(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to InWisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
Each week we bring you stories about the people
and issues in our state.
This week, take a journey in search of history
with our state poet laureate.
Find out what it takes to manage a forest
in a non-traditional, but what this man describes
as a more natural way.
And witness a very rare visit from some winged
neighbors to the north.
We'll bring you that plus an update on some documents
that may change what we know about an ancient people.
The documents are now on display in Wisconsin.
- Major funding for InWisconsin 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.
- April is National Poetry Month and the occasion
inspired us to wonder, what would happen if we combine
the talents of a word artist with those of a visual artist?
Producer Joanne Garrett took up the challenge
and brought a series of our videographers and poets
from around the state to different
locations in Wisconsin.
Once there, the assignment was simple,
find poetic inspiration.
Each poet then created a poem based on the experience
and each videographer then interpreted that poem
using video gathered from the location.
The result is a series of uniquely crafted visual poems
that we'll share with you throughout this month.
The first of our poems about places
features the collaboration of Wisconsin's poet laureate,
Denise Sweet, and one of our veteran videographers,
Everett Sotenga.
They spent the day near Green Bay searching for red banks.
- Beauty at its best is undisturbed in winter.
The white wings of ice and snow wrap around this forest
without so much as a whisper.
This dry oak savanna fills and fills without warning,
without witness, and then one day we're buried
in our own mock amazement.
Where did all this snow come from?
As though drifts of snow and slates of ice
would not be here had we paid attention.
Had we not slept through the howl of storm
or let go of the rope that tethers us to autumn.
I wander the wooded corridor on the way to red banks
surrounded by silver maple, poppled, and birch.
Slender red cedar stemming skyward.
I'm left to plod and stammer through drifts of snow.
No tracks for me to follow or posted map
with arrows and stars to mark the spot on which I stand.
You are here.
The sky is all I recognize.
The star stories and the legends of naked eye astronomers
stir and sway within the wind as I whisper my real name
and reach through to the Anishinaabe at a socon.
In my third season of life, I have finally
learned to be still.
I have finally learned to wait.
Here, the people of the thunders gathered around
the stranger on the shore of this inland sea.
They listened to the one who spoke with eloquence
and grand gesture, his splendid robe or nade
with feather stitching, folds of satin and tiny beads.
The one who could throw lightning with his hands
and split open the sky with a crashing report,
no one could remember ever hearing before.
A red tailhawk has begun to follow my curious wandering.
I tighten my shawl and wrap my thin coat closer to me
as I leave.
Beyond this stretch of forest is a highway
and the distressing sound of 18 wheelers
and SUVs sailing through this moment
towards an urgent other place.
Some may be unaware of the slow searing stair of the hawk
or have not witnessed the mintsing steps
of a white tail deer before she leaves
the wooded grove, before she races
frantically back and forth and then across the
highway into an open field or another stand of trees.
But we can imagine what moves, moves,
what moves within can bring us back to the remembered earth,
back to the shores of where we began together.
A star story sweeping through the sky
pours over us each dawn hoping to be remembered,
hoping to be told to the children of the seventh fire.
The story of the heart of the earth,
shuddering like thunder beneath our feet
with a pulse who recognize as our own.
You can find out more about our poems about Place's project
by going to www.org/inwisconsin.
And join us next week for our second visual poem.
It takes place in a beloved O'Claran institution called
The Joint and features poet Bruce Taylor,
the man Denise Sweet calls her mentor.
We travel now again into the forests
that cover much of Wisconsin.
The majority of these forests are privately owned
and landowners have many different management choices
available to them.
Producer Liz Kerner introduces us to one private woodland owner
who practices what he calls full vigor forestry,
respecting the land while still making money from his woods.
The most important thing to our family is this forest.
And we love the big trees and love the wildflowers.
And anytime I'm out in the woods with a saw,
I'm always cutting vines and pruning trees
and trying to tend the forest to make it a little bit better.
You know, we want a natural, beautiful place,
but we also have a farm that has a lot of costs.
But we want to manage that to produce some income too.
When I started in forestry 30 years ago,
the oak was the real common species.
