DAMMED IF YOU DO

Everyone lives in a watershed, and every river tells a story. The tale of the Kickapoo River in southwestern Wisconsin is a long and winding one, beginning about half a billion years ago when most of the Upper Midwest lied on the equator and cooled off in an ancient ocean called the Silurian Sea. Only 50 years ago, the proposition of damming the old river brought national attention – a well-intentioned but ultimately doomed boondoggle. In between these two benchmarks, innumerable cycles of history have come full circle, and the best way to listen to that story (and learn from its lesson) is by being present – especially in a boat.

But let’s first visit the past. As continents shifted hundreds of millions of years ago, landmasses rose above the shallow ocean, were submerged, and then rose again, not unlike a fussy infant adjusting to a new outfit. During these fits, sediment settled at the bottom of this body of water and solidified into a compact of lime, sand, coral, and crustaceous critters, that would become the bedrock upon which much of the Midwest is built. Ever since our eventual home rose out of that primordial soup, rivers have carved deep fissures into the land, which in turn became drainage channels. Sedimentary rock is particularly soft, so time and entropy have eroded the landscape and exposed the bedrock to reveal elaborate outcrops of sandstone, limestone, and dolomite. Sculpted by wind and wave, freezing and thawing, flooding and drainage, these rock outcrops today resemble bombarded castles strewn in beautiful ruins.

But then glaciers came and damn near ran everything aground; they planed the landscape in their advance and later deluged it with earthen deposits as they receded. Except they didn’t penetrate all of the Upper Midwest, especially southwestern Wisconsin, a region of enchanting valleys and deep ravines called the “Driftless Area” – because it’s bereft of “drift,” the deposited hodgepodge from the glaciers. And at the heart of the Driftless Area is the Kickapoo River, its waters flowing like arteries, its arteries distributing nutrients to fertile floodplains and future human habitats.

The Kickapoo River is one of the oldest in all of North America. The earliest evidence of humans living in the valley dates around 12,000 years ago – coinciding with the glaciers about-facing back to Canada. They lived in villages, built effigy burial mounds, and carved petroglyphs on the rock faces. Most of these succumbed to fates similar to the sedimentary rock outcrops outside of the Driftless Area, except that the destruction and desecration here was caused not by a volatile ballet of colossal ice, but by the clumsy and callous hands of man. Lead by arrogance or pleading ignorance, European pioneers did more to undo the woven fabric of the ecosystem in as short as a century than had been intact for a couple million years.

First came the plough; spade and blade both broke the back of the land as it bled brown and eroded the banks. Wetlands were drained, grasslands as well, nature’s sponges that absorbed precipitation and later released it slowly into the watershed. Once these were converted into crops, the natural flood control was no more. Together with the steep hillsides becoming increasingly deforested, flash flooding and epic erosion followed. A diverse menagerie of native flora and fauna that had existed for millennia (including humans) was evacuated or went extinct in a blink of time’s eye, replaced by monoculture crops and invasive species (including humans). E pluribus unum, indeed. In more modern times, quarries for road construction alone and excavators for subdivisions from former farms did the bidding of glaciers on blitzkrieg scale. The delicate cave art and fragile effigy mounds didn’t stand a chance.

The denuded landscape soon bore its bitter fruit. Severe flooding occurred in 1907, 1912, 1917, 1935, 1951 and 1956, wreaking havoc to the Kickapoo Valley and its residents. The latter raised its collective voice and lobbied its lawmakers to do something. Congress listened and passed the Flood Control Act of 1936, which in turn tapped the shoulder of the U.S. Corps of Engineers to study the matter of the diluvial Kickapoo. Three decades and lots of studies later, the Corps proposed damming the river and making a fake lake.

From its inception, the project was mired in controversy and undermined by both its economic and ecological costs. Still, by the summer of 1971 the Corps broke ground and began seizing the land it needed – private property that would be underwater as a reservoir almost 2,000 acres large, extending some 12 miles upriver. In turn, the community was split in two – some heralding the project as a way to boost tourism while mitigating the wide-scale damage of floods, others railing against the wide-scale damage of flooding this ancient river and its terrific history. In between were 149 families who were righteously incensed to have their homes and farms taken from them by eminent domain.

By 1975, the project reached an impasse. Initial support from political leaders had waned, and the zeitgeist generally favored environmentalism. Even though 80% of the needed land had been acquired, and roughly 40% of the dam was constructed, the budget had already gone overboard (to the tune of $113 million in today’s currency) and would cost 2.5 times its initial projected estimate to complete. Wisconsin’s longest-serving U.S. Senator, Bill Proxmire, a staunch watchdog of wasteful government spending, railed against the dam. Even the Corps’ own Council on Environmental Policy had qualms about proceeding. In the end, it was left undone, and it remained a raw wound for the next 20 years.

