Laura Erickson's For the Birds

I was in Port Wing, Wisconsin, July 7 for their Centennial celebration. People in the town have amassed a wonderful collection of photographs and artifacts that make its history come alive, and will soon have an historical museum to house this wonderful collection.

Northern Wisconsin was a land of enormous natural resources in the 1800s and early 1900s, and Port Wing’s economy depended on those riches. It served as an entry point into Lake Superior, where logs and red sandstone could be conveniently shipped to Duluth and commercial fishing operations could harvest Lake Superior’s abundant fish. The black-and-white photos from the early days showed people who virtually never smiled-of course, back then people weren’t supposed to smile in photos because photography took so long and moving lips could blur. But most of the people in the photos have sad eyes, too. A woman named Helga Skogsburg wrote a book about life in Port Wing long ago called Comes the Day, Comes a Way, about how difficult those times were. People worked so hard, and so many of their babies and small children died. And a few among them amassed lots of money, but the town boomed for only a few decades.

Progress spelled the end of the quarry– Port Wing sandstone has been used in some of the most beautiful buildings in Duluth, but also in many big cities in the east. But it is so heavy that it can’t be used in buildings taller than four stories. So in the end New York City skyscrapers doomed the quarry, which shut down in 1929.

The logging practices of the 1800s and early 1900s seems, in retrospect, appallingly short­ sighted, chopping down every tree in one area and then moving on to the next place. Many people then had a trust that there would always be an abundance of huge trees somewhere, and for a couple of hundred years there really WERE an abundance of huge, old growth trees somewhere in America. I’ve read that most people didn’t foresee the end of this abundance, but from Audubon to Teddy Roosevelt, some people WERE predicting extinctions and writing about conservation. I think cynicism and greed were as much at root as blind faith in an infinite supply of old growth–I think one of the biggest factors driving the powerful men who owned the companies was fear that if they didn’t cut down the trees first, someone else would.

Commercial fishing lasted longer than the lumber companies and big sawmill–at least one commercial fisherman was still at work when I started birding there in 1975. But the saddest thing for me, listening to the old timers talking about the fishing experiences of their youths, was hearing about the abundance of fish they used to catch in the rivers and lakes. Even in the 1970s there were a lot of fish compared to later decades. Where did they disappear? Was it pesticides, over-fishing, habitat destruction? It reminds me so much of the questions about where birds have disappeared. There are still a lot of birds, and sometimes I find myself in a good spot to see a really great migration, but when I started birding in 1975, there really were many more days when I saw huge waves of warblers and other songbirds.

So as wonderful as it was learning more about Port Wing’s history and celebrating its hundredth birthday as a city, I was left with a melancholy feeling. Those huge trees of the past, that abundance of fish-all gone today, and the rich people who founded the town and thrived on it left for greener pastures after extracting all the natural resources. It made me wonder if people will look back on us in a hundred years with more melancholy or admiration.