When Tamara Dean and her partner, David, moved to the Driftless Area two decades ago, they were following romantic notions of living as homesteaders, growing their own food and having less of an impact on the planet.
“We were seduced by the beauty, as a lot of people are. It’s so magnetic. It’s magical in its diversity of flora and fauna,” Dean tells Isthmus. “I had the idea that I would be a farmer somehow. I hadn’t thought that through.”
Dean found plenty of wonder and joy living close to the land in the Driftless, but nature also provided equal measures of menace. As Dean documents in her new collection of essays, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless (University of Minnesota Press), living on the land is both sublimely rewarding and brutally difficult.
Dean says the essays focus on the tension inherent in the title, shelter and storm — “nurturing and comfort and refuge, versus threat and difficulty.”
Nature sometimes threatens to destroy their home (constructed, as Dean describes in one essay, out of handmade mud bricks). She faces tornadoes and floods, made worse by climate change, as well as cancer and debilitating bouts of Lyme disease.
Unlike the authors of some back-to-nature narratives, Dean recognizes that she didn’t invent this way of life. The essays regularly find connections to the past, popping up in ways that sometimes seem disjointed, but eventually make perfect sense.
“An Ordinary Woman” begins with Dean researching the people who have been buried on her land, to discover Nancy Ann Harris, who died in 1876 from an abortion. What follows is an exploration of how women historically controlled reproduction, sometimes with the help of a doctor, but more often from other women. It’s a sad, but fascinating rabbit hole that Dean takes us down.
“In Case of a Famine” details how Dean discovered that a weed in her garden was actually a nutritious tuber, Apios americana or groundnuts, that Native Americans, early European settlers and even Thoreau relied on and cherished. They first try cooking the strange plant by slicing and frying it in butter. “They were good. Delicious, in fact,” Dean writes. “They tasted like a potato but sweeter, and, as Thoreau had written, a little nutty.”
Dean also acknowledges the community she found there was always willing to help. “We felt very connected with our neighbors and the broader community, even if we didn’t share political views. That would never come up,” she said. “They just came and helped.”
But some conflicts did arise. One of the more fascinating essays, “Good Neighbors,” begins with their aging farmer neighbor — normally soft-spoken — angrily confronting them about a beaver dam on their property. The farmer is worried that the dam will flood his property, destroying some of his crop. But there is more to their neighbor’s outburst than meets the eye, and the couple walk a delicate balance in trying to be good neighbors to both the farmer and the beavers.
Dean’s struggles with Lyme disease eventually forced her and her partner to leave the Driftless, moving first to Minneapolis (where she faced another mortal threat, in the form of an SUV) and then back to Madison.
Dean says that there is wonder and hardship to be found whether you live in rural or urban areas, but that community is key to thriving. That is something that she keeps in mind during the current political moment.
“It’s too bad that rural education, rural health care and farmers’ livelihoods will be affected, certainly, and probably damaged or impaired by, the current administration,” she says. “We need to double down on local action and realize that we are all in this together.”
