[peaceful music] [birds chirping] – When a person opens themselves to learning from the natural world, what they discover is that the world is a teacher.
[peaceful music] – My name is Ben Albert.
I’m a 20-year-old filmmaker making my first documentary.
This is my grandparents’ backyard, a 1,000-acre wetland preserve that has remained relatively undeveloped.
[peaceful music] Only 20 minutes from the state Capitol of Wisconsin, it’s one of the most thriving and diverse wetlands left in the area.
– I often use the word “an invitation to wonder.”
I love to invite people to wonder.
[singer vocalizing] [insects chirping] – Ben: Nestled in on the southern side of the marsh live my grandparents.
You and Grandma moved here, like, 40ish years ago?
– Yeah, we moved here on January 1– Well, let me, I’ll start over.
[laughing] I’m Cal DeWitt, Calvin B. DeWitt.
My family and I moved here early in 1972, and in May of that year, we came to live here on Oak Knoll.
[gentle piano music] And around us here, mainly out our backyard, is Waubesa Wetlands.
And over many years, I’ve worked with my neighbors to develop it into a preserve, which is now well over 1,000 acres.
– Ben: They have lived here for over 50 years, and they are completely immersed in this world.
Their home sits on a small mound protruding from the wetland.
It’s a glacial drumlin, formed and shaped by the movement of glaciers over 12,000 years ago.
My grandpa is a wetlands scientist.
[projector clicking] And he spent over half his life studying and exploring this system out their back door.
He’s also a teacher.
He’s used Waubesa Wetlands as his outdoor laboratory, where he’s taught hundreds of graduate students.
He and his students made a number of fascinating discoveries about this place.
It became his lifelong passion.
And both of my grandparents passed on that passion to their grandkids.
– Cal: This is a rookery on what we think is Long Island in the middle of Manistique Lake.
[birds squawking] What are your reflections on this event here, Naomi?
– Um, it’s very interesting to see the entire lake.
– Cal: Oh, great.
I think we better start the engine and see what else we can discover.
– Ben: My grandma would take us backpacking almost every year.
– Naomi: We are walking along the trail.
Hey, Ben.
– Ben: And she was over 70 years old, but she would carry more than any of us in her pack.
They didn’t always take us on these far-off adventures.
There was so much to learn right in my grandparents’ backyard.
– When the grandchildren will be here tomorrow, but she gets all the nets together and some trays, and they all go down to the creek.
– Ben: And that was such a special time to us as kids.
– Ruth: Oh, Naomi, did you go right in?
– Naomi: Yeah.
– Ruth: All right!
Are you trying by some of those weeds over there?
And then how about right next to the culvert here?
– They just “ooh” and “ahh” about what they find.
They do that almost every Friday.
– Oh, whoa!
– Got a fish.
I got, like, I got one of those huge ones.
– Oh, look at all the stuff you’ve got.
– Look at me, yeah!
– Ben: There was all this life around us.
– Naomi: And we don’t want them.
– Ben: All of these things that you never even knew were there, never even knew existed.
[sandhill cranes calling] – And then you just put the magnifier up and down, because you have to focus it yourself.
– Ben: It was like this glimpse into a hidden world that I haven’t been a part of for over a decade.
It’s spring of 2020, and I’m taking some time away from school.
I don’t know what I’m doing next, but something drew me back to this place.
My grandparents taught me that the only way to really learn from the wetlands is just to spend the time out here.
This entire summer, I decided I would go out almost every single day.
[peaceful music] [birds chirping] At first, I didn’t see a whole lot.
[water splashing] It’s probably my third week, third or fourth week out here.
And, as you can tell, I’m getting the full experience.
Smells great.
And I’m just kind of learning as I go.
[birds chirping] The wetland is not a place for humans, and I discovered that in many different ways.
[mosquito buzzing] – When people first come here, especially if it’s near evening, the first thing they mention are the mosquitoes.
[mosquitoes buzzing] [buzzing continues] – Ben: Holy– [inaudible].
