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

This Week in Iowa Nature

Scan roadsides and open fields for mixed flocks of horned larks and snow buntings.

Jean C. Prior and James Sandrock, The Iowa Nature Calendar

Plant of the Week

Wild rose
Rosa species
other common names: meadow rose, prairie rose
Rosa: from ancient Latin, the name for “rose”
Species: Several species occur frequently on the tallgrass prairie
Rose family: Rosaceae
Photo: Rosa blanda
W. T. Aiton

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

An Interview with David Faldet: Part 2

Tell us how you wrote this book. You interviewed lots of people, you spent lots of time on the river, you read deeply into the historical literature. How did you put it all together?
I got lots of help, and Luther College, where I work, gave me lots of time. Still, it took me twelve years from the time I started the book until it went to press. I wanted to, as Victorian writer William Morris once said, “See things bigly.” Researching involved lots of adventures: canoeing, spelunking, walking streams, talking to an amazing variety of people.

In the end, though, that meant I had far, far more material than I could use, which meant lots of cutting and reworking. One smart move in my young life was marrying someone who is a fantastic editor. My wife, Rachel, asked me the hard questions and gave me the advice you can only take from someone whose instincts you trust and respect. 



What advice would you give to writers who want to combine history,
 environmental science, contemporary events, and memoir as you have done so 
successfully in Oneota Flow?
I would say it is worth the effort, because it reflects a truth that is often hard to see. The field of environmental studies shows us that the world is vastly interconnected and complicated. There is difficulty in that, but there is also amazing beauty and wonder. Putting the pieces together is rewarding for both its truth and its aesthetic value.


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

Plant of the Week

Queen-of-the-prairie
Filipendula rubra (Hill) Robins.
other common names: meadow sweet
Filipendula: from Latin filum for “thread” and pendulus for “hanging,” in reference to the small tubers strung together by the fibrous roots of one species
Rubra: from Latin, meaning “red”
Rose family: Rosaceae

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

An Interview with David Faldet: Part 1

In Oneota Flow you hold true to Aldo Leopold’s conception of land as a 
community in which water, people, and soil play interactive parts. Tell us 
more about this conception as it informs your writing.
I begin the book by saying that people are walking tributaries of the nearest river. We are three-quarters water. Water passes from a river system through us, then back into a river again. That water has probably been around for billions of years. It isn’t ours, really, and it isn’t “us.” But for all that, we can’t live for more than a few days without water. Knowing that really brings Leopold’s message home.

While I show that people have been successfully interacting with the Upper Iowa River for over 10,000 years, I also try to show the problems that stem from the modern misperception Leopold pointed out to us: thinking we are overlords of the more-than-human world around us. Our misuse of water resources is just one example of the way we mistake ourselves as somehow above the physical world. We are dependent borrowers in a world we often mistakenly think we own.

Soil loss and water quality are huge issues in Iowa, and the Upper Iowa
 River is no exception. You’ve lived in the Upper Iowa basin for more than 
forty years. What has changed since you first came to this area? What’s
 better, and what’s worse?
The Upper Iowa flows mostly through a state with some of the most extreme water-quality issues in the nation. For every ton of corn our farmers harvest, we let two tons of soil, nitrogen, and phosphates flow down the nearest river. On the Upper Iowa it’s sometimes ten tons of soil per ton of harvested grain.

For all that, we are doing better than when settlers first came here, better than farmers before the conservation movement of the Great Depression. Urban and point-source wastewaters are better treated now than before the Clean Water Act of 1972. We’ve got a long way to go, but there’s ground for hope. 

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

This Week in Iowa Nature

On cold winter nights, plan nature hikes into new territory, using U. S. Geological Survey topographic maps. Consider exploring Iowa's three officially named canyons: Whitewater, Preparation, and Brush Creek in Dubuque, Monona, and Fayette counties, respectively.

Jean C. Prior and James Sandrock, The Iowa Nature Calendar