Why don't we start out with
the kids with kids and
Rhinelander? Is that where that took
place when you talked about
everybody? Yeah.
Yeah, we were there.
Well that story at
Rhinelander with the family begins
in 1971
when I began teaching
at the Rhinelanders School of the
Arts and I taught there
for some 32 years
and our kids were
something like seven eight and
nine when we started going
there in 1971 And
as they got older and
grew up and had jobs and
eventually married Ruth and
I were there alone for several years
while I was teaching, but then in
2002,
I think it was my daughter Susan
said, well, wouldn't it be fun if
we brought our
spouses and our kids to
Rhinelander to experience what
we experienced as kids?
And so that's what we did.
And starting in 2002 and
still today,
16 years later,
We are still doing that.
For many years at Rhinelander,
and then as the
kids and the grandkids' jobs
demanded that they be
closer to Madison,
where several of them were working,
we started,
we left Rhineland.
And one year we were at Watomo,
another year we're at Channel Lakes
near Wapaka.
We discovered in bringing the
family together, and there's
something like 15 of us when we're
all together, grandkids,
now two great grandkids
coming from Colorado
and Minnesota and all over
Wisconsin, it's a way
to bring the family together
in a way that we
could never have anticipated.
And water was a key to it,
being on a lake where
they could fish and water
ski.
And just sit and
watch the water.
And what's interesting, sometimes
we think that the kids and the
grandkids want to be busy all the
time doing things.
But every so often, I catch one
of them, sometimes several of them
just sitting by themselves
watching the water,
so water has been
the glue, if that makes
sense, in bringing the
family together, which we do once a
year for a
week or more.
And it has been absolutely
wonderful.
We rent a boat, so those who want to
water ski can do that.
This year, when we were at
Chano Lakes this past year in
Wapaka, the most
fun thing the kids did was
kayaking.
They were four kayaks, and they were
out exploring.
And they would come back.
These are the grandkids now with
stories about what they had seen.
The big blue herons and
the... And the fish
that they had seen, and the water
plants, and it was like they were
discovering all of the, it probably
was for the first time, some of
them. So it was a great satisfaction
that we've had, my wife
Ruth and I,
in bringing the family together.
And we hope that that will continue
for some years ahead.
Do you think you look at your
grandkids differently
than you looked at your kids?
I don't think so.
But that's an interesting question.
Either consciously or sometimes
unconsciously, I was intent
that my kids
appreciate the outdoors,
that they appreciate nature,
that the appreciate the quiet
that goes with being outdoors.
I did that with my kids.
I'm doing that with my grandkids.
Maybe I'm more of it with my
grandkids, I've got more time to do
it because I'm...
I don't have a nine to five job
to go to, but
that's
been my intention and I try
to do it subtly rather
than saying this is this and
this is that and I want you to
memorize it. I really don't do that.
I point that out.
I say well this is a white pine and
this a red pine and so on and
interestingly enough they're picking
that up. It's a way
of teaching that I guess I
have tried to follow as most
people who know my background I
taught for many years at the
university and my way of
teaching was always to be a little
more subtle rather than so direct,
to tell a story rather
than to say here are the points I
want you to memorize.
And I've pretty much been doing that
with my grandkids, did that with my
kids.
Do I recall that you said
something in the book about
the students at
Rhinelander and something
about being on the water even for
them as they're working on
assignments? I didn't hear-
I didn't hear the first part of what
you said.
In your book, do you want to say
something about the students,
the people you were...
Yes, in fact,
I've taught creative writing now
for 40 plus years,
and I have discovered
that there's something magical
about having
a writing class, I expect
any class, but a writing class which
I do, close to water.
And I've thought on Washington
Island where my students are
watching Death's Door, so to speak,
that body of water between
Washington Island and Door County.
I still teach that at the
clearing in Ellison Bay, which is
right on the waters of Green Bay.
And of course at Rhinelander,
the lakes were everywhere,
and water was one
of the attractions I think that
brought some of the students to
my classes.
