Tag: Wisconsin

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Indian Summer in Milwaukee

Below is Lake Michigan looking south from Warnimont Park.

Indian summer is always a bittersweet time.  The warm sun shining through colorful leaves is delightful, especially mixed with the smell of the new fallen leaves and the sound of their rustling underfoot.  But this is also an ending.  The last flowers of summer are on hanging lonely on their stalks.   The falling leaves will soon leave branches bare.  Pleasant October will yield to rainy and bleak November and we will have to wait several months for exuberant life to return to the forests and field.

Below is Boerner Botanical Gardens in Whitnal Park

Indian Summer is often a metaphor for life with its last vigorous but perhaps futile & melancholy gesture.   It essentially one of the characters in John Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist”.   The poem “the Last Rose of Summer” sums it up.   (I put the full text at the bottom of this post.)

Below is Austin Street where I grew up looking north.  Those beautiful yellow trees are ash trees planted after the death of our elms.  They were planted in the middle of the 1970s.  The one on the right I repaired after a wind storm broke its branches.  It was smaller then.

Metaphor aside, October is my favorite month and Milwaukee’s October did not disappoint.  I visited some of my old haunts.  Many things have changed; most things have remained the same or similar.  

Below is a statue of Patrick Cudahy in Sheraton Park.  Cudahy founded the city that bears his name when the opened a meat packing operation south of Milwaukee.  

Below is Tadesuz Kosciuszko the Polish American hero in the park that bears his name.   The Polish epic Pan Tadeusz is based on him.  Interestingly, it starts “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie.”  Lithuania my country, you are like good health.  Of course nationality is always complicated.  The most famous Polish epic, written in Polish about a Pole can talk about Lithuania because they were part of the same commonwealth, which was lost, swallowed by its more agressive neighbors in 1795.  It was gone for 123 years.  That means that most Poles who came to the U.S. were not technically coming from Poland; they came from Russia, Austria or Germany, the countries that had annexed Poland and controlled its parts.  Pan Tadeusz goes on with some poingancy, ” I never knew till now how precious, till I lost thee. Now I see thy beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.”  Poles didn’t get their country back until 1918.  The Lithuanians lost theirs again in 1940 and didn’t get it back until the fall of the Soviet Union.  When I see the statue, I am reminded of the struggle.  This was a Polish neighborhood and people knew the story back then.   Today most people probably just see a man on a horse and think it is George Washington.

Speaking of a Polish neighborhood, this is Saint Josaphat’s Basilica, built by Polish immigrants.  Milwaukee has lots of churches near each other.  Each immigrant group built its own. We used to see it in the distance from our house.  It was lit up at nights and my sister and I thought it looked kind of like some kind of giant monster. It was scary.  You can see how this might be the case. Look at the “eyes”.

Below are geese flying into the pond in Kosciuszko Park.   The geese chase away the ducks. In this goose-duck war, the ducks are completely outclassed.  Geese used to be rare, but now they are all over the place.   They are bigger and more aggressive than the ducks and they crap all over the place.  Eventually, I suppose they will come to replace the ducks in the local ecology.  They also used to migrate, but now many stick around all year living off the fat of the land (and the local gardens)

Don’t forget the poem

Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one!
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go, sleep thou with them.
Thus kindly I scatter,
Thy leaves o’er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
From Love’s shining circle
The gems drop away.

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Chickenfest 2004

Returned from the annual family get together “Chickenfest”. Jerry and Tony Bozich do the cooking. My cousin Dorothy organizes the party. It has become a big event that a lot of people look forward to (how about that for great grammar dangling.)

It all starts with the chickens. Jerry seasons them from the inside out and then puts them on long pipes. They kind of get their heads stuck up their asses, a kind of Abu Ghraib for chickens. You can see from the picture. The machine is a local design. Jerry got some old man friend of his to make it. It is literally made of junk – pieces of metal that the old guy scavenged up. But it works well. The chickens cook slowly and the meat remains juicy. The result is chicken as good as I have had anywhere and better than most.

