Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch: The Lives of Naturalists Frederick and Francis Hamerstrom

10 The Setting, the Task

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would soon die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man. —Chief Seattle As head of the WCD’s Grouse Project in 1949, Hammy undertook administrative and supervisory responsibilities managing ruffed grouse and sharp-tail, members of the grouse family elsewhere in the state. The major emphasis, however, was on prairie chickens—especially in Portage County, home of the great Buena Vista marsh. Driving the well-known highways, he stopped at the spot where, in the spring of 1938, he had seen odd shiny streaks in a pattern of interrupted stripes stretching for rods in a field near County Trunk O. He had walked out, knelt, and felt the firm strips and marveled at the compacted scars of the plowshare that stayed put after six inches of fertile topsoil blew away.1 Surprisingly, the dismal landscape, marked by gnarled oaks and scraggly Scotch pine, still appeared much the same as it had then. Gray unpainted farmhouses still stood on county roads that wound past hillocky fencerows.2 Some were deserted; others connected to electric wires, for the nine-year-old Waushara County Rural Electric Cooperative had brought transforming electricity to many farms. Solid brick community buildings built by the WPA added substance to the main streets of small towns; yellow buses made entrepreneurs of the residents who drove children from widely spaced farms to consolidated schools. The population was smaller than in 1939; the wartime defense boom in the cities had made life on a sand farm comparatively un142 10 The Setting, the Task attractive. In 1934 the editor of the Necedah Republican could logically defend the right of the poor man to move into submarginal land—the traditional “haven, where he could retreat and live, with little initial investment.”3 Now what Aldo Leopold called “the hammer of development” was beating on the “anvil of wilderness.”4 The light soils, wetlands, and oak savannas were yielding to new agricultural practices. To the west, large, profitable cranberry operations transformed townships that had originally been covered in “water from six to forty inches deep, with marshes destitute of timber.” Tamarack swamps “unfit for cultivation . . . [with] no permanent settlers,”5 had become fast-growing pine plantations to supply the paper mills on the Wisconsin River. The “great dead heart” of Wisconsin was beating once more. In Waushara County, a citizen planning committee labored for eight months and decided: some fifty thousand acres of unsuitable land should be retired; its swamps turned into game refuges, hunting areas, or marsh hay fields. (Had their assessment held, the Hamerstroms would have had a simpler task.) Merely marginal land, eighty thousand acres of it, could become 360-acre farms with shelterbelts, woodlots, and feed patches for wildlife, that would produce a healthy livelihood for families—for $25 per acre. The committee envisioned bountiful gardens and pigs, cows, and chickens—the previous era’s agrarian dream. They ventured a cautious prediction: “Approximately half of the land in this area lies within fifteen feet of the water table. . . . research . . . [may] develop a practical irrigation system for many of the farms . . . completely [revising] . . . long term plans.”6 The report was outdated almost before it was read. Irrigation was about to transform farming. Long time residents, intrigued by Professor A. R. Albert’s demonstrations at the Hancock Experiment Station, bulldozed pits from which they pumped water through labor-intensive hand-moved pipes to fields of green bush beans or matted cucumber vines where once only moss and sandburs grew. Enterprising farmers began to move into the country. One of them, Bob Moldenhauer, brought along his 1951 master’s degree in Soils from the University of Wisconsin. He and fellow graduate student Dick Corey devised a system more efficient than a pit. Bob (with a 1941 Chevy) and his partner (with $400 in the bank) borrowed $5,000 and persuaded a Coloma The Setting, the Task 143 banker to sell them a 320-acre farm. Bob’s bride brought a dowry that put a down payment on an old Ford tractor. The dealer looked them over. “Pay me the rest when you get some cash,” he said. They bulldozed a long, shallow trench into which they pumped and forced powerful, spaced jets of water, thus putting down five twenty-foot wells. These, linked to a centrifugal pump...