Author uses family history to talk about drainage of an important wetlands

In 'The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape,' award-winning author Cheri Register invites readers to Freeborn County in Minnesota. Register tells the story of the Big Marsh, once a vital ecosystem before it was drained. The author's family is part of the history of the place, and Register combines memoir and history to create a portrait of a place in transition over time.

Register also is the author of 'Packinghouse Daughter,' which won a Minnesota Book Award and an American Book Award. She taught creative nonfiction writing at the Loft Literary Center for 20 years, and lives in Minnesota.

In an email interview, Register talks about the origins of her new book, her thoughts about creative non-fiction, and what the future might hold for wetlands in America.

In the book, you reveal the reasons — personal and environmental — that drive your interest in the marsh, but can you identify a moment or series of moments that led you to conclude that you needed to write this book?

Happening upon my great-grandfather's essay critical of the drainage certainly sparked my interest, especially since it didn't fit the public story I knew about the development of Hollandale. I knew I needed to look into the story, but had no idea then that it might be worth a book. Finding picture postcards of the dredge that served as a courtship letter from my grandpa to my grandma sent a strong signal.

I showed those artifacts to the director and editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, with whom I had published 'Packinghouse Daughter,' and their response was enthusiastic. The director even challenged me, 'Do you need to be struck by lightning?'

A couple of other factors helped me keep up the momentum: one, my participation in a monthly meeting of independent historians, who were always curious about my research; two, growing public attention in newspapers and on public radio to worsening water quality and the role that wetland loss has played. I became convinced that agricultural drainage is a core piece of Midwestern history that remains largely unexplored.

'The Big Marsh' is a blend of memoir, history and ecology, all beautifully blended together. Tell me about the writing (and/or editing) process and how you found the balance from which the book benefits.

I can say right off that I never write from start to finish. Drafting a manuscript is a discovery process for me. I don't know how the story is going to turn out until I see it developing on paper or screen. I write in chunks. Each of the chapters or 'pieces' in the book came about because something began to cohere or because some particular feature of the story seemed to highlight the meaning of the whole. After lots and lots of writing and revising of individual pieces, intuition takes over and the pieces begin to fall into place.

I'm often asked how I decide when to add memoir and when to write history. I don't see them as separable. My ancestors, like everyone else's, were actors in history, so their story feeds into the so-called bigger picture in a seamless way, at least in my mind. I'm always guided by my belief that writing creative non-fiction moves us from the merely private to the deeply personal to the public. We see universal truths more clearly in the particular. The ecological content comes through in the same way. Rather than write a treatise on wetlands, I wanted to show, in one particular case, how we got to this juncture.

You describe a seemingly inexorable march toward the draining of the marsh — a series of strategies that overcame or worked around every effort to stop it once and for all. Are there lessons for today as we seek to preserve the environment? What are the counter-strategies that can lead to preservation?

The big lesson for me is that we need to understand the genuine value and purpose of wetlands and separate their drainage and restoration from economic considerations. The fate of wetlands too often hangs on agricultural policy, which is driven by money: the availability and price of land, crop price supports that drive farmers to cultivate every inch, the waxing and waning of government programs that encourage conversation and restoration.

The same holds for the conflict between conservation and development in urban and suburban areas. I was so pleased to come across the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that saved Bill Bryson's 'little duck pond' from county encroachment. It is an eloquent statement of what wetlands do for the environment. Whether we see them metaphorically as 'sponges' or 'lungs,' they are vital to life.

I'm also glad that the story I tell debunks the myth that everybody, and especially farmers, saw wetlands as wasteland and sources of pestilence. The farmers around the Big Marsh lived in concert with it — hunting, fishing, trapping, haying — and were alert to its seasonal fluctuations.

You draw a directly line between the draining of the Big Marsh and the flooding that devastated Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and the surrounding area in 2008. Do you believe that direct line is evident enough to policy makers, farmers, community leaders, and the like to lead to consistent, beneficial changes going forward? Can states collaborate to create better regional policies in the current political environment?

These are huge questions that reach beyond my skill set. But, as a citizen who reads and pays attention, I am struck again and again by the failure of public policy to draw links between wetland drainage and flooding or wetland drainage and water pollution. The people who manage the watersheds and the engineers who keep ditches flowing have a day-to-day understanding of the consequences, and they work hard to keep rainfall and thaw from flooding rivers. But they don't make laws and set policy.

I read about efforts in the Red River Valley to build dikes and to dig bypass trenches to divert floodwaters around cities, but seldom do I read about proposals to restore wetlands in the floodplain. Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota has been pushing for buffer zones along ditches to filter herbicides and pesticides out of the water that flows into the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, but there is tremendous opposition. Recently, though, Land o' Lakes came through and offered to work with him.

Recurring spring floods and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico are proof enough that we need regional policies, but in the current political climate? If only we could agree on how to educate the next generation about the value of wetlands, but even that is contentious.

'The Big Marsh' ends on a tentatively hopeful note. Do you think the current efforts to preserve the land you describe will be left in place in the coming years and decades?

I can only hope that there will always be people who care and stay vigilant, at least about maintaining what has been achieved. Earlier this spring, I visited Crex Meadows in Wisconsin. That was drained about the same time as the Big Marsh, and it was owned by the Crex Company, which used reeds to make carpet and furniture.

Restoration efforts began incrementally in the 1940s and now it's a sprawling, beautiful wetland, wildlife habitat, and stopping point for migratory waterfowl, including sandhill cranes and trumpeter swans. It's amazing to see how natural life came back to a place that had been devastated. I can't imagine that anyone would ever drain it again.

Book reading

What: Cheri Register reads from 'The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape'

Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Cost: Free