The View Changes When You Rise Above the Noise

What a fight over my mom's lake taught me about conflict.

My mom has lived on Lake Mallalieu, in Hudson, WI since 1993. I have a lifetime of memories on that water. So when the fight over the lake blew up, I wasn’t watching from the outside. I was in it.

Here’s the short version. The lake has been declining for decades. Sediment building up, year after year. Then a dam breach dumped a fresh load in and pushed the whole thing to a head. The breach wasn’t the real problem. It was just the match.

My mom and a lot of the lake folks have been fighting to fix it for years.

And that’s where the noise started.

On one side, save the lake. Make it healthier for the people who live on it. On the other side, ‘save the swans’. That one got pushed by a gal in town, and a river conservancy lined up behind it.

I stood back and watched both sides get louder and louder. And the louder they got, the more annoyed I got. Because they were fighting like enemies over the exact same thing.

Both sides want a healthy lake. That’s it. That’s the whole fight. Two groups screaming at each other on the way to the same place.

Here’s what actually happened, once you cut through the yelling.

The lake association won a state grant to improve the lake’s health. Dredging would’ve been ideal, but it’s too expensive. So the next best option was a drawdown. To do that, they needed the Wisconsin DNR’s approval, and that’s a whole process.

The process only starts when all four municipalities that own the dams on the lake sign the application.

And this is the part everyone missed.

Those signatures were never a yes to the drawdown. They just started the DNR’s science-based review. The research. The part where actual experts figure out whether a drawdown would help or hurt the lake and the waterways around it, including the St. Croix.

The signatures didn’t approve anything. They just opened the door to finding out. But people were so stuck on these were signatures to approve the drawdown.

So the anti-drawdown side fought to get a municipality to pull its signature. And yesterday, the St. Croix County Board of Supervisors rescinded theirs.

That killed it. The whole process, stopped.

So now we’ll never know. Would the drawdown have helped? Hurt? Gotten modified into something better? Nobody knows. Because the research never got to happen.

That’s the part that gets me.

People didn’t vote down a drawdown. They voted down the chance to find out if it was a good idea. They shut the conversation before anyone had the information to actually have it. They missed the wholeness of this project because they were stuck in their own muck. Tunnel vision.

And I’ll be honest about where I land. I get conserving the St. Croix. I get protecting the river. But a healthier lake means healthier water flowing into that river. So the side fighting the process was fighting against the thing they say they want. That’s the part that doesn’t add up for me.

Here’s my lesson.

If people would pull themselves out of the muck for one second and rise above it, they’d see the two sides were never that far apart. They’d see the vote wasn’t even about the drawdown. It was about whether to let ourselves learn something.

The view changes when you rise above the noise.

Down in it, all you see is your side and the enemy. Up above it, you see the truth. Everybody wanted the same lake. And in the fighting, they lost the one thing that could’ve gotten them there.

That’s the real Lesson with Lori. The lake was never the point. It was just the mirror.