The Corona Diaries 2: Perambulating

Late August 2020

The Frau stumbled upon an old photo of our abode shortly after it was built:

Our house was one of the model homes built by the A.A. Elkind & Company who developed much of our neighborhood, Eastmorland.

I've written about the Eastmorland neighborhood previously. In the intervening 3.5 years since that post, some things have changed. There are shiny new apartments along the southern boundary on Cottage Grove Road. An "affordable housing" or "low income" apartment complex sits across the street from brand new single-family homes, some of which are valued at nearly a half a million dollars with more square footage in their basements alone than my entire house.

We have a new neighborhood library. The Pinney branch had its grand opening scheduled the same week, if not the exact day, that the state announced the pandemic lockdown back in March. I've heard that it's really nice but have never been inside. My sole experience with the new library has been to retrieve DVDs from a table out back.

There's also been some action on Milwaukee Street. The old Swiss Colony warehouse is now an Amazon Hub. Sadly, El Poblano, a nice little Mexican restaurant, closed shortly after the pandemic hit. It was in the parking lot of Woodman's Market which has gobbled up the land and is now building an expanded gas station/oil change facility.

For more on development in Eastmorland and Madison in general, check out "Keep the Home Fires Burning", an episode of the podcast I do with my pal Old Man Schuck. You'll also hear some great tunes about houses, homes, neighborhoods, and whatnot.

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Willkommen to part 2!

The Frau and I started working from home in mid-March. I felt very lucky as neither of us had lost our jobs nor lost any hours as this was my immediate concern. My job doesn't actually require me to be in the office very often. When I am there, I sit at a desk and log into other computers remotely to do a lot of my work so remoting in from home isn't all that different from being in the office. My boss is very anti-telecommuting but I am hoping that, when the pandemic ends (or ends enough) I will be able to work from home 3-4 days per week.

Since I was going to be working from home, my daily ritual of walking to the bus stop and spending 8+ hours on the other side of town needed to be replaced. I simply had to make sure I spent some time away from the old homestead. It was part of a larger stratagem on my part, really. There wasn't a formal plan and what scheme there was wasn't particularly grand. And, truth be told, it was something of an extension of an attitude I've had for a while - indulging in some telos.

I found a good example of what I mean in a recent read. The author, who is English, was at an august museum or library in Paris or Copenhagen or some such place and he noted how you can always tell which tourists are American because they will look at an exhibit only briefly before moving onto the next one. We Yanks apparently have a short attention span and little patience for reflection and contemplation.

Perhaps a good way to say it is that I tried to live a little more deliberately. With those basic levels of Maslowian needs seemingly secure, I was free to work on the upper levels. I strove to be more thoughtful in choosing the paths to take - in the Thoreauian sense of direction in life but also in a more mundane way.

Werner Herzog once opined "The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot." I used to walk a lot in college. For a while, work was a little more than a mile from home while most of my classes were a bit farther. At some point I stopped walking. Then several years ago I began once again to go out on leisurely walks of moderate distances. And then a couple years ago I started taking lengthy treks on foot. Not like a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but a few miles.

Last spring as the weather was getting warmer, I started walking more frequently. On the vernal equinox I took a walk to the Starkweather Conservation Park which is just a few blocks from home.

I'd walked through the western half of the park before and it is mostly wooded. But I had never taken the bicycle/walking path that goes along the park's eastern perimeter up to its northern border.

There were some mallards because mallards are everywhere here. Our baseball team is named after them. And I spied a few Canada geese as well because they're ubiquitous just like mallards. Shorelines can be overrun with them and their poop in the summer. A Sandhill crane pair were hanging out by a nearby office building.

(The International Crane Foundation is about 40 miles north of Madison up in Baraboo.)

Also to be found were the obligatory red-winged blackbirds.

Someone somewhere somewhen posted a map of the Starkweather Creek area online as it was in 1892. My neighborhood was largely marsh before becoming farmland and the park seems to be the last remnant of that.

The path around the park leads under the Highway 30 overpass where there was the usual graffiti. It was a sunny day and some of the sights reminded me of The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci. I like to think that his cinematographer Vittorio Storaro would be proud of the use of light & shadow and all of the straight lines here.

Some rail tracks go underneath the overpass so I followed those and came upon a couple of disused loading docks next to a siding.

Trains used to be loaded here at some point in the past but I'm not sure when. The Wisconsin & Southern Railroad PR person was not overly helpful in this matter. But that is Commercial Avenue there in the background running along Highway 30 so I wouldn't be surprised if this area was much more industrial/warehousey back in the day.

A couple of years ago there was an article in our local alt-weekly about Trachte buildings which are a piece of vernacular Madison architecture. They are known for their steel walls and barrel roofs. I've noticed them around town since I moved here but never knew their history until reading the article.

Walking home on this trek I noticed a couple Trachte sheds and have been taking their pictures whenever I see them ever since. 

It occurred to me one day that, since I enjoy going for walks, I should do so every day before work. Just get outside before being stuck behind my desk for hours on end. We live a couple blocks from Starkweather Creek so I began walking down there and then heading home along the bike path. This allowed me to watch as the magnolia trees down the street started to bud and then bloom.

The creek had the occasional mallard on it just after dawn but the birds were always very noisy.

Red-winged blackbirds are a sure sign of spring and they nest near water. And so they were tweeting away. I believe they were mostly males announcing their presence and marking their territory. They would also sit on the electric line along the bike path for several minutes at a time chirping or singing or whatever it was that they were doing.

One morning I heard an odd bird call coming from a tree. I am no expert on birds but I knew what a red-winged blackbird sounded like by this time as well as cardinals and robins. After walking back and forth along the railroad tracks for a couple minutes I eventually tracked down the tree where it was coming from. I got out my binoculars and eventually discovered that it was a woodpecker and that I had stumbled upon its nest. I believe it was a red-bellied woodpecker.

The woodpecker seemed to hang around for a couple weeks and then disappeared.

It was really fun to take these walks through most of the spring. Doing so every day, I was able to see the incremental changes in the flora and in the creek. Schools of minnows appeared in the concrete stream by the bike path that carries runoff water and they'd abruptly change course when they saw me hovering over them.

I think these walks helped me ease into the abrupt change in my morning schedule that the pandemic brought.

Just as I had developed a routine outdoors, routines were also developing indoors…

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Bonus photo! I found a picture of the Buffalo ice cream parlor that I went to as a young boy in Chicago along with an old model Big Green Limousine. Note the "Key Punch Computer Program School" sign in the window.