FIELD NOTES: MEMBER NEWSLETTER

Hay for the Horses
by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night

From far down San Joaquin

Through Mariposa, up the

Dangerous Mountain roads,

And pulled in at eight a.m.

With his big truckload of hay

        behind the barn.

With winch and ropes and hooks

We stacked the bales up clean

To splintery redwood rafters

High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa

Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,

Itch of haydust in the 

        sweaty shirt and shoes.

At lunchtime under Black oak

Out in the hot corral,

---The old mare nosing lunchpails,

Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---

"I'm sixty-eight" he said,

"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit, that's just what

I've gone and done."

REFLECTIONS

Being involved with the Driftless Folk School, at least in my case, often means voluntarily ensnaring yourself in the tightly interwoven web of schools and other educational ventures that share ties with the Folk School. This past week, I got the chance to tag along on a field trip with a class at the Youth Initiative High School (one such school in the constellation). The class was an Agriculture intensive; the trip, a visit to Vince Hundt’s farm in Coon Valley, where he raises beef cattle and practices biodynamics. Also on the trip, we got to see the deer exclusion zone, a somewhat radical forestry technique at work in the forested land that surrounds the farm.

Vince explained to the class that the overpopulation of deer in the state of Wisconsin can have devastating impacts on the health of the forests. A healthy forest in this area should have a strong understory, and should comprise a wide variety of species—especially oaks—of all ages, from one year to one hundred years old. When a region has too many deer, they eat all the young trees over the winter, and tend to eat the species that the forest needs the most, while leaving the less choice varieties, like buckthorn. He shows us an uncontrolled section of forest. There is no undergrowth, except an abundance of invasive garlic mustard, and a layer of tiny maple sprouts coating the ground. These little trees, Vince says, will all be eaten by deer over the next winter.

Then, he leads us to a small area of woods, surrounded by a six-foot-tall wire fence. This section of forest was clear-cut years ago, then fenced off and allowed to grow. Without the presence of deer, all species of trees and shrubs have been able to thrive. There are young oaks, walnuts, even a few baby spruces that were planted there before it was fenced off. The visual difference between the fenced-in area and the rest of the forest is astounding; inside the fence, it looks like a thriving ecosystem. By comparison, the surrounding area looks like a barren plain with a few trees growing on it.

We tend to think of conservation and preservation as a project which is either entirely hands-off—as with forests, where the common belief is that our forests will be healthier the more we stay out of them—or entirely hands-on—as with endangered crafts or cultural practices, where often the proposed solution is for a team of anthropologists to swoop in, document every detail, and archive the report away somewhere safe where it will “live forever.” Often, the real solution lies somewhere in between hands-off and hands-on. Like clear cutting and fencing in a small slice of forest, an incredibly laborious process, and then letting it be and allowing the forest to do its work for years. As Vince says, nature will even everything out eventually; the best thing we can do is help it get there a little faster.

FROM THE FIELD: SPRING FORAGING IN THE DRIFTLESS

It’s a pretty perfect spring morning in the Driftless. It’s sunny, warm but not hot, with a steady breeze sending clouds across the sky. Rather than beginning our day of foraging by hiking miles into the deep wilderness, we start out in the instructor’s backyard, looking at dandelions, chickweed, Creeping Charlie, Virginia waterleaf, basswood buds, and other easy-to-find delicacies. The instructor, tracker and forager Nicholas WazeeGale, explains that more often than not, foraging is not about venturing into dark, unexplored wilderness in search of rare and exotic species; but is often as simple as getting a little more familiar with what grows in the grass right outside your door.

A class experience with Nicholas is always far from what you would get in a typical classroom, or from an edible plants guidebook. In a book, plants might be categorized and shown in alphabetical order, cleanly divided and presented for convenience and ease. In Nicholas’s classes, the learning experience is more associative. A search for one plant species quickly puts us on the trail of another; and as we’re examining that one, someone discovers an animal track nearby, or a bird flies overhead, bringing in new information about the environment as a whole. For a novice forager, this methodology helps to engrain the importance of looking at the whole picture, rather than hyper-focusing on the individual plant you want to find. Nicholas explains that plant identification apps can be adverse to learning, because they often only show a plant in one stage of its life cycle (which may not even be the stage when it’s most edible), and tend to focus on what the plant looks like, not what its surroundings look like—a detail that can be just as important as appearance in making a confident identification.

