The Manawa Dam A Future in Question

Let’s face it – we all get a little fussy when something is in our way. After all, we have somewhere to be, something to do. But when our way is barricaded and we become separated from loved ones on the other side, unable to reach them, we feel torn and wronged.

While this cruel reality occurs at political fault lines, often along borders, it is practically customary in the natural world. We call these walls dams – monolithic, lethal barriers that lobotomize the free flow of wild rivers to a kind of domesticated submission and brutally alter the natural landscape upstream and downstream. Even after dams are removed (whether by coalition or chaos), communities remain divided between those who embrace change and imagine a new future and those who bristle and cling to a faded past. The municipality of Manawa, Wisconsin, along the banks of the Little Wolf River, is a case in point.

Huff and Puff

Like many burgeoning settlements in the 19th Century, when rivers were seen solely for their utility – driving logs through saws or turning wheat into flour – Manawa grew around a series of mills. In 1929, a hydroelectric dam replaced earlier operations and disrupted the Little Wolf River for nearly a century (although its electricity generation would be fleetingly fickle). In turn, the impounded water behind the dam backed up into a millpond 180 acres large, with a shoreline of 5 miles and an average depth of 6’, to the delight of those homeowners with coveted lakeshore property. But to call this a lake or even a pond is a misnomer; it is literally a reservoir, a giant vanity sink meant to do work – to serve us and sate our consumption (up to and including the mirage of nature).

By the late 1960s, the dam was in dire need of repairs. Patchwork remediation was finished ten years later, but signs of further deterioration would reappear over the next decade. And again, a decade after that. According to the River Alliance of Wisconsin, this dam is one of 14 similar small hydropower facilities throughout the state that have “exempt status,” meaning their licenses have no expiration date (unlike most major dams). Over and over, elected officials faced a difficult dilemma: repair the failing structure, replace it outright, or remove it entirely. Instead, they funded stopgap measures and passed the buck to a future generation to figure out.

That determination began in the morning of July 5, 2024, as Manawa received over 5” of rain in a four-hour period – on top of a half-foot of rain that had fallen days earlier. The ground was saturated, the river swollen. The dam breached at its weakest point, and a 50’-wide section washed out. “Its bristles scrape and strike the stage,” Neko Case sings. “A rock, paper, scissors rage.” Like unplugging a bathtub, the millpond drained, leaving a wasteland of mucky sediment in its wake. But for the first time since the late 19th Century, the Little Wolf was a free-flowing river again. Au revoir, reservoir.

Damned if You Do

Most of Wisconsin’s nearly 11,000 total dams are grandfathered from yesteryear and serve no purpose today beyond the politics of nostalgia and real estate aesthetics. They do not prevent floods, saw lumber, or mill flour, and only a handful generate electricity. They remain as emblems of arrogance and ignorance.

From the anthropocentric perspective, dams model our capitalistic values of dominion and production. They are self-serving marvels of engineering that optimize profit, supply, and convenience. But these contrivances come at a cost, liabilities that are fiscally irresponsible and ecologically incalculable. And while we all like looking at water, the aesthetics of a so-called millpond belie its devastating impacts.

The architecture of planned obsolescence, dams generally have a lifespan of 100 years, at best. They’re expensive to build in the first place and expensive to maintain afterward. But like a predatory payday loan or credit card scam, the devil is in the details of hidden fees and overall tolls.

Dams pervert the natural order of water and thus the delicate web of life itself, the amniotic womb in which we all swim, bathe, drink, feed, tread, and are born. Dams disrupt natural hydrological cycles, in turn undermining wetlands and floodplains. They alter the chemistry and raise the temperature of a river’s water, leading to deadly algal blooms and nasty parasites that threaten already endangered species like mussels. This is no mere casualty extracted in the name of progress. Mussels filter-feed and remove pollutants from streams. They are the liver of a river, and their presence indicates a healthy system.

But they can’t do it alone. Female mussels lure unsuspecting fish through remarkable ruses and attach their larvae (called “glochidia”) to the gills of hitchhiked fish. No harm is done to the host fish, but the mussels get a free ride they’d otherwise be incapable of on their own. But the impenetrable wall that is a dam limits the migration of fish – and thus mussels as well. Fewer mussels mean more pollutants; an injury to one is an injury to all.

