WISCONSIN DRIFTLESS

DAY 1: WILD AND BROWN

I hail from a state, Kentucky, that can’t claim to be part of any collective geographical identity. We’re not exactly the South, and we’re definitely not the Midwest. The eastern part of my state sits squarely in Central Appalachia, but the western part looks out tentatively over the Plains, as if it would like to jump the Mississippi River and go sprinting west, but can’t quite get up the nerve. Here in the middle of the state, where I live, we have, well, a lot of caves. One very famous. A lot of deteriorating dinosaur museums and terrible restaurants surround that cave. However, there are rich seams of coal to the west and the east of me, seams that have consequently made Kentucky one of the poorest states in the Union. An extractive industry doesn’t just extract natural wealth—it takes that wealth elsewhere. If you know about Kentucky, you probably know about the things that can shave years off of your life: bourbon, tobacco, fossil fuels, high-stakes gambling. So it behooves a Kentuckian to get away from time to time, to search for healthier climes.

It was the last week of April. I had just taught my final class of the spring semester at the University of Kentucky. The students had a week to write their final essays and I had a week to not think about them. I scooped up my cousin Tye, along with all his fishing gear, and we headed straight into the late-afternoon sun. Pretty soon it was all farms, silos and wind turbines—the Midwest. We took turns driving, passing through Davenport and Dubuque, which, if you don’t know, was the home of Victor Feguer, a convicted killer who for his last meal requested a single unpitted olive, hoping, he said, that an olive tree would grow from his grave—whether as a symbol of contrition or proclaimed innocence, he didn’t say. That’s all I can tell you about Dubuque.

When the sun rose behind my truck, we found ourselves winding through the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin. Sometime during the 19th century, geologists around here noticed a lack of glacial sediment, or drift, as it was then called. Over a million years and 15 different ice ages, the glaciers quite miraculously never touched this little corner of Wisconsin. It has looked pretty much like it does now for a half-billion years, while the surrounding regions were last rearranged by massive ice sheets a mere 12,000 years ago, about the time humans began to arrive. But because this region was never scoured by glaciers, the landscape has instead been formed by rivers cutting into the nearly flat-lying sedimentary bedrock, forming valleys as deep as 400 feet from ridgetop to river level. Seen from high above, the entire Wisconsin Driftless looks something like the frond of a fern, with the Mississippi River forming the main leaf stalk, while hundreds of smaller veins wind down through fractalized blades that form bluffs and valleys.

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