At my office I realized that I forgot my office keys and daypack (lunch, coffee thermos, raincoat), leaving them there on the counter when I left. I remembered my binoculars though, because you never know when you might encounter something holy and need a closer look. 

When she asked to meet, I offered to drive up, relishing in advance an hour or so of Spotify windshield therapy crossing the Great Sauk Prairie, and an excuse to get off campus for the afternoon. We were to talk study design, an idea to improve refuge habitat for endangered whooping cranes. I had worked with them before – a good group and I was grateful for the invite. 

Highway 12 follows the terminal moraine mostly north, jogging west at the Wisconsin River and then due north again across the prairie proper — an anomalous plain at the intersection of several Wisconsin landforms. Distracted all morning in anticipation, I finished my campus meetings and grabbing a shrink-wrapped sandwich at the coffee shop before releasing my free-range imagination to dusty finger-picking poets and histories that pull on you. You listen for grace in the textures, a callused finger on the guitar string, a bit of gravel. 

As you leave the flood plain, its mostly Midwestern farm fields, the Baraboo Hills on the horizon wrap themselves around you as you approach, gray and distant in the soft-focus April rain. It reminds me of mountains or foothills, here in my otherwise mostly flat Midwest, and I enjoy the catcher’s mitt mysterium of driving straight for the pocket and burrowing deep into the capture of ancient topography.

This land is sacred to the Ho-Chunk. Over the eastern ridge is the Ho-Chunk’s sacred lake, Tee Wakącąk (egregiously renamed Devil’s lake). It’s a landscape of pain. Coerced from the Ho-Chunk, and later appropriated from the farm families to produce “smokeless propellent” on a massive scale. How many Badger bullets? How many Badger cannon blasts? How much grief traces back to this 7400-acre tortured prairie spot in view of the ancient Wisconsin River bluffs and the even more ancient Baraboo Hills?

Built for the World War II effort, the old Badger Ammunitions plant was the largest in the world during World War II and produced propellant for the Korean conflict, for Vietnam, and stood ready to spring to life during the cold war. A belt of war-machine explosives strapped across the geological belly button of Wisconsin (Environmental Historian Curt Meine’s description). 

And yet. Bobolinks flit among the charred shrubs in the burned prairie. Native grasses are expanding. The land is demonstrating its resilience. It’s a reminder that you are small. Not 45 minutes from Madison, you can lose yourself in the blissful quiet. Driving to meet my appointment, I imagine crossing the tallgrass prairie before the settler farms, the savanna oaks as islands of permanence in a surging sea of grass.

A Ho Chunk elder told us once that she held stories of a home place on the terrace snugged up to the backside of Tee Wakącąk . That’s the terminal moraine. How delicious to imagine, holding the retreat of the glacier in your cultural memory. She said her people were removed nine times under the authority of coercive treaties and violence. 

But the Army gave it up and it’s now the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area – a name that soft-pedals the restoration work. Its stewards are the Ho Chunk, the Wisconsin DNR, and the USDA. They became owners when the army walked off. But the heroes are the dreamers, activists, historians, and ecologists. They recognized the all-too-rare opportunity to restore a landscape. They fought against parcelization and fragmentation impulses, and a hostile (for a time) state government. They had a vision for cooperation, and restoration, and healing. And they are winning, at least here. They are dismantling the bunkers, mapping and monitoring the contaminants, reclaiming the prairie from the invasives. They are reconnecting people to the land. Recovering heirloom apples where settler farms once were.

Two of them told Badger’s story for our grad student group a few springs ago and it’s lived in my imagination ever since. This landscape of pain, now a redemption story. The prairie burn is fuzzing new green under an April rain, gravid and full term.

Hope is hard to come by these days, but there’s rumors of wolves returning. 

Spears into pruning hooks. Pain is the essential residue. You can dwell on it for its own sake or you can appreciate it for bringing redemption and beauty into sharper relief. 

She met me at the door to let me in. We had zoomed but it was nice to meet in person. Her collaborators were friends. We worked over the finer points of sample sizes, and control plots, and treatment effects and played with the pup. I enjoyed the mental exercise, partly a refugia in the distraction, and mostly because I enjoy the company and energy of young biologists with mud on their boots. 

As we were saying our good-byes, I ask about whoopers nearby. My friend, the one who captures and bands the cranes, e-mailed me a set of coordinates from across the table. And as I was fumbling with the cut and paste, she gently poked me for being clumsy with it. 

“Here,” she said, taking my phone. She dropped a pin in my mapping app and gave the phone back to me. “Drive here,” she pointed. “She’ll be in the marsh you can see from the road.”

So I followed the GPS out and around a couple of turns, right to a sweeping turn in the road. Right to the pin. 

And there she was. Five-feet tall and glowing hot white against the gray sky still-winter-rank cattails. I watched her for a bit, foraging in the marsh, stepping through with gangly grace. I think that nearly every culture that lives with cranes considers them sacred (and maybe it’s not too late for ours). I was grateful for a closer look. I remembered my binoculars. 

Photos:
Whooping Crane 1: Whooping Crane (-16-12) (Grus americana) (13042050703).jpg, Ewing Bottoms, Jackson County, Indiana. By Andrew C
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Whooping Crane 2 : Grus americana -Michigan, USA-8.jpg, A Whooping Crane in Michigan, USA. By Diane Constable
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Sauk Prairie Recreation Area – Van Deelen
Prairie Burn with new growth – Van Deelen