So I
discovered that sort of accidentally
by realizing that
something was going on that
I couldn't figure out, that I
couldn't understand.
The relationship of people
to water,
the creative juices
that began flowing,
and this sounds crazy maybe,
but as people associated
with water watched it, played
in it, did whatever they wanted with
it, or simply wrote
about it even, there was something
mysterious happening.
And I still haven't figured out
exactly what that relationship is,
but it's an important one.
And I firmly believe, and
I've taught this for years, that
everybody has a
creative side to them.
It's often dormant and
not being expressed, but
water and the presence of
water, in my judgment,
will help to release that
creativity that sits there
and is waiting to be released.
Okay, let's get political.
I don't know yet go
ahead
with that whole,
in fact, I think it kind of started
and grows out of thinking about your
dad's life and
his association with water and.
Yeah, my
perspective on water
goes way
back to when I was a little kid,
growing up on a sandy
farm in central
Wisconsin where we never ever
had enough water.
And thus my dad's
comment, which he mentioned often,
never, never curse the
rain.
That every drop of water that
fell on our land was precious.
And I've never forgotten that.
And I grew up seeing
water not just as
something that helped
our crops grow, which it surely did,
but something that was precious,
something that had to be respected.
Because if our windmill
quit turning, as it did one
time, and the cattle
and the horses did not have water,
That was a catastrophe.
And as I've mentioned earlier,
I've never forgotten the sound
of cattle not
having enough water to drink.
So all of those
experiences with my dad
going fishing, with
my brothers and I going swimming,
all of that helped me
develop this tremendous respect
for water.
And I'm reminded, as I
do a lot of reading,
about Native American
strategies, impressions,
and attitudes.
And I am convinced
that the Native Americans
really have something when
they talk about water as
something that's sacred,
to be respected,
to be cherished,
and at the same time,
be useful in cooking and
all the other uses of
providing the supply of fish and all
of that.
And I'm afraid that
so many people today
in our society
see water as an economic
commodity.
Something that is unending,
and most of us who study this
know better, it's not unending.
The supply is not
forever abundant.
It needs to be,
we need to watch that, and watch
that carefully in our overuse
of water.
So going way back to
the days when I was a kid,
and learning to respect
water, to cherish it, and indeed
to see it as something sacred,
to today, when I'm
trying to do that myself with
limited water use,
but I see so many people around me,
and I don't mean to be
judgmental, but so many
who see water as
something that's going to
economically benefit them.
And not worry about what it does
to the environment,
what it those to the aquifers that
draw down, right here on my farm
where we're sitting just now.
One only has to look at my two
ponds, one in back of me, one
in front of me.
Both of which have less
than half the water in
them that they had as recently
as fifteen years ago.
And I don't want to blame it on the
on the irrigation that takes
place in this area.
Part of me doesn't want to do that
because I'm a farmer, I've
known farmers for years, but I
also know in studying
the evidence, the research
evidence that's been done
in this area, that that
is a major contributor
to the decline of
the aquifer and
the disappearance of several
feet of the water table.
There needs to be more study at
this, but that is a problem, and I
don't have the solution to it.
I'm hopeful that more people will
recognize that as
a problem and begin to talk
about it and discuss it and
begin figure out policies
that will allow us
to put the brakes on
some of our overuse of water,
some of the inappropriate use of
water. For now, I want to refer to
the pollution that's occurring
everywhere, where we...
Don't spend enough time realizing
that if you've got 5,000
cows and their manure
is spread on the land, there's only
so much that the land
can accommodate.
And most people know this, and
the thoughtful farmers know this.
But there are always those that are
not. And then we see these manure
spills, and we see the
streams polluted, and
it's tragedy and
we try to try to prevent that from
happening. What is happening?
Do you think that's a harder sell up
here in the Midwest because
of the abundance of fresh water?
