Shelter and Storm
At Home in the Driftless
Tamara Dean’s introspective memoir-in-essays Shelter and Storm is about sustainable living in a Wisconsin farming community.
Pursuing a “new beginning,” Dean left the city and purchased a small farm in a southwest Wisconsin region known as the Driftless. The beautiful area, which features limestone bluffs and spring-fed streams, is a magnet for “back-to-the-landers” seeking to live closer to nature, Dean explains. The essays convey her hopes about living in a flourishing, harmonious “deep-green Eden.” She also faced obstacles, including catastrophic flooding, tornadoes, prairie fires, and bouts of Lyme disease. Other topics include a neighborhood dispute over beaver dams, a community storytelling project, a search for elusive “slow-blue” fireflies, and the construction of an ecofriendly adobe house from hand-formed mud bricks and salvaged wood.
The specter of climate change surfaces often, as with notes about the impact of rising temperatures and extreme weather events on waterways, prairie ecosystems, and rural communities. Dean urges farmers to “regard their acreage as a whole life-supporting system and take pride in leaving habitats for diverse species to flourish.” A range of social issues are also examined, including the complicated impacts of USDA farm subsidies, progressive nineteenth-century attitudes about abortion, and community reactions to electrification in 1937.
Marked by sharp observations, taut pacing, and mixed subjects, the book interweaves discussions of a rainwater cistern with reflections on water quality issues in Tanzania, Michigan, and the local Kickapoo River. Its descriptions of nature are captivating, as in an account of raccoons swinging like monkeys to feast on acorns in a canopy of oak trees.
The lyrical essays in Shelter and Storm are insightful in addressing sustainable living, climate change, and the resilience of rural communities.
Reviewed by
Kristen Rabe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