I personally still feel the pain from last year’s Chickenfest revelation when I learned that my grandfather was NOT a brew master, as I had always believed. He was, in fact, a candy maker. Beer . . . candy? Candy is not as cool. It wasn’t even famous candy like M&M, Three Musketeers or Milky Way. He made caramels and hard candies of dubious trademark. I really believed he was a brew master. Why? I thought he was a brew master because when he took the glory road he left a bottle of “Meisterbrau” (or brau meister – don’t recall exactly) beer in our fridge. My mother never threw it out and it dwelled permanently in the space between the catsup and mustard for at least twenty years. When we replaced our gas fridge with a new and improved electric one, the beer moved too. It was a fixture of the fridge. For as long as I could remember I saw that bottle every time I needed some cheese or coke and I ate a lot of cheese and drank a lot of coke. Meisterbrau was grandpa’s beer. I started associating Meisterbrau – brew master with my grandfather. We lived in Milwaukee, the most famous beer city of North America. The leap of imagination was a short one. Grandpa was a brew master. Meisterbrau, as I learned later, was not a good beer and not even made in Milwaukee. Its little known claim to distinction is that it was the precursor of all light beer. Meisterbrau tried unsuccessfully to make a light beer in the early 1970s. Miller bought Meisterbrau, tweaked the formula a little and created Miller Light. Anyway, I blame Meisterbrau as the source of my confusion. A lot of family histories are like that, I suspect. I am thinking of going with the original legend, maybe even embellish it with scandal to explain how we lost whatever great fortune we once enjoyed. Why tarnish the beauty of the thing with unnecessary accuracy.

Whether the old guy was a brew master or not, Beer was and is still a big part of family gatherings, but beer drinking is a declining art among us. The older generation failed to pass the torch. In days of yore, the men (they were real men in those days) would sit around a keg of beer and drink prodigious amounts of the liquid bread. Past, present and future blurred into a soft amber glow. In the parlance of the time, they would all get a snoot full. Now the our gatherings are relatively sober affairs. We still have our share of characters, as you can see from the pictures. Everyone is healthier, however, and that is a good thing. The beer now comes in bottles and cans and there is greater variety. You count cans and bottles individually. Bottles slow the drinking. The keg tended to facilitate sluckin it down, as cups held more than a standard can and you tended to fill it up again before it was empty. In other words, you never really knew how much you were drinking because you had a bottomless cup.

Milwaukee was especially pleasant during my visit, with highs in the seventies with low humidity and a breeze off the lake. I drove around a little and ended up near Whitnall Park. I used to ride my bike to Whitnall Park along Grange Avenue. I don’t recognize most of the way any more. What used to be a country road is now a suburban street, but some is preserved as park. Just past 76th Street stands Jeremiah Curtin’s house and an old lime factory. Jeremiah Curtin was a moderately famous linguist, who wrote a history of the Mongols and translated Szienkeiwicz (for those less up on Polish culture, he wrote “Quo Vadis” and won a Nobel prize in literature about 100 years ago.) Above are pictures of the old lime farm. It is that quintessential Wisconsin style. The house is made out of crème city brick, the kind you can find only around Milwaukee. The other building is stone. It would be nice to make a community in a place like that.

I went down to my old running trail in Grant/Warnemont Park. It is a really nice running trail with a little roll but nothing a reasonable person could call a hill. I ran the distance in 24:21, which is 25% slower than I used to run it when I wore a younger man’s shoes, but it was still fun. That trail was a solace through the worst of my unsuccessful job searching back in the early 1980s. I think I applied at every major firm in North America. They were amused, but not interested. The more rejection letters I got, the farther I ran. I was probably in the best aerobic condition of my life. Sometimes I ran all the way through Grant Park to the Root River Parkway, about 12 miles. I am fatter now and I can’t run that far. I blame the economy. The economy has not been that bad since then, so I have no compulsion to run very far. The trail has changed a lot since I started there. A very big oak tree that used to guard one of the kinks in the trail died some time back. Most of the birch trees have died and even the stumps have rotted into compost. A birch forest is ephemeral everywhere, but especially around here. Individual trees don’t live long and won’t reproduce naturally in southeastern Wisconsin.

