Tales from the Ice-free Zone

TALES FROM THE ICE-FREE ZONE, by Robert E. Lee, was seriously and soberly written to inform anyone who might pick up the book about life in the Driftless Area of America's Upper Midwest. Here lies the portion of our country that the great glaciers bypassed, though glacial activity completely surrounded it -- on one side at a time -- during at least four advances of the ice sheet. The bulk of this anomaly lies over the southwestern quarter (approximately) of the State of Wisconsin, though its edges slop across state lines into the adjacent corners of the neighboring Sister States of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. Tracks of the great ice sheets can be seen all around the "Ice-free Zone" -- with plenty of glacial till of sand, gravel, and boulders in the landscape. The principal signs of glaciation within the Driftless Area lie in the bottoms and on the banks of rivers such as the Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Black Rivers that completely traversed the Ice-free Zone. The beds of such streams are filled with glacial till that was dropped as the melt-water flooding subsided. Such material is dug from gravel pits today and used as the aggregate in the mixing of concrete.

On the other side of the glacial coin, it seems reasonable to suppose that much more of the pre-glacial topography adjacent to the Driftless Area must have looked much like the unglaciated terrain does now. Therefore, one might very well say that we have a living museum of ancient landforms right in front of us today. Only the life forms upon it have changed.

These life forms are the principal subjects of this book. Here are the flora and fauna, depicted as the author has met them. He sees subjects of interest wherever he goes. Almost all of them are commonplace individuals of ordinary species, yet each one seems to tell a story by doing something that many folks miss. Every individual plant, mammal, bird, amphibian, or reptile has its own individuality and beauty,