Cutover Country

By Alice Judy Behrend

In the 1920s, Alice Behrend was struggling to grow up in the harsh but beautiful cutover country of northern Wisconsin, so-named because all of the trees had been cut down to create farmland. Her family moved to the Wisconsin wilderness from the flat, prairie cornfields of Illinois. Her mother yearned for the comforts of civilization, but her father was determined to succeed at diversified farming.

Alice was a plain yet spunky 11-year-old with a normal amount of curiosity about mysterious adult affairs. At times she found her contemporaries equally hard to fathom. Even the endless farm chores and long hours working in the potato and sugar beet fields failed to daunt her delightful and irrepressible spirits. Some of the most dramatic moments in the book hinge on her two prized companions: a black and white bull terrier name Spark, and a fleet-footed Chippewa Indian pony named Bill.

Although the story is set a century ago, many of the problems of Alice's world still plague us now. Alice saw racial and religious prejudice, as well as against immigrants, and she tried to cope in her own way. When the Ku Klux Klan was out on its night rides, and her father took a stand against them. Bootleggers and mobsters frequented the area, too.

Some of the most moving moments in the book are ecological -- deer traps, settlers dynamiting the stumps of majestic virgin pines, the wildflowers carpeting the land before being tilled under. Alice's story is charming and nostalgic. It captures the timeless memories of childhood winding its inexorable course to adulthood, while acknowledging the pangs that assailed us even in a simpler age.