An Interview with David Faldet: Part 3

Besides the Upper Iowa region, what are your favorite natural areas in Iowa?
The eastern half of the Upper Iowa flows through the Driftless Area of the Upper Mississippi. I love the whole Driftless region and feel very lucky to live here. My favorite natural area is Effigy Mounds National Monument, where the Yellow River enters the Mississippi. That’s a natural area where 1,500 years of human history is an evident part of the landscape.

I have a dream for Iowa, however. That would be to have every road ditch and a strip along each side of every stream restored to wetland, woodland, prairie, or savanna. Then people would see this whole state as a rich natural area. And it would allow corridors and homes for plant and animal neighbors that are too often, these days, in short supply.

All first-year students at Luther College read Oneota Flow last summer. Tell us what kinds of responses and events were inspired by this.
It was such an honor to have 650 students and at least 50 faculty all reading the book. The day after the first-years arrived, the first activity for their dorm floors was to set out together on a river walk where faculty, staff, students, and some local folk played the roles of people I wrote about in the book: persons who lost their home in a flood, Winnebago schoolgirls, workers who harvested river ice. All of the scenes took place along the river.

I got fantastic responses from readers. One of my students lives on a dairy farm. She said for several weeks she had been having impassioned discussions about land use and conservation with her father as they milked. One boy told me he had read the book while on a canoe trip in the Yukon. One night by firelight he read a long and labored sentence, a sentence about my aged father trying to walk through a cemetery, and he said aloud, “Why would David Faldet write a sentence like that!?” Then it hit him that the sentence imitated my dad’s walking. He was an enthusiastic fan.

The book was a favorite with male students who like the outdoors: guys who don’t frequently consider themselves readers. An athletic trainer at the college e-mailed me to report that he was getting way more information about the summer reading than normal; first-year football players getting taped up before or after practice would be telling the older team members about the book.

All that was hugely gratifying.

David Faldet, Oneota Flow: The Upper Iowa River and Its People