually about 12 to 8 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.
- You get them floating up.
- Foraging takes time.
This is no quick trip.
- And it's one eight from the world of fast food.
And that's fine with there.
- I do it because I like to do it.
I don't worry your 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.
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.
- It was a big one.
Try and 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,
thairs 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.
(crickets chirping)
- Sam Thayer tells us that he's still foraging
and in fact, he wants to teach others
the art of gathering wild foods.
Thayer is holding a Midwest Wild Harvest Festival,
August 26th through the 28th.
The fest happens at the Beaver Creek Reserve.
That's in Falk Creek in Eau Claire County.
(upbeat music)
- If you're traveling the roads of Richland County this summer,
you might want to keep an eye out for the gang of bikers
in our next story.
They're not known to be troublemakers,
but they're not known for their need for speed either.
(upbeat music)
- The term Harley Davidson is the definition
of the term road bike meant for lone wolf-like travel
on the open highway.
But for whatever reason, our leoners clump together.
So when you pass a bar in a little Wisconsin town
like Blue River and you see a bunch of guys
in matching outfits strapping on helmets,
you figure it's just another bunch of bikers.
Until you realize, these aren't parlies.
Instead of the rolling thunder of a gang of parlies,
you hear the sound of a swarm of mosquitoes.
You've gotta check it out.
This is what could happen if a bunch of shriners
went a little nuts and busted out of the parade route.
- When a bar owner sees you guys coming to they think,
"Oh, oh, here comes travel."
- I don't think so.
We have red jackets instead of black.
- Norm, the color of the jackets may be the least
of the differences.
First, the bikes aren't legally considered motorcycles.
They're moped.
They fall into the gray area between motorcycles
and bicycles.
The moped engines are limited to 50 CCs.
That's about 135th the size of a Harley engine.
And moped have a top speed of around 35 miles an hour.
It's great cruising around a college campus,
but also fast enough for a few Richland County residents.
They bought moped in the early 80s.
- It was cheap transportation.
People in the cities bought them,
they rode them back and forth to work
and they get 100 miles to the gallon out of them, you know.
- And over time, the Richland Center folks started riding
in small groups and then in big group groups.
Everyone had the same kind of moped,
a Honda Urban Express.
- They called them Urban Expressives
and pardon me, the Richland Center is not Urban.
- You know that?
(laughing)
- The group formally organized in 1997
as the back road express riders.
About 72 express riders have monthly meetings
and weekly rides during Wisconsin's warmer months.
- We ride every Tuesday.
The rain's on Tuesday, we ride Thursdays.
- It probably never occurred to anyone at Honda
that some folks would take them out on weekly trips
of 140 miles or so.
- They found out how durable they were.
They started taking 50 mile rides with them
and maybe all day rides.
(upbeat music)
- Gaines of Harley bikers have a motto,
ride to live, live to ride.
The express riders motto should probably be something like
ride to eat, eat to ride.
Most of the destinations seem to be restaurants.
- How that is, I'll tell you.
- Do they ever go to live at Routing?
- Oh no.
They have a good time, but as far as being Routing, I know.
- We're gonna get a little gas here.
- A little gas.
Very little gas.
- Ah, probably 50 cents worth?
- Putting a credit card.
(laughing)
- Some of the gas stations kinda throwing a plan that's coming in
and each paying $50.50 and $60.00 for gas.
- You owe me $0.00.
Seven cents.
You brought $0.00.57 for the gas.
I paid $1.44, I gave you $0.50.
- No, I gave you $0.00.
- And you gave me $0.00.
- No, I can't handle that.
- One woman told us that soon we didn't come back.
We were gonna make her figure out 30 and 40
and 50 cents sales.
(upbeat music)
- I'm hoping to turn over 10,000 this year.
I have 9,500 about 60 right now.
- Priscilla Williams is a retired school teacher
who heard about the club and decided she wanted to ride
even before she bought an express.
- I wanted to play.
I've worked really hard.
I was a teacher for 36 years.
I retired early so that I could ride more.
- Getting into the group may be harder than you realized.
- And to express this, haven't been built for 20 years.
The odds are if you really wanted to ride,
someone in the group would probably be willing
to sell you one.
- We tend to be collectors.
Once somebody finds one, they want another one
and another one.
In our garage we have a red one, a brown one
and a black one.
Now I need a blue one and a gray one.
- To accessorize?
- No, just because I'm greedy I guess.
? And as long as I need to move in ?
? I want it a place to stay ?
(upbeat music)
? More a psycho, mama, won't you lay your pants fight down ?
? I always get in trouble when you bring that around ?
? A psycho, mama, won't you lay your pants down ?
- It takes an army of volunteers to keep Madison's
Ulbert Gardens looking beautiful.
Volunteers also played a large role in our next story.
Chippewa Falls residents working together
gave their community a center for the arts.
(upbeat music)
- The old Catholic high school in Chippewa Falls
perches on a hill overlooking the Chippewa River Valley.
The building has been a prominent feature
on the city skyline since it was built in 1907.
- It was a big building, it was an impressive building
on the outside with its pillars and it stood up here on
these hills all these years.
- McDonald Memorial High played host
to thousands of students in its heyday.
But in 1964, a new school went up in town
and the old building was abandoned.
Over the years, neglect threatened to destroy
this historic structure.
- Everything was just falling down.
There were bats all through the building
and there were dead pigeons.
The floors were all buckled, the water had
come through the roof.
The walls were all stained.
- By the late '70s, some people were ready
to rip the building down.
Others argued to give it a second chance.
They wanted to create a performing arts center
and the old high school was just the ticket.
We just didn't have anything that
we could have some lovely cultural activities going on
for families and their children to go to.
And it was needed.
