‘Shelter and Storm’: Tamara Dean’s Memoir of Living in the Driftless

The Driftless — an unglaciated area that runs through Wisconsin and a few other states — lured Tamara Dean and her partner, David, to escape their life indoors two decades ago.

“We had spent our days in offices, staring at screens most of the time. And we thought, we just want to try something that is healthier for us. And that included cleaner air and cleaner water,” Dean said. 

They uprooted their lives, purchased a plot of land, and moved to the Driftless, known for its unique topography that resulted from avoiding the passage of glaciers and their attendant stones and debris. The region is known for its carved valleys and spring-fed streams. 

Dean’s new book Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless is a series of essays that recounts this time. The book is not just a memoir of many of the challenges that these new homesteaders faced, but also a love letter to rediscovering the marvels of nature. Dean writes about re-seeding a prairie, dealing with bouts of Lyme disease, the local plant life, and tornadoes and floods. Throughout the book, Dean relies on histories, other nature writing, and even Woody Guthrie’s posthumous novel House of Earth to complement her narratives. 

University of Minnesota Press

Despite its rugged and natural beauty, the Driftless is still under threat from climate change. “It’s a combination of more frequent rain events and more significant rain events,” Dean said. On top of this, the EPA has modeled more severe future droughts and higher temperatures for this area. 

Dean and her partner started from scratch in Wisconsin. They built their home out of almost wholly sustainable materials harvested from their plot of land, a project covered in the title chapter of the memoir.

Tamara Dean

“Our aim with the house, with not having any plastic, was to imagine that long after we’re gone, it could just dissolve into dust, go back into the earth. So, it would be entirely compostable. We landed on compressed earth blocks, which are basically mud bricks. They’re made of the clay that was dug from our subsoil.” But due to building codes, they did have to use PVC piping for the plumbing. 

Dean also wished to cultivate a small farm with organic produce, but because of a lack of safety net in the region for small farmers, the risk inherent in losing all the crops to flooding wasn’t worth it. She pivoted to another environmental need. 

“When the Obama administration recognized that pollinators were in trouble and that planting habitat for pollinators would help all growers because they’re necessary for all crops and offered that grant program, I thought, okay, that’s what I’ll do with my acreage,” she said.

“I never figured out how people make a living with a small farm of the type I wanted. I just couldn’t get the numbers to add up. I thought, even if I don’t hire people to help, you can’t get the bottom line to be positive unless you’re growing those commodity crops, corn and soy, with subsidies.” Dean did end up growing a large garden each year, though. 

Tamara Dean

Another part of the memoir, “Floodways,” focuses on a major flood that happened in and around their land. Dean writes: 

In the fifteen years I lived beside a river in the heart of the Driftless area, I watched seven record-breaking floods bury the low-lying fields. 

“One of the reasons we were attracted to the property was this beautiful stream,” Dean said. “Soon after we purchased the property, we were camping in the field, and a flash flood came up. It really was dramatic. We got a taste for the contrasts or contradictions in living next to water.”

After dealing with the flood, Tamara and her husband became citizen water monitors.

“The idea is you can measure things like pH and dissolved oxygen and flow and upload that data monthly to a statewide database,” she said. “The theory is that the state Department of Natural Resources could draw on that data to learn about trends or even threats to the environment. And that really appealed to me.

“Our drinking water was rainwater. We thought that that would be cleaner and healthier than well water. We were lucky that we made that choice because we didn’t know when we purchased the property that so many wells in the Wisconsin area are contaminated with E. coli and other bacteria because of spreading manure on farm fields.”

Tamara Dean

But much of what made their move memorable was the community of which they grew to be a part of. “We learned a lot about community,” she said. “We became rooted in that rural Wisconsin community.”

At times of calamity, for example, politics took a back seat to community. 

“When all our water disappeared from our cistern while we were gone, these people who hardly knew us just stepped right up and said, of course, we’ll fill our tank, our milk truck or the sap truck, fill it up at the fire station and take it to your place,” she said. “And when they’re helping you out, nobody’s asking who you voted for, or how you feel about a certain legislation or issue. It was so heartwarming. It really shows that humans are more apt to help each other out.”

One of Dean’s projects while living in the Driftless involved collecting narratives about the catastrophic 2018 flood.

“Some of the people we talked with were farmers in their mid-80s,” she said. “Those older farmers would acknowledge that the weather has become more extreme. There was not a blanket denial among the people who worked the land for 50 or 60 years. They know that things are drastically different than they used to be. And some of them indeed would say it’s because of climate change. That surprised me a little bit.”

After 15 years and having contracted Lyme disease multiple times, Tamara and David moved back to Madison. She writes: 

We foraged and grew fruits and vegetables, heated our home with wood we cut from our forest, and experimented with prairie restoration. This life we’d crafted and loved required energy. Now I was walled off from our dream. I gazed out the window as seasons came and went.

But Dean gleaned hopeful lessons from the time spent living in the Driftless. 

“Working with our neighbors, working to improve our environment, we have some power in the face of what feels like overwhelming changes in the environment, whether that’s climate change or policy changes,” she said.

“The one measure of hope I have is that individuals can still make choices, and we can choose whether it’s planting more trees or planting pollinator habitats in our neighborhood or turning to alternative energy despite the lack of incentives or benefits that the government’s going to offer us. We can still make choices. I hope that we come together and do make choices that will benefit our own health and the health of the planet.”