The Shack Idea

As each of us siblings—Starker, Luna, Carl, Nina, and i— matured and entered our professional lives in different parts of the country, we carried with us a hankering to have a place in the country, a Shack of our own. It is not merely real estate, of course. Instead, it is a camping place for feeling close to the land, a place to work with the land and to observe the ecosystem and its fauna. To “own,” or as the first peoples saw it, to “belong” on a piece of land is exciting and special—a chance to become acquainted with a few favorite species, then to watch them grow. But of course it is way more than that. As Dad said, he chose his land for its backwardness, but it flourished in splendid isolation under our care. Shack land, as we conceived of it, had the potential of being inhabited by a vast number of native bird species, plus a diverse fauna of mammals, which got richer with time. We were excited that the Shack landscape itself had such physical variety; it had hills and dales, a grand river, a series of tributaries animated by spring and fall floods, a standing bottomland forest coursed by those floods and occupied by lively muskrats, with ducks flying in and out of the sloughs, as well as kingfishers and jays. Even though it was “degraded” agricultural land, Dad and Mother saw it as a land of opportunities for the family. While it had a “reduced level of complexity,” the soil was still there, and we could help improve it, which actually means that the right plants could make it better. Prairie is the perfect model for this kind of restoration and recovery. Dad described the upward flow of energy from soils through the plant community as a kind of circuit. After major disruption and loss of native species, the energy circuit is slowed and altered. He asked, “Can the land adjust itself to the new order?” He was sure it could if we reintroduced the native plant species on that cornfield, on that terrace, on that hill, in order for a genuine prairie, with its very efficient energy-flow, to become reestablished.

Epilogue: Family and Familiarity

“As many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and thus be bound to it by economic interest, by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and by tradition.” This statement by Wendell Berry in his Art of the Commonplace says it all, in my view. Each of those elements can be so important in attending to one’s land. The fact that the Shack land purchase during the Depression came at a reasonable price was indeed a fortunate happenstance, as it gave us a new opportunity. These eighty acres of failed Wisconsin farmland at the Leopold Shack that became Dad’s experiment carried us all, a family of seven, into a communal work project. Wendell Berry’s comment that “ancient wisdom . . . tells us that good work is our salvation and our joy” was indeed our experience. Aldo Leopold was an astute observer of nature and did not miss much. He traditionally carried a sharp pencil and a tiny notebook in his vest pocket where he noted pertinent developments and events that he wanted to register in the Shack journal or think about—things he was seeing that might be part of a new idea about the land. Some of what he saw would rub off on us, when he would turn to us and ask probing questions to explain it. One instance I particularly remember. We were standing by the river, when he pointed and said, “Baby, look at that island. Why do you suppose that the big cottonwoods are on the upstream end of that island and the little ones are growing at the bottom end?” I struggled with the issue until I remembered that the river was moving sand all the time to the downstream end of the island. That meant that the upstream end was older and the lower end was younger. Ha! That’s the answer. In fact, theoretically one could date the upper and lower ends of the island using cottonwoods. A nice thought. Dad was a great storyteller. That made him a good teacher.

Spring

Spring always seemed to begin for us with spring break, when we had a whole week to be at the Shack and do the planting together. Spring is such a special time, with the buds bursting and the early flowers opening. Ever since we started planting in the spring of 1936, we always looked forward to the project, though it meant a fair amount of work, and we always had such a marvelous time. The preparations each year were considerable. Mother and Dad would sit at the dining room table in Madison with a list and plan what kind of meals we might like to have up there and what supplies would be needed. Dad would order in advance thousands of pines from the Conservation District. He ordered at least two-year-old seedlings, usually at least two thousand white pines and two thousand reds for a season, and sometimes more. As soon as we arrived at the Shack we would prepare the slurry of red clay and water (as described earlier), dip the roots of each bundle of pines in the clay to protect them, and dig a short ditch “to spud them in” (as Dad called it). The ditch was in the shade west of the Shack so the pines seedlings would not dry out. During the drive up our car was usually jam-packed with gear, and Gus or Flicky the dog. To keep things organized, we used the old chuck boxes Dad had used to lash to his packhorse when he worked in New Mexico. We generally stopped in Baraboo for a twenty-five-pound block of ice so we could keep our vittles cool. If Starker joined us he brought his little roadster to help carry the gear. We also looked forward to the guests sometimes invited to help us plant. Daddy’s sister, Marie Leopold Lord of Burlington, Iowa, fit right in. She was lots of fun, and a great botanist with a special interest in ferns. One year our visitor was a forester Dad had met in Germany, Adelbert Ebner, who was a jolly fellow perhaps fifty years of age, and quite a musician.

