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6. The Shack
- University of California Press
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47 In 1933, when Leopold published Game Management, it was well received, especially among scientists, conservationists, and sportsmen . With this book he not only created an entirely new academic discipline, but when, on June 26, 1933, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation approved eight thousand dollars per year for five years to support a game management program, Leopold also finagled the first-ever academic appointment in wildlife biology , at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.1 The New York Times “hailed it as the one and only ‘wild game chair.’” 2 The question—for anybody, not just academics—is, How do you top the big thing you just did, the thing you know you will always be remembered for? At age thirty-three, Alexander the Great is said to have wept when he realized he had no more worlds to conquer. Darwin followed up his Origin of Species by working out the pollination biology of orchids. Leopold followed up Game Management by putting his ideas into action. He first leased, then bought, eighty acres on the Wisconsin River, just north of Baraboo chap ter six The Shack 48 / The Shack and east of the Wisconsin Dells. The place had a shack—an old chicken coop—and the property took its name from the building. Leopold and his family began spending weekends there. At the Shack, Leopold did two things. First, he began putting into action the principles outlined in Game Management. He planted trees and restored prairie—managing habitat for wildlife. As Stephen Jay Gould has written, “science . . . dedicates itself above all to fruitful doing, not clever thinking; to claims that can be tested by actual research, not to exciting thoughts that inspire no activity.”3 The other thing that Leopold did was to think deeply—beyond science—about game management. With his predawn coffeepot and his notebooks, he was doing more than simply recording bird songs. Many of these thoughts, strung together, became essays, and many of these essays became his second book, A Sand County Almanac, which eventually did indeed top everything else that Leopold did. Leopold did not purchase the Shack in order to provide material for his new book (in fact, no new book was planned); however, without the experiences and perspectives accumulated at the Shack, it is doubtful that anything like A Sand County Almanac would have been written. Unlike the purchase of Leopold’s Missouri cabin, the acquisition of the Shack is less a story about buying a building than it is one about buying land and happening to find a building. Nina Leopold Bradley wrote in her essay, “A Daughter’s Reflections ,” “In an essay found among my father’s works, he had written , ‘there are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.’ As a place to put such ideas to work, my father bought a ‘sand farm’ in 1935 along the Wisconsin River, first worn out then abandoned by our bigger-and-better society.”4 [52.91.177.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:16 GMT) The Shack / 49 As with many things associated with life, there is a separation, a disconnect, between origin and ultimate utility.5 The wings of the first birds had nothing to do with flying; they were likely thermoregulatory devices that expanded and eventually became modified for flight. And so it was with the purchase of the Shack.6 During the fall of 1934, two counties in Wisconsin staged the nation’s first bow-hunting deer season in a century. Aldo, Estella, Starker, and Luna tracked a dozen bucks through new snow. They shot, and their arrows missed, but they had great fun; so they decided to look for some old farmland to use as a base camp. The land quest continued into the winter. As Meine relates, on January 12, 1935, a day after Leopold’s forty-eighth birthday, he and his friend Ed Ochsner drove in and around the Baraboo Hills region, centered in Sauk County, north of Madison.7 The Baraboo Hills are the weathered but still spectacular quartzite remains of an ancient mountain range. Ochsner knew his way around this landscape, and eventually they came to a bend in the road near the Wisconsin River and turned onto a two-rut track, which had once been the main pioneer wagon route out of Portage. They stopped at a forlorn site along the river, once a farm, now abandoned. Nina...