Candice Gaukel Andrews | Writer/Author

Book Excerpts Table of Contents

Excerpt from Great Wisconsin Winter Weekends: "Preface"

Excerpt from Explore Wisconsin Forests, Chapter Three: Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest: "Forest Footprints"

Excerpt from An Adventurous Nature: Tales from Natural Habitat Adventures, Chapter Ten: Yellowstone: "Wolves by the Numbers"

Excerpt from The Minnesota Almanac: "July," "August," and "September"

Excerpt from "Great Wisconsin Winter Weekends"

Preface

     Winter is an inward season; its quietness and reflectiveness have always appealed to me as a writer. People, when you do see them, are more apt to linger for a bit more conversation and talk about topics that go a degree or two deeper. Those things alone have always made me long for the last season of the year.
    It often seems to me today that we try to erase weather, if its extremes should fall just outside our comfort zone. We'd rather stay inside in a climatically controlled, year-round 70 degrees than go outside and experience real weather head on - never catching that first snowflake on our tongues or seeing the last of the ice break up on the river. These are the things that should not be missed, but I fear sometimes we'll all miss them once global warming hits us hard. We should enjoy winter while we still have it.
    As much as I have enjoyed winter over the years in my own back yard, this past year while writing this book, I have had the opportunity to get to know winter in ways I had never imagined. Traveling all over the state of Wisconsin on numerous great weekends, I discovered amazing new places where winter thrives and inspiring Wisconsinites who celebrate and innovatively embrace the season.
    I snowshoed Rib Mountain, the fourth highest peak in the state, on a beautiful, cold and calm January Saturday in -20 degree weather and needed to take my jacket off in the effort. I saw no one else the whole time I was there, as if the whole state park was my very own. I hiked past quartzite rocks, glazed in ice that sparkled so my sunglasses weren't enough protection to face them. The trees in the forest were close and tight, all legs. I heard them popping and cracking and making noises up in their heads high above me; I didn't know until then that trees had a language all their own and often talked among themselves. Two deer came out to see just what I was up to.
     I toed the sidelines at the start of the largest cross-country ski race in the nation at the American Birkebeiner in Cable. Thousands of avid Nordic skiers and I sang "Wild Thing" as we waited for ten "waves" to push off.
    I stood on the shores of the mighty Mississippi River in Prairie du Chien in the last hour of December 31. I counted down the seconds with the happy people around me as a huge carp was lowered to ring in the New Year. The bonfire was so warm, I had to move away from the heat on a -5 degree night. Who could have guessed that kissing carp was a sure-fire way to bring you good luck all year.
    I walked to the shore of Lake Michigan on another winter weekend and watched as Santa Claus arrived in the port town of Manitowoc on a "Christmas Tree Ship" to deliver trees, just as had been done 100 years ago. On another - but frozen - lake in Merrill, I watched dragster cars race on the ice in an exciting show of speed. On another great lake, Lake Superior, I took a wild ride on a "windsled" on the state's only officially recognized road made of ice to an island at the other end.
    I've stood in the sugar bush in Appleton and tasted 100 percent maple syrup next to the tree that gave it. At Mirror Lake, I fell asleep watching the stars in the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in the world where you can lay your head down for the night.
    I saw artists from all over the country sculpt intricate masterpieces from snow at the National Snow Sculpting Competition in Lake Geneva and the state competition in Wisconsin Dells. I saw the hands of nature, with the same artistic mindset, sculpt fantastic ice caves in Bayfield. There, too, I cheered for the teams taking on the challenge of the Apostle Islands Sled Dog Race, the dogs' enthusiasm for the snow infecting all who could hear them.
    I've been surprised by bald eagles in Wyalusing State Park, who rose up from a cliff below me without a single sound of warning to fish where the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers meet. For such large birds, they are amazingly quiet and inspired the same respectful silence in me.
    For five months, I traveled through Wisconsin, looking to find winter. Not the season, but the spirit of it. I did. I hope you will, too.

C. G. A.
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
January 1, 2006

Excerpt from "Explore Wisconsin Forests"

Chapter Three: Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest
Forest Footprints

