What a glorious breeze! The maple leaves, hemlock boughs, and pine tops sway slowly like underwater plants. I’m at Kemp Station, UW’s remote natural resource campus situated along 200-acres of wooded lakeshore in northern Wisconsin.
I spent the night at Kemp years ago as part of a summer soils course as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. For three weeks, we dug test pits and studied soil horizons in the state’s prairies, bogs, sand flats, and boreal forests. Kemp Station was our northern-most stop, three and half hours due north of Madison in Oneida County. We spent the night in the Norwegian fishing camp constructed on a steep bluff above Lake Tomahawk, playing euchre and telling stories around the campfire. Professors Fred Madison and Birl Lowery were our guides—legends each in UW Department of Soils Sciences—men with big hearts, a deep wealth of knowledge, and a passion for teaching.
Earlier in the week, I received the sad news that Fred passed away. My most vivid memories of him are during that summer at Kemp, his handlebar mustache quivering in the firelight while he regaled us with tales from the field and shenanigans of the 70s in his deep graveled voice. I’m not here this weekend because of Fred, or maybe I am: to remember him and the Greats of our Wisconsin natural resource heritage who are leaving us with shoes far too big to fill.
One such character is William (Bill) G. Lunney. I’m piecing together a story of Bill’s 50 years of service to Dane County Parks. The story begins in Dunn’s marsh, a small wetland once threatened by urban sprawl. Jim and Libby Zimmerman were the botanist protagonists in defense of the marsh. They saw the need to value wetlands as vital natural resources rather than a dumping ground. Bill, Libby, and Jim gave birth to the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, one of the most active and productive wetland organizations in the country.
Bill said that despite her 80+ years of age that Libby was still actively researching and teaching. Sure enough, a quick Google search turned up an invitation to join Libby on a free ‘Sedge Walk’ at Kemp Station this Saturday, where Libby was also lodging while conducting research. For a bargain rate of $18, I was welcome to spend the night at the lodge. For some reason, the thought of spending another Friday night Up North at Kemp Station made me ecstatic. As soon as I polished off work, I loaded the car with my inflatable paddleboard, plant lens, and bug spray and hit the open road.
Professors Fred Madison (right) and Birl Lowrey (left) soil coring into the peat bog at Kemp Station. (Summer, 2010)
Kemp Station was just as I remembered it. I stepped into the timber-frame lodge with its giant stone fireplace, restored vintage Up North wicker chairs and flannel rockers, and relic felling saws from the timber-cutting days at the turn of the century. The banquet hall embodied serenity, dignity, and nostalgia for a time long past. I plunked my bags down in Mead Residence Hall, delighted to have a room all to myself. A simple wood desk abutted a wall of windows facing the lake, and one painting of Cedar Waxwings (my bird) hung over the single bed.
I bumped into Libby and her husband on the way down to the dock. It turns out Libby and I had met before, about ten years ago, in a wetlands ecology course at UW where she lectured and gave field trips. A fact she remembered quite clearly, and I which I embarrassingly forgot, my shame growing more evident with every bite from the hungry swarm of mosquitos. She gave me another chance that evening, finding me in the banquet hall after another visit to the dock, sharing with visible glee how a mother mallard and her chicks swum up right underneath her. We sat perched on the sturdy solid pine banquet table, chatting for hours and eating cherries and almonds from my travel stash, a five-day crescent moon hanging above us like a pendant over the lake.
We spoke about Dunn’s marsh. How she met her late husband, Jim. Their shared passion for botany. The story of how she found him face down in the grasses before lunch, gone too suddenly and too soon. And the seven years of grief before connecting with Jack through a nature-based dating catalog in the late 90s. She painted a picture of Madison 100 years ago, when her mother—then a student at the UW—walked the entire ___mile circumference of Lake Mendota, almost missing her a blind date that evening. The date would become her future husband and Libby’s father.