Of course, as
most of us know,
the Great Lakes have something
like 80 plus percent
of all of the fresh water
in North America, can you believe
that, 80 percent,
in those same Great Lakes that 20
some percent of the
world's fresh water
happens to be in the Great
lakes.
Well, try and convince somebody.
That we've got a water problem,
a potential shortage of water,
and they'll look at you and say,
well have you noticed what's
happening in Lake Michigan lately?
And it is up.
Have you noticed whats going on in
Lake Superior?
Of course I've noticed that.
But, but, as we look ahead,
and as we begin to
recognize that global
warming is real,
it's affecting us, and
as some predict, by as early
as 2050.
We are going to have a
terrific shortage of water
in the world, including
the United States.
We see evidence of it now.
California has had a drought that's
gone on for almost half a
dozen years already.
The southwestern states, New
Mexico and Arizona, have
had drought. And the wildfires
in the northwest, these
are symbols, indicators of
what we can see coming and
global warming's effects.
Are storms where we'll get
inches of rain an hour,
as we've had here in Wisconsin
recently, and then there'll be a dry
spell with nothing.
So it's very difficult to
convince somebody who has just
had their car flooded out
because of a recent terrific
rainstorm that there's going to be a
water shortage.
But all the indicators
are that that will be
true.
And then what happens when
people are desperate for a
while?
Well, then we have all
kinds of social
upheavals.
We have death from
starvation and lack of
water. That's happening in parts of
the world already.
We've simply got to figure
out a way of
number one, using less
water,
and number two, making sure
that we have fresh water
and that we're not polluting it.
Those are two major things that
we have to be concerned with.
And the third thing, which
is probably the most difficult of
all, is to
help people realize that,
as I mentioned earlier,
come to realize that water is
sacred. It is not an economic
commodity.
It is something we've got to
cherish.
Our very lives depend
on water. Without water, all
of us would... We would die in
48 hours, I think, something like
that, without water.
Death is imminent.
And people today,
it's so easy to turn on the spigot
and there's the water.
And for most of us, it is fresh and
it's safe.
Increasingly, that will not be
so.
We need to find something surier to
end on.
So doom and gloom I probably
sound, but I
am trying my darnedest
through my writing and through this
kind of work, through the radio work
that I do, to not preach,
to say unless you do this you're
in trouble, to help people
through my stories realize
that there's another way of
thinking about our relationship to
water. And not everybody has
had that opportunity that I've had
to grow up at
a time in a place
where water was
not in abundance,
was always in short supply.
And so I learned very early
on the meaning
of thinking about water as
something important and essential.
And many people have not had that
opportunity. They've grown up where
water is always abundant.
So my goal
has been to
help people at least Well,
at least to begin to think about
it and then to talk with each other
and debate this and for
heaven's sakes Pay attention to the
research. There's a lot of research
these days about water
And you don't have to look far to
find it and Then to begin,
to develop policy that
helps us come close
to if not arriving at the
place Where the things that I've
just mentioned Become
a reality No
polluted. No polluted water,
water as sacred, water
as something more than economic
commodity.
What do you think your dad would...
If he saw how
much water is being
used these days for irrigation,
for bottled water.
I think my father would shake
his head, as I do,
in seeing how
water is
being used in the irrigation
systems. They're everywhere, and
again, I don't
want to be critical of that.
People have to make a living.
I understand that.
But the broader scheme
means we've got to see the
relationship of what we're doing to
a bigger picture.
And that means that we are all
in this together.
We just can't.
Constantly think about the
individual and what that person
is entitled to and
what rights that person has.
We really are all in this together.
And my dad knew that.
My dad would have,
I think, for the most part
agreed, his language would not have
been mine.
He would have told stories about
how somebody had
purchased lake property and
this happens have happened.
Had purchased lake property, were
very happy with it,
saw their taxes increased
tremendously because they had lake
property.
And then over a period of three
or four or five years, they saw
their lake literally disappear.
It became a pasture.
