The Corona Diaries Vol.8: Guess I'll see you dancin' in the ruins

November 2020

As I type, polka music is blaring from my computer's speakers. Curiously enough, the cat doesn't seem to mind. The music is by Chicago's own Polkaholics, who merge polka with rock music. Back in old times before Covid they played every so often at the Independence Tap at Irving Park and Harding, not far from my old stomping grounds. The album of choice today is Wally!, a polka-rock opera about the life of the Chicago polka icon "Li'l Wally" Jagiello.

Over the course of an hour or so it chronicles Li'l Wally's life from growing up in Chicago to retiring to Florida and all polka points in between. Listeners are treated to some Chicago history along the way. "Division Street" celebrates life on Chicago's Polish Broadway (mainly the taverns) while "Caldwell Woods" is about family trips on Sundays to the north side for polka music, food, and fun at the titular forest preserve.

I brought up the subject of polka-laced picnics at Caldwell Woods to my mother and she told me that she used to go there on Sundays as a girl. Perhaps she heard Li'l Wally in person back in the day.

Wally! can be heard here:

This is the band here in Madison at the Essen Haus in honor of the Great Taste of the Midwest beer festival several years back.

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A friend of mine recently pawned some Criterion Collection blu-ray discs off on me that were duplicates in his collection. One of them was Kiss Me Deadly and the Frau and I watched it that same night. It was the first viewing for both of us although we both knew it was referenced in Repo Man and Pulp Fiction. I adored it! I loved the sound design for the ending. It complemented Detour, the 1945 Edgar G. Ulmer film that we had watched a week previously very well.

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In addition to fresh air, exercise, and letting me indulge a desire to simply cruise around town, my bike rides earlier this year also afforded me the opportunity to investigate things that I'd heard of or read about but had never seen with my own eyes.

Take, for instance, this cistern on the shore of Lake Mendota.

Built in 1934 by the Wisconsin Emergency Relief Administration, it captures the waters of Merrill Springs before they run out into the lake. It's in a nice little park on the west side in a rather upscale neighborhood at the dead end of a street. I don't happen to know many upscale people so I've never really had cause to go to that area previously. And so the cistern was something that I'd heard about but had never seen until this year.

In a similar vein is the Annie C. Stewart Memorial Fountain.

Like the cistern, the fountain is in an upscale neighborhood but this neighborhood isn't in some hidden corner tucked away on the far west side at the dead end of a street. Rather it is just south of campus. Perhaps I saw the fountain at some point back in the 1990s but I don't recall doing so. This spot was the entrance to the zoo back in the day and today it's a small part of a much larger park with a Native American effigy mound nearby.

Built in 1925, it is in pretty rough shape today although I have read that a non-profit group is looking to restore it back to its former undinal glory. More or less, anyway.

I must admit that I never thought of Wisconsin as prime Revolutionary War memorial territory. Yet just a block or two down from a popular mall stands this statue.

It is dedicated "In Honor of the Minutemen of Lexington & Concord 1775 – One of whom was Capt. Abraham Andrews." A cursory search of the Internet didn't reveal any connection between Capt. Andrews and Madison. Presumably there is or was one with a distant ancestor who lived here. It's in front of a building that I suppose is neo-colonial in style and is home to various offices.

Even more enigmatic than a Revolutionary War memorial here in Madison is this concrete pyramid.

I first heard about it last year and was intrigued as its genesis remains shrouded in mystery. The pyramid sits in the woods of a park behind an elementary school and it is generally thought that it was made by a teacher and their students back in the 1970s. Apparently, however, no one knows exactly who it was, when it was built, or what, if anything, the symbols on it are supposed to mean. At least no one is stepping up and taking credit for it. Either that or I haven't searched the Internet long enough to find out more.

My hypothesis is that a teacher had read some Carlos Castaneda, taken some peyote, and came up with the idea to build a pyramid. It was the 70s, after all.

Madison is home to the 115th Fighter Wing of the Wisconsin Air National Guard. Any friends or family from Chicago reading this may have heard and/or seen some of its F-16s on 11 September 2001 as it's my understanding that they were dispatched to guard the skies over the Windy City on that day. They are stationed out at Truax Field Air National Guard Base. I've known that Truax has been open, more or less, since World War II. What I didn't know until this year is that it used to be much larger than it is today.

I was riding my bike to the north side – near the airport/Truax Field – when I noticed some dirt paths off of the bike path in the woods. I decided to investigate. They turned out to be trails for folks who like to do some off-road biking. I followed one to an area that I call Blair Witch Alley. It's a small clearing on the path with dolls, stuffed animals, bones, et al adorning the tree branches.

The place had a creepy vibe that brought to mind those scenes from The Blair Witch Project which feature stick figurines hanging from branches.

Continuing down the trail I noticed Barbie dolls on branches about every 50 feet or so.

It was all rather eerie.

In addition to dolls, there were cement blocks with the rebar hammered flat lining some stretches of the path and hiding in the overgrown areas at others. Eventually I came upon spots that had much larger concrete bits.

Having seen these and recalling the patches of blacktop sticking out of the grass I'd seen to the south, I figured that these must the ruins of the Truax Air Force Base of yore, leftover when its mission was scaled down in the late 1960s/early 1970s and the base apparently downsized.

I'd heard tell of bunkers used by the Air Force to store rockets and other munitions that were long abandoned. One of my co-workers moderates a historic Madison Facebook group and he proved helpful in finding some old posts about the bunkers. With an idea of where they were, I set off to find them.

I found them just west of the concrete ruins down a small ravine in the middle of a golf course. To get at them you have to traverse one of the holes and I irritated a couple golfers the morning I went in search of the bunkers.

Approaching the fence, I was startled by movement. I spied a deer on the other side. It was staring at me and, because I relate everything in my life to movies, I suddenly had this weird, uncanny feeling that reminded me of the scene in Annihilation when our heroines come upon two deer that are in the process of transmogrifying into plants. Things went eerily quiet and I felt oddly alone as a chill ran down my spine.

For its part, the deer quickly tired of the intruding human and bounded away into the woods.

As for the bunkers, an Air Force vet had this to say:

Truax stored the Douglas AIR-2 Genie rockets in those bunkers (along with a lot of other types of munitions) from about 1958 when we started flying the Northrop F-89 Scorpions as a part of the Air Defense Command mission and then the supersonic Convair F-102 Delta Dagger (which carried the GAR-11/AIM-26A Nuclear Falcon missiles) up to 1974. As we know the Genie was an unguided air-to-air rocket with a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead and the GAR-11/AIM-26A Nuclear Falcon missile was a semi-guided W54 nuclear, explosive with a yield 250 t TNT equivalent. So contrary to what Gene Rankin mentioned, Truax harbored 24 plus (2 squadrons) and two types of aircraft that carried nukes for a period of about 16 years and let’s not forget the Active Duty Air Force was also there during that time as well.