In the absence of a justifiable function, deadbeat dams are like complacent slumlords; they sit and collect but do little to improve the lives of anyone. They trap silt deposits on their upstream side while depleting these nutrients for the flora and fauna downstream, thereby contributing to the fragmentation of linked ecosystems. The backfilled flooding subdues whole habitats as well. Moreover, the silt-laden impoundments reduce oxygen, which in turn leads to decaying vegetation and the release of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a primary greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, which causes a surplus of volatile heat and humidity that fuels extreme weather events, which then increase the prevalence of dam failures. It’s an unforgiving feedback loop.

Common Cents

Due to its extensive structural damage, the derelict dam in Manawa is beyond repair. Removing it outright would incur a one-time cost of about $700,000. Replacing it would cost 12 times as much, to the tune of $8.4 million (not to mention tariffs, lawsuits, or future maintenance). A new dam would be decoupled from hydropower capacity, as the negligible rate of return wouldn’t offset its upkeep. By the numbers, that’s an awfully expensive wall for a community of fewer than 3,000 residents and only 53 households whose frontages miss kissing a fake lake.

Tellingly, only weeks after the dam breached, the Manawa city council voted unanimously to restore the millpond, leaving little dialogue after the deluge. Nonetheless, the demographic forecast for the area shows a population decline by 2040, suggesting at least a second opinion, if not an outright pause, on major infrastructure investments. One year later, state representatives denied Manawa’s request to include the dam’s rebuild costs in the state budget. Thus, a stalemate prevails, and the besieged dam remains an ugly eyesore, with only a sliver of river running past its ruins.

In the meantime, Manawa can borrow money via general obligation bonding or by creating tax increment districts, but each amount to gimmicky tricks masking tax hikes – wolves in sheep’s clothing.

The biennial budget will be bandied again in 2027, at which point the state will have a new governor. Should the Republican candidate, Tom Tiffany, win the election in November, those in favor of rebuilding the dam will find a friend in Madison. Still, that’s no guarantee, and the permitting process alone to build a new dam would stall any work for an additional 18 months. By that time, there will have been five years of riverine recovery and natural restoration, five years to forget a stagnant and stinky sink.

Salient & Resilient

The Little Wolf is one of the most prized rivers in central Wisconsin. Renowned for trout far upstream and a venerated tube-float downstream, paddlers likewise revel in its swift waters and impressive boulder gardens in between. But the imposing presence of the dam meant that boaters avoided the Manawa area, its walled-off water written off as undoable or undesirable.

That is, until the dam breached. Not knowing how long the impasse would last, I trekked up to Manawa twice in 2025 to through-paddle where the millpond had been. To my surprise, as far as four full miles upstream of Manawa, vestiges of the reservoir were visible by way of watermarks: ghostly traces indelible on boulders like chalk outlines at a crime scene and fissures along the upper banks where the water had lapped up to – often several feet taller than the river today. The discrepancy was sobering. More surreal was the juxtaposition of docks and piers looking like so many pairs of shrugged shoulders hovering above dry land. Several backyards are now hundreds of feet away from the water, a veritable no-man ’s-land in between.

It reminded me of Toni Morrison’s notion of “rememory,” the spontaneous process of past wounds reappearing in the present – coined in her novel Beloved. “If a house burns down, it’s gone,” the protagonist explains, “but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” And I recalled Neko Case’s lyric, “Just at sorrow’s waterline I drape you on tomorrow’s plate.”

Perhaps the most appreciable nuance of paddling through the former millpond is witnessing the earth resurface. Consider how radical this simple reality is: after being submerged since the late 1800s, fields feeling the sun’s warmth are awash in shrubs, plants, wildflowers, saplings – and with them insects and pollinators, attracting songbirds. Great blue herons and sandhill cranes heard the word and speared for fish and frogs. Deer now browse the forbs and gorse; red fox likewise graze and prowl for mice, moles, and voles.

And for the first time in over a century, with no wall imprisoning them, sturgeon have been sighted more than 20 miles above Manawa. Sometimes called “dinosaur fish,” sturgeon are ancient relics from the Jurassic who’ve been swimming upriver from Lake Winnebago since the last Ice Age to spawn.

