Black Earth

What surprised me the most about our trip was when I saw how big the pigs were. I thought they’d be the size of a small dog, but they are as big as a person on his knees! I enjoyed the color of the baby pigs, their hazy blue eyes and silky pink skin. I loved holding the small, cute piglets, especially when one was really quiet and didn’t try to get away. The smell at the pig farm was beyond the word “strong,” but I did okay. It takes getting used to. I remember hearing the squealing of the piglets and the sows and hogs. I was scared of the big grandfather herd (that means they’re purebred). The most disgusting thing was the placenta the piglets were in when they came out of the sow. The most peaceful thing was when we got OUT of the pig farm.

–Kyle

When you walk in where they keep the piglets the first thought you have (besides the really bad smell) is “oh, how adorable!” But after a while you feel bad for the sows that have to put up with all the racket and squealing. Then you think how much it resembles our class, scrambling to get a seat on the couch! I bet their mothers feel like squashing them! Of course, they can’t—the sows are barred into the center of the cage.

–MacKenzie

When we entered the building where they keep the sows and boars, the sound was even louder than Randall’s lunch room!

–Lowell

The sudden squeals of the piglets touched my heart, and the adorable piggy’s twingling, mischievous eyes made me want to laugh out loud. How the soft, wet snout on my chin made me feel is hard to describe.

The sows and boars were snorting and banging on the side of the cages when we walked past. They were so loud it scared me, and they would suddenly jump at the front of their cages, which surprised me, too.

–Alice

At the pig farm the noise shocked me. There was a placenta in the room where the piglets were born that shocked me, but I could not show it or I would get in trouble. The smell at the butcher shop almost made me throw up. Also, at the butcher shop when they were cutting carcasses and shaving them and taking out the bones I was getting very, very shocked.

–Thomas

A volunteer fire department is a fire station where the people don’t get paid. The one we visited takes care of 94 square miles.

An average fireman/woman gets paid 40 or 50 thousand dollars a year. It is very kind that the volunteers do the same thing, but for no money. The department has a summer fest to raise money. All of the activities are physical. The activities are meant to improve your skills on things.

Some people have been at the department for 27 years. They go through a 14-week training session. The first thing you learn about is how to keep yourself safe, and how to work with other people. Every time they get a call they see something different. There are no secrets between firefighters. They share almost everything.

–Gabby

About 30 volunteers work at the Black Earth Fire Department. One of the volunteers if Paul Fassage, the chief of the fire department. The department was started over 100 years ago.

In this fire station, there were 35 men and only two women! Wow, what a big difference. The firefighters said that as time goes on probably the number of women will change.

The firefighters showed us the vehicles they used. There was the command vehicle (obviously used for giving commands) and the tanker (carries 3500 gallons of water), which has a fold-a-tank that goes on top of the tanker and also carries 3,500 gallons of water. There is a heavy rescue truck, which carries air, masks, the Jaws of Life, and ten firefighters. They have another tanker that only carries 1,500 gallons of water but also has four-wheel drive. They have a main engine with water pumper, ladders, and the hose.

–Sarah

One of the funnest things I did was go to the fire station. We got to ride in a fire truck. I waved at people. We got to go around the block and by the ShoeBox. After we came back we had to go to the Jaws of Life. The Jaws of Life is like a big scissors, so you can cut down doors or cut wires or just cut something big. The Jaws of Life weighed like 25 pounds, so it was pretty hard to pick up and cut things.

–Marcus

I really liked when Mike told us the fire stories. Some of his stories were scary, like the one where one man was driving home in his car and it was pretty foggy. And then he accidentally killed himself by crashing into a horse, and he also killed the horse, because when he crashed into the horse, the horse’s head went flying through the air.

There were a lot of calls for the firefighters, and a lot of them were sad, but a lot of them were happy, and some of them were really funny.

One day Mike and his fellow workers received a call that an apartment building was on fire! The firefighters, of course, responded, and they went there in a hurry. But when they got there it turned out that the chimney made the smoke, and there was nothing that was so scary!

–Nick

Mike’s first story was about a fire in a trailer. When they got there, a neighbor hold them a lady was still in there, so they went in. They looked through the whole trailer. They had to search everywhere. When they looked in the last room, they fell through the floor. At this time there was lots of fire, and they had looked through the whole house. So they assumed no one was in there. They got out of the hole and left. Two hours later, Mike and his brother went in. While they were looking through all the ashes, they found a skull, lungs, and a stomach.

–Emma

My favorite part of the fire station was when we got to put on the firefighters’ clothes. They were heavy, especially the helmets.

–Kyle

The clothes they have to wear weigh 60 pounds, and that’s not counting the oxygen tank.

–Brett

When I put on the firefighter outfit and fell down in them I was amazed that I couldn’t get back up!

–Emily

Transcription of interview with Mike Danz, Black Earth Fire Department

“We started crawling in the back of the trailer [that was on fire] looking for this lady who was supposedly still home. . . All the furniture had fallen down around us, so we’re crawling through all the lamps and the tables, and the chairs were thrown about and it was very full of clutter anyway. It was an older lady and she had lived there for twenty-five years and she’d kept everything.

