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The Buckridge is a 160-acre
southern Wisconsin woodlot. Like all woodlots, it is wonderfully unique upon the landscape, and it has taught me much. Woodlots
are moderators of wind, year-round habitat for wildlife, cleaners of air and water, the only form of agriculture dependent
on wild species in natural communities, and places of unique living cycles and natural beauty.
Woodlots do many
diverse things. They might pay for a college education, inspire a painting, chronicle a human life in concentric rings of
pine, warm a winter hearth with the heat of a hundred summer suns, teach a boy or girl life's important meanings, provide
sweet venison or wild turkey for a Thanksgiving feast, or offer a haven from a fast-paced world of technological gadgetry,
or be a repository for an environmental bank account to accumulate interest and be spent wisely in furthering society's well-being.
Woodlots enter our personal space in the form of writing paper, stair steps, dining tables, garden stakes, picture frames,
hoe handles, caskets, baby cribs, disposable diapers, cereal boxes, dog houses, rafters, love seats, milk cartons, baseball
bats, church pews, bird feeders, wild mushrooms, wall paneling, tooth picks, Christmas wrapping, computer desks, and a thousand
other items of beauty and utility. Some people assume these necessities come from a store or factory.
The sketches
in this book are crafted from more than 40 years of interacting with the Buckridge. Most are a view through a small window
in time. All are from within the being of a man whose wealth is measured only partially from those woodland attributes that
create dollars, but mostly from the wood thrush song embellishing an oak knoll, the gentle breeze floating through a glacial
valley, and the endless energy of the earth itself.
Dick Hall
August 2002
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