Tag: Wisconsin

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Mauthe Lake

Went up to Mauthe Lake to get my fix of glacier landscape. Mauthe Lake is a gift of the glaciers. During the last ice age, which ended only 11,000 years ago, Wisconsin was covered by ice. Ice ages last a long time. The last ice age lasted 74,000 years, more or less. The time between ice ages is short, about 10,000 years. We are overdue for the start of a new ice age. We don’t think much about this in the age of global warming, but we should recall that we can influence but not control the really big swings.

When the last period of rapid global warming occurred, the ice rapidly retreated. Some big chunks of ice persisted, buried under the ground. When that ice melted, they became depressions called kettles and the bigger ones became lakes, like Mauthe Lake. You can see all the glacial forms in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, near Milwaukee.

The kettle is a depression often a little lake or a bog. I explained its origin above. A moraine is where the glacier stopped. They are like ripples. Hard to ride your bike up and down, as I can attest from my youthful experience. The glaciers advanced and retreated, so there are lots of ripples. The farthest advance is called a terminal moraine. Sea levels were much lower during the ice age. Long Island is mostly a terminal moraine, a big one. It was not an island during the ice age. There were rivers that ran across the tops of glaciers. Sediment accumulated in the bottoms and when the glaciers melted they dropped to ground level leaving serpentine hills. These are called eskers. Sediment also accumulated where there was a hole in the glacier or a little lake. When the glacier melted, this sediment dropped to ground forming teardrop shaped hills called drumlins. There are lots of drumlins in Jefferson and Dane Counties. Capitol Hill in Madison is a drumlin.

Part of Wisconsin was NOT covered by ice. This is the driftless areas around Lacrosse. Chrissy grew up in this region. Locally, they call the the “Coolie region,” A coolies is a long, narrow valley formed by glacial melt water. Grand Coolie in Washington State is an example of a very large coolie, formed when a giant ice dam collapsed releasing a torrent of water that scoured everything until it ran into the Pacific Ocean.

My pictures are from around Mauthe Lake. I walked around it. It was the kind of “solitude” I like. There were few people on the trail, but I could hear kids having fun in the lake in the distance. The second picture shows tamarack trees. Tamaracks are deciduous conifers. They are tolerant of bad and acidic soils, but very intolerant of shade, so they tend to grow on bad soils and in bogs where there is less competition. Picture #3 is scrub oaks. They are small, but old. Some of their size is probably due to genetics, but the soil is also little help. Picture #4 is the Milwaukee River. Mauthe Lake is not the source of the Milwaukee River, but it is close. The river runs through it. I first visited this in 1965, when I was ten years old. I was confused when I learned about the Milwaukee River. I recalled the polluted water in Milwaukee and worried that I was swimming in that. Of course, that was foolish. The water is clean up here.

Last picture shows a red pine plantation. It was planted in 1941 and has been thinned four times. I asked the ranger if they burned under the trees. No. I asked if they would be harvested. Yes but no clear cutting. So that means that the future will not include red pines on this acreage.

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Grant Park forest evolution

Grant Park is a place I have been going from my whole life. My parents took me there as a kid and it used to be part of my running trail, so I have been observing it now for more than a half century. There have been many changes in the forest cover.

The natural forest is beech-maple-basswood. But they planted lots of exotic trees, so you get examples of scotch pine, Norway spruce, Norway maples, white birch and larch. Parks of the woods are really European with the species mentioned above dominating.

In the time I have known Grant Park, the birches have largely disappeared. They do not naturally reproduce in the Milwaukee area. These were not North American birches, in any case. They planted European white birch. The Scotch pine will be gone soon. They do not live that long and also will not naturally regenerate. The Norway spruce will not regenerate either, but they live a long time and will be here long after I am not. Norway maple do and are regenerating. They look much like sugar maples. You can tell the difference by their bark and more easily by their seeds. They seem to occupy the same niche as sugar maples but can be rather more successful, since they better tolerate city conditions. They are pretty, but could be considered invasive.

My first picture is one of the European forests. Nothing in the larger trees is natural. There are white pine, native to Wisconsin, but not to Milwaukee County. Most of the rest are from farther away, Norway spruce, Norway maples, Scotch pine and European white birch. The next picture shows the white birch. They will soon be no more. Picture #3 is natural forest with native species and finally is the Lake.

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An old forest

One of the last intact maple-basswood forest in Milwaukee county was about to be made into a parking place for trucks back in 1972. The County bought it and preserved it as Cudahy Nature Preserve. It is only around 40 acres, but it had managed to avoid the ax for a couple hundred years, so it had the trees, soils and some natural communities intact.
 
