Month: August 2014

Instead of sticking to I-90, we took the scenic-slower route through the badlands.  The badlands are rough.  They are pretty to look at, but must have been hell to cross on foot.  Being in a car on a paved road changes your perspective.  They often have snake warning signs like the one below.  I have only seen a rattlesnake one time in all the years I have walked in places with signs like this.  Maybe they just put them there to spice up the experience.

You can see from the picture below that they even made a boardwalk along the hill. Again, your perspective is different when you can walk in comfort.  The poor pioneers having to live here would have seen it differently.

You can’t even sit in a bar and get slowly drunk to the tones of a sad country song.  The gambling machines are everywhere, even little monitors set into bars and tables.  Who knew that Deadwood was a gambling mecca.  All that I knew about it came from the Wild Bill Hickok legends and that series by the same name.  I guess that it was a gambling center back then, but I assumed that it evolved.

Gambling, or now they like to call it gaming has become troublingly common.  I don’t like it.  It is not that I am puritanical.  I think “vices” like drinking and card playing are okay.  What I object to is the ubiquity and the inane variety.
Wild Bill played poker.  Poker is a legitimate occupation. Those who are talented and develop their skill can win more than they lose.  And we have to thank gamblers for the science of statistics.  It was they (some at least) who cared enough to think through the mechanics of luck.  Poker is also a social game.  In the Old West it often had anti-social consequences, but at least you were playing with others.
Today’s gambling is mostly a lonely affair with a row of poor suckers growing soft in mind and body as they push a button on a flashing machines decked out in childish, sometimes even cartoon themes.  It is a random process.  You can never become good enough at pushing those buttons that you will routinely win more than you lose.  You interact only with the machine, which has no memory or emotions but is programmed to let you win often enough that you feel you are making progress.
As I wrote above, I object not to gambling but to its ubiquity.  And in quantity I think it is corrupting to individuals and society.  I emphasize “in quantity” since I think a little is okay and useful fun.  But when you get a lot of it, it gets bad.   I don’t object so much to the fact that it parts some fools with their money, but rather that too much gambling instills a kind of fatalistic point of view where luck and superstition take on too much of a role in lives.  It also fosters an over materialistic view.  After all, the goal is the big win, n0t the satisfaction of a job well done to get y0u there.
I suppose my criticisms are those of an old curmudgeon.  I just don’t like it and never really have.  the hotel gave us $15 worth of credits to play.  We lost that very rapidly and fled the frenetic scene.
I hope I have not too much insulted “gamers.”  I know lots of people like it.  I would just like less of it.
My picture up top shows Deadwood main street.  The one below is a walking path. The ponderosa pines are the best part of the city.  In the Black Hills, some of the pines are too dense and are being attacked by pine beetles.  This is not new. The town of Deadwood got its name from a forest of dead wood that occupied the site way back in 1876.  Pine beetles cannot be eradicated, but can be controlled by thinning and other silvicultural methods.

A big attraction along I-90 is the Corn Palace.   It is not very far from the highway and so worth the short trip.  The palace is an auditorium where they hold events and things like basketball games.  The difference is that it is decorated with corn cobs and parts of corn plants.  It is corny art, as you can see from the picture.

As you get toward the center of South Dakota, the land gets flatter and more barren.   This is the short grass prairie where the pioneers had to make houses out of sod, since there was no wood.  You can see below the great emptiness.

My pictures were taken near the Sinclair station.  I liked the dinosaur when I was a kid.   Below is an interesting sign.   I wouldn’t think they would need to worry very much about parking.

We stopped for the night in Sioux Falls.  It is a pleasant, medium-sized city.  It was founded because of the waterfalls, as the name implies.   It is not a very big river, but it was evidently enough to power grain mills.

There is a nice park where around the falls.  There rocks were laid down millions of years ago, when the earth was much warmer and the middle of what is now North America was under a shallow, warm inland sea, as I learned from a plaque in the park.
Chrissy and I had supper at a place called “Monk’s House of Ale Repute” where they had craft beers.  Like many such places, it was located in an old industrial building.  These things appeal to people like us.  It is as close to “cool” as we ever get or ever want to approach.

Hormel, the maker of Spam, is just a little off I-90 in Austin, Minnesota, so we stopped off at the Spam museum that they run there.