Libby opened up and shared with me deeply personal stories, her legs swinging like a little girl from the pine table. She asked about my work too, and I shared stories from projects in Maine, removing dams on old white pine logging rivers to reconnect anadromous fish once again from sea to headwater pond. We spoke about old-growth white pine and how some rare 100-tall individuals can still be found standing in Wisconsin’s Menomonee County. Then Libby got up and said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” Together, we walked into the dark night and stretched our arms around one of the oldest and largest white pines, right outside the lodge front doors, our fingers tips barely reaching each other.
Upside down view of a pitcher plant flower.
The following day I woke up to a cool lake breeze floating through the screened-in window. I fixed coffee and wrote for a couple of hours before heading out for a lake adventure. Pumping up my SUP at the lake’s edge, I launched off the small dock and let the strong winds push me around the point into a sheltered cove. At the far end, a narrow channel led me around a corner to a hidden keyhole bog.
Bogs are essentially floating gardens, spongy mats of vegetation so thick and buoyant they can carry trees such as tamarack and pine. A ‘ground’ layer composed primarily of sphagnum moss support companion plants that thrive in the acidic and nutrient-poor environment: bog ferns, sedges, and shrubs with names like Leatherleaf and Labrador tea. Flowers dot the landscape, too: flag iris, wild white calla lilies, and the occasional orchid. I found five Arethusa bulbosa, a fuchsia-colored dragons’ tongue orchid, standing delicate and alluring on a slender 6″ tall stalk. Bogs are also infamous for their concentration of carnivorous plants, insect trappers like the Pitcher plant with a slippery one-way slide leading to an acidic pool, and the Sundew’s sweet nectarine pink pad that becomes a jaw-clamped fly prison.
Bog habitats are unique and quite magical. Found in the kettle depressions of glacial landscapes, they form in the groundwater-filled voids where giant ice blocks calved off the glacier and slowly melted. There’s nothing stable or solid about a bog. The bottom layer is composed of a slowly decomposing peat and has a gelatinous consistency. One can quickly sink up to their waist into it. It’s not the type of landscape to enter alone. The bog landscape is a floating lens, like the iris of an eye encircling a still, dark, and deep pool.
Curious to explore further, I pushed my paddleboard into a narrow channel and nearly became lodged by a renegade mass of floating peat. The weighty mass of this bobbing bog mat—no larger than two sofa cushions—reminded me of the artificial floating islands we installed in a degraded swamp in New Orleans. During a subsequent hurricane, the islands broke free from their anchors and blew away. We found them 100 yards down the shoreline but struggled to paddle them home. We could carry the recycled plastic mats on our shoulders during the installation, but now established with vegetation, it was like dragging along two small reluctant circus elephants.
Fully vegetated floating island from the BBWT platform installation.
After safely returning from my paddle through the bog, I join Libby and a handful of weekend naturalists to spend a gorgeous summer day in a mosquito-filled forest. Libby pointed out species of sedges she carefully flagged for our walk: this one with a drooping chain of fruit that uses gravity to fall a leaf’s length away from the parent plant, and this one whose fruit, mistaken as a grub, is hauled away by ants to be planted a little further afield. Sedges and grasses are often difficult to distinguish, even for the seasoned ecologist. Miniature fruiting structures observed through a thumb-sized plant lens provide clues to proper identification.
Though slowing, Libby shows no signs of stopping. At age 80, she’s still leading ecology tours and monitoring the research plots her late husband began in the 90s. She’s working on finishing a book on sedges, one Jim started, and is scratching the surface of mosses, a subject one could easily spend a lifetime wading into. Bill, Fred, and Libby all share an insatiable curiosity to learn and enthusiasm to share their knowledge and passion. While it was a series of little nudges that led me north on a road trip this weekend, I don’t believe it was random. Perhaps I needed to visit Kemp to reconnect with the spiritual beauty of Wisconsin’s ecology. Or maybe it was to connect with the wisdom of the elders. Either way, I left with an immense feeling of peace and gratitude.
Libby Zimmerman points out flagged sedge species on a naturalist walk at Kemp Station.