From Tending the Valley: A Prairie Restoration Odyssey

by Alice D’Alessio

The following essay is an excerpt from Alice D’Alessio’s Tending the Valley: A Prairie Restoration Odyssey, published in 2020 by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Prologue

About 15 or 20 miles west of Madison, Wisconsin, the hills are steeper, and the valleys narrow, as though somebody took the map and crumpled it in a fist to create a more interesting landscape. It’s known as the Driftless Area. The glacier that scraped and flattened the rest of Wisconsin missed the southwest corner, leaving a rugged landscape ribboned with meandering streams and roads, still forested in places and stacked with sandstone cliffs and outcroppings.

Here in early 1960, John and Sally Marshall found a hidden valley, pooled with mist, patchy with wildflowers, surrounded by high wooded hills. Since reading Aldo Leopold, they'd been looking for some wilderness land, and were particularly attracted to the Driftless Area. Forty acres of an 80 acre valley was owned by an elderly woman named Henrietta Cross, who had inherited it from her father. They were able to convince Mrs. Cross that they would care for her beloved valley, and she sold them 40 acres in 1961. They later bought an additional 45 acres and another 35, for a total of 115.

When John and Sally died, the land was passed on to their three children, Jan, Laird and Owen, who visited from time to time to picnic with friends. Most of the time, hunters, coyotes, birds, field mice and invasive plants claimed the place as their own.

This is the story of what came next: of the people who loved the land, who worked hard to restore it to what it could have been before it was mined and farmed and grazed. And over the course of 30 years, learned much: enjoyed successes, suffered disappointments, and remain in awe, despair and delight at nature's wonders.

Part I. Discovery

Arrival

I remember the first day I saw the Valley in May, 1983. It was gray and drizzly when my new-found partner, Laird Marshall, drove me down the long, rutted driveway, creeping slowly around the steep, hairpin turns in his rattly old Volvo. When we met, he had told me about the wilderness land that his parents had owned and left to him and his siblings.

I was eager to see it, and he chose this Sunday, when neither of us was working. He had invited his cousin David, and David's wife Shelley—the couple who had introduced us some months earlier—to come with us that day, for what was billed as a picnic.

The driveway—more like a path—sloped between high, thickly wooded ridges and outcroppings of sandstone. We emerged from a tunnel of woods, beside a gray, shabby shack. Wood-sided, paint-peeling, it was shuttered and forlorn. A large roofed deck jutted out in front, and we climbed the three sagging steps to this platform and turned to look toward the open fields and the ridges that surrounded them. Like a door opening, or curtains being pulled back, the valley unfolded. I know I felt the same mixture of awe and delight that I have felt each time in the last 30-some years that I’ve climbed the steps and made that slow, half-circle turn.

Whatever the season, the impact is the same: an expanse of field—maybe 15 acres—always changing. Spring green, summer yellow-gold to autumn tawny, to white in winter, then March’s discouraging brown again. It’s a patchwork of black after a burn, and then suddenly, new bright green, and on into a multicolored summer and the festive streamers of fall.

Above the field on all sides are steep hillsides, thick with pine, oak, hickory, walnut. And over all, the wide-open sky like an immense canvas, waiting for the watercolor fantasies that will play across it during the day, or the blue-black night with its saucer-sized stars. The distance is so varied, so beautifully framed in ridges and dark pine fringe, that it compels you to gaze, and gaze long.

That May day we wandered over much of the 110 acres—up and down hills and through woods that were tangled and overgrown with bramble in places, wet and uninviting. David and Shelley had visited the valley before, and were eager to show us some of their favorite areas. I was particularly enchanted with the rock outcroppings, layered in soft colors, lichened and crumbling. Foxes lived there. We could see their scat and smell their musky odor.

We visited the old pond that Laird's parents had established—after they got permission from the DNR to dam one branch of the stream. Muskrats had tunneled through the dam, and the pond had emptied and grown over with reed canary grass. Elsewhere along the stream we discovered beaver dams. These would come and go over the years—now in one spot, now another.

At the end of our rambles, when the rain became a little more persistent, we returned to the deck for shelter, and from there ventured inside. I think the cabin wasn’t locked, or if it was, David forced the lock on the rotting door-jamb to get in, where we made a different kind of discovery.

The cabin had been neglected for years. Deer hunters had made themselves at home in the basement, which was a cement block room under the deck with a small bunkroom above, all part of Laird’s parents’ addition. It was dark and damp, with seepage from the back wall and mouse litterings everywhere. Dirty frying pans and dishes added to the smell. It was the sort of space that made you want to escape immediately.

A spiral staircase built around a giant trunk of a red pine led upstairs to the small bunkroom, consisting of two double-decker platforms piled with narrow mattresses. Once again, the smell of mildew and rot, of dank, unstirred air, was nearly suffocating.

For many people, the cabin could have been enough to quell the excitement of the day. But I was raised with brothers and spent my summers on an uncle’s farm with four boy cousins. We were ratty, barefoot and curious; the flour-sack sheets were always gritty with sand; we slept in the barn, explored caves, scaled trees and wallowed in swimming holes. I never learned what squeamish was. This cabin, to me, was just another new adventure.

A narrow hallway led from the “newer” area to the original cabin. Probably over 100 years old, it had been a three-room farmhouse, approximately 19’ by 13’ in size. An ancient wood cook stove squatted in the middle of the remaining space. The back area was jammed with a workbench and a vast collection of tools and rusty hardware. Here the condition of the interior was just as appalling, though with the large front shutters removed, the space was at least light.

Laird’s parents had been dead for over a decade and the cabin has been more or less abandoned. They had apparently used this area as sleeping quarters and had built in a linen closet and two wooden bunks. The closet stood open, providing comfortable quarters for countless generations of mice, past and present; sheets and towels in various stages of gnawed-ness hung out of shelves or lay fallen to the floor. Old newspapers and magazines also littered the floor. The walls had been plaster, painted a rosy pink. The plaster was crumbling off in places, adding to the debris on the floor, and making it difficult to take even the few steps necessary to view the wreckage.

And yet, in the midst of the disorder, the smell and the aura of hopeless abandon, I sensed the promise. The windows framed the view of distance—wild, varied and intriguing. We could wake to a ridgetop horizon of white pines. The sun would ease above them and slant into this window.

On that first day we closed up the shutters and left, returning to our entanglements in Madison: my still new relationship with Laird, the winding down of my worn-out marriage, reality of my two older sons’ graduation at the University, departure of my younger son for a year in India, the sale of the house we’d lived in for 17 years—and yes, the challenge of a new job.

As I think back, I am again astonished at all those endings and beginnings. How much loss and renewal was layered into those few short weeks in June of 1983. Is it any wonder that I was not immediately consumed with thoughts of the Valley. Swept with "confused alarms,” I was too distracted to recognize that a small, tenacious seed had been planted in my subconscious. Like the seed of the graceful big bluestem, it would grow very slowly, invisible for the first few years as it concentrated its life force on sinking its roots. And it sank its roots deep.

Alice D’Alessio was born to a father who loved poetry and paid her a quarter for each poem she memorized. She grew up on the east coast, graduated from Allegheny College with a degree in English Literature and now lives in Middleton, where she works on restoring and writing about the family property in Ridgeway.