The Continuing Process of Restoration, 1948–Present

The process of restoration of the Shack lands did not end with Dad’s passing. Quite the contrary. It was picked up by several of his children and by some key neighbors and Wisconsin-based foundations, and ultimately by the Leopold Foundation staff, which continued by expanding the prairies. In this regard, some special recognition is due my sister Nina and her second husband, Charles Bradley, for their initial work developing new prairie areas in Sauk County. Their methods in building a prairie were novel additions to the work/technology that Aldo Leopold and John Curtis had started at the UW Arboretum in Madison. During the years 1940–1948, Dad continued to purchase more acres, so that by 1948 our holdings were about 350 acres in Fairfield Township, Sauk County. These acres were all contiguous with the original Shack lands. Nearby, Mother and Dad’s friends the Thomas Coleman family had over the years enjoyed the log cabin they had built on their land high above Lake Chapman overlooking the great marsh and floodplain. Reed Coleman, the younger son of Tom Coleman, with conservation in mind, in time wanted to expand the land holdings his father had purchased on the south side of the river road across from Lake Chapman. Reed and his colleague and friend Howard Mead laid a plan for the L. R. Head Foundation to gradually purchase nearby parcels of land as they became available from retiring farmers. The Head Foundation was able to compile a huge protected reserve surrounding the 350 or so acres that Dad had bought. It was a creative effort to protect the land of the region from being degraded by home developers and the like. Over the years from 1950 to the 1970s the Head Foundation succeeded in building what is now called the Aldo Leopold Memorial Reserve. This expansive project served indeed to stave off local development. Reed said that his effort was inspired by witnessing the subdividing of the old Gilbert farm along the river into slices of land for summer homes, and he did not want this to happen around either the Shack or the original Coleman land area.

summer

Summer was a time for transplanting prairie wildflowers. We knew that we wanted to restore prairie on the cornfield in front of the Shack. How did we know where we could get these prairie species? Of course there were no commercial sources at all. We had heard that prairie species were especially prolific along railroad tracks, because in those days the railroad frequently burned them to control brush. So we would stop there during different parts of the summer and find the prairie species in bloom (so we could identify them), or along an old road cut where we felt we could dig up chunks of sod with the species, put them in a tub in the car, and transport these to the Shack, to spud them in to the old corn field (our future prairie). This included prairie grasses, legumes, asters, and a whole variety of perennial species. And of course these can reproduce. This means that in those days (and to some extent now) there were “idle spots” along each side of the railroad tracks, as Dad observed, where the cow, plow, and mower are absent and a profusion of wild prairie herbs persist and bloom vigorously. Some species had huge deep roots, like the beautiful compass plant. Dad collected their seeds and built a little plot on the hill to plant these along with a mix of seeds of prairie grasses. This was an experiment. As mentioned, he did not water them, but they came up and did beautifully. So we knew how to promote such species on our prairie. (See chapter 7.) Over the years our prairie became more diverse, and more beautiful. According to the Land Institute of Salinas, Kansas, these native perennial prairie herb species typically grow very deep roots. Some extend downward ten to eighteen feet below the land surface! So it is no wonder the prairie vegetation is so stable and tenacious during drought; they have unusual adaptations to reach moisture and minerals at depth.