[buzzing stops] – But during the day, it’s pretty much mosquito-free.
– All right, here we go.
[gentle music] [water splashing] [sighing] I’m about to cross over the third beaver dam today.
Did not pack a lunch.
Did not sleep very much.
[yawning] I’m getting sunburnt.
There’s, like, a jelly inside of a cattail.
There’s, like, literal jelly.
That’s gnarly.
– It’s a very pleasant place to be, at least when you finally get your marsh legs.
– Ben: Oh, I’m sinking.
– It takes a while to learn how to walk on a water bed.
[water splashing] Pretty much, it’s safe if you’re really careful about where you walk.
[mud squelching] – This is all very loose.
Tsssh!
– But you can also sink into holes and go in over your head.
And, occasionally, in peat deposits, we find human beings that are still over their heads and have been so for the last several thousand years.
– I was just walking back there and I took one step.
Instantly sank, like, all the way up to my waist.
And I stopped my– I don’t know how deep it is.
I really don’t.
It could just be a hole going down and down and down, like… [sighing] So that was, like, actually a little bit scary.
– And the key is, jump in, and…
But be cautious, because you could jump in and go down and down and down.
[laughing] [birds chirping] When you live here for now 48 years, you learn far more than you can in any other way.
[peaceful music] That’s one of the reasons why I’m a very good student, because the wetland teaches me.
But it’s also the thing that makes me a good teacher.
This is a goldenrod.
An insect has laid its egg in the stem of this goldenrod.
Produces a chemical that stimulates the growth hormones, cause this sphere to form rather than the normal stem.
One thing that you learn in being a student of the wetland is patience, persistence, and that often will open the book to you so that you can read the real beauty.
[insects chirping] [ducks quacking] [tent flap zipping] [peaceful music] – First time out here.
I feel like there’s nothing very, nothing really stands out to you, but I think there is a lot of kind of mysterious things going on around here.
[peaceful music] A big snapping turtle, I think it’s a snapping turtle.
It was just right here.
And perhaps it laid eggs.
[sandhill cranes calling] Mm.
Some cranes flying, like, right over me.
Right over me.
[calling continues] – I call it beholding.
I don’t just look.
Sit there and behold, and that means let the beauty of it all sink in.
– Where’d they land?
They may land right next to me.
They’re still flying over.
[calling continues] [gentle cello music] – And the beauty is not only the appearance, but it’s also what’s happening, what they’re doing, and what other things are doing to it.
[gentle cello music] – Ben: It took me a while before I really started to notice anything special, and a lot of the things I started to notice I had no understanding of.
[bright string music] This bright green dragonfly and this blue dragonfly circling around it in this sort of dance.
[bright string music] It would smack its tail multiple, multiple times and then… At the time, I had no idea what I had just captured.
Later, talking to my grandfather, I discovered the green dragonfly was actually laying eggs into the water.
I had witnessed this vital moment in this species’ life cycle.
[peaceful music] Everything here is supported by a constant supply of fresh water.
This network of meandering streams… created by springwater welling up from deep underground… pumping over 10,000 gallons of water per minute.
The springs are like the heart of this whole ecosystem.
[singer vocalizing] – The most difficult thing to get people to admire is the hydrology.
[gentle cello music] A wetland is literally wet land.
[peaceful music] And the land is not soil in the sense of mineral soil, but it’s soil as peat.
And that interacts with the water, and it’s symphonic.
The rains fall.
[thunder rumbling] [grass rustling] [peaceful music] The water percolates into the soil, raises the water table around the marsh, and that feeds the springs.
[bright music] And in those places, there are unusual creatures.
In one of our springs here called Deep Spring, there’s a bacterium that grew on Earth before there were green plants on Earth, and it uses sulfur rather than oxygen as an electron acceptor.
[gentle music] That bacterium preexists the time we had oxygen available on Earth anywhere.
[gentle music] – Ben: This organism has been around for over 2 billion years, and it still lives on, hidden in these small, little pools in the wetland.
And it’s not alone.
