(early-January 2023) (Watch the prelude.)
My first nature walk of the winter took place just a few blocks from home so it was a short, if chilly, stroll to meet up with the guide and my fellow walkers. Our guide was a young woman who announced that our venture for the day would be about trees.
She knew her stuff and lectured us on how to identify trees by the bark and leaves. What is the texture of the bark? Did the leaves grow directly across from one another or were they staggered? I need to write this stuff down because I can only recall a few of the many types of trees she pointed out to us as we ambled around the east side of the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood.
Here is a conifer with flat leaves and I cannot recall anything our guide told us about this tree except that "conifer" means cone-bearing. Or something to do with cones, anyway.
She noted that conifer trees are cone shaped because this helps keep the branches intact under heavy snow loads.
Here’s a box elder which is a type of maple, if I remember what she said correctly. There was agreement all around that the proper term for those pods is "helicopters", arborists be damned.
The pods come in pairs like other maples but aren’t spread so far apart and have a droopy appearance. This is now lodged in my brain as the identifying trait of the box elder.
Nearby was a river birch with its tell tale peeling bark.
As our allotted time neared an end, we took a path which went along the shore of Starkweather Creek. I was happy because there is a giant tree at the end and I had no idea what kind it was. When we got there, I saw that a branch had been cut off and that there were mushrooms growing on it.
For a little scale, here’s a photo of it that I took in the summer with my bicycle leaning against it.
Our guide identified it as an eastern cottonwood, the biggest one she’s ever seen, in fact. May it be around for a few more decades, at least.
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I recently rented an Austrian movie called Die Wand or The Wall.
It’s been on my to-watch list for some time now and so I stopped by my local video rental store, Four Star, and got the DVD.
It concerns a woman who goes to a secluded Alpine hunting lodge with a couple of her friends. The friends decide to hoof it to the local village tavern while our protagonist, whom I don’t think is ever named, decides to stay at the lodge with the dog, Lynx.
Strangely, her friends don’t return that night and she goes to bed thinking they’ll turn up the next day. Waking up the following morning, the woman discovers that they still have not returned. And so she decides to walk to town only to find that there's an invisible wall blocking the road and, as she soon learns, surrounding the lodge compound.
She wanders the area trying to figure out if the wall has her totally enclosed or not. In one unsettling scene, she comes across an older couple at a cabin. The wife sits motionless on the porch while the husband stands frozen at the well. Confusingly, while the people don't move, the water from the well does. This is the only time the movie even hints at the nature of the wall beyond it being impenetrable. Did time stop out on the other side? Or was the temporal anomaly inside of it?
The movie features extended readings from the woman's diary and we get to see the scenes that she describes enacted as well. She deals with the enforced solitude and having to hunt and grow her own food. She is no mere city slicker, helpless when confronted with the absence of modern conveniences like electricity. With no other company, she becomes attached to the loyal Lynx and begins to notice the rhythms of nature in detail as she wanders the woods and around the nearby tarn.
It's a lovely, meditative film with nature being alternatively giving and harsh. The woman tries to comes to grips with her predicament by writing. I found her observations of the white crow and its rejection by its fellow corvids to be particularly moving.
Now to read the book it's based on.
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I took my oldest stepson and his ladyfriend out to dinner recenty(ish) at Vintage Brewing and I got to try an interesting new beer. It was called Z-Quester, an ale made with a grain called Kernza.
It was neat to see something new in the beer world that didn’t involve a novel strain of hops that tastes, yet again, like some combination of tropical fruits, and promises to turn another brew into a variation of Hawaiian Punch. Kernza is a wheatgrass that is being investigated as an alternative to wheat and barley. It’s a perennial so you don’t replant it and it’s got deep roots which helps keep soil erosion at bay. Plus, it apparently sequesters carbon very well, hence the beer’s name.
I liked it quite a bit. Kernza tastes nuttier than wheat or barley but still provides a fine grainy flavor. Farmers and brewers are preparing for global climate change by looking at ingredients better suited to a warmer, wetter world, including new strains of hops as well as grains and we're off to a good start here.
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I spent Christmas Eve down in the exurbs of Chicago at an uncle's house. I had planned to see my mother that day as well but she informed me that she was quarantining as she had been exposed to Covid. We ate, drank, and chatted the day away.
Christmas Day involved a lot of eating. My Frau and I had breakfast at a fancy lakeside hotel. Although the hotel dates back to 1948, we dined at the new tower. Well, it is several years old but new in contrast to the rest of the place. One of our former mayors, Dave Cieslewicz, used every drop of blood, sweat, tears, and political capital he had to get it built despite it not conforming to the recommended building codes for the historic neighborhood that it resides in.
Cieslewicz wasn’t a terrible mayor but he drank the Richard Florida kool aid by the 55 gallon barrel and, rather than championing, for example, efforts to tackle increasing poverty in the city or trying to improve public transit, he proposed a downtown trolley and got a luxury hotel tower built for Madison's burgeoning “creative class”. I guess he adhered to a Reaganite theory of trickle down economics: if we get enough tech companies and their well-paid employees living on the isthmus, then their prosperity will trickle down to the poor people on the south side.
Just as Chicago’s Mayor Bilandic lost his bid for re-election over the city’s handling of a blizzard, Cieslewicz’s efforts to have a playground for the rich built cost him a third term.
Walking by a glass-walled room lined with wine racks, I knew I was out of my element. I am just the hoi polloi. On the other hand, one wall was lined with photos of local luminaries, including Aldo Leopold.
At least wealthy out of towners can get a feel for the city’s history as they head towards some haute cuisine.
The food was fine but I didn’t get anything fancy, no omelet made with quail eggs collected by virgins on a full moon served on a gold plate or any such thing. I also didn’t eat too much as the gluttony was scheduled to happen that night.
Although my youngest stepson was in town that weekend, he and his ladyfriend were elsewhere so Christmas night was just my Frau, a friend of hers, me, and enough food to feed an army.
The first course was a Québécois meat pie called a tourtiere. While the Frau had explained the concept to me, I got worried when she asked me to grab the springform pan instead of using a pie pan.
This thing was massive!
And it looked simply wonderful.
Our first course was tourtiere with roasted Brussels sprouts and roasted yellow squash & grapes.
It was some serious rib sticking food. Second course was some vegetarian lasagna that the Frau's friend had made. Delicious!
I was quite full but had just enough room for a slice of chocolate bundt cake from a bakery here called Nothing Bundt Cakes. And, yes, they make bundt cakes and nothing else. But they do come in 4 sizes and even more flavors.
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A few days after Christmas we had a snow storm which made things very pretty once again.
And a few days after that was New Year’s Eve. We took it easy but the Frau cooked a wonderful dinner consisting of pasta tossed with chick peas and kale and these little patties of ricotta cheese and other ingredients that shall remain secret.
It was all quite delicious, I can assure.
While I went to bed with no resolutions to keep starting the next day, I was determined to figure out what do with all of this.
I came into work one day back in the fall and discovered that my boss had left me a million pounds of rhubarb. While I managed to give a lot of it away to one of my Frau’s friends who is a prolific baker, I still had a freezer full of the stuff. What do to with it all?
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Bonus photo. I didn’t mention it a few entries ago but the city replaced the dead sapling out on the front terrace back in November. I am hoping this one lives. I watered it well for a couple days before it started freezing at night and have been told to water it again come the spring.
I cannot recall what species it is but I think it’s a new variety of elm that is resistant to Dutch elm disease. Welcome!
