A Madison institute says Wisconsin congressman Tom Tiffany's emergency landing skipped Lake Wausau's yes
The Midwest Institute for Relational Hydrology has booked Tom Tiffany for six repair sessions with Lake Wausau. Facilitators say the emergency landing skipped the water's consent. The work starts Monday at a public boat launch.
The Midwest Institute for Relational Hydrology, based in Madison, has booked Wisconsin congressman Tom Tiffany for six repair sessions with Lake Wausau.
Staff will run the work from a public boat launch starting Monday. They plan to ask the water what it needs after an arrival it never named as welcome.
Tiffany, a Republican running for governor, swam to shore after a light aircraft lost power near Wausau. Reporting from The Guardian and NPR says the pilot set the plane on the lake and both men reached land.
Institute director Dr. Marisol Quell called the swim a start, not a repair. Survival, she said, is not the same as a yes.
A landing without a check-in
Quell told colleagues that emergency rules still center the person in the air. They treat the lake as furniture.
She calls that altitude privilege: moving through sky as if water is a soft field with no inner life. She wants a trauma-informed splashdown protocol, meaning no one puts a plane in a watershed without asking what the water can hold.
Engines fail on their own clocks, she granted. A failed engine, she did not grant, cancels the lake's standpoint.
The lake does not exist to catch campaign itineraries. Gravity is not a hall pass.
Jordan Phipps, who holds the title of lake liaison, said the first session will open with six minutes of shared silence. Humans will stand in the shallows. The lake will not be asked to perform calm for anyone's comfort.
Phipps will read a six-line water acknowledgment first. Then the lake can choose whether to continue.
The dinner-to-airport rush, Phipps said, skips co-regulation. That is the therapy word for two nervous systems slowing down together. A watershed cannot slow down with a wing that never introduced itself.
What the six sessions ask
Session one is naming. Tiffany is expected to say, out loud, that Lake Wausau is not a runway. Session two is impact: how fuel film and an unplanned hull press on fish, weeds, and people who fish there. Session three is repair offers. The last three return to listening, because listening is the part offices usually skip.
Anisa Reed, who organizes with Progressive Aviators for Watershed Healing, said she felt cautious hope. She wants candidates to practice enthusiastic consent with inland water, meaning a clear yes, not a splash.
Swimming to safety can be brave, she said. It can still leave the lake doing unpaid emotional labor.
That labor, in her view, is the quiet work of taking a shock so a campaign can keep its calendar.
Harm does not check party registration before it lands, Quell argued. The Institute will not grade Tiffany on a ballot line.
A politics of extraction, she added, often treats water as a prop. A repair practice would put the watershed in the middle, which simply means the lake talks first.
After Wausau, the clouds
Wider rules are already in draft. Any unscheduled contact with Wisconsin water would trigger the same six-session arc, including rain that arrives without a check-in.
Weather, Quell called unprocessed atmospheric touching. Towns, she said, deserve a pause before they wipe their faces.
Phipps wants the Great Lakes Compact read as a living agreement between anxious partners, not a cabinet of gallons. If a plane can enter a lake without a greeting, they asked, what else do we call an accident that is really a skipped introduction.
Reed floated a pause on low approaches over lakes until each body of water can post a boundary. She pictured buoys with listening hours. She pictured candidates who fly to dinners also flying into accountability.
Care, not punishment, is how Quell named the work. She invited Tiffany to bring his full positionality, meaning the mix of office, party, and having been dry before the water was not.
The lake, she said, will bring its depth. No one leaves until both have been heard, even if only one of them has a press secretary.
The boat launch is public. The sessions are not closed.
Anyone willing to stand in cold water and wait may hold space. Here that means staying quiet long enough for a lake to finish a thought.