When you peer into these pools, especially with a macro lens, it turns into this alien world.
[gentle music] These microorganisms too small to see with your naked eye.
Translucent and fluid.
They’re so tiny, it appears as though they’re crawling through the water.
As if the water is jelly, which they push themselves through.
There still is very little known about these spring areas, what organisms live here, and the mysteries that they hold.
I started to realize the wetland isn’t uniform at all.
This place has so much diversity.
It’s not one wetland.
It’s all of these separate ecosystems, each with its own uniquely adapted plants and animals.
[peaceful music] [croaking] I began to wonder how it all formed.
– In time, as you live in a place like this, you can come, eventually, to think of it historically.
Here is the peat, and that’s partially decomposed plant material formed by previous generations of those very same plants that are growing here.
It very soon runs out of oxygen and build up all sorts of toxic gases.
These poison the process of decomposition.
So this is what gives us this great history book.
[gentle music] [grunting] Here’s what it looks like.
You can see roots at the top.
And then, as we go farther down, it gets more pasty, a few more roots, and now hardly any roots at all.
And we’re down here at least a few hundred years already.
When I take a sample of peat, and all of a sudden, I realize this was on Earth live when the pyramids were being built, and I’m holding it in my hand and think it was then.
Only a meter down, and I can go many more meters down, and it’s astounding.
[reeds rustling] I had occasional experiences of a fear of falling.
Because I knew there were 20 feet of peat beneath me, 30 feet, and there were some areas that were really loose.
[singer vocalizing] – Ben: [sighing] It’s definitely a bit scary.
Definitely feel like I could just fall straight through.
[eerie music] – My graduate student and I arranged to make 10 12-foot-long rods.
We brought them out to the deepest spot in the wetland, which would be right at the lake edge.
We added one rod to the other to the other, 12, 24, 36, 48, and down and down and down.
And finally, we just added the rod that would have brought us to 96 feet.
And it stopped one foot from the top.
The peat there was 95 feet thick.
– Ben: I was walking on a thin layer of vegetation on the surface of an ancient landscape.
And what my grandpa and his students discovered is that all of this used to be water in what was once a bay of Lake Waubesa.
– Cal: We know we go back about 12,000 years.
Picture the glacial bay and glacial Lake Waubesa.
In quiet water, algae and aquatic life settles.
That peat builds up and provides a new base for wetland plants.
They die down.
They form a little particulate matter.
Then the next batch the next year grows.
Every year, it gets deeper and deeper, layer after layer after layer.
Gradually, the peat moves out, the peat builds up from the bottom, and the edge moves out toward Lake Waubesa.
[gentle music] Perhaps the most astounding realization is that we live on the edge of a great history book with 6,000 pages, and they tell us things about the climate, the chemistry, the vegetation, the animal life, the history of the earth.
What a history book.
[gentle music] This system builds itself and it builds its own soil, and it increases its own depth.
And so it has the feeling of an organism.
[bright string music] [mosquitoes buzzing] – Ben: Once you get beyond this initial terror of the mosquitoes, and once you start paddling down the streams at night, it turns into this mystical landscape.
[gentle music] Even at night, the marsh is very much alive.
[frogs croaking] These bullfrogs, which had seemed dormant during the day, reveal a whole different side of themselves.
[croaking] The males mark their territory while also trying to impress curious onlookers.
[croaking continues] [splashing] [birds squawking] I just saw something right there.
[splashing] I just saw it over there.
I think there’s a lot of them.
[splashing] [loud splash] [Ben sighing] Marsh at night is just, like, it feels very surreal.
It feels like a place you’re not supposed to be in.
[chuckling] And the way, like, that splash was massive, and that sound was so loud.
And just, like, the feeling it gives you is so strong of just, like, this is such a wild place and I don’t belong here.
– It was kind of like becoming acquainted with a beautiful creature that absolutely overpowered you, in terms of its size, in terms of its age, in terms of its dynamics.
So the wetland quickly reclaims what you have stepped on, and you always feel like a guest rather than as the master.
