By Bob Gross

One Friday afternoon, early in November, I joined a group of students in the Superior Connections program for a field trip. It had snowed in the morning, the first snowfall of the year, and the campus was dappled with patches of white, all melting in the afternoon sun. I met the group and two of the program instructors, Associate Professor of Geoscience Tom Fitz and Associate Professor of English Alan Brew, by the doors of the Larson-Juhl Center for Science and the Environment. We stood by two vans as Tom outlined the plan for the afternoon. We would travel south from the College, down along State Highway 13 to several places where the bedrock has been exposed, places where man or nature have peeled away the soil to show the bones of the land. We would explore several sites and look for signs that would tell a story, not just a story about the stones, but a story about this place: the Lake Superior Watershed.

Superior Connections is a new program at Northland College dedicated to exploring the many facets of the story of Lake Superior. The two year program is an integrated series of environmental liberal education courses that focus on many aspects of the Lake Superior watershed. In the true spirit of a liberal arts education the cohort of 18 students and the 13 professors teaching the program are studying a wide range of topics from biology and religion to literature and art. But more than just teaching each of these topics separately, Superior Connections explores the ties between those topics. The program focuses on the connections between biology and religion, between art and literature and all the other factors that make the Lake Superior watershed unlike anywhere else on earth.

The idea is to show students the bigger picture. It’s the difference between looking with a flash light and looking with a floodlight. If you walk into a darkened field at night and look with a flashlight you will see one clump of grass or one tree, one glowing green set of eyes looking back in the narrow beam of light. Each of these glimpses are interesting, but if you look with a flood light you can see all the clumps of grass and all of the trees, all the glowing green sets of eyes looking back; you can see it all. And what’s more, you can see how the grass and the trees and the eyes are all related, how they influence each other. That wider view of the world is the idea behind Superior Connections.

The first place we stopped on our Friday trip was a high, round hill that looked out across the rolling wooded landscape of Northern Wisconsin. Tom led us up onto the arching crown of stone at the top and, instead of delving into a lecture, he began asking questions: what was the texture of the stone? What did that mean? What marks could we see and what did they tell us? At each place we stopped, he asked the same questions. Slowly, by telling him Tom what we could see, we told the story of the region in our own words.

Over the course of the afternoon, we discovered the lava chamber deep below the surface that formed the coarse texture of the granite, the layers of sediment from an ancient lake bed that pressed into sharp flaking stone, the extreme pressure that shattered the earth and shifted massive plates on their side and the eventual advance of the glaciers that formed Lake Superior. It was all there written out in clues beneath our feet; all we had to do was read them. And there was more than just the ancient story of the stones told in increments of 100’s of millions of years. There were the burnt orange stains in the rock, signs of the iron ore that spurred the mining boom that put Ashland on the map. Even today, the iron ore in the Lake Superior watershed is drawing the attention of U.S. Steel.

At one of the last stops of the day, Tom told the group about the possibility of a new iron mine right on the spot where we were standing. Students in the group began asking questions: what will it do to the ground? Will it pollute the water here? There were questions about the mine, questions I had myself about the changes it could cause, but then came questions I wouldn’t have thought of: what will it do to the lake levels? How will it affect the town of Ashland? I was still thinking about the rock beneath my feet, but the students were already started thinking about the Lake and the people nearly 20 miles North of where we stood. With the sun getting low and more snow moving in from the North, I listened to the group and realized that I was still holding a flash light, but these students were using a flood light. Less than a semester into the program they are beginning to see the big picture, the connections that tie it all together. I can only wonder how far the glow of their floodlight will reach after two years.

For more information about the Superior Connections program and to learn how to apply go to www.northland.edu/Northland/Academics/ProgramsOfStudy/SuperiorConnections/ or call the Office of Admission at (800) 753-1840.

Bob Gross is a communication specialist in the Office of College Communication at Northland College. He holds a bachelor of science degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and has been working at Northland since the fall of 2006.