Though acrimony continued to divide residents, unanimous contempt for the federal government prevailed. It was the worst case scenario: the public was asked to make sacrifices for benefits the feds assured would come, and did so but got nothing out of it but economic hardship and displacement (families from farms, kids from school). A lot of money was spent on rerouting a state highway and building a tower for no purpose – the ugliest, government-sponsored outdoor sculpture ever; call it “futile brutalism.” In 1995, the state legislature endorsed a proposal by local citizens that the land be relinquished by the feds and dedicated to education, recreation, and low-impact tourism.

Turning the page on the 20^th Century, the Corps officially transferred its land ownership to the State of Wisconsin and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which set up a management board and the creation of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve (KVR), primarily run by the Ho-Chunk Nation. There was poetic justice to this: a full century before local residents petitioned their elected officials about the flood-prone Kickapoo, the Ho-Chunk had been forcibly removed from the same area – their own home, their own land – via the Treaty of 1837. In other words, the United States forced the Ho-Chunk out, then forced Whites off, then returned the land to the Ho-Chunk.

Today, 25 years later, the KVR is a National Natural Landmark, a State Natural Area, an Important Bird Area, a Dark Sky Preservation Area, and a Wetland Gem. Relics of the Ice Age, cold-loving flowers like the northern monkshood and Lapland azalea thrive here. As do trout – equally fastidious favorers of cold climates. But turtles seek the heat, agog on logs, craning their necks towards the sun. A space that’s home to trout that are rainbow and turtles that are painted must be a special place indeed, to say nothing of the beavers, mink, otters, fox, bald eagles, sandhill cranes, herons green and great blue, red-shouldered hawks, and a wealth of warblers from blue-winged to –gold, worm-eating to morning, Connecticut to Kentucky. At over 8,500 acres large, it’s also a silent sports’ dream come true, with 40+ miles of hiking, biking, skiing, and equestrian trails, and scores of remote, primitive camping sites. The emphasis is on Leave No Trace, and all trails are closed to motor vehicles.

But to experience the KVR in true two-part harmony, one must paddle the Kickapoo itself, the definitive Driftless river. Within the KVR alone there are no fewer than eight landings allowing paddlers to delight in a range of 18 total miles of blissful floating. Kayaker and canoeist alike will dazzle through an ease of near-zero development past an amusement park of endangered plants and Jurassic-esque ferns tucked into a crack or pock of rock – the tiniest of nooks on the vertical façades of sandstone edifices typically stippled with lichens. Above, scraggly cedars look like tortured vortexes impossibly clinging to crags and fissure-folds in sheer-faced cliffs. Rare white pine and virgin hemlock top the bluffs like the ancient sentinels they are. Swaths of lush sand or riffle-feathered gravel lie below you in the clear water with quiet but steady current.

The name “Kickapoo” is an Algonquin word that is often translated as “one who goes here, then there,” a fitting description of the river’s moseying nature, but also of the Kickapoo people themselves, who’d moved in and out of the area for the last 400 years. The river itself is about 120 miles long, but half that from beginning to end. From its headwaters to the town of Soldiers Grove, it meanders some 70 miles, while Highway 131 crosses over more than 30 times. Engineers being straight shooters and all, the Kickapoo makes for an awfully kinky river!

Start your tour at the Visitor Center, north of La Farge, to learn more about the river, valley, and reserve. Inside, some of the construction materials are made from trees harvested after the highway was rerouted. Outside, the names of the 149 families who lost their land are etched in brickwork. South-facing, the building’s solar panels emulate the resident turtles. From there, one can see the ominous obelisk of the dam tower, a sobering reminder of what could have been – of what was lost, but could have been lost worse.

The river does still flood. While soil conservation programs have improved the eroded landscape, the valley has endured so-called hundred-year floods four times in the last 40 years alone (1978, 2007, 2008, and 2018). The towns of Soldiers Grove and Gays Mills have since upped and moved out of the floodplain altogether. The past is prelude, and what goes around comes around, just as the meandering Kickapoo itself. Climate change poses new threats on sensitive areas.

An anonymous quote attributed to the Ho-Chunk Nation in the KVR guide invokes community that we “are part of the land and its spirit.” It commands us to “be humble in its presence and respect its power to change, provide, and continue.” Rivers do just that – they change, provide, and continue. In the long view, nothing is permanent. But nothing has to end prematurely either. We all contribute to and receive from the air we breathe, the soil we eat from, and the watershed which quenches our thirst for both creation and recreation. The Driftless Area was a refuge from the onslaught of ice 2 million years ago and is no less a haven from modern life. Despite its past threats and present challenges, what’s old is new, and the Kickapoo River runs through it. The KVR reminds us that giving a damn means giving up on one.