It looked like a cow pasture and
the taxes stayed high.
And this person was irate.
My gosh, I
have lake property but all I have to
look at is a bunch of weeds and
grass.
My dad would have laughed when he
told that story,
but the person who experienced it
wasn't laughing.
Speaking of your dad, tell me again
about when he
told you never curse the rain.
If you can remember that first time
it...
Well, I was probably, I don't know,
three, four years old when
it was
a rainy day, and
I wanted to do something else.
I don t know what I wanted do.
As a little kid, I had all kinds of
little projects I wanted work on,
and most of them were outside.
I was always an outside kid,
and I couldn t do it.
It was raining, and then I said, Pa,
this is terrible.
This rain is spoiling what I
had in mind, and he looked me
right in the eye.
And he said, Jerry,
never curse the rain.
I didn't really know what he meant
at that time
because I was just learning cuss
words myself.
And my mother made sure that I
didn't use them.
But to his point
of never, never say
something negative when
it's raining, cherish it, respect
it, celebrate it.
That's what he was about.
He didn't say those words.
But you could see when he was
glum and unhappy
and it began to
rain.
And I've got a bug here somewhere.
Is it gone?
Right by the microphone.
Ha ha ha!
Wait, wait, wait.
Have some chopsticks.
No, no, just a second.
Don't move.
He doesn't like me, he laughs.
You're getting this, aren't
you? Ha ha ha
ha!
Mick the bug killer!
You
So then as the years pass...
Yeah, let's start again,
because it was buzzing off.
You know, just a little buggy.
Go back to that little four-year-old
person
Well, this little four-year-old,
when I was three or four years old,
I remember fondly the day
when I had planned,
I had a little, I
mean I had a sandbox.
I mean it wasn't a sandbox, we call
it the sand hole, we had a lot
of those on the farm.
But there's where I played and I
would have little horses and
cows and I had made
a little fence even, that
was my little farm.
And I was all
intent on spending the afternoon.
Playing in my little at my
little farm in this little sand hole
and it began to rain and
I was well, I
probably did use one of
the the few cuss words that I knew
at the time And
saying to my dad that it was
raining and everything.
I'd planned Was now
I couldn't do it and
he looked me right in the eye With
a very serious look no smile
Never curse the
rain cherry
And I've never forgotten that
because I knew later
what he meant because our farm
was sandy.
We never had enough rain.
And for the crops to amount to
anything, and there wasn't such a
thing as irrigation in those days,
for the crop to amount anything,
we needed an ample supply
of rain.
And he then did something
else to help me appreciate
a rainy day.
One of the things that we did,
especially in July,
during the haying season.
And on a rainy day,
we'd crawl up into the barn
and spread out on the hay,
alfalfa and sweet clover and
timothy.
Nothing, nothing smelled better
than curing hay,
according to my dad, and I would
agree with him.
And we're resting on the hey and
listening to the rain.
Come down on the roof.
A few drops and then more
drops. It was like being
inside of an airplane
flying over. Over.
Such a good story, too.
We're sprawled out in the barn, my
dad and I and my two brothers.
And the rain is coming down on
the barn roof.
And it's ever so much like being
inside of an orchestra
with the drummer beating
on the drums
and the raindrops beating
on the rain roof.
Because the inside of the barn had
a kind of, it was like an echo
chamber as I think about it now.
It would amplify the sound
of the rain on the roof.
And the wonderful,
the wonderful sound of the
combination.
The wonderful experience of the
combination of the sound
of the rain on the barn roof
and the smell of the hay
that's drying.
And having Pother with us because he
was working all of the time,
and now he wasn't, he was resting.
And he would probably start telling
stories, which was his way,
about other rainstorms, about
other days, about fishing.
He had a never-ending supply
of stories.
But all of that to celebrate
a rainy day when
he had earlier proclaimed never,
never curse
the rain. He didn't say celebrate
it, he didn't have
to, he showed us how
to celebrate it by crawling up into
the barn and
listening and smelling and
hearing his stories.