As midday approaches, we gather round to enjoy a lunch of delicious foraged greens, mushrooms, and roots, as well as wild rice, which Nicholas has prepared for us. While we eat, he tells us about the origins of the plants on our plates.

As we walk around the lowlands of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, gathering fiddleheads, ramps, and nettles, we talk about plant relationships being tended by Indigenous peoples, who subtly encouraged the composition of their natural environments through the plants they chose to pick and consume. This nurturing was mutual and intentional. It’s not a dead relationship either. The land where we’re foraging is collaboratively managed by the Reserve and the Ho Chunk Nation, ensuring that traditional ways of caring for land and people are kept alive.

Join Nicholas WazeeGale in June for classes on Trees, Shrubs, Brambles and Vines of the Driftless, and Harvesting and Processing Basswood Fiber. Or, join him in August to learn about tanning animal hides with plant materials. Learn more on our website!

FACES OF THE FOLK SCHOOL: LINDA CONROY

Will Young: You are one of the original instructors at the folk school, since its start two decades ago. Can you tell us what it was like to work with the folk school at the very beginning?

Linda Conroy: Yeah, it was really exciting. It was a new endeavor, and it was just really exciting to work with new people with so much enthusiasm for folk education. At that time, all the classes were on people's land, including land I owned in the Driftless, where I had my classes. It was really wonderful to be inviting people in and sharing skills and ideas. It was a seedling, so there was a lot of potential. 

WY: How has the Folk School changed over the past twenty years?

LC: Well, the Folk School has had many incarnations. It went from being this place without a center, and then it found a center for a while, and then it shifted and it’s in a decentralized state again. That's one of the things I really appreciate about the Folk School, is that it's had this ability to shift and change as people’s needs change, as resources change. There's been a lot of flexibility and adaptability and resilience within the Folk School. And over time, those changes have become more deliberate. It seems that right now there's a change happening to create more deliberation, and to get more of an anchor. And I love how Jacob [Hundt] has been able to weave different things together to keep the folk school running, because I think the Folk School needs partners. And being a small business person myself who offers a lot of education, the key is always partnerships and relationships. 

WY: What about you? How do you think you’ve changed as a teacher over these past twenty years?

LC: I've changed a lot. As a teacher, I always say I learn a lot more than I teach. I teach a lot, but I learn a lot. I'm always responding—again, that flexibility, adaptability and resilience—responding to the needs of the students, responding to the changing time, what people are interested in, how people are learning. I mean, gosh, with my field, the internet really affects how people receive information and how they perceive it. I've had to really shift how I'm presenting the information sometimes, or just helping people to maneuver through information that isn't 100% accurate. So I’ve really had to stay aware of learning styles, of needs, and of what's happening in the broader fields that I'm working in.

WY: Of course, you’ve been a practicing herbalist for much longer than you’ve been teaching here. When did your interest in herbs and herbal medicine begin?

LC: I was in the field of social work, and I always worked in the medical arena, even in my social work days. I became interested in herbs partly from my own health, but also because I saw one of my coworkers who was bringing herbs into her life, and she was really thriving. In my social work, I was working with people with AIDS. And this coworker was living with AIDS, and she was thriving and doing really well, and some of our clients weren't. So then I started learning about herbs for myself. I started for my own health and then it just became something I loved, and the plants kind of drew me in. That particular woman was my first teacher. She mentored me for a long time, and she's still thriving, and she’s still mentoring me. I love it because I'm always learning. I learn something about plants every day. It’s a lifelong endeavor for me.

WY: In which areas are you still learning? What skill or knowledge are you excited to acquire next in the field of herbalism?

LC: When I first started learning about herbs, I thought, I'm going to learn to use herbs in place of drugs and medications. That's what my thinking was, because it's a Western way of thinking about it. It's how we're conditioned. And year after year after year, I get more and more clear that there's a whole other aspect to working with plants, which is relational. It’s about experiencing the plants on their own terms, and seeing the world from their perspectives; being plant-centric rather than person- or ego-centric. I'm learning something about that every day, because it's not easy to undo your conditioning around that kind of thing. Right now, actually, I'm staring at this linden tree that I planted a couple of years ago that’s starting to leaf out. It's leafing out very slowly. It's so interesting because some of the trees leaf out really quickly. And this tree is taking its good old time. I wonder what it is about that tree that makes it move at that slower pace. Looking at the world from a different being's vantage point is really powerful. It opens up this portal to a different kind of experience in life. So it's a mystery, because I'll never know exactly why it's leaving out so slowly, but I'm curious about it. 