[laughing] [gentle string music] [Ben exhaling deeply] [gentle string music] [reeds rustling] [ducks quacking] – Cal: It’s a peaceful place.
There’s not a whole lot of disruption.
And then, of course, one of the things that gives it pulses are migrations.
[gentle piano music] [birds chirping] – Ben: Migratory birds flock in in the thousands… [geese honking] …using the marsh as a refuge on their long journey south.
[gentle piano music] The more permanent residents stock up on food for the long winter.
Insects emerge from the shallow waters and stagnant pools, providing a feast for the migratory birds.
– Every once in a while, something just bursts out with tremendous excitement.
[cedar waxwing chirping] [gentle cello music] – Ben: All of this activity attracts new visitors.
[gentle cello music continues] With populations declining, these common nighthawks have become a rare sight in Wisconsin.
The wetland provides a brief sanctuary for them on their migration over 4,000 miles away to South America.
[red-winged blackbirds calling] Okay.
What is it today?
I think it’s November, it’s November 2.
We probably only have a few weeks left to film before it gets, like, way too cold and before the animals migrate.
[blackbirds chirping] [gentle cello music] Right now, we’re kind of focusing on blackbird migration.
[chirping continues] They’re so loud.
Like, just incredibly loud.
[chirping continues] Being surrounded by so much life, it’s just, like, a really inspiring and really awe-inspiring, I guess I would say, moment.
Especially when you have a sunset like this.
It’s really cool.
– What you learn from listening is there is a community there that is way, way beyond what you’ve usually even experienced in human community.
There’s a harmony.
It speaks to you.
[gentle cello music] [blackbirds chirping] I often think of it as a symphony.
[bird squawking] There are all these different instruments playing.
[fly buzzing] If you’d look narrowly, you’d just look at this particular instrument and say, “I wonder what it sounds like as a solo,” but it’s not playing a solo.
It’s never playing a solo.
It’s always in a symphony.
[blackbirds chirping] [grass rustling] [gentle string music] [sandhill cranes calling] [blackbirds chirping] [gentle string music] Then there’s the beautiful quiet of it all.
And if you try to understand it, you’ll discover that you have entered a system which always requires more knowledge.
It doesn’t stop at the bottom of the peat.
[laughing] It doesn’t stop, period.
[sandhill crane calling] The cranes, of course, have been coming here for thousands and thousands of years.
This area has been inhabited for a good 12,000 years.
And so we’re not the first ones here.
And we don’t want to be the last ones here.
Not everything on Earth is something that you can exploit.
There are some things on Earth that are there only so that you can learn.
They’re teachers.
– Ben: The more I explored the wetland, the more questions I had.
It was this realization of something much older and more complex than my own understanding.
But there’s so much beauty in simply wondering about it all.
I started to feel this childlike curiosity again.
[Ruth laughing] – Oh, look.
– Oh, yeah, mm-hmm.
– And Benny, who was five, said, “I know what I’m gonna be when I grow up.”
He’s such an observant person.
– Oh, Grandma, I know a way how to get the crayfish.
– What?
– We’re gonna go under here… – Aha!
– And then I, you know, I said something like “scuba diver,” you know, and so on.
And he says, “No, Grandpa.
“A scientist!
I’m gonna be a scientist.”
[chuckling] – Ben: They taught us that there’s always more to learn, more than what immediately meets your eye, even in your own backyard.
– Ruth: The claws?
– Young Ben: Wow!
[gentle piano music] – Good.
– Ben: Nice.
– Man alive, what a treat.
What a treat.
[laughing] – Ben: When was the last time you were out here?
– Oh, a long time ago.
I don’t know how long.
[laughing] Man, isn’t this something?
This is really something.
[laughing] Wow.
Great pleasure canoeing through Waubesa Marsh.
[gentle piano music] Sandhill cranes coming up there.
That’s a nice thing.
[sandhill cranes calling] [calling continues] Lovely.
Wow.
They called right above our heads.
Wow, how wonderful.
[gentle string music] [singers vocalizing]