So tell me what your
relationship with water has been
through your life.
I still drink it.
It started, of
course, as I've
explained several times, on
this sandy farm where we never had
enough of it.
But then when I bought this farm
50 years ago now,
with its ponds,
again, all along
I had an appreciation because we
always grew a garden.
And here we started growing a
garden, and to grow
a garden in Mochera County,
Western Missouri Colony.
You'd better have rain or
a hose that you can water because
you're not gonna have much of a
garden.
Most years, by
the time we get to August,
everything is brown and
drying up and the garden's not
gonna work.
So water in the garden
became essential.
And the first years,
from 1966 until
the 1980s, we had no indoor
plumbing.
At the cabin.
So that is one way
that I helped teach my kids.
We couldn't afford it, to be
honest about it, putting in
a new pump.
But it was my way of teaching
our three kids how
to get along without a
ready supply of water.
It was almost as if, well, that's
impossible, Dad.
We can't have, we can't stay
at that cabin without running water.
Well, you can.
And we did.
For many years.
And the kids, as it turns
out now, as they're adults,
that was one of the fun times
in their lives.
So water has meant a lot to me.
It's a way to teach my kids
something about the relationship
of water
to nature and the appreciation
of it.
I've watched my own ponds
go up and down, down now,
as I explained a while ago.
And I, in a rainy year, which we're
having right now, to
see the magnificence
of the growth that occurs
in my woods and
in my prairies.
I've got wildflowers in my
Prairie that I've never seen
before, acres of them
in full bloom.
Every week something different,
grasses up to my waist.
This time of the year my Prairies
are usually sort of brown and not
very attractive until the fall
rains again. But now, through
summer, the flowers
and the grasses are...
Just taking off like everything,
as is my garden because
of the rain.
So I have learned to
see the cycles of
a rainy season and not a
rainy season.
And now, as I mentioned earlier,
I'm beginning to see some
of the effects of global warming
on our climate, on our
rainfall, on
the on the fact that we'll get two
inches of rain in an hour.
That's more and more.
So water has been a part of my life
for years.
I still, I don't do much fishing
anymore. I used to do a lot of it
both in summer and in winter.
I did a lot of swimming.
I never was much of a swimmer, but I
did it and I enjoyed it
and my kids have.
So it's been integral all
along.
And as I mentioned earlier, I have
done a lot of studying.
In fact, I've lived with Native
Americans at different times as part
of my university
work. And came to
appreciate how they see
the environment and how they
sea water.
And it's very different from how
many other people have.
As I've come to appreciate what
they've taught me, what science has
taught me and what I have personally
experienced,
my view of water is what I've been
saying and it comes not out
of the blue, not something
I just thought up yesterday,
but something that goes way back
when I was a little kid.
Did you tell your kids you'll
recurse the ring?
I probably did,
many times.
Have you told your grandkids to
never curse? Uh, yeah.
I have, I have.
Okay.
I think we got it. We can't hear
anymore.
Thank you.
Hey, Dad,
what kind of wood was it?
Does that matter?
I think they're locusts.
So tell me about that photo.
This photo, this is a picture
of our one-pale
shower.
And the picture's showing my dad on
a ladder hooking up
the one-pal shower at the top of a
teepee. It was sort of three
long branches
tied together at the top and
the one pale shower was on
a pulley system so you could
pull it up and down.
It was one of my dad's finest
inventions.
And my brother is
sort of helping out and making sure
it's hanging straight.
And at the bottom there was a little
mat to stand on and
then of course we covered the whole
thing with a table
like the front had a tablecloth and
the back had canvas so it was all
tied on there.
You needed privacy?
Yes, we did.
So the main reason that we
had a one-pail shower in the first
place is because there was
no indoor plumbing in our cabin.
And we started out just
having a washing station actually
right here at the pump house.