WY: What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from your practice as an herbalist?

LC: I would say trust. I've been doing this for over three decades, and very deliberately. And a lot has happened in my life over that time, just like a lot has happened for the Folk School over that time. I've had a lot of changes and shifts; I've had health things come up, all kinds of things. And no matter what, the plants—I always go back to them. There's a level of process that I have: that the plants are going to catch me in some way. They're going to be there. They're going to have my attention. I'm going to have their attention. Somebody said to me one time when I had health problems about 10 years ago, they said, do you feel like the plants let you down? And I just said, absolutely not. I actually felt the opposite. I feel like they've been there for me. It's like you have a relationship with a being, like how if you have pets, you have a relationship with them that's based on mutual respect and trust. I feel that with the plants really deeply.

WY: What do you hope to see from the Folk School in the future?

LC: Well, I would like to see it, of course, continue to offer new learnings. And I would love to see—this is something I’d love to see more of in the world in general, and I see it in the classes sometimes—more intergenerational experiences. To have a whole spectrum of age ranges together, learning from each other. We can learn from younger people, we can learn from our elders. I love learning from elders at the [Midwest Women’s Herbal Conference]. At the conference, one of my greatest pleasures is spending time at the kids's camp. I'm not even working there, but I always go there. And I often go spend time with the teens, too. We have a teen camp. And, oh, my gosh, those girls, when you watch them bond with each other…so having the Folk School having some element of that that's real deliberate could be really fruitful, I think. And then I love the direction that it's going in getting a home, because I think having a little bit more of an anchor will probably be really helpful to the school. And I love that there's a community event now in July that's becoming a tradition because I think traditions are important. You want lots of change, but you also want some anchors that you keep going back to.

WY: Why does alternative and folk education matter to you?

LC: It's important for a lot of reasons. The biggest thing for me is that it is lifelong learning. That’s what gets instilled in you, rather than academic learning, where you take a test and you move on thinking you've conquered the body of whatever you're studying. In lifelong learning, you're continually getting new insights. You're learning to learn. I was just thinking about this yesterday with my apprentice students. They do a sharing at the end of every season where they bring a dish that they've made and they do a sharing of all the plants they were studying. And I was saying to them, what you're doing is learning to learn. It's not necessarily about the exact information. It’s that you know how to learn. You know how to engage with it. With tests, with memorization, it doesn't get integrated into your being, which is what I think this type of education does. And it enriches the community, it enriches the individual, it enriches families, and you know, it really just enriches everyone.

Want to learn more from Linda? She’s teaching two weekend-long intensives this summer: Botany and Sensory Skills for Herbalists and Foragers, from June 20th to June 21st, and Wild Foods, Wild Medicine, from July 18th to July 19th. We hope you’ll join us!

NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

Upcoming Classes

• Mushrooms A-Z: Preparing and Growing Fungi for Food and Medicine, with Linda Conroy and Ingrid Daudert - Saturday, June 6th

• Intro to Oxen, with Anneka Baird - Saturday, June 6th

• Shibori Dyeing with Indigo, with Martha Buche - Sunday, June 7th

• Intaglio Printmaking with Recycled Materials, with Maureen Larson - Sunday, June 7th

• Intro to Beekeeping, with Jeff Hancock - Saturday, June 13th

• Basic Fermented Dairy, with Laura Poe Mathes - Sunday, June 14th

• Family Cow Bootcamp, with Anneka Baird - Friday, June 19th

• Hammered Copper Bowls with Stone Tools, with Martha Buche - Saturday, June 20th

• Everyday Delicious: 3 Lamb Dishes, with Heidi Eger - Saturday, June 27th

• Stone Masonry Basics, with Rikardo Jahnke - Sunday, June 28th

Upcoming Events

• Community Celebration - Sunday, July 5th

• First Fruits Banquet - Saturday, August 1st

Thoreau College

• Applications are now open for the Driftless Field School, our summer program, and the Fall Metamorphosis Gap Semester!

• The 5th Annual Viroqua Shakespeare Festival will take place at PrairieWind Park from June 25-28. Come see our production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Greta Zandstra.

Did you miss the first issues of our Field Notes Newsletters? Check them out here!