FINDING HIGHER GROUND: A road trip through the unlikely cradle of America's Great Climate Migration.

• Author: Tempus, Alexandra

Along the main drag in Rock Springs, Wisconsin, is a sidewalk to nowhere.

A little more than a decade ago, there were eight buildings on this stretch, which parallels the Narrows Creek just before it tumbles into the Baraboo River. Today, only an old bank building remains. From there, the sidewalk lines an open grassy patch so incongruous you can almost see the village that once was: the historic facade of the Coach House pub, the cheery planters overflowing with petunias, the green banners on each lamppost welcoming visitors to the place, as the town motto goes, "where the waters meet." In 2008, those waters overflowed on a historic scale, swelling more than twenty-eight feet and cascading into the towns treasured community center, drowning the library and village office in the basement. More than ninety of the villages then-400 residents were displaced from their homes. Locals went to work mucking out and building back what they could.

"We felt pretty good about ourselves," Village Trustee Jamie Busser tells me. "Ten years later, we got another 100-year flood."

After that second major disaster, in 2018, the residents of Rock Springs decided to take a different approach: move the heart of their 170-year-old village to a new location, outside the floodplain.

"Enough's enough," says Village President Lisa Zautke, recalling the sentiment at the time. "We're not doing this anymore."

This "community relocation" solution to flooding is in the local blood. The nearby village of Soldiers Grove made national headlines when it pioneered the model more than forty years ago, moving its Main Street businesses up onto a ridge. About a decade ago, downstream neighbor Gays Mills followed suit, laying out an expansive new neighborhood on a hillside. Now, Rock Springs is among at least four more Driftless towns moving to higher ground--an entire region leading the nation in a grand climate adaptation experiment.

I visited Rock Springs last fall at the outset of a road trip through what I've taken to calling "uprooted America"--U.S. communities where climate-driven crises have forced locals to reckon with leaving home. I thought about starting my trip in California, where the state's largest single wildfire on record had just wiped out an entire town. Or in Louisiana, whose famously hurricane-prone coast is losing more land per minute than just about anywhere else on Earth.

Instead, I decided to begin in this unlikely cradle of America's Great Climate Migration, a place in my own home state that Wisconsinites call "the Driftless." The region got that name because the two-mile-thick glacier that covered much of North America during the last Ice Age never drifted over it. It meant the untrammeled land retained its dramatic ridges and limestone outcroppings, looking more like the foothills of Appalachia than the gently rolling fields of Wisconsin.

It is an alluring landscape that lends itself to a vigorous economy of canoeing and hiking and biking--and to flooding. This became a problem when settlers built towns along rivers in the narrow valleys between ridges, where the water has nowhere to go but up, and often, inside.

You can tell the moment you cross into the Driftless Region, as I did in November 2021, when the land rises sharply under your wheels, and yellow signs for Amish horse-drawn carriage traffic punctuate the winding roads. "Wow," I exhaled as I rounded a deep bend into Rock Springs, the treeline sloping softly down the ridge before me into a postcard view of the hills.

My first stop was the village's squeaky-new municipal building, a combination fire station/public works department, village office, library, and community center that sits up the road, higher in elevation than the old downtown. It is a cornerstone of Rock Springs' relocation plan, which, together with plans for an...