The Shack Landscape and Its Restoration: A Natural history

“The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism,” wrote my father in Round River. As he was hinting, we can locate many of the parts, but how these fit together in the land organism was another matter. Finding the native plant species would be a good start. To reunite some of these came next. The work of our family was creative in its own right: figuring out what conditions these species needed, including by experimentation. Essential to that is appreciating how this landscape got its form—what processes have worked on it and with what results. This much helps us with our understanding of the setting and the soils—what I would call the lay of the land. In the work to restore old habitats and old vegetation types, it is really useful and interesting to know something of the land history, ancient and recent. As Mary Austin wrote, “To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year.” The Shack experience involved both of these elements. When you live in an area, a natural question that arises is how the landscape got the way it is. What forces shaped it, and over what periods of time? In the Shack area, two different prominent ridges (about twenty-five feet in height) are oriented perpendicular to the Wisconsin River. One is the north-south ridge just west of the Shack—the Sand Hill/Clay Hill ridge. The other is the north-south ridge downstream from Gilbert’s farm; it is the ridge on which the Leopold Center is built. At the point where the river cuts the nose of that ridge (Barrows Bluff) are a great number of large boulders and clay. The Sand Hill site also has an enormous boulder on it. Both have sand on top near the river. I wondered how ridges like these formed in the first place. Then I read the report by Robert Dott and John Attig about the history of the glacial ice lobes in Wisconsin.

The Evolving Archery Endeavors

This passage, from Dad’s essay “Man’s Leisure Time,” seems to sum up why Dad had turned to bow-and-arrow making as a favorite hobby in the late 1920s. Archery became a family enterprise. Dad loved to hunt, and we all grew up participating in hunting and archery practice at or near the Shack as well as further afield. And it turned out that Mother particularly had an extraordinary talent and skill for tournament archery. My father was a skilled carpenter, and probably learned from his father, Carl Leopold, who was skilled with hand tools. Dad’s father was the president of the Leopold Desk Company of Burlington, Iowa, and all of Dad’s siblings became expert in woodworking. Dad started making bows and arrows in 1926, when someone gave him a bow stave of yew wood. In Madison he began to shape this stave, and later ones of Osage orange or yew, into beautiful bows. In the basement he kept his giant toolbox of carpenter tools, which he had transported from Albuquerque. We still have that great box and some of his tools—planes, squares, chisels, files, saws, and such. In the basement he also set up a German-style workbench, with a wood vise on the right side, a metal quick-release vise on the left, and a series of peg holes down the middle to hold a block in place for using a plane. Dad placed his giant staves of Osage orange or yew in the vice and shaped the bow with a sharp drawknife and a wood file. The midsection, where the grip was located, was carefully shaped and made oval to fit the hand securely. To gauge the symmetry of his sculpturing of the bow stave, he hung up a large sheet of brown paper on the wall and placed a hook high at the top, hung up the bow, and, with the bowstring attached to the sculptured bow tips, pulled the string downward so the bow bent, and so he could see if the curve of the drawn bow was evenly symmetrical.