Alone, Above the Treetops.
     Manny Stein was totally alone, just sitting and watching. He was at work, and that's all he could do, really. That's all his boss would allow him to do.
     "I was a lookout in the Chequamegon fire towers in the 1950s and 1960s," explains Manny by phone. I had called him after reading a newspaper story about an upcoming ceremony the U.S. Forest Service planned to hold in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. Manny and his sister, Betty, would be in attendance at the September 2006 commemoration for the Fifield Fire Lookout Tower in the eastern region of the forest's Chequamegon Land Base. Betty had been a fire tower lookout, too, and the brother-and-sister pair promised to be some of the prime storytellers at the shindig.
     "When I first started as a lookout," says Manny, "it was pretty much a no-no to take up a book or a radio or any of that stuff. You were supposed to be watching for smoke, and that's it."
     The whole idea of being a lookout intrigued me: working in a dense, green, natural setting surrounded by precious solitude day in and day out, and seeing the forest from a bird's-eye perspective that most of us will never be able to arrange. But while a job where you're paid to just sit and watch sounds like a "breeze" to me, Manny quickly corrected my thinking. Watching for hours in a forest fire tower with absolutely no distractions is a bit harder than it sounds. And breezes were just one of many challenges.
     "The wind constantly whistles through those towers, the tin, and the antenna," says Manny with an eerie tone in his voice when I ask him to tell me what a typical day was like up there. "It was kind of a weary sound, you know? You couldn't get away from it. Very seldom do you have a calm day at one hundred feet above the ground. You kind of had to talk to yourself and tell yourself to ignore it. If you let it get to you psychologically, it would start to bother you."
     The more Manny talked about the lonesome, moaning steel giants in the forest and the tricks they liked to play on you, the more I got bothered. I had to go and see the Fifield Fire Lookout Tower - and Wisconsin's only national forest - for myself.

An Unfamiliar Vastness.
     There is something a little unsettling when you first come face-to-face with the breadth of this forest. The total acreage of the Chequamegon side of the combined Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest is a vast 849,000 acres, with the isolated eastern portion accounting for 150,000 of them. State Highway 70 takes you right through the heart of this region. Totally alone is how I am - and I'm not even in a tower.
     The two-lane highway runs like a straight cut through tall, beefy trees on either side; for miles and miles and miles and miles. Although I know that just beyond these trees there must be trails and tracks, raccoons and ruffed grouse, squirrels and snowshoe rabbits, black bears and white-tailed deer, I can see nothing but the trees and the road even on this January day when the woods should be more bare. I am forlorn. And "forlorn" isn't a word I've used or even thought of for a very long time.
     I feel what Manny was talking about, even from ground level. I can see how getting lost alone in this forest or having your car suffer a mechanical breakdown somewhere on this stretch of asphalt could, after a few hours, start to play with your mental state.

*************************

Big Shoes to Fill.
     Eagle talons on fire tower roofs, and cougar paw prints in the snow. The steel legs of lookout towers anchored in the soil, and the muscular lower limbs of river men controlling enormous rafts of weighty timbers. Aldo Leopold's ethics born in the earth, and Smokey Bear's burned hind feet. That unsettled feeling I had when I first stepped into the Chequamegon metamorphosed into a notion of being very grounded. And if you look closely on the Chequamegon's forest floor, you might see yet another set of impressive tracks.
     "I was born and raised in these woods," says Manny, "and I still live here, in a log home on the South Fork of the Flambeau, which is right in the middle of the national forest. My dad was a logger, and my son's been a logger for thirty-five years. He lives in the forest, too, in a log home I built. I go out and help him sometimes," Manny says with pride. "Still being able to work in the woods with my son, well, that's kind of neat because the forest is a big part of my life.
     "After I retired," Manny continues, "I was offered some timber inventory work. I was able to walk farther into places I hadn't been in for years and even into some little spots I hadn't ever been in. I must have covered sixty thousand acres after I quit my U.S. Forest Service job. I have flashbacks now of where I've been to in this forest, of certain locations, lands, roads, and swamps.
     "It's humbling to know that my boot tracks are all over this beautiful place."
     Manny's final reflection reminds me of something else Aldo Leopold once wrote: "Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasqueflower is a right as inalienable as free speech."
     I guess Manny, in that fire tower all alone, without benefit of books or radios, or television, came to know that, better than anyone.

Excerpt from "An Adventurous Nature: Tales from Natural Habitat Adventures"