And the way we were trained that this woods is over mature.
And so we used to harvest these stands very heavily,
looking at the growth rings and looking at the forest.
And I could tell this was bad.
This wasn't.
This isn't good for the forest.
After a few years in forestry, I quit.
And just came in and sat in the woods a lot
and started to cut a little bit.
And gradually learned to do things just the opposite.
And as long as the trees healthy and vigorous,
we let them grow.
An industrial harvest would want to cut most of the big trees
down here at one time.
And then come back in 20 years or 30 years and do it again.
It's efficient for the big harvesting machines.
This is a whole different system where taking out just the
trees that are losing a vigor.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The industry's going to bigger and bigger machines.
Where you grab the whole tree and cut it off.
Set it down.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And then in other machines, scoop them up and take them out.
As a landowner, I don't ever want one of those on my land.
We need a steady supply of young trees coming up through here.
And they say, well, these big machines
have just a couple pounds per square inch of pressure.
But you run over all these little cherry trees
and all these little maple trees.
And where's your regeneration?
A harvest should always improve the forest.
It should never damage it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We carefully cut the tree down.
And then sneak it out of here without doing any damage.
I've got a two-wheel drive farm tractor with a winch
on the back that runs off the power takeoff.
It's got 165 feet of cable.
And we use our winch line to drag the wood over to the trail.
To make that easier, we've got several arches.
They're a little mechanical device that you take out
in the woods with you.
And it actually carries the log back out of the forest
instead of dragging it through the dirt.
It helps me in a lot of ways to save power,
keep the logs cleaner, and minimize the damage.
The loggers take the nice, straight trees.
And they leave all these crooked, bowed trees.
But the practice natural forestry we
had to develop markets for the crooked ones and
the different species and the trees that are dead.
There's about 20 forest species here,
trying tree species.
And it's just amazing.
We've got a floor where we've installed all 20 species.
And it's not only the different species,
but we use different widths.
One and a quarter inch red oak and cherry,
and two inch locust, red maple, white oak, more locust,
hickory, sugar maple.
Here on our farm, we have every piece of technology
we need to produce hard wood flooring.
Just recently, a Swedish company has introduced
a small molding machine.
So you can put a rock board through and come out
with a finished piece of flooring or miller.
By making it symmetrical with both sides good,
that gives me a choice when I install it,
of picking the best side fruits part of the board.
Each one of these boards is about six quarts of water.
And as this board dries, it's going to change shape a lot.
So we have to dry it very carefully.
So the kilns essential to this process,
we saw a solar kiln being used in Maze-Maini
back in about 1984.
And the idea just struck me that let's use a renewable,
or a natural energy source to dry our wood.
What we call a solar cycle kiln is kind of
our trade need for it.
Most of the water is just taken care of with natural evaporation
of the wind flowing through.
But we do heat it to get from 12% moisture down to 6% moisture
so we can use it for flooring.
So it takes a little bit of heat and a little bit of electricity
to circulate the air through the kiln.
But it's very, very low cost.
And we just feel good about it.
It's probably the most important step.
It costs about a penny of board foot to run the fans
and we gain a dollar of board foot.
So that's a pretty important value at its step.
Now this wood can be shipped anywhere in the world.
In the last few weeks, some of the wooden products
have gone to Japan and China and Europe.
So it's just amazing how your wood on one little farm
can be spread all over the world.
So we're able to make a very good income from our forest.
And what's important for forest owners
to realize this is like a retirement account.
You build up a forest, the full value, and
you don't cut it down.
You don't boil your retirement account on one big thing.
But you live off the interest every year.
[APPLAUSE]
Jim Burkemeyer's method of managing his woodlands
is just one of many forestry practices.
And in fact, his theories on forest management
differ to a degree from the state's program.
You can log on to wpt.org/inwisconsin
for more details on Wisconsin's state
run forestry program.
The medicine-based couple in our next story
feel passionately about many things,
including the right to free speech
and the need to protect basic civil rights.
Patricia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez
share these beliefs in their nationally syndicated column
of the Americas.
