Human Powered
Season 1, Episode 2 Transcript
Jimmy
One night in late August of 2018... it started to rain in southwestern Wisconsin. That rain quickly turned into a downpour… and then a flash flood. That’s when Clinton Bagstad woke up.
Clinton
The electricity went off at 2:30 in the morning. And the first thing I saw—really the only thing I remember about in the house, because I went to the bedroom, which was straight ahead—my, well I call them my good shoes, my Sunday shoes, were floating.
Tamara Dean
In your bedroom?
Clinton
In the bedroom.
News Tape
Our forecast panned out with a round of severe weather last evening with strong damaging winds and then training thunderstorms overnight. Also, the Kickapoo River is a concern. Very heavy rain fell around Ontario, and all of that water has to flow downstream and could impact La Farge, Viola, Reedstown, Soldier’s Grove, Gay’s Mills, and Steuben...
Tamara Dean
And then what did you do?
Clinton
People have asked me that, and I said, “with my knee boots on, and my clothes I had on, I went and laid down in the bed.” They said, “didn’t you go upstairs, did you…where did you go?” Well, I said, “I didn’t have anywhere to go.” Because I got the storm door open just a little bit and I saw what was going on and I didn't have anywhere to go.
And then I figured, well, it’s gonna go down eventually, and if it gets so bad the house goes...that’s the way it’s gonna be.
Jimmy
Clinton is 84 years old. He’s lived in what’s known as the “Driftless region” of Wisconsin, his whole life. With the snap of a finger, he can recall memories of floods dating back to 1942! And in all that time he says, nothing was quite like this...
Tamara
So, you’ve seen a lot of floods. How does this compare to previous floods you’ve experienced?
Clinton
It doesn’t.
Caroline
It is clear that people are super traumatized. And what if we tried to help people express that and share it and understand that they’re not alone in it?
Jimmy
For the last 15 years, the Driftless region has been under water...and increasingly so. In a part of the state that’s already prone to flooding, this has become devastating—almost existential. And it has people asking—how do we make a life here?
A project called “Stories from the Flood” could be one of the answers. Started two years ago by the Driftless Writing Center, volunteers and community members have interviewed over 100 people about their experiences during flood events. Folks like Clinton Bagstad.
These stories share grief, resilience, and even joy...but they also give us the ability to think about complex issues like flooding and climate change in a brand new way.
I’m Jimmy Gutierrez, and this is Human Powered, a new podcast from Wisconsin Humanities, Love Wisconsin, and Field Noise Soundworks about how people make places better.
I’m from Milwaukee, but I’ve been visiting all corners of Wisconsin my whole life. And something I’ve noticed, from Stoddard to Spring Green is just how folks care for the land. And for each other.
Today, we’re heading back to the Driftless Region with Caroline Gottschalk Drushke.
Caroline
These are really steep parts of Wisconsin, so I think folks who haven't traveled to that part of the state can't quite picture that it looks like Appalachia, you know, it's mountainous in some ways, small mountains, but mountainous and tends to flood….
Jimmy
That’s because the glaciers from the last Ice Age didn’t cover this land. And since the area wasn’t flattened by glaciers, the hills and valleys were carved by the waterways…rivers and streams and floods. That’s the reason why people here mark the years of their lives by floods.
Caroline
I was working with a gentleman in the Kickapoo Valley, and he was saying that his first memory was the flood of 1935. Like his absolute first memory in life is water washing up from the creek that's way far away from the house because he still lives in the house that he grew up in, you know, up to the house.
Jimmy
Caroline is an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s also a master's student in environmental resources, focusing on stream ecology. Basically, what that all means is that she’s an English professor who knows a TON about science—and the value of personal narratives.
Caroline
I really think that to try to understand a landscape or a process on a landscape, like flooding in the Driftless, you can’t understand how that’s working without the stories that people tell about their lives.
{>>mux beat<<}
Jimmy
One of the stories people tell starts about 100 years ago...back when the Driftless was facing a similar problem.
Tim
You would hear stories of, you know, how things got out of hand in the 20s and 30s. And you can go back and look at the historical photos of what happened in the watersheds and the farming practices were not — they didn't match the terrain. We used farming practices that caused a lot of damage.
Jimmy
Tim Hundt was a long-time local journalist, who now works for Congressman Ron Kind. He was also one of the volunteers for Stories from the Flood.
He knows this land because he grew up on a farm in the driftless that sits atop of a hill.
Tim
...If you dumped out a bucket of water at the top of the ridge where I lived, it could either go to, toward the Mississippi River, and the other direction was the Coon Creek watershed...