I started to go out there before it was a park. I have a relationship with it long term. I went out there and walked around the day after my mother died in 1972. My cousin Ray Karshna used to live across the street, so I would visit him and then look in on the forest. It is thick and dark. Deep shade trees like maples and basswood are dominant. There are some oaks, but mostly near the edges. Milwaukee is a very interesting ecological region. The range of beech trees extends only about a mile inland from Lake Michigan. The Cudahy Forest is just a little too far inland.

My other pictures show Lake Michigan at Grant Park. And the sugar maple brewery on Lincoln Avenue. Interestingly, the logo shows the seeds of a Norway maple, not a sugar maple.
 

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Bur oak

Bur oaks are characteristic of “oak openings” or areas of oak mixed with grasslands. The famous naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote about them in “Sand County Almanac.” They are robust against fire, which is one of the ways they survive. They grow slowly. Some get pretty big; others just get old but stay small.

There are two bur oaks that I know “personally.” One is at Dover Street School and the other in Humboldt Park. Both are big and old. They were old when I was young. The first pictures is at Dover. I played under it when I was in kindergarten. It used to be surrounded by asphalt, which evidently did it no harm. Now it has grass. The other one is in Humboldt Park. I admired it since I was young, although not as long as the one at Dover St.

The next picture are honey locusts along Pine Avenue. They were planted in the 1970s. They take a very long time to grow, but they keep on going and get pretty big. The last picture is a big old cottonwood at Grant Park. I like cottonwoods. They grow fast and don’t live long (for a tree) but they are good early succession trees.

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The old house

Finally getting around to posting from my trip to Milwaukee a couple weeks ago. My sister did a better job of posting some of the social stuff.

My posts are mostly about changes with trees, so please feel free not to read more. I am interested in changes and trees. I am surprised sometimes how fast and sometimes how slow things change.

Let me start with my old house on Dover Street and the trees. So you can see how fast they grow, or not. It is only with my advanced age that I get some perspective on tree. The big trees are not always the oldest ones. And some get to a particular size and then just kind of stay that way.

The first picture is a silver maple. My uncle Ray Karshna planted it 1967. He dug it out of the bushes at his house. I was a volunteer. The maple grew fast and then mostly stalled.
Next is my basswood tree. I planted that in 1972.  I brought it home from the woods on College Avenue, carried it in a plastic bad riding my bike.   I pruned it and guided it over the wires and now it is pretty robust.

The horse chestnut on the hill is from 1966. I grew it from a chestnut that year.
Finally, we have the crimson Norway maples. They were planted in 1973 by the city of Milwaukee.

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Warnimont Park by the Lake

Natural succession is the way that the ecology changes over time. The textbooks usually take it from an open field or a pond to a forest. You can see natural succession in Warnimont Park in Cudahy. Around 1970, the park was mostly grass. I started to run down there about that time.  I remember there were lots of thirteen-lined ground squirrels. They stopped mowing and soon wildflowers moved in, followed by pioneer trees Today, large parts are young forest. I have watched the evolution over the past 45 years.

I do wonder a bit about the future here. In SE Wisconsin, green ash are among the most important pioneer trees. With the emerald ash borer, I wonder what will happen.

The first picture is still mostly meadow I think they cut it occasionally. The second shows the running/bike path with young forest. That used to be all grass. Next is a grove of black walnut. They planted those in the 1980s. Last is one of the bluffs. If you look closely, you will see all the dragon flies.  The sky was full of them.  They are generally beneficial.

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Milwaukee, August 2015

Jake and I had a “traditional” day: breakfast at George Webb’s, a look at our old house, visited Mrs. Gebhardt, a stop at (formerly) Medusa, and lunch at the Cousins on KK. Added a new tradition: the beer garden at Humboldt Park. I didn’t get to drive the convertible he rented but we had perfect weather to enjoy it. Later with Greg, Dorothy, Mary and Dick, had dinner at Café Central in Bay View. Fun day and great weather.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Left Over Pictures & Stray Thoughts

Below is the tree version of the sword of Damocles. I suppose it will fall in the first strong wind and it is not over a walking trail, so it probably is not a real danger to anybody. Natural places need not be made antiseptically safe.

Below shows why forests in foggy places are different than those w/o so much fog. The tree leaves sort of comb out the moisture and it drops to the ground, as you can see in the picture with the water under the silver maple in Warinmont Park. 

Below is the fog bank hanging out over Lake Michigan on the other side of the Milwaukee breakwater. I thought it looked like a distant mountain that could move. 

Below are lichens on a white birch tree. This is a European white birch planted by the park authorities, not the native paper birch. Of course, neither is native to Milwaukee, but the paper birch range is much closer. 