To any of you live in the studio, I'm very pleased
to have my good friends and regular contributors
to the eight-fifth-bus Roberto Rodriguez and Patricia Gonzales.
Patricia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez
share their opinions as guests on wrt,
a public radio station in Madison.
There is not such thing as a native community.
There isn't one native community,
and nobody speaks for all native people.
They say let the woman in the brain speak.
The couples share their opinions in writing.
They're promoting their most recent work at
Rainbow Bookstore.
So I want to start this passage with a little song.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
A spirit saying these stories is weird.
The couple also co-author the weekly column of the Americas.
It's published in some 30 newspapers across the country.
The column gives voice to the growing Latino population
in the United States.
From a national perspective, there
are not a lot of Latino voices writing national columns.
And they were among the earliest to get out there
and be a Latino voice in editorial pages
across the country.
The column of the Americas covers issues and ideas
north and south of the Mexican border.
I've got this piece on coming from a worker family.
Topics of interest not only to Latinos,
but to all readers who care about civil rights, democracy,
and the need for social change.
I try to show the potential for change.
And I often say that I'm like one of those long time ago
that sent an Indian runner into the villages
to spread a message or to announce something.
And so often that's my role.
Rodriguez grew up in Los Angeles, Gonzales, and Texas.
They both have Indian ancestors.
There's values that we have and that we've
been taught absolutely are indigenous values, ideas,
beliefs. But they aren't for
our little reservation or our little body
or our own minds.
That's for all of humanity.
The claim I have to make is we are human.
And we are living in the midst of a very demonized world.
I mean, where war is now peace.
One of the columns that I'm writing, I'm saying,
we don't need a truth commission.
What we need is a commission to study
whether we are all using the same dictionary.
It's like somebody says, they are a wager war,
but they say we're doing it for peace.
The couple has written a number of columns in support
of peace starting before the war in Iraq.
It's been incredibly difficult because we were one
of the few voices daring to write those words,
daring to say things that I think people felt.
I think they were times that we felt it was our responsibility
at this particular historical moment to do something
that other people didn't have the opportunity to do,
which was to give a voice and a clear message about what
it means to have a sense of morality and to have a sense
that the greatest democratic act that we can do is to question
and to challenge.
They cite the tragedy of 9/11 as a turning point
in our country's attitude, not only about war overseas,
but also a different type of war at home.
As a result of 9/11, people really, really got scared.
A hysteria was whipped where people almost beg the government
to say, please, you know, snoop, please take our rights away.
And I was like, where are they getting those ideas?
If we're here defending our rights and our freedoms,
then why would you take them away?
Rodriguez has strong opinions about freedom and civil rights.
His opinions are based on personal experience.
I was almost killed by police in 1979.
It was pretty vicious, pretty brutal.
Rodriguez was beaten by Los Angeles County Sheriff's
while working as a photojournalist.
The sheriffs were beating a man on the street.
And when Rodriguez began to take pictures,
the police turned their batons on him.
The beating left Rodriguez with a cracked skull
and permanent brain damage.
He sued the department for police brutality
and false arrest.
It took seven years, but in the end, he won his lawsuit.
We know the consequence of silence.
You know, we know the consequence of
brutality, you know?
And it's like, if others perhaps don't know it,
and it was like, well, we know it.
And we know, you know, you can't give up your rights.
You can't not step forward.
Gonzales has also had a painful event in her past.
I'm a rape survivor.
And I've written about being a rape survivor.
And I remember when I wrote one of those columns,
I've written several times about violence against women
from a personal perspective, men and women,
like probably 100 letters that I got
from people who were survivors of rape, insist, molestation.
It gives people permission to testify.
If you're living in Puerto Rico, you might use a coconut.
Gonzales used traditional medicine to help heal
her emotional wounds.
She shares her knowledge of healing, which
has been passed from generation to generation in her family.
I tried it, we've traditional medicine
into a political context and a social political context.
So after 9-1-1, I wrote about a T for the world,
because when you're nervous, it affects your stomach.
One of the things that I said is that you have
to have a good burga or a good purge.
