The Corona Diaries 5: I'd Rather Go and Journey

September 2020

It's been a sad week here. The tree on the terrace out front didn't fare well during the last round of storms and their nasty winds. We awoke one morning to see a large crack running down the center of the trunk where a large limb connects to it.

I alerted the city via its webpage and a crew was dispatched the following morning. They made quick work of the tree which took decades to grow to the size it was with its lovely, shade giving canopy. I found it irritating since, not only did I not want the tree to be cut down, but the city had been extremely tardy in replacing another tree that they felled a year previously over on a different side of the house. Destruction is swift while creation takes a while, I guess. 

It was a nice old tree. In a matter of hours I found myself beginning to miss the afternoon/evening shade it had cast.

While I won't miss all those leaves and twigs gathering on the lawn as well as in the front gutter, it was very sad to see the tree go. Looking out our picture window, the front yard seems so open and I almost feel exposed.

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As I noted in my last diary entry, Madison has some wonderful green spaces and I've had a lot of fun this summer biking to conservation parks and spending some quiet time watching birds, turtles, and muskrats in addition to walking around wooded areas. If I weren't so lazy, I'd pick a park and head there on a more frequent and regular basis so I could start a phenological log noting the behavior of birds I'd have to look up in a book bopping around in trees I couldn't identify. It'd be like A Sand County Almanac. But different. Very different.

I also rode the Lower Yahara River Trail part of which runs along the north side of Lake Waubesa and only opened in 2017.  There's a mile-long boardwalk with some great scenery as you head from the southeast side of Madison to the neighboring town of McFarland. The county boasts that it is the "longest inland boardwalk bridge constructed solely for non-motorized transportation in North America".

And, as you can see, it runs parallel to rail tracks. I was lucky enough to have a Wisconsin & Southern train zip by on this ride. The trail ends next door to the Green Lantern, a supper clubby joint on the lakeshore where you can grab a beer, a prime rib sandwich, or a fish fry before heading out once again – by road or water. They have slips and will bring your order right to your boat these days.

Besides trekking around the lakes and natural areas, I've also been doing some strictly urban riding. One thing I've enjoyed doing is taking pictures at the same spots (roughly) of old photos from the Madison railroads Instagram site. E.g.:

You can find some old film footage from the mid-1950s of a train going down this street here at about the 30 second mark. They did not take extra caution by going particularly slowly down the middle of the Strasse, it seems. The footage also has some shots from Chicago in 1956 of the L.

It's always fun to detour from the bike paths and arterials to head down side streets. I've been to neighborhoods here in Madison that I haven't stepped foot in in ages. Maybe they're places I've only driven through. Sometimes I've never been there at all. It's a little sad because Madison is not a huge metropolis. On the other hand, Madison isn't a tiny burg. If you don't know anyone who lives in a particular area and have little reason to go there such as work or shopping, it is little wonder you'd be unfamiliar with it and may never have even so much as been through the area.

One ride took me to Bram's Addition. It's a mainly working-class neighborhood on the south side of town and has had a large black population for a long time. There have been a couple shootings there this summer, unfortunately. I rode to the intersection of Center Street and Third Avenue where shots were fired on a couple of occasions in the past few months. It's a nice, shady cul-de-sac on the west side of a railroad embankment. There were no broken windows, nothing to hint that it was anything but a quiet middle class nook of Madison. Why the shootings here which injured at least one person?

The neighborhood's northern boundary is just south of a bike path that runs along Wingra Creek. After crossing the creek, I immediately ran into this house that had a really neat mural.

As I made my way south, I began to hear voices. Some folks were singing. At first I was flummoxed but it occurred to me that it was Sunday so I figured it must have been a church congregation. While I was making my way towards the mellifluous sounds emanating from Mt. Zion Baptist Church, my progress slowed as part of the way was uphill and even further delayed as I took a detour to the east where I found a couple more Trachte buildings that needed photographing. And so, by the time I got to the church, the singing was over and the preaching had begun. Riding around the neighborhood more, I came across this old railroad bridge which I have since learned dates to the 1880s.

I eventually headed to the Bay Creek neighborhood which lies just to the north of Bram's Addition. Unsurprisingly, it sits between Monona Bay and Wingra Creek. On the south end of the neighborhood is Naty's Fast Food which used to be various soul food restaurants including the greatly missed Jada's. But before that, it was Mr. P's Place, owned by Madison firebrand Eugene Parks, who was a thorn in the side of the Madison establishment as he advocated for racial justice long before the State Street rioters of this past summer were born. Mr. P's Place was a poplar tavern for many black Madisonians and, arguably, its absence is a hole that has never been filled.

A friend of mine used to live on the north side of Bay Creek until he left the city around the turn of the millennium. And so it was another one of those neighborhoods that I hadn't wandered about in 20+ years. It has gotten more expensive to live there and become a desirable place to live with its older homes and proximity to Monona Bay.

When my friend lived there, we'd take his hound for a walk out to the bay along the railroad tracks. Local trainspotters say that Lake Monona is the only place on Earth where two rail lines cross each other in the middle of a lake.

The remains of what I think is an old telegraph or switching tower are still there after all these decades. (Nearly a century?) People line the tracks to fish during the warmer months when bluegill are the prized catch while shanties pop-up all over the bay in the winter to shelter those hardy enough to do some ice fishing.

A bit to the east is O'Sheridan Street which is (supposedly) home to Madison's only optical illusion. The only one I know of, anyway. If you drive north on O'Sheridan towards the Capitol, it will appear to recede into the distance instead of getting larger. I have never driven down the street to verify this. One day…

Bonus photo this time is a rainbow-laced Piper.