Equally remarkable, the river’s natural channel has re-emerged, nudging along like a patient regaining strength after a long coma. It’s a reminder that wildness is a vigil that never leaves, forgets, or gives up. Its patience outlasts us and our lust for superficial prettiness. Nature re-members, and the landscape is reverting – or “riverting” – to its natural state. It’s practically a chrysalis.

Pier Pressure

No one alive today is responsible for the splendid river being harmed by a dam, but the onus is on us to decide what to do now. An uncanny nomenclature of street names north of downtown Manawa portends which direction the community can go: Riverview Drive, Progress Road, and Pond Street. That decision will reflect our values: essentially, what kind of “future ancestor” do we want to be – those who build bridges, or resurrect walls? More precisely, do we want to be good stewards or plumbers and emergency responders? It’s a question implied in the principle of the Seventh Generation, the Haudenosaunee philosophy that bases decisions on sustainability – that something thriving today be thriving still seven generations from now.

Presently – presciently – we are approximately seven generations since the first dams were built in Manawa.

To some, the dam is the keystone to community identity: without it, there’s no millpond; and without a millpond, there’s no Manawa. To others, that’s old-fashioned and wrongheaded; call it crying wolf. To me, the Manawa dam is a literal and illustrative example of a legacy burden: a belief or behavior passed down from one generation to another via nature or nurture. The “legacy” is often predicated on a past violation that can be singular or systematic, and the “burden” can be tacit or explicit. When one knows only one thing, it’s hard to imagine anything that isn’t that no matter how unhealthy it is.

Change takes courage – the more so when the change wasn’t a choice in the first place. If crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin, one can see triumph from tragedy. Today, the land where the millpond had been a veritable field of dreams, intimating the promise that they will come back – all the native flora and fauna. It just takes time. Patience. Faith. Local residents can be the first generation to get it right, to break the cycle and leave well enough alone, letting nature heal from old wounds. Or they can double down and borrow gobs of money to saddle their grandchildren with debt to build a brand new dam that will inevitably fail – all to re-create a cursed body of water as cosmetic as a pond on a golf course. It’s a choice between humility and hubris.

“Don’t you tell me I didn’t warn you/ That that’s some gravity you ought not to play with,” Neko Case warns on her song “Hell-On,” about having mercy on the natural world. It’s a reminder, too, that we can be a part of it or be apart from it. “But you’ll not be my master/ You’re barely my guest,” she admonishes. “You don’t have permission to take any pictures.” We’re taught as children not to play with matches, but as adults, we forget not to tinker with water. And while nature may not be able to amend its ways, humans can, if we choose to.

Howl

The acclaimed writer Robert Macfarlane wrangles over a seductively seditious question in his book by the same name: Is a river alive? To wit, is a river a living thing with agency and legal standing, like you or me? Or is it merely a resource for humans to extract and subjugate, no different than severing a tree for forestry or blowing up rocks to mine minerals? There may be no answer we’ll all agree on, but it’s a question we should all be asking.

In the meantime, memory and reverie swirl together with meaning and metaphor in a slippery palimpsest, colliding like coiled currents boiling above and below the surface in a meandering matrix of Möbius strips and underwater aura, outside in and upside down. This is the river’s voice, rich and poised, versed unrehearsed over the course of time as long as time itself. Now come the holistic helices of fish, mussels, plants, of sand and gravel and sediment, each wavering and wandering, squandering nothing, only giving and taking. Next come birds – ducks, geese, eagles, kingfishers, swooping, circling, dipping, plunging in figure eights, making Neko Case’s “perfect rings around a heron’s legs.” Mammals follow – muskrats, beaver, otters, industrious barges bearing fur and gathering grasses, twigs, sticks, swimming for thrills, curving, swerving, churning. Don’t forget rocks, those bones of the planet, of matter itself, inert sentinels adding eddies. Last but not least, trees, sheltering in sweltering heat, their shaded canopy, roots like thirsty straws, boughs broken and bowed over, loose limbs sprained and strained, habit and hospitality below the water, a sun-drenched perch above for neck-stretched turtles or strung snakes. Fin, feather, wing, grass, shell, scale, rock, wood, tooth, talon; eye, dart, heart, hunger, sex, death, birth – a polyphonic symphony savory and mellifluous, healthy and healing, this is a river’s voice. It sings as it swims, as long as its song is not drowned out.