“As we crawled through one room and didn’t find her we crawled to the next room, then we’d go to the next room… We were headed down the hall to go to the kitchen, myself and my brother were both searching for her. As we went down the hall, the smoke got very thick, we couldn’t see anything.

“The heat was getting very intense. It started to hurt coming through your gear. We had one room left …. as we got closer to the kitchen both myself and my brother fell through the floor. At that moment, I was the most scared I’d ever been. We had to go from looking for her to figuring out how to get ourselves out of there without dying.

“So I helped my brother out of the hole and he helped me out of the hole and we hightailed it to the back door.

“I don’t want to know more than the guy next to me. If we were all in the fire department, I would want every one of you to know just as much as I know. Because if you don’t, and I depend on you to know something and I kept it a secret the whole time, it may cost me in the end. So it’s better not to have secrets.

“Out here we get wildfire and they’re grass and pine trees… We were going through there putting the fire out and putting the fire out and, all of a sudden, the wind turned, and it turned the whole fire and it started coming at us. Just faster than I could run. And I’m running and it’s getting closer and closer and closer, and just in the nick of time a jeep comes by, and I was able to jump in the back of the jeep and hide down between the wheel well, and we had to drive straight through that fire as fast as we could in that truck. And that was very hot and very scary.”

(Transcribed by Emma)

Something that surprised me was one of the ways to make signs. You have the design on the signs, and then you peel back the paper and instead put on a huge piece of masking tape that covers the whole thing. Then you put the tape onto a piece of metal and push the tape down, then remove the tape and you have a sign! I can’t believe it’s that simple.

–Anna

The sign painter makes signs usually for businesses. But he’ll do anything from name pins to awards and plaques. He has been making signs for over thirty years. He has done mostly engraving over the years because before he started his business he had some experience engraving.

He started his own business in 1988 and bought the building in 1989. But he didn’t buy the building, the city did. He makes signs for people mostly in a 50-mile range. They made signs for the DNR once, and they put them at the entrance of a lot of state parks.

–MacKenzie

To make street signs, you cut out the pattern on the material, then lay it onto a huge roll of masking tape. It will stick. Then you make sure it’s straight on the metal and lay it down. The adhesive is stronger than on the tape, so it will stick to the metal; then you smooth it down. It’s a good idea to heat up the metal before you use it.

–Zoë

The slimy sausage filling was very interesting, but when they sawed a cow in half it made me feel a bit uneasy.

–Sarah

Two large cow tongues sat on the counter I was standing near. If you looked closely, you could see that the end that had been connected to the mouth was jiggling back and forth just the slightest bit.

–Lowell

The butcher shop was awesome. Actually it was gross too. There was a dead headless cow lying upside down on a table, and they were culling the skin off of it. The skull and the tongues were on a table and both of them were moving. When we went into the next room I had to dodge dead cows hanging from the ceiling.

–Brett

It shocked me how they skinned the cows and how they cut them in half. Another gross thing was the smell of guts.

–Juan Pablo

Sitting in the small shop of Poast Mark, probably making or playing a Hardanger fiddle, is Ron Poast. Ron first got into Hardanger fiddles because a great uncle had one, and the family loved it. When they were short on money one year, he sold it to a pawnshop. Many years later Ron was walking through downtown ?? and he saw what looked exactly like the one his Uncle Owen sold, in a museum. So he went in and talked to the people there, and they let him study Hardanger fiddles. And he found that they were not totally different from the violins he was already making. After that, he started making them.

When Ron makes a Hardanger fiddle, he always uses either curly maple or bird’s-eye maple. The curly maple is also called tiger maple. Ron uses curly or bird’s-eye maple on the back and sides of his instruments, and elm on the front. For the finger board and end board he uses African ebony, which is fairly expensive. He takes the bony and cuts designs that are quite intricate into the ebony. Then he inlays mother of pearl by hand.

Next, before he puts the bridge, finger board and strings on, he decorates the violin/fiddle with very intricate patterns that resemble rosemaling. What he actually does is called rosing.

The head of the violin or fiddle, which is the end with the tuning pegs, is always in the shape of a mythical dragon’s head. The dragon always has two teeth that Ron ?? on. All the rosing and cutting Ron does is freehand. He doesn’t have a stencil or any other material that helps him. He uses India ink, which works very well on wood.

–Anna

The Hardanger fiddle has two sets of strings. Ron says that the sound stays longer. The fiddle has nine strings, five on the bottom and four on top.

–Pao

Ron Post was a cool person. He is a violin maker and an artist. He free draws with a pen on the violin. If he messes up, then he just makes it part of his design. He won an award for the best violins in Wisconsin. He also won a national award.

–Marcus

I really want to learn how to make violins and fiddles, because then I could make my own instead of having to go out and buy them.

–Alice