Chapter Ten: Yellowstone
Wolves by the Numbers

A Last Impression.
    It was late afternoon by the time we stopped and parked the van in a turnout in Yellowstone National Park. The first hints of sunset-pink were dimly discernable in the winter sky that spread across the top of the open valley. I reached for the handle of the van's side door and quietly slid it open. As my thermal boot touched down on the crisp and just-crusted-over snow, I could see that earlier a wolf had passed by this place where I now stood in the Lamar Valley. His footprint was there in the snow. And as I bent down and held my hand gently over it to compare our sizes, it was like we were standing there together, and the difference in time didn't matter.
    In fact, as I was about to find out, the customary way of thinking about time as a linear construct didn't make much sense when you are standing in the midst of a Yellowstone winter. History, the now, glimpses of the future - they are all jumbled together here.
    It is believed that wolves have inhabited Yellowstone for thousands of years. But by 1926, the last wolf in Yellowstone was shot and killed. For seventy years following the firing of that bullet, the valley winds have ferried no howls; delivered no haunting messages to other wild souls. But, in 1995, fourteen wolves captured near Hinton, Alberta, Canada, were reintroduced; and in 1996, seventeen more wolves were brought in from an area near Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada. Today, in 2007, the estimate is that there are 145 wolves living in thirteen packs in Yellowstone National Park.
    That's why I came West from my home in Wisconsin in January of 2004. Of all of our country's great icons of the wild - the wolf, the bear, the eagle - I most wanted to see a wolf in the wild; I most wanted to hear the wind's wildest signature: a wolf howl. While Wisconsin is home to almost six hundred timber wolves, I had never managed to see one on any of my excursions into my state's Northwoods. Perhaps I made too much noise. Perhaps there was too much forest to hide in. Or perhaps the wolves knew I wasn't ready to see them.
    I read that wild wolves are seen more easily in Yellowstone National Park than in any other place in the world, so there it was that I wanted to go. I wanted the chance to see the packs of Yellowstone in the broad, open, nearly treeless, sagebrush grasslands of the Lamar Valley. I wanted the chance to see wild wolves in another natural icon - the world's first national park.
    My home state has a long and strong environmentalist tradition: John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Founder of Earth Day Senator Gaylord Nelson all lived, worked, and wrote in Wisconsin about the natural beauty around us and the importance of learning about that world. The soul of the wolf, too, has been much written about. As a writer and a Wisconsinite wanting to learn more about my state's fauna, I decided to go on a journey to find the place where the two - the environmentalist tradition and the soul of the wolf - intersect.
    Sometimes, you have to leave home to find the road there.

Excerpt from "The Minnesota Almanac"

July, August, and September

July

     Although technically it isn't, The Fourth of July is our mental-marker for the middle of summer (it's kind of like the true North Pole vs. magnetic North Pole). School lets out in early June and starts in late August, so at the beginning of July, we're pretty much into picnics and boating, parks and burgers. You'll find Minnesota-style inspiration for all of these things in this chapter.
     July also brings to mind two of Minnesota's most iconic resources: lakes and lumbering. Has anyone ever actually counted every lake in the state? Although there's an "official" number, tally-takers disagree but have generally reached the consensus that there are more than ten thousand, for sure. But with at least one in six Minnesotans out on the lake in the summer (and that's just the boat owners - not counting the ones who join in for the ride!), most would rather just enjoy their lakes than count the ones others may be enjoying.
     Like the lakes, the number of trees in Minnesota has confounded people since white settlers first arrived and tried to take stock. Nineteenth-century loggers thought we'd never run out. We now know we can, but sustainable forestry practices enacted in the twentieth century are making sure that trees will count in the future.
     With the Fourth being the midpoint of summer, then (at least in our minds!), we're halfway past the season and halfway stepping into fall - appropriate for a state sitting on the forty-fifth line of latitude, halfway between the North Pole and the equator.

August

     "August," at least the way Lord Byron uses it, means "marked by a majestic dignity or grandeur." The name of the eighth month of the year comes from such a personage, Augustus Caesar.
     Minnesota has never been short of "men of might," "those grand in soul," or for that matter, dreamers. Early miners - along with the loggers and farmers - used their strength to forge a state, even if they had to dig through rock to make living here possible. Some other Minnesotans have beautified urban settings with works of art, and more than a few have brought joy to their neighborhoods on a summer day with a friendly, community game of softball. These people certainly have a grandness of soul.
     The state has its share of dreamers, too, such as a man who imagined skyscrapers and another who envisioned the biggest ball of twine in the world, sitting right in his back yard. Such an unusual, disassociated thought must have been a dream. Good or bad, you can decide.
     Read about these august people and mighty men here, in this month, before the dream of summer ends, and fall is the reality once again.

September

     Fall in Minnesota is an incendiary time. The forest's leaves seem to start to catch fire, beginning their transformation from shades of green to saturated tints of orange, yellow, and red. Ripe vegetables and fruits bend their vines and consume the rich nutrients in their soils. The sun itself seems aglow in pale, evening skies.
     But the month has been incendiary in other ways, as well. One of the nation's worst forest fires happened in Hinckley in September, and Chisholm had its own September battle with the blaze. Northfield was the scene of a different kind of fire: that from guns. It seems nature and human tempers run hot at this time of the year.
     By the end of the month, however, a certain, unique-to-Minnesota coolness comes that is comforting. Thousands of hawks beat their formidable wings in the air just over our heads, and if we're lucky, we can catch the breeze sweeping by our faces. And if we're even more fortunate, we can be there to see and feel those rare acres of tallgrass prairies fanning themselves, waving a goodbye to summer and a greeting to the soon-arriving winter.