I am not a big fan of Spam, but I sometimes like it for breakfast with eggs. The advantage of Spam is that it is easy to cook and evidently lasts almost forever in the can.
I inherited a whole pantry of the stuff when I was in graduate-school in Madison. Whoever was living there before just abandoned it. My food budget was very low in those days, so all that Spam became a big part of my diet for the next six months or so until it was gone. The biggest problem was the cans. They had a kind of twist key that you used to peel back the tin. It was hard not to cut your hands. They have since addressed the problem. Now it has a kind of pop-top.
People say that we don’t know what is in Spam.  We know it is pork.  Beyond that, I don’t care or really want to know.  You should not ask how laws, sausage … or Spam are made.
Of course, the last words in Spam were from Monty Python.

Chrissy says that she used to be a little afraid to come to this part of Lacrosse because of the drunks and weirdoes. It was an area of sleazy bars. Besides, the river was not that nice back then. Today it is very different and much better as you can see from the photos. As I wrote in the section in Milwaukee, if you people have reasonable sense of security, good things happen.

Lacrosse still has a lot of industry. I like the Mississippi because it is very pretty and home to wildlife, like bald eagles, but it is important as an artery of commerce. A lot travels on that water. It is very much cheaper to ship heavy things like bulk grain or cement by barge than it is by truck or even rail.

I woke up early in the morning to take advantage of the glorious day. It was cool and clear. I felt perfectly comfortable with a light sweatshirt. Summers in Wisconsin are often nice. I am not sure how much that compensates for the long winters, but you take what you can when it is available. It is so different from Brasília, where the weather is much more consistent.

There is a foot/running path that crosses the bridge shown in the picture and goes to a place called Pettibone Park, so named because a guy called Pettibone gave it to the people of Lacrosse in 1901. It is good for a park and probably for not much else. It floods. There are some places where you just should not build houses or shops and this is clearly one of them.

You can see from the nearby picture that the trees have a mud line that marks the latest water mark. The trees on the island are mostly silver maples and cottonwoods. Standing water does not hurt them, as long as it does not stand too long and it never does on where they are. In fact, it is good for them, since it brings mud and nutrients.

Lacrosse today has several small breweries. The biggest is the Lacrosse Brewing Company. It used to be G. Heileman Brewing Company, maker of Old Style & Special Export. It was decent beer, not one of my favorites but okay. They used to brag that they used a method called Krausening. I don’t think it did anything in particular. It has something to do with shaking it us and tossing on more yeast just before putting it in the kegs. The sign on the Lacrosse Brewery still talks about Krausening, so maybe they still do it.

There are more breweries in Wisconsin than ever before. This is a big change from a few years ago, when they were dying out. Prohibition killed lots of them and the others were victims of consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s.  Prohibition was a very bad idea.  Ben Franklin supposedly said that beer was proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.  Purist cannot find the actual quote, but having read several biographies of old Ben, it sounds like something he would say.
The new brewers are often very local, so you can get a little local flavor wherever you go.

We went to see Chrissy’s parents’ grave near Holem.  It is a small cemetery overlooking working farms with the sounds and smells of nature, a very peaceful and probably appropriate place for old farmers.

We stopped off at the Ho-Chunk Casino along the way. We visited Las Vegas a few times.  I like Las Vegas, but we never spent much money gambling.  Las Vegas is nice because hotel rooms and restaurants are good and cheap.  Ho-Chunk doesn’t feature these things.  We really couldn’t figure out why anybody wants to play gambling games.  They are like bad video games.
The gaming hall is ostensibly opulent but vaguely depressing. It is full of old people, many infirm, wearing expressions of joyless resignation while they feed the machines.  The whole place has an elusive smell of stale cigarette smoke.  It bought back memories of old bowling alleys and bars I used to visit during the 1970s.  I don’t understand the attraction.

Each of us spent $5.00.  I came out the winner and left with $0.11 on my ticket.  Chrissy had only $0.03.  We didn’t expect to win and the casino met our expectations. Some places are worth seeing but not worth going to see.  It was not far from our route; we saw it. I don’t suppose we will ever go back.
My top picture shows the casino. The one below comes from the Spam museum in Minnesota.  It is not related to the casino, but I thought the admonition to stay OFF the wagon seemed appropriate.

