Author: JohnMatel

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.

Starting our trip across the U.S. we made it to Lafayette, Indiana on the first day. Lafayette is where I had my first job after graduating with my MBA. I worked at a place called Microdatabasesystems (MDBS) . I was a market researcher and since I was the only one in the department, I was the director of marketing research (never trust a title.)

I worked there only five weeks. I was working there two weeks when the owners/founders called me. They asked me what I thought of the product. I told them the truth. I told them that their software was wonderful, but it was too hard to use. One of the guys told me that if customers were too stupid to use the product, perhaps they should not buy it. That day I called the Foreign Service. I had taken and passed both written and oral tests and they were doing the security clearance. They told me that they had finished the clearance and offered me a job. I was supposed to have responded a week before. I guess that the notice went to my old address in Minneapolis. I asked for an extra day and they gave it to me. The next day, I put in my notice at MDBS and a couple weeks later went to Washington to start the career I have had ever since.
Sometimes I have wondered how life might have been had I not made the call. A few years after I was in the FS, I went back to Minneapolis to talk to MBA friends. Everybody made more money than I did. Even new MBA graduates made more on average. But the jobs were not as much fun. My most successful friend was a brand manager at Green Giant. He was in charge of frozen peas – not all peas, not all frozen products, just frozen peas. He seemed to like his job and he made the big bucks, but I thought the FS was perhaps a better choice for me.
Lafayette is a pleasant place, the home of Perdue University. But there is not much more. We went to the Tippecanoe Battlefield, where William Henry Harrison defeated the forces of Tecumseh’s alliance. It is interesting to see the old trees and the nature succession that happened since, more on that in the next post.
My picture up top is the gate to the Tippecanoe battlefield. Below it are some of the windmills in the farm fields north of Lafayette.

It has not been hard to re-adapt.  I filled up my bike tires, tightened up all the bolts and I was good to go.  Yesterday, I went down to State Department to check in. I also talked to my predecessor about my Smithsonian job that I will start in September.  It will be fun.

The biking is a little harder because I am doing the round trip of 34 miles.  When I get to my actual work, I will do as I did before, i.e. ride to work in the morning and take the Metro back in the evening.  It is mostly downhill on the way to Washington.  Coming back is not as much fun.  It gets a little worse now, since they have closed the gate at Fort Meyer and I have to go all the way around.
The weather has been very good, not too hot.  It seems like summer is cooler. I was thinking about whether this was really the weather or if it was just my perception, having spent some time in Iraq and Brazil, where it gets hot.  I think that might be true, but it is also true that summers have been a little cooler.  We bought the house in 1997.  It turns out that our first full summer in Washington, summer of 1998, was especially hot. That was my “base year” and since then conditions have been better, so it feels better to me.
Today I went over to the Nature Conservancy.  I have been a donor for more than twenty-five years and the person in charge of donor relations invited me over for coffee.  TNC is my favorite environmental organization because they are actually involved with improving nature instead of just complaining.   I hope to visit the TNC tallgrass prairie station in Oklahoma during out upcoming trip across the U.S.  The donor relations woman told me that she would make some calls and we could get a guided tour.  Hope it works out, so I can learn more.
The top picture is my new workplace.  Not bad.  I am way underground, but still in a nice place.  The middle picture is my bike trail and on the bottom is the Nature Conservancy headquarters.

I went down to FSI today to do a couple of talks.  I spoke first at the Portuguese Department about Brazil.  This is probably that last time I will give a full-out lecture in Portuguese.  My audience was colleagues almost done with their Portuguese language studies and about to go on their assignments.  The other talk I gave was to PAOs headed out to their first posts as PAOs.  I tried to give realistic advice, with the caveat that my experience should be taken in the context of Brazil, which is special.

FSI has changed and improved.  They have created nice environmental spots you can see in the photos with lots of tall grass and natural looking rain gardens. I liked the cedar meadow.  This would be typical of an old farm field in Northern or Central Virginia in the early stages of natural succession.  This is one of my favorite stages, so full of dynamism and potential.  I really don’t much like manicured lawns and I am pleased – maybe a little surprised that State Department has adopted the more raggedly natural approach.
I rode my old bike down to FSI. It feels off balance, but I will get used to it again.  It is faster than my bike in Brazil and comfortable.  In fact, of all the bikes I have ever owned, this one remains my favorite.  I bought it back in 1997 and put more miles on this bike than any other, mostly on the same W&OD bike trail.  I look forward to many more miles.
BTW – W&OD has also improved.  They now have signs on the road and cars are stopping at the crosswalks.

This is a little late. I did my last visit to my erstwhile post in Recife last week. I visited Recife only three times. It was not like São Paulo or Rio that constantly called for attention.

One of my goals in Brazil was to get away from the big cities of Rio, São Paulo and Brasília into the rest of Brazil. I will not say the “real” Brazil, since there is no such thing. Each section is real in its own way. São Paulo probably has the biggest claim to be called “real,” since it has so many people and is so productive. But there is a lot more.

And there are big changes. Brazil used to be the land of Samba and coastal cities; it is now more a country of sertaneja and interior growth.
Before going to Brazil, I wanted to see all that, put my feet on the ground. I succeeded to some extent. I visited a total of eighteen out of the twenty-six states, including the extreme ones like Acre, Rondônia and Roraima. The ones I missed were mostly near Recife. There are lots of smaller states up in the Northeast and I didn’t get there. I thought of making a last run in my last few weeks. I could have hit all of them by driving in a circle from Recife and then just setting a toe into Tocantins & Mato Grosso, the other two I managed to miss. But I thought that was just a false way to do it. So I did not succeed in visiting all the states of Brazil, but I got around a lot.
My picture up top is the beach in Recife.  It is nice that they have grass and trees near the water.  There is less a beach than Rio.  Maybe one of the reasons is those sharks.  Look at that sign. Recife has some kind of special conditions with the reef. Sharks evidently  are kind of herded toward the beach and they come very shallow. They eat a few people and it kind of puts a damper on people’s enthusiasm for swimming.