Jimmy
The farming practices we’re talking about are the ones brought over by European immigrants. They converted the native vegetation to crops and dairy pastures. They plowed up and down the hillsides. And it didn't take long before erosion...that slow, geologic process that shaped this land...started tearing it all down.
Tim
.... and you would have huge ravines that you could you know, park a truck in and soil erosion got out of hand and farmers couldn't make it really was what caused the Dust Bowl, those tillage practices.
Jimmy
In the Driftless, pastures were washing away down hillsides. But in other parts of the midwest, farms were *literally* blowing away in the wind. That’s when parts of Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma were called the Dust Bowl.
In response, the government started a new Federal agency called the Soil Conservation Service. The agency was made up of a new generation of scientists, including Wisconsin’s Aldo Leopold. Their goal was to look at the whole system of farming...soil, water, plants....everything! Even taxes and farming loans. They had visions to transform the landscapes with bold new ideas...things like crop rotation and wetland restoration.
And they set up shop right here in the Driftless.
Tim
Coon Creek watershed was the birthplace of conservation work that really turned the Dust Bowl around. And, you know, as I went to college, and then later worked as a journalist, and I realized how those practices really dramatically transformed the country, and really, probably not exaggerating to say they save the country, because if those those practices, and hadn't been tried and implemented, I don't know what would have happened with the Dust Bowl, it would just gotten worse and worse, probably.
Jimmy
These conservation practices worked. The Dust Bowl ended. Farming came back. It even improved. The Driftless would become home to countless organic farms, including Organic Valley: the largest organic co-op in the country.
And with the soil finally staying in place, the waterways cleared up. Trout soon returned and the area became a major destination for fishing and canoeing.
Sounds like success, right? Well, almost. That’s because the flooding came back.
[mux in]
There’s a few reasons why. First, from a farming standpoint, small farms have been and are being displaced by larger ones. There’s more profit in grain than dairy, and the machinery used on the land keeps getting heavier.
{>>music up<<}
But the bigger problem...is the rain. Extreme rain events...where over four inches fall in one storm...have increased dramatically in recent years.
Tim
You know, people sometimes shy away from the term climate change in these rural areas, because it's so politically charged even today. But even if you don't, you know, want to use that terminology, people out here know that something is drastically changed.
2007 was the first major flood. A year after that, 2008, it was a record-setting flood, it was worse yet, in all of those communities through the Kickapoo Valley got hit even harder. Then, about every two years, another devastating flood, most of them not as big as 2008, but really high and difficult and a lot of damage.
Cap that off with so far the worst was 2018. Exceeded the other floods by a foot or two, just absolutely devastating. That was the point at which people sort of had to step back and say, “What’s going on?”
Jimmy
{>>music down<<}
Here’s Caroline again...
Caroline
You know, these are communities who are used to floods, these are people whose homes have flooded, and businesses and main streets. And so they're kind of used to the pace of that in some ways. But this just blew everything out of the water.
Jimmy
The interviews from “Stories from the Flood” give a portrait of these flood events , firsthand, from people who lived through them.
{>>flood sequence<<}
Jimmy
For Nick and Ellen Voss, it started as they were moving into a house they just rented in Soldier’s Grove—right along the Kickapoo River.
Ellen
Between thunderstorm downpours, we were loading everything we could in the van, trekking it out here, unloading, and so the last load of the night, we emptied everything out. Nick took one last look for some reason in the basement. I can't remember why but even at that point, it was completely full of water.
Jimmy
Ryan McGuire’s a firefighter in Coon Valley. His pager starts going off at 11pm; and by 1am he’s making his first rescue
Ryan
It was me, my chief and then two other firemen that were down there. We were rapping on the window on the door. She was home alone, and she had a, God was she like a four or five-year old I think, in the room. They no idea. She didn't know there was water in the house until we woke her up. So she goes to open up her door. Now by this time, the waters about midway in between my knees and my hip. And I'm six foot. And we always tell, grab your phone, grab anybody that's in there and grab any medications because we don't know if we're coming back. So I had the dog in then the gal was in between me and my chief and the chief had the five-year-old and we're walking out. The water this point that was chest-deep.
Jimmy
At 2:30 in the morning, Clinton Bagstad loses power. He lives upstream in a town called Westby
Clinton
We have a sump pump in the basement, I went up to my portable camping light, put my knee boots on, went to the basement to get the pump. But when I was on the way out of the basement, I just got past the basement window. I had one foot on the first step, and the window broke. And when I got up on the main floor, the flood was there also.
Jimmy
At the same time, back in Coon Creek, Ryan starts evacuating 15 people from an assisted living facility.
