Review: In ‘Shelter and Storm,’ a woman puts her mark on Wisconsin’s Driftless Area

Like a modern-day Henry David Thoreau, writer and self-reliance guru Tamara Dean set out early in this century to make a home in the country and to live simply there.

The acres of choice for her enviable homestead (strangers would pull over at random and ask to take a look around) were in the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin. There lies a unique landscape of painterly hills, valleys, forests and streams in a region so named because it was untouched by the glaciers and thus its soil contains no “drift” — pebbles, silt, debris.

What she experiences there and shares with us in these dozen essays is a revelatory study of person and place, entwined.

“The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself,” she quotes the naturalist Aldo Leopold in a chapter on the controlled burning of her hay field after a long-mulled decision to return it to prairie for the benefit of pollinators (that would be bees and butterflies). Prairie restoration “was, and remains, an act of defiance,” she notes, with one ecologist stressing it was a project that could take decades to realize.

This is not a life for the weak of spirit.

From forging her new home’s walls, mud brick by mud brick (7,220 of them), grieving the violent stripping of an entire forest by a tornado or watching the overflowing banks of the area’s waterways swallow neighboring farms and dreams (not just once, but several times), her Driftless story is one consistently steered by the brutal and unpredictable hand of climate change. But if one hand holds the vulnerabilities wrought by a hotter, wetter and more unstable climate, the other, more temperate hand guiding her generous and self-aware tales is that of the enduring power of awe.

Dreams of the pastoral life have been drawn for ages, memorably by Thoreau and his experiment at Walden Pond. Yet we never seem to tire of such dreams or dreamers. At a time when our world feels chaotic and a bit upside down, it was grounding and meditative to follow one woman’s back-to-the-land adventure:

• Dean’s historical research on the life and times of a woman who died in 1876 at the age of 35 — and whose grave marker is one of only a handful left standing in a dilapidated cemetery on her property — yields a fascinating and surprising tale of Civil War-era practices regarding childbirth and birth control.

• Weathering both inner and outer storms, Dean and her partner come to realize that their “undertaking in the name of self-reliance and security was utterly vulnerable.” And from this they learn the painful but liberating reality of impermanence.

She closes with an essay saturated by both sadness and hope as we find her, covered head to toe in tick repellent, tramping through a nearby landscape in search of the elusive “slow blue” firefly, a turquoise symbol of self-illumination that’s only been found blinking on and off, on and off, in this very precious neck of the woods. Like much that is worthwhile in life, the experience of awe, she realizes, is equal parts work and luck.

Attention, as the Buddhists say, is love. This small book of deep attention is a love letter to the joys and griefs of living on the land.

Michiela Thuman is a design director at the Minnesota Star Tribune.

By: Tamara Dean.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 216 pages.