The trail used to run through a mixed meadow and forest that looked like the ecosystem you would expect 100 miles farther north. Whether through indolence or design, the park system has let some places return to nature. I used to think that letting things return to nature was an unmitigated blessing, but on reflection I recall a beautiful view of the lake around the second trail bend, kind of a v shaped field with wild flowers framed by tamarack trees. It looked natural, but was not. It takes a lot of planning to be spontaneous and somebody planned it well.

Tamaracks are not native to this part of Wisconsin, so they must have been planted about forty years ago. They backed up against the native basswoods and maples and looked really good especially in the fall, when their gold needles burned against the crimson of the maples. The park system also planted some Austrian pines “randomly” in the fields about the same time. They stayed dark green through the year. It was a work of art. The tamaracks and pines are still there, but you can’t see them unless you look closely in the bushes. The exquisite interaction of tamarack, maple and pine is now replaced by the pea green banality of the box elder. Some of the box elders and ash reach about 20 or 30 feet. Box elders are nice in their place (generally next to rusty railroad tracks and pushing up through the ruins of abandoned warehouses next to rusty railroad tracks) but I never did like their unique fragrance and they block the view. That’s not good. I loved to watch the lake and the joys and sorrows of its changing face. Natural succession won’t stop, of course. The box elders are transition species. Some of the ash trees will remain but in about fifty years maples, basswoods and maybe a couple of beeches, will cover the whole place. I won’t see that and nobody will see the lake through them.

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Milwaukee, Wisconsin – Near the Airport

St. Paul said that faith is the essence of things hoped for and the evidence to things unseen. I have faith in transcendence, which I sometimes feel but can’t articulate. When my father died, I was depressed. I was surprised at how sad I was. I lived away from home, across the oceans. My contact with him was episodic. How much practical difference could it make? It did make a lot. Then awhile after I had a very vivid dream, and the gloom lifted. Details there were none, only a feeling. Everyone was there: the living and the dead, along with the unborn generations. They were all there in a vast eternal present in the multiplicity of all the aspects of their changing personalities. The only existing analogy I can think of is when I see my kids. I don’t see only what they are today; I see what they were and what I hope they will be. It was kinda like that, only all encompassing, the alpha and the omega. I have faith that there is more to life than the life we know. It is a dream I have that I won’t give up. I can’t give it up. I am not religious enough to be an atheist.

I had a long time to wait for my flight, so I decided to take a walk to the forest on College Avenue. I used to go there a lot in high school. Now it is a part of the Milwaukee park system, but then it was just a forest. Around 1973, there was a big outcry when a trucking firm wanted to tear down the forest and make a parking place for the big rigs. Everyone said that this was one of the last “virgin forests” and should be preserved. I am happy for the preservation , but it is not a virgin forest as even casual inspection reveals. Many of the older trees are broad and branched almost to the ground. Trees do not grow this way in a forest where they have to compete for light. Beyond that, there is a the stone wall that once separated tilled fields. This is a new forest. Since the park service took over, the trails are less defined. Where I used to ride my bike is now almost impassible. Nature returns. As I got to College Avenue, it started to rain – hard. I had my Gortex coat, but my pack and all my stuff got wet. I hunkered down in the shelter – below pictures. Forest shelters are lonely places, especially in the rain. Besides the occasional school field trip, they are not used. It feels good to build them and to have a dedication. The forest shelter is a lot like the exercise bikes people eagerly buy, but never use. I expect most people who live near this forest are only vaguely aware of its existence. The other pictures are the stone wall and the old bike trail that still exists. The last picture is from our back porch in New Hampshire. I only had three pictures from the forest and wanted to add a fourth for symmetry.