Ryan
We ended up taking them out of the house. And we were able to walk them out the door. So as we're walking them out, you know, we're talking to them. And I remember saying, you know, I’d ask every single one, just to kind of calm them, I kind of got into a routine, and I’d say “Hey, where are you from? You from down here?” And if they said yes, I’d say “have you ever seen it rain this much?” or you know. People would say, “yeah, I’m from down here. I’ve never seen it like this” or whatever.
Jimmy
Over in Viroqua, Tim Hundt is in the radio station at WVRQ, sharing what he learnt as soon as he learns it.
Tim
It was getting to the point where it was going to be almost impossible to get from LaCrosse to Madison. Highway 35 along the river, Highway 14 had water over it at the bridge at Coon Valley and at Reedtown. Highway 27, coming from Sparta to Westby, had water on it from the little La Cross River. It was getting really daunting.
Jimmy
By the time the sun came up, the rain had stopped. People finally get their first look at the damage. It’s a scene Clinton won’t soon forget...
Clinton
in the morning when the water had receded, so I went outside. Three buildings were gone completely. The buildings and the contents.
Jimmy
And when Nick and Ellen Voss came back to check on their new place…
Ellen
We're met with water all the way out probably 50 feet out past, there's an arrow stream sitting at the edge of the property kind of by the barn, and up until that spot, it was completely full of water.
Jimmy
Around noon, Ryan McGuire goes home.
Ryan
Finally all of our guys were able to kind of reconvene and take a breather and then I left. It was now over 12 hours on wet, wet socks, wet everything... I wanted to go change. I went home, took a nap, and then was backed out in a couple of hours.
{>>music down / end flood sequence<<}
Jimmy
These oral histories reaffirm what we already know about disasters. In the direct aftermath, people help each other. That’s reflected in how churches doubled as donation centers. Libraries served as gathering places for information. Water pumps were passed around neighborhoods to clear out basements. But that is just the beginning of the work.
Caroline
I think folks who haven't experienced floods, think about them, maybe as a one-day event, or two days or one week. And really, you know, two and a half years later, now, people are still cleaning things out, rebuilding things, tearing things down, dealing with soaked insulation, and carpets and basements and all kinds of things. So it's really, I think, floods appear in the news and then disappear. And really, the impact of flooding is felt, you know, for years.
Jimmy
“Stories from the Flood” also shows people are impacted by so much more than what they lost. That’s what volunteers from the Driftless Writing Center realized when they were helping neighbors clean up. Director Tamara Dean, Lisa Henner, and Jennifer Morales and other volunteers were out in the community with their neighbors.
Caroline
I think what they saw in the immediate wake of the flooding was, as I said, a lot of trauma. People kind of talking through what they had been through, but also really just trying to clean, clean up their lives and their places. And so the Driftless Writing Center really saw that this might be a way to help people process their trauma, first and foremost, and then maybe it can support recovery.
Jimmy
That’s how the whole project started. People wanted to talk. People needed to talk. So Tamara, Caroline, and other volunteers started recording stories. They soon found out, more people wanted to talk than they had people to listen.
Caroline
“Stories from the Flood” is such a great idea. But it needed more bodies, you know, more bodies and more brains, like it needed more people on the ground. And it needed more people working to think about what was contained in this ever-growing archive that now contains stories of over 100 people about flooding in August and September 2018.
Jimmy
So in 2019, Caroline got her students involved. They would carpool out to the Driftless on weekends from Madison.
Students heard about recovery. They heard stories of resilience, stories of hope...and also pain. For Nick and Ellen Voss, this meant finding unexpected support from neighbors you just met...but also living in constant fear this would happen again.
Ellen
Every job I've ever had has involved water and I have I love water and they love recreating on it. And studying it. It's so interesting. But yeah, there's also this like giant fear of water, and living next to it. And it's the thing is, it's not the water fault. All of the problems we have are man-made. And so you can't be angry at a river for doing what a river has to do.
Jimmy
For Ryan McGuire, the night of the flood is a memory he’ll never forget...
Ryan
I don't wanna say you have PTSD, but you get flashbacks. I go right back to that night. I can picture the, I'm there... I mean, I'm walking down the street and the water's up to my chest. And you just feel like a shiver up your back. And you know, and I don't know if it's, it doesn't scare me. But it's just, I'm there.
Jimmy
And this trauma isn’t linear. It’s a collage where these floods have started to blend together. Cele Wolf is still haunted by the memory of the 2008 flood, when she headed out on her morning drive.
Cele
I drove my usual road through Boaz. I just got...I didn't make it to Boaz because I got to a certain place on highway--what is that, 171? And... everything stopped, there wasn't anything more. There was, water was everywhere. And you know, that image still comes up in my dreams. [Wow] I'll be driving somewhere and all of a sudden, I get to the end of the road, and there's nothing but water everywhere.