I mean, we just figured there was a big need
for a center like this.
(gentle music)
The community came out and forced to
support the new center.
To date, they've raised almost $2 million
to renovate the former high school.
- A lot of people went to school here.
They had a great education.
They became successful business people.
They wanted to give back to the community.
- They named it the Heidi Center for the Arts
in honor of a local family that helped fund the restoration.
Money also came from other local groups.
- They were one of the most exciting things
and really impressed me as the park
the elementary kids sold candy bars
to name part of the building.
So they paid, they raised about, think about $15,000
in candy bar sales.
- The community came through in another important way.
People volunteered and drove to renovate the interior.
Chuck Card went to high school here in the 50s.
- I don't know, I guess I just, I think that everybody should
put back into the community and that's where you
really get things.
- Volunteers have helped restore every inch of the interior
from sanding and painting the woodwork
to refinishing the floors.
So far, volunteer hours have saved the Heidi Center
three and a half million dollars.
- This place would not be here without the volunteers.
So much labor and time and energy has been
put in by these people.
I call it blood, sweat and tears to get to where we're at today.
- Well, I think the entrance to the auditorium and everything
is really neat because they found these old windows up
in the attic and there are the little design pains
in the windows and so on.
And as you those were taken out and I imagine
that they probably got broke so often that they just put
plywood panels in there and those weren't even there
when I went to school.
And then they found those up there and they restored those
and they replaced them in the backyard trying there too.
- The newly renovated Heidi Center opened its doors
in a year 2000.
The restoration work continues behind the scenes
but the community already enjoys a range of arts activities
from music and theater to art classes and exhibits.
The metamorphosis of methanol high into the Heidi Center
for the Arts is positive proof of the power of community.
- This community is great.
They really take pride and ownership
of what they do in this community.
- It's just a wonderful place to have around.
You can, I live on the south side and I
can look out my window and see the lights on over here.
It just makes you glow inside to see that happen.
It was a long time coming but it's here and it's happening.
- You can find out more information
about the Heidi Center and other art spaces around
the state by logging on to our website at
www.org/inwisconsin. Once there you'll see more about
all of this week's stories.
Again, the address is www.org/inwisconsin.
Throughout the summer we're bringing you
some of our favorite in Wisconsin's stories but we
also thought it would be fun to bring you some
other favorites from the Wisconsin
Public TV video vault.
Stories that were produced long before in Wisconsin came along.
This week's Wisconsin Retro Story first aired in 1992
and features an artist who shares his ability
to make inanimate objects come alive.
- It came about by walking my dog in here
and noticing that there were these trees blew down
and that storm we had a couple of years ago.
- This particular one was already a storm damage
the top was broken off.
I was approached by Pat Tully.
- Well you gave me the name of Harry Whitehorse
and then I also was asking the native American friend
of mine who could do wood carving
and she suggested Harry Whitehorse.
- He's a very talented artist and I'd seen his gallery.
- And I liked the car of any home.
So that's how we got started on that effigy tree.
- You should have told him that tree would've been much better.
- Wact that down.
- The tree itself was carvable 'cause it was a hackberry tree
and I had carved hackberry before.
I like to work in that area because of the
lake being right there and the trees, the other trees
and the people that did come by were interested
in to see what I was doing with the tree
rather than chainsaw the whole thing into something.
- Did you build this yourself?
- Oh yeah, yeah I didn't have any help.
I, what I did is I submitted drawings first.
I submitted drawings of the mounds
and incorporate the effigy mounds into the tree.
- Can you toss the story?
- In a Winnebago tribe, I'm what they call
the bear clan.
I'm in the bear clan.
So, and everything we make, we use to put a bear in Signian.
Like if I made a boat or canoe, I would put a bear in Signian
because that's my clan.
Other people belong to the Eagle clan
or the Summeda deer clan and then some of the bird clan.
- What's your Indian name?
- I'm Whitehorse but to be calling my Indian name, it
would be hard people to call it because it's long.
It's a shuhat deska.
Yes? - What animal was
kind of hard for you?
- What animal was the hardest one to make?
- The animal that was hard for us.
Well, actually the animals aren't hard for me to make
but the Eagle takes the most detailing
in order to get the feathers all looking right.
You can see the wolf on the area,
you can see the Eagle on there.
So it came out pretty close to the model.
On the backside, I have the bear and a cub and a thunderbird.
So it does help to have a model, especially at
something that's round.
And I started chiseling on April 10th,
on the figures.
People when they look at it, like one woman come
up through one time and ask, "When you
took the bark off," she says, "I was watching
you take the bark off."
She says, "I didn't know all those figures
"wanted underneath that bark."
That gives them a little closer contact
with the piece itself.
In fact, I had some blind people coming.
They had felt the whole tree.
They went around the whole tree and felt,
"Oh, this is a wolf or a dog."
And they went down and they said, "This is
a cat or some sort."
And they felt the whole tree.
Very little bark, except for sculpture that they can feel.
- There's a cub.
- There is a bear, a cub bear, that is eye-level
with the smaller kids, and they like that part of it.
- They're going to climb up there.
- The dedication of this effigy carving
was done in keeping with our past ancestors,
Indian people that lived here 3,000 years ago.
I go by, they're quite often just to see it,
so they're on a high note.
Hey, this is this fits.
- Since that story first aired, Harry Whitehorse has continued
to work as a sculptor.
Among the interesting pieces he's since created
is a sculpture from a piece of virgin timber
raised from the bottom of Lake Superior.
The work is called Superior Spirits,
and it's installed on the seventh floor
of the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority
offices in Madison.
That's our program for this week.
Thanks for joining us.
We leave you with a walk through Devils Lake State Park
in Sock County.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
See you next time.
(soft music)
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