Winter

Winter at the Shack was always a great time, and some weekends it was a big challenge just to get in. After a good snowfall we would park near Mr. Lewis’s farmhouse and ski in the mile and a half, carrying our grub. We have a picture I especially love of Mother skiing through the woods, wearing her denim skirt and winter coat. What a great sport she was! And she would holler “Whoopeee!” while sliding down a short terrace in the woods. We were proud of her. Skis were not much in those days—just two waxed boards with a leather strap. But they were better than walking, and fun too. Passing through the snowy winter landscape was always, in Dad’s words, a “search for scats, tracks, feathers, dens, roostings, rubbings, dustings, diggings, feedings, fightings, or preyings collectively known to woodsmen as ‘reading sign.’ ” We could often see many of these signs on the snow. I can remember skiing through the woods with Nina one morning after a heavy snowfall and seeing little “bursts,” places where a partridge or two had spent the night in a snowbank and then burst out in the morning to feed. If one wonders how our songbirds survive a cold snowy winter, the answers are revealed on a fresh snow surface: the prairie plants hold their seed pods up away from the snow, and the songbirds land on these dark stalks and remove the seeds. Their dear little tracks show where they were picking up seeds. A way to make a living in winter. For our wood-gathering efforts, our tools were the two-man saw, a double-bit ax with an extra-long handle, two regular axes, a heavy sledgehammer, and two iron wedges. Some of the logs we cut in the woods, though of fireplace length, were too big to carry, so we would split them right there before loading them on the sled. Our favorite place for the cutting operation was west of the Shack, down the slough and bearing south at what we called the “branch slough” and “the fallen bee tree.” Our dog (then Flicky) was always running along with us.

The Shack Enterprise

In each person’s life a particular place may stand out—a place where one spent a lot of time, a place one grew to love and recall for so many happy memories. Such a place for me was the Shack, on the floodplain of the Wisconsin River. In summertime, standing by the river, it was incredibly quiet, except for the occasional call of a kingfisher. It often seemed that high overhead one could hear a kind of humming. Look up and there were barn swallows turning in the air catching insects. Look down and the surface of the river was always quietly in motion, and rippling against a snag in the shallows. We were a hunting and fishing family. Although camping on weekends early on became a family tradition in Wisconsin, Dad got it into his head to buy a piece of land of our own on which we could camp, hunt, fish, swim, and study nature and even do some bow hunting. He also had a real itch to practice a new idea, ecological restoration, on his own land. At the dedication ceremony of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum on June 17, 1934, Dad told the audience: “The time has come for science to busy itself with the earth itself. The first step is to reconstruct a sample of what we had to start with. That, in a nut shell, is the Arboretum.” He was looking for a place of our own to do just that as well—“a place to show what the land was, what it is, and what it ought to be.” It was in January of 1934; Dad asked an archery friend of his in Prairie du Sac, Ed Ochsner, to help him locate and lease some land near the Wisconsin River. They visited an eighty-acre piece in the south-central part of the state northeast of Baraboo. Dad apparently thought it would fit his purposes. By paying the taxes we could buy the land for just eight dollars an acre.

Fall

In the fall we had great fun picking our orchard apples and harvesting in the garden. There were two old apple trees, undoubtedly planted by the Baxter family in the late 1800s. One bore very large sweet apples, which probably was a Wolf River type, in Mother’s estimation, and the other bore just nice, tasty apples. The trunks of these two trees were ten to twelve inches in diameter, so they were really mature trees. Under and around these apple trees we usually had planted potatoes (our best crop!), corn, and huge beefsteak tomatoes. A slice from a beefsteak tomato warmed by the sun and just picked would cover a whole slab of bread. What fabulous sandwiches these made with mayonnaise. Makes me hungry to think about it. It was always such fun to visit our garden with Mother, as she would get very enthusiastic about our crops. Most fun was to dig potatoes. I might be at the shovel, and Mother with a bucket was collecting the potatoes, which were invariably healthy and robust. We would both get on our knees and feel around for the potatoes. Mother would get excited and ooh and ah about their size, their ruddiness, and their abundance. “Oh, Estella. Look at THAT one! Put your hands through that loose soil and make sure we did not leave any potatoes behind! Those little potatoes are hiding,” she would say, or words to that effect. Boiling these little potatoes up for supper was a special treat, as they were so tasty with butter when lightly cooked. Our corn occasionally bore enough cobs to give us a meal. We usually had good luck with onions, too. To weed this garden we had a one-wheeled cultivator with a hoe or blade attached behind the wheel, which was about one foot in diameter. The wooden handles formed a V sprouting from the axis of the wheel. With two hands one would push this wheeled implement between the rows of crops, and it would turn over the weeds, so one could keep the space between the rows pretty weed-free without too much work.