{>>music change<<}
Caroline
Many of those storytellers, then did give feedback saying that it was a really important experience for them. And it was important to be able to tell, and to think through, and to narrate what had happened to them. And then putting that experience in some context and putting it in connection with other people who also experienced something really, really hard right alongside of them.
Jimmy
It also helped her students as they themselves struggled through a school year like no other.
Caroline
A lot of my students in the spring and fall said that listening to the flood stories helped them make it through COVID. Like, there was something powerful in the ways that people face something really overwhelming and awful, and kind of find their way through it, that gave my students a lot of peace when they were going through a similar kind of situation. And that's something that science doesn't necessarily do. You know, science helps point us towards an answer. But I think, yeah, stories can give us equipment for living, if you will.
Jimmy
As important as these personal experiences and revelations are, Caroline and her students are also using the oral histories to learn more about floods themselves. By analyzing the histories closely, they can use them to track events throughout the watershed, to try to understand what communities value.
Caroline
You know, I'm into data, I'm pro data, I want more data. But I also want more stories and the richness of stories and I think one of the really cool things about a project like Stories from the Flood is that you get 100 versions of the same event. Same climate event, or climate exacerbated event, and those really matter. I think something like flooding, like climate change, is not just a data event. It’s not just a scientific process. It’s an experience of our world.
[mux in]
Curt
As someone who has worked on the history and stories and landscape of the Driftless, to me, this was one of the most important missing elements: giving people a chance to tell their version of the story of their experience.
Jimmy
Curt Meine is a conservation biologist and historian who has lived in and around the Driftless for 25 years. But he’s been writing about it for even longer.
Curt
I mean, I can give you lots of technical information and numbers on, say, flooding in the Driftless, or the recovery of groundwater flow in the Driftless. But conservation is always about more than the science. It's about the culture and the community and the memory and the hopes of people. It's not it's not the science that is going to solve the problem for us. It can give us the necessary information, and data and theories that help us to understand change. But for us to change in a way that makes us compatible with our landscapes, we have to look inside.
Jimmy
As a historian, Curt sees the past as part of the way forward. He thinks there’s something to be learned about how the Driftless recovered during the Dust Bowl.
Curt
The forester alone can't do it. The farmer alone can't do it. The hydrologist alone can't do it. The Wildlife expert alone can't do it. You need to have all those areas of knowledge and expertise brought together and working and talking together and planning together.
Jimmy
The biggest question that could be facing the Driftless and the people here is how do we respond? What does it look like to be in a relationship with the land? With this land. A place that’s becoming more unpredictable, more traumatic, but one that’s still rich with traditions, stories, and life.
Curt
So when we ask that question about living well, and in a healthy way, within the Driftless, we're actually asking the larger question of how do we humans live on the earth going forward in a time of rapid social and environmental change? And how can we do that in a way that benefits not only people but the entire ecological community?
Jimmy
The Driftless region, with its enchanted landscapes and steep, rolling hills is an absolutely gorgeous stretch of land...unlike anything else in Wisconsin. It is also home to some of the most unimaginable devastation. And the problems facing the people there will only grow in the coming years.
But the Driftless region has historically been a place to find answers* To experiment and understand. To realize...that in the face of questions this big...you have to start small.
“Stories from the Flood” helps get us there. The stories are more than just ways to share data, or collective harm and healing...they’re a pathway to a new future. A future that’s needed to stand up to the challenges facing the region today.
Credits
Wisconsin Humanities and Love Wisconsin have teamed up to make six monthly episodes of Human Powered because we believe that sharing stories about people making their communities better helps us all imagine what is possible.
If you like what you heard today, please subscribe wherever you listen. And if you want to leave a rating or review, that would be great, too.
Human Powered was produced by Craig Eley at Field Noise Soundworks, along with Jessica Becker. Story editing by Jen Rubin. Production assistance from Jade Iseri -Ramos.
Dena Wortzel and Brijetta Waller are Executive Producers. The show is mixed by Rob Byers, Johnny Vince Evans, and Michael Raphael of Final Final Vee Two. I’m your host, Jimmy Gutierrez.
Special thanks to Tamara Dean and the Driftless Writing Center for sharing the oral history interviews with us. You can learn more about Stories from the Flood at wisconsinfloodstories.org
Thanks also to our voice recording engineer, Ian Olvera at Wire & Vice Studios. Music in our episode comes from Blue Dot Sessions and the band Kinfolk, find them on Facebook at Kinfolk soul music Madison.
Visit Wisconsin Humanities at wisconsinhumanities.org and Love Wisconsin at lovewi.com for more information about this episode and our work.
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