In other words, that no world leader should
be making decisions who's constipated.
So I gave a T for constipation.
Some columns handle hot button topics with humor.
Others hit them head on.
The issue of immigration is one of the hottest.
We have received threats for our work.
What she would consider veiled death threats
or that it wasn't like anyone actually came to our home.
But for instance, we have received mail from
the KKK to our house.
I remember when we were living in a bussel,
it's like that was this content.
Not even that our ideas were wrong,
but rather how dare you even speak.
It's like who has given you the right to speak in our country?
The couple has taken issue with the concept of our country.
One reason for this is a series of early maps
that show present-day Utah as the ancient
homeland of the Aztecs.
The Aztec folks almost certainly did come from the Southwest
or spent some period of time there.
And so go back where you came from is a...
it's only an argument that makes sense in the
context of the 20th century.
In the spring of 2004, the University of
California, Los Angeles, put the collection
of maps on exhibit, an exhibit organized by
Rodriguez and Gonzales.
The exhibit is one more outlet for Roberto Rodriguez
and Patricia Gonzales to give voice to their opinions,
a voice firmly grounded in their beliefs.
I really look at our work as a very spiritual.
It's political, but it's deeply spiritual.
And we're really guided by elders, by prayers,
by what we hold in our hearts.
You know, we really, I think, have lived by this sense
of duty to our community, but also just really
following what we felt deep within our being
about what we believed to be right.
If you'll be in the Madison area,
you can check out the map exhibit for yourself.
The display of 16th through 19th century maps
is at the Wisconsin State Historical Society April
7th through May 13th.
Log on to wpt.org/inwisconsin for more information.
[music]
Our next story takes us to our northernmost counties
where a very rare avian event can be cited.
It's a migration from Canada of what some call
the Great-Great Ghost, the Phantom of the North.
This year, great, great owls from Canada have
descended upon Wisconsin in record numbers.
[music]
For us to have this many in Wisconsin is just jaw-dropping.
It's beyond what anybody's ever seen.
Mind-boggling jaw-dropping, once in a lifetime experience.
[music]
It's a huge owl from the north.
[music]
Evidently, the small-rown population in Canada is so small
that these owls got really hungry up there
and they moved south.
And if they hadn't moved, they would be starving
to death by the hundreds.
I would guess there's at least 100 birds in Douglas County.
And in a normal year, how many Great-Great-Grays
are being Douglas County?
If you're lucky one.
[music]
It's a cycle similar to, say, grouse and gossahok
on every 10 years or so.
The grouse are real high in numbers and they plummet
in the gossahok follows.
Rabbits and foxes is another cycle.
Well, it's the same with the mice and the owls.
Very docile animal.
It's mice diurnal, which means that hunts daytime rather than
in the middle of the night.
They like to hunt at least a corridor of open country.
That's why they're found along roads so much.
They hunt with their ears.
You can see them watching the snow,
cluing in on where the mouse is and they'll actually plunge
through the snow without ever seeing the rodent.
So they hunt by sound, even though they're hunting in the
daytime and can see really well.
They do it by hearing.
You can pull up right across from an owl, but keep in
mind that if he's hungry, just the vibration
from your car could be messing up him hearing.
The bird is counting on being able to hear a mouse walking
under the snow in order to eat.
So a lot of traffic or cars sitting in an idling
definitely interfered with that bird eating.
I've heard there are people here from New York and California
and everything in between.
I took a woman out from North Carolina a couple of weeks ago.
She saw 14 owls that day.
I've seen great grales before, but there's so many.
There's something special about driving around
seeing 20 in a day.
You end up giggling.
There's another one.
It's just never heard of something like this before.
Robbie Johnson tells us there are still one or two stragglers,
but most of the owls have now returned to Canada.
She adds that the owls probably will not return next year,
but that the process is cyclical.
So there may be another boom in the owl population four
to five winters from now.
Johnson also says it's possible a very small number
of owls may remain and breed here in Wisconsin.
And that's our show for this week.
Thanks for joining us.
We leave you with a walk near Echo Rock in Sock County.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
See you next week.
[Music]