I am worried about the ash trees.  They are so common in the Midwest and such an important part of the ecology that I cannot conceive of them not being around.  Maybe something can be done to stop the emerald ash borer.  We understand a lot about the bug. There must be weak points that can be attacked.  You can see some of the wonderful ash trees along Austin St in Milwaukee. They were planted in the 1970s to replace the doomed elms.  I sure hope they don’t suffer a similar fate. Below shows how the city is trying to save them.
There is some good news too.  Milwaukee is managing parks and land better.  I have seen lots of rain gardens and areas allowed to be more natural.
Below are pictures from along Lake Michigan.  This used to be a kind of maze of jetties and erosion along with managed lawns and beaches that helped cause that erosion.  Today it is much more natural.  You can see that black locusts and cottonwoods have colonized the sand and grown along the hillsides.  Their network of roots will hold the soil and suck up the water before it can loosen the dirt.

The sand you seen in the picture used to be Bay View beach.  I swam there when I was a kid and as a teenager tried always w/o success to meet girls there.  It was kept clear of brush and looked like someone who had never actually seen one might imagine was a California beach. It is better left to nature.

I don’t believe, however, that it has been just “left to nature.”   This is managed.  Someone at the Milwaukee County Park system actually knows what he/she is doing.  It takes a little bit of planning to make spontaneity like that work.  Kudos.

Went with my sister on a walk around the old neighborhood.  Things have improved a lot since the time when we were kids.  I am starting to think we may have been young during some of the bad times of our neighborhood.   A lot of the trouble was due to crime and disorder that grew in the 1960s anon and has been declining again since 1992.

When people feel reasonably safe in their persons and property, they take care of their businesses and lives.  There is a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy at work.  I remember that we felt insecure after dark up around Lincoln Avenue, so we didn’t go there as much and it became more dangerous in a downward spiral.  Feeling safer brings it an upward spiral.  Security first. Nothing else good happens until people feel secure and once they feel secure they start to do good things.
Anyway, I was very encouraged to see how much better things are getting in my old neighborhood.  It used to be “blighted” but now is becoming again a good place to be.

My top picture is the Avalon Theater.  We went there as kids to watch movies.  It had a special ambiance.  Inside was made to look like an outside courtyard with stars in the artificial firmament.  I hope they can restore it.

Next is the former Medusa Cement Company, where my father worked for 32 years and I worked for 4 years.  There used to be dozens of men working there. We did 12-hour shifts loading bags.  Today there are a few guys with machines that do our work in a few hours.  It used to be hard physical work, throwing bags that weighed 94lbs. Today they don’t pick up or lay down anything really heavy.

The third picture is the Kinnickinnic River and the dock where the cement boat comes in to deliver the product.  We used to just call it KK. In the 1960s it was horribly polluted and smelled bad. Today it is reasonably clean with lots of pleasure boats.

The church in the 4th picture is St Lucas Lutheran Church on Kinnickinnic Avenue.  It is made of cream city brick, the local Milwaukee product from the 19th Century.
Finally, the second last is a picture of the new beer garden at Humboldt Park.  It is about time.  A beer garden in the park is a good idea.  I think we had these kinds of things in Milwaukee before prohibition. Prohibition dealt a severe blow to beer culture and it only now, generations later, is really recovering.  The last picture is a mystery to me. The path goes directly into the pond.  It is a relatively new path.  Maybe it is for the beer drinkers wandering over from the new beer garden, kind of a sobriety test.

When I studied ecology in the 1970s, one of the foundations was natural succession.  This is the process where one ecological community evolves into another and an abandoned field becomes a stable forest.  First come weeds, then grass, followed by fast growing trees like cottonwoods or box elder. They are replaced by longer lived trees like oaks and finally there is a stable climax forest.  I liked to study this. It had a determinist logic, with everything building toward a final goal. In a place like Indiana, the final forest would be oak-hickory forest.
This formulation is too simple.  There really is no final goal or a final equilibrium.  Balance can be had along the way and nothing really lasts forever.  I think it is similar to our understanding of evolution.  Evolution does not have a direction.  Things may not get more sophisticated and certainty do not always move up toward better outcomes.
My pictures show the progress in the forests around the Tippecanoe battlefield.  It was cleared as a farm field  in the 1800s.  The big trees are oaks. They were probably left or planted as boundary markers.  When the fields were abandoned forests came back.  The signs say that the climax forest will be/is an oak-hickory forest, but a closer looks indicates this might not be true.  The oaks and hickories are big and apparently dominant, but the smaller trees are maples.  Maples are more shade tolerant and will come to replace the oaks in time.  Oaks require semi-open sunlight and won’t reproduce in the shade. But something will happen to create a disturbance and …
The challenge now are invasive.  New plants and animals have been introduced from other places around the world.  How they will fit in, nobody can be sure.