I have been wandering forests for my entire adult life, most of my adolescence and some of my childhood. I have learned to identify the trees, soil types, & topography. I love forests, but my thinking about them has changed. I used to like to wander lonely as a cloud. I didn’t want to see the signs of human kind in my forests. Maybe that was because there was little chance I would get my wish. I have changed my mind. I don’t really like wilderness in the sense of land without man. There was plenty of that in the countless eons before man and there will be plenty more after we are gone. Will “time” stop with nobody left to count the minutes, hours and years? It might sound arrogant to say that man is the measure of nature, but it is even more arrogant and downright ignorant for any human to say that he can understand nature in any other way. Raw nature is nasty, cold and incompressible. No human can respect nature in its natural state and it really doesn’t matter if we do. There is nothing the human race can do to add or detract from nature. If we managed what we arrogantly fear (but couldn’t really do) – if we destroyed the entire surface of the Earth, would that make any difference to a nature that encompasses an endless universe of worlds without end and billions of years of time at its disposal? Is there anything any of us could do that will make a difference a billion years hence? It would make a difference to humans in the here and now. We can only add or detract from the human interpretation of nature. Now I am happy to see signs of “good” human intervention and sometimes even the results of a bad intervention healed. More than a century ago, a great man-made catastrophe transformed N. Wisconsin. The great Peshtigo fire burned everything from the middle of the state to Lake Michigan. You can still see the signs in the type of vegetation and soils. We now call it old growth, but it results directly from inadvertent “bad” human intervention. The people living now benefit from this horrible tragedy of which most of them are unaware. Sitting in alone in a forest shelter in a downpour puts things in perspective. I take refuge in my ignorance and fall back on faith.

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Lacrosse

Western Wisconsin is nice enough – clean and pleasant. There is almost no crime. People don’t lock their cars. They even leave the keys on the dashboard sometimes, and they leave valuable things such as bikes unlocked in their back yards. Although I bet the local people would tell me their particular harrowing crime stories, you can’t be too afraid to walk around in a town where barking dogs and aggressive littering are reported on the police section of the local newspaper. I ran for about a half hour through north Lacrosse. I have never actually set foot in that particular neighborhood, but I have been there before. This type of human geography extends from New England to the Pacific Ocean. Adjust for regional variations in vegetation and you could easily find this in Buffalo or Boise, Sioux Fall or Spokane. Norman Rockwell could set up shop here. Millions of Americans still live his lifestyle.

So what’s not to like? I don’t like the houses, and the yards, especially the yards. Houses are small and there is almost no landscaping around them. Thanks to fertilizers, weed killing chemicals, and power mowers, the grass is neat, but people don’t seem fond of trees or big bushes, at least not near their houses. There are lots of trees on the streets – maples, ash, hackberry and linden – but not many on property people take care of themselves. That is a contrast with the East where trees sprout from even small spaces. Around here, people would complaint that shade interfere with the grass; roots clog drain and trees drop leaves in the rain gutters. I know this compulsive neatness that loses sight of goals. My father wanted grass ½ inch high and neat, although we rarely achieved it. (He was too lazy and I didn’t care about a neat lawn . . . and I was lazy too.) Strip mall & gas station owners spread little stones over the landscaping. It is neat and requires no care, but it is unattractive and predictable. I would rather have the confusion and profusion of growing plants, even ones that were not well maintained or volunteer to occupy that patch of ground. Most people call the latter variety weeds. They are better than the little rocks or the chemically induced grass.

I would not want to live here, but I understand why so many do. The Lacrosse area is growing rapidly. I might complain about the houses, but it looks like most people can afford to own one, at least in cooperation with their mortgage company. Prices are remarkable low, by Northern Virginia standards. This place has become a paradise for hunters and fishermen. The forests and fields near town teem with wildlife as farm fields revert to nature and create habitat. Fish are jumping in the lakes and the Black River across from my hotel is full of small boats. There have not been so many deer here for more than a century. Wild turkeys, which were rare in this area even 200 years ago, are common. They like the old farm fields. Eagles nest along the Mississippi. God’s Country.

This is Middle America. The citizens of Lacrosse work hard, teach their kids decent values and send them off to the local university, or maybe to the University of Minnesota at Winona not too far up the river. “The Lacrosse Tribune” carries stories of local boys serving in Iraq. Many houses fly the American flag. Most people love the USA. SUVs & pickup trucks fill the wide and well-maintained streets and most people drive near the speed limit, unlike drivers in my Polish experience. Wisconsin is a nice place to visit and a wonderful place for a lot of people to live, just not for me. It is my native state, but I can’t go home again permanently.

The boys and I are staying at the Roadstar Inn, since it would be too hard for Chrissy’s mother if we descended on her small house. It is an inexpensive 1970s type hotel, near fast food places and the Mississippi River. We are about to head out to the free “continental breakfast”. The weather is warm (about 70) and humid. It rained last night. It is 7:15 am on June 28, 2003.