Below are gargoyles on my old Bay View HS. The building was constructed around 1920. I heard it was designed to look like a castle in Germany, but I don’t know for sure. My mother went to Bay View and it used to have strong local support and traditions. This was mostly lost in the 1980s, when the city did busing to achieve integration. The goal was good, but the method was bad.  IMO, it was an experiment that failed. It didn’t quicken integration; it cost a lot of money; it delivered kids more tired to school; it contributed to the ruin of a once decent school system and it wrecked the idea of neighborhood schools. A quarter of a century later, we have nothing good to show for the suffering.

I used to go in the door below the gargoyles at Bay View. From that spot, my home, grade school and junior HS were all within a ten minute walk. It was a better time to be a student in Milwaukee than it is today. We didn’t need to be bussed. We didn’t spend a lot of time commuting. We got some exercise and we got to know the neighbors. It was something that should not have been thrown away.

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New/Old Milwaukee

Some things, place & people become trendy about the time they stop being used by ordinary people.  This is what has happened in some parts of Milwaukee and some old habits. I mentioned the decline or disappearance of Milwaukee industry. The old industrial park is now becoming trendy. All those old industrial buildings make wonderful, sun-filled loft condos. Old bars that used to serve beer and whiskey, now serve drinks with cute names along with an impressive array of beers … with cute names.  I thought the “pedal tavern” above was cool. The drinkers have to propel themselves. Everybody seems to be having a good time.

Milwaukee was livelier than it used to be, even if it is more of an afterglow than the commerce we used to have. People with money actually live near and in the downtown, in all those condos. We didn’t see what downtown looks like in the evening, but I understand that nightlife is improved. A lot of these places used to be scary during the day and no-go zones at night.

So I am not sure how I should react. As I wrote in my previous post, the old Milwaukee had jobs and texture that the new one does not. On the other hand, the new Milwaukee is cleaner and more pleasant.  

The industry will never return. Industry in general has changed. It takes a lot fewer workers to produce industrial products, so even if industry returned, jobs would not.  Beyond that, no intelligent large manufacturer will ever locate in a old city when they can more easily build a new operation in a new place. An old industrial center like Milwaukee has too much baggage.  Think about a place like the old Grede foundry site. You can see from the picture I took yesterday, that there is now an eight acre site all flattened out and ready to go. But what about the roads? There are narrow, urban streets. A truck would waste hours navigating those streets. And what is below that ground? Industrial processes used to be dirtier than they are today. Many old industrial sites have toxic waste issues. 

Milwaukee is a pleasant place with a beautiful lakefront and one of the best system of county parks in the world.  But it is not a crossroads place.  It is not a prime industrial location.  I grew up during Milwaukee’s industrial heyday and thought it was natural, as did many others. But it was really the end of an era, the last flash, the last hurrah, glorious but ephemeral. Those trendy places represent the future. People will live in the buildings where our fathers and grandfathers worked. Milwaukee can be a great, medium-sized city. But it never again be the industrial city it was. Those times are gone and will never return.

The new people will like the cleaner, more trendy city better and the old people are mostly gone.  Below is our old house. They are putting on a new roof. My father had the roof put on in the late 1970s. The trees are interesting. The crimson Norway maple was planted in 1972. The silver maple was planted in 1967. The horse chestnut in the front I grew from a chestnut in 1966.

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Disrespecting the Wishes of the Artist

The Milwaukee Art Museum building is itself a work of art, perched on a wonderful location up against Lake Michigan.  Chrissy & I saw it shrouded in the lake mists.   I am sure that the designers anticipated such meteorological events as part of the presentation.


How much does art belong to the artist?  This is a difficult question.  IMO, we revere artists too much.  Artists express themselves through their art.  But it only becomes meaningful when interpreted by other people.   I don’t really think very much of individual expression. Art is a social activity.  Below is a good example. It is the infinity room. The artist evidently thought it represented outer space. Do you think it does? And I think that Chrissy standing there greatly improves the artist’s vision. It is a human showing wonder at the otherwise soul-less light show. So the art was not complete until we stepped into it. And it will not be complete until others do too.

I wrote a couple of posts on this general subject here & here and won’t repeat it here.  I guess the general idea is that art is like a general idea.  You put it out there and other people add to it, change it and maybe perfect it. Below is the infinity room again with my feet improving the art.

I think it was a good thing when artists had patron who could help call the shots. A lot of great art resulted from the tensions between the creator and his patron.  When artists are left to their own, they too often drift into a kind of self-indulgence.  Art usually improves when it ages because it gets modified or reinterpreted.   Most art is incomplete when the artist gets done with his part.  Below is a “sunburst” sculpture.  It is made our of girders. It is interesting, but the city paid too much for it, since any competent steelworkers could make the same thing. In fact, when the city bought the thing, I recall that some old guy on the South Side made his own smaller version out of scrap steel.  Some art is like the “Emperor’s New Clothes”.