Harvey Baumgartner: Life Outside the Cubicle
The beauty and seclusion of the Driftless Area attracts and supports creative, individualistic people. One such person is Harvey Baumgartner, rugged outdoors-man, author, philosopher, and gentle idealist.
I met Harvey soon after my wife and I retired to Hillsboro. We were visiting a lady who raised goats and had offered to introduce us, her new “city slicker” friends, to them. After we made acquaintances with the nanny and billy goats, the women sat down for coffee and cake, and I wandered about the barnyard, admiring the Driftless panorama. On that early fall day, the hills wore a coat of many colors: several shades of green, straw-yellow, gold, and crimson.
An Amish style buggy pulled into the gravel driveway. The lanky driver, however, was hardly Amish; rather, he resembled a cowboy, with his Stetson hat and leather boots. His friendly, soft-spoken manner was engaging, and I soon learned that Harvey lived up the road, in an off-the-grid sod house without electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing.
In the course of our conversation, other fascinating facets of Harvey’s life emerged. He had been raised on a dairy farm in Monroe, served in the U.S. Army’s Special Forces during the Vietnam Era, attended the University of Wisconsin, and worked as an electronics technician, construction foreman, cowboy, mule packer, and naturalist, among other things.
I told Harvey that he should write a book. “You think?” he asked, in all modesty.
I offered to work with him on the project, since his home was without electricity or a computer. Every Tuesday evening, I drove to his sod house, north of Hillsboro, with my battery-operated tape recorder. We sat in semi-darkness—just a single candle burning—as Harvey shared stories of his adventures out West.
He described a Lakota naming ceremony in which he had been invited to participate. It was a rare honor for an outsider, but Harvey’s simple ways and humble nature won over the elders of the tribe. After the preparatory sweat, he entered a low, wooden building with all the windows blacked out. “It was time for the medicine man to journey,” Harvey recalled. The medicine man’s helpers laced his hands behind him with rawhide thongs and then wrapped him in a blanket, which completely covered his head and body. They tied rawhide thongs around the blanket and placed him on the floor, face down. When the lights were turned off, leaving the room in total darkness, the drumming started, and Harvey could hear the medicine man’s muffled voice calling to the spirits in Lakota. He also heard sounds of animal calls and felt an eagle fly close to him. “I felt the wind from his wings and shuddered at his passing cry,” Harvey told me. After a while, the drumming stopped, and the lights went on. “There sat the medicine man on his blanket,” Harvey said. He then described the actual conferring of names, followed by a wakíčhičʼu (giving of gifts-pronounced wa-kee-chick-oo) and feast.
Listening to Harvey tell that story in his sod hut, his solemn face illuminated by the flickering candle, was a spiritual experience. It was the first of many life-changing conversations I enjoyed with Baumgartner in the course of preparing his memoir, Dancing in the Dew: A New Way of Living on Planet Earth (2009, Apple Tree Press). We became good friends.
Harvey graciously agreed to speak with my students at Madison Area Technical College. Although most of the students were studying nursing or allied medical fields, they listened attentively when Harvey described his somewhat unorthodox views on the healthcare system. When asked what healthcare plan he has, Harvey said, “…pumping 20 gallons of water for my horses” (at 100 strokes of the hand pump per gallon). As a veteran, Baumgartner has access to the VA system, but he prefers to avoid unnecessary medical care, relying instead on hard work and a simple lifestyle to stay healthy.
Born into a farm family in Monroe, Wisconsin, Harvey studied electronics at Madison Area Technical College after high school. He worked as an electronics technician in Phoenix before joining the U.S. Army Special Forces in 1966. When he returned from the military, he began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, interspersed with travels to Alaska and the American West, where he augmented his classroom studies with first-hand experience of natural science
Married with two children, Harvey earned a living as a construction supervisor in La Farge, Wisconsin. He lived, at various times, in Idaho, where he worked for outfitters, the U.S. Forest Service, and Minnesota, as well as Wisconsin.
Dancing in the Dew is full of Harvey’s adventures out West, where he lived in the back country, receiving mail sporadically via air drop, and stories that reveal his quest for the right way to live.
One such adventure was a 1983 horseback trip from Wisconsin to Wyoming. Harvey, his wife, Cyndee, and their two pre-school children made the four-month trip without benefit of cell phones or GPS, relying on county maps and the kindness of strangers. Harvey and Cyndee each recorded the details of that trip in a separate daily journal. Those journal entries later were published as Riding West: One Family’s Journey Through the American West (2016, Ephesus Press). Reading Harvey’s and Cyndee’s very different descriptions of the same events along the road is to understand their separate perspectives as horse wrangler and child guardian. The book is also a testament to the American character—we are much less scary than we are portrayed in the media.
Harvey made two other unconventional cross-country trips: a 1998 covered wagon trek from Minnesota to Montana, and a 2011 trip from Hillsboro, Wisconsin to New Mexico in a plywood “Spirit Wagon” drawn by two mules.
In 2002, Baumgartner built his sod house on twelve acres north of Hillsboro. Given his experience in construction, he could have built a fine conventional house, but as a fifty-six-year-old widower, he chose to go simple, back to the earth. As described in Dancing in the Dew, Harvey pitched a tent on his windy hilltop in October and commenced construction of a one-room hut with salvaged timbers and windows retrieved from the township dump. His mission, as stated on the jacket of Dancing in the Dew, is as follows:
“My house, made of sticks and clay, is created out of my imagination and built for under six hundred dollars. I wish young people could see this as an alternative to a thirty-year mortgage. There can be so much more to life!”
Harvey is a modern-day Thoreau, a philosopher and conservationist who lives his convictions. Free from the constant distractions of electronic noise, he listens attentively, thinks deeply, and speaks clearly, with a minimum of well-chosen words. He represents a unique brand of American men who make their homes in unique and beautiful places, such as the Driftless Area.
Robert Potter is very interested in documenting the lives of area residents for Driftless Now. If you have a story you are willing to share with readers, please contact Robert at robertdaypotter@gmail.com.
