The Northwoods and the Lakes, A State Built Around Water

Wisconsin has fifteen thousand lakes. The number is familiar from road signs and tourism pamphlets, but it takes a moment to absorb. Fifteen thousand. A number that rivals even Minnesota's famous ten thousand. They are the signature of the last glacier, which retreated from this landscape more than ten thousand years ago, scouring basins in the bedrock and leaving behind a rumpled topography of moraines and kettle-hole ponds and long ribbon lakes that drain through rivers that eventually reach the Mississippi or the Great Lakes.

The Northwoods, roughly the northern third of the state above a line drawn from Green Bay to Hudson, is the region most defined by this water-saturated landscape. The great mixed forest of white birch, sugar maple, yellow birch, balsam fir, and hemlock closes around the lakes. Loons call in the early morning. Bald eagles have made a substantial recovery here since the nineteen seventies, when the federal protection of the Endangered Species Act combined with the banning of DDT began bringing them back to the lakes they had been absent from for a generation.

The human use of this landscape has always been shaped by its seasonal nature. The Ojibwe harvested wild rice in the lake shallows every fall, a harvest that is still carried out today and protected as a treaty right. Nineteenth-century ice companies harvested winter ice from the northern lakes and shipped it south by rail to pack fish and cool summer drinks. Tourists arrived on those same rails beginning in the eighteen eighties, renting cottages and fishing for muskellunge and walleye on lakes the lumber companies had not yet drained of life.

The resort culture of the Northwoods, the supper clubs and bait shops and Friday night fish fries, the musky fishing tournament and the snowmobile trail, is a genuine regional culture, not just a tourist imposition. People here are attached to this place the way people get attached to places they have been coming back to for four or five generations. The water is the reason.