And my mom was determined to keep us
clean even though we were outside
every day all summer getting really
filthy crawling around in the woods
and barefoot and running around
getting really dirty.
So she just determined that we would
at least have clean feet when we
went to bed.
And plus it was hot, so it
felt better to be cooled off,
to go to sleep when you weren't all
sweaty and hot.
So we had a washing station right
here at the pump house and
with like a basin and
cups, because we brushed our teeth,
you know, spittin' into the bushes.
And we thought that was just really
grand fun because we were
outside washing up.
And the water coming
from the pump, coming from the well
was just beautifully.
Cold, really really cold.
So I have to think it was you
know our very first water park
experience because lots of times we
just stood under the under the
water coming out of the pump house
if we were hot and apparently that
wasn't good enough.
That wasn't enough of a way to get
cleaned up because there was no soap
when you were just standing under
the water and we used to just
spray each other all the time and
play in the water just coming
straight from the well.
And my mom decided that was not
enough of washing.
It didn't count as washing up.
So we needed the whole shower
experience.
And we did have soap in there.
So we were officially clean once we
were out of the shower.
And this is the actual
one pail shower
bucket.
So it's a, yeah.
So it had
a hole in the bottom, and this is
just like a hose, an actual hose,
like you would put on a faucet.
And then it has an on-off
switch here for a sprinkler.
So you fill up the bucket with
warm water heated on the wood stove.
So it was really warm.
And in fact, it was actually too
hot, because I remember we had to
bring it over and put cold water in
it, because it was boiling hot from
the stove. And then, it would hang
up on that pulley system.
We actually would, we would pour
water into it because it was already
attached and then you could
just be outside getting cleaned
up and use the soap and we
were officially cleaned up.
It was a much better way to clean
instead of just our little washing
station outside of the plump house
here.
So does the bucket look as big now
as it did then? I don't ma-
I don't know, I don't remember.
I don remember, we couldn't use the
whole pail.
That's why there was an on-off.
So I don't remember if we had some
sort of a timer, some sort time
limit, but we just had to
be soaked up and cleaned up and then
the rest of the pail and the rest o'
the water in the bucket was for the
next person.
Well, he said that when you work
hard, you gotta work hard.
Yeah, so if we were tired
we got a whole pale
shower and you could just stand
there with it open until it
was just sprinkled out and no more
water came out and then you knew you
were finished.
But yeah, very fun.
Especially at night.
You can imagine at night it's
getting a little bit cooler and
the whipper whills are out and
there's a breeze and you're swiping
mosquitoes and it's a whole
different experience from taking an
inside shower. I think this is like,
definitely the...
The camping shower of my
childhood, because it was completely
different from anything else I ever
did in the city.
It was actually very fun.
So if there was an incentive
to work harder to get the one-pail
shower, then we certainly worked
harder, because it's
a lot of water.
Let me take it and then let me ask
you, your father is
under the impression that
your attitude toward water was
forever changed by
how precious water was up here,
do you think that's true?
I do.
I have to say that I think,
as I think back to it,
when we were growing up and
not knowing that in order to use
water you actually had to go get
the water and that there was
no place that you were just going to
turn on a faucet and there would be
water.
So that we had to get the the water.
Every time we were going to wash
dishes and we had to heat it up and
we had do things with the water
first before you were going use the
water.
So I do think it made you think of
water in a completely different way
than if you were in a city and you
just turn on the faucet and you
don't even know where the water
comes from.
So I think the fact that
we knew this was our water.
How does he do this?
Is that cut?
He always makes people cry.
That's really bad.
Okay, I'm not gonna cry.
Okay, starting over.
But I'm counting on you to cry a
little bit more.
Okay, sorry.
Now I think knowing that water, that
we knew where the water came from
and it came up out
of our.
Out of our land.
It just made it so much more.
Stop, we have to stop again.
Now, we have quite a
bit of
We have a bunch of slides though.
I'm looking at the different ages,
so I've got uncovered for
a child.