The Corona Diaries Vol 30: This Entry Is For the Birds

(Mid-August 2021)

I recently came across the neat map of Chicago above that has the remaining brick alleys marked on it. (The map is here.) Wanting to see what they looked like, I consulted Google Maps for one of the alleys and this is what I found.

Not many remain. I believe you can submit entries to the keepers of the map, should anyone know of others that may have escaped their attention.

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was a spot underneath the Chicago and North Western(?) rail overpass at Pulaski and Avondale where the black top would get worn away periodically to reveal a patch of the old brick street with streetcar rails. I thought it was really neat to be able to get a glimpse of the past that had been buried.

Here in Madison, you can occasionally see some rails emerging from the asphalt on the 200 block of S. Paterson.

Sometimes the past just won't stay hidden.

I have also heard tell that there are still a few wood block alleys left in the city. Jessica Mlinaric, the author of Secret Chicago, discusses them here.

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In an earlier entry I described hiking around Edna Taylor Conservation Park but noted that I left wandering around the adjacent Aldo Leopold Nature Center grounds to another day. Well, that day came earlier this month.

I was out the door and on my bike a little after 6 one overcast, hazy morning. It didn't take too long to get there as it's only about 3.5 miles from home. Just across the street from the entrance were some Sandhill cranes strolling amongst the graves of Roselawn Memorial Park just as I did before venturing to Edna Taylor on that day last month.

It was made apparent that summer is quickly slipping away when I contemplated how low the sun was on the horizon. The scene was dreary and the air so humid that you could cut it with the wrong side of a knife. There was still 30-45 minutes to go before the sun would burn off the fog.

A path led me through a lot of tall grasses and wildflowers, none of which I could identify although I now know most of the yellow flowers to have been Brown-eyed Susans. It wasn't long before I came to a large clearing dotted with Leopold benches and spied a dock on the far side at the edge of a pond. I hadn't seen anyone else and, as I approached it, became aware of just how serene everything was - almost preternaturally so. It felt like I was in the video game Myst. 

Stepping onto the dock made a lot of unseen frogs and/or toads scatter. All I saw were several circles of water rippling outwards. In addition to the frogs, a bird emerged from its resting spot somewhere on my right and flew across the pond well away from me. I was unable to get a good look at it. This scenario would repeat itself when I stepped out of a small pine stand on the other side and onto an aluminum bridge that spanned the pond at its narrowest point. One of those birds was perched on the railing and immediately took off when I emerged from the copse. It joined a brace of its compatriots who were already hanging out on the branches of a tree not too far away.

More frogs were sent scattering as the bridge rocked gently under my feet. This time, however, one brave amphibian stood its ground. Or rather its log as it was completely unperturbed by the presence of a human.

After getting to the other side, I made my way towards the tree where those birds had congregated. I wasn’t sure what they were but my glimpses of them revealed enough to convince me that I hadn't seen them before. The colors that I was able to discern and the way they looked as they flew were quite unfamiliar to me. Lacking direct sunlight, I wasn't able to get a very good photo of them, but I did manage to get at least one that displayed their general shape and a little of their feather pattern including a crest.

This, combined with a very blurry photo that I took later which showed some color, gave me enough to go on with my newly recovered copy of Birds of Wisconsin. After careful consultation, I have concluded that these were Green Herons. They are found in most of Wisconsin during the summer while they spend the rest of their time down in South America.

I eventually found my way to the border with Edna Taylor Conservation Park which reminded me of Checkpoint Charlie as it had a sign saying "You are now leaving the Aldo Leopold Nature Center" and crossed over. This area seemed quite familiar to me as I had been on this side of that sign previously.

At first, I wandered down a path that I would have sworn I'd strolled on during my last visit but I soon discovered that this section of the park wasn't quite as familiar as I had initially thought. It wasn't long before I found myself in terra incognita. Taking the path to the right at a fork in the road, I ended up in the playground of an elementary school that had a mural of Sandhill cranes.

I re-entered the park using another path. A short distance to the east I came to an intersection that had one route blocked off with a sign noting that Native American burial mounds lay ahead and that they ought not be disturbed lest you run afoul of various state statutes. Heading down the other way, I soon found myself looking up the same hill that I saw deer having breakfast on last time. The path continued to the south and I ran into this tree bearing what I think are plums.

I forged on and came to a trail that went up the hill on the east side of the park which had recently been cut into the tall grass. As I was walking, the sun decided to peek out from behind the clouds at last and burn off the fog.

I spied some movement on a dead tree ahead just off of the trail. It was a woodpecker! I've had mediocre luck at best in the past trying to photograph these birds but Fate was smiling upon me this day as this one was thoroughly engrossed with the tree and the insects inside so it ignored the human fumbling with its camera a mere 10 yards or so away.

I think it was a Downy Woodpecker but it may have been a Hairy Woodpecker. They look very similar. When it stopped hopping around, it began pecking. Not very aggressively but luckily it was quiet enough that I could hear the gentle pecks on the wood.

As I neared the exit, I came across some bees doing what bees do.

When my walk was over, I was pleased as punch to have finally gotten a decent photograph of a woodpecker. But it was still fairly early. I was on Femrite Drive and decided to go east and find out where it would take me once it left the city.

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While I am not the biggest Anthony Bourdain fan around, I still went to the see the new documentary about him, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

It didn't attempt to portray his whole life and instead began with the publication of his first book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and proceeded to chronicle his rise to stardom. Having worked in a kitchen for several years, I found myself smiling and nodding a lot while reading Kitchen Confidential. It had only been a few years since I'd left the cooking trade when I read it so memories of all the madness and chicanery were still fairly fresh in my mind.

While I may not have worked at a fancy restaurant in a big city, there was plenty of drug use (it being Madison, it was largely booze and marijuana instead of cocaine) and low-level mayhem in the kitchen of the private dormitory I was at back in the 90s.

As with any place of employment, various members of the staff slept with one another. For example, I dated a couple of my coworkers. But we had a cook that would sneak off with one of the hostesses for some hanky panky amidst sacks of flour in the baker's storeroom. Tangentially, another cook was a woman who was big farm girl. And tall too. Taller than me. She never hid the fact that she and her husband were swingers. Indeed, she was happy to let you know this. One day after boasting to me and my fellow prep cook about being able to balance multiple quarters on each of her nipples, she leered in our direction and rather menacingly invited us out to her place where she would "make us into men"...

It is said that college students gain 15 pounds their freshman year, the Freshman 15. We figured that 15 just wasn't enough and endeavored to give these kids their Freshman 25. Honestly, it didn't take much as, if it came out of a fryer, the gormandizers would empty the freezer for you. However, if it was something prepared from scratch, then the students mostly avoided it like the Plague. We'd go through oodles and oodles of chicken nuggets and French fries. A nice batch of ratatouille made from scratch? The staff would end up eating some of it with the rest forming the base of a soup the following morning.

One day I was offsite feeding a bunch of very hungry athletes and we ran out of taco meat. I called back to the main kitchen and asked for more. The reply was, "Well, we're out of ground beef but you'll get your taco meat." There was something mildly threatening about that response and, when the delivery truck finally pulled up, I felt a bit like the couple at the end of "The Monkey's Paw" when there was that ominous knock at their door. I didn't want to know what was in that "taco meat". Peeling back the foil on that first pan off the truck was more than a little like that scene at the end of Kiss Me Deadly.

Ah, the bad old days.

I had the pleasure of seeing Bourdain speak here in Madison, have read a couple of his books, and have watched random episodes of his TV shows. I appreciated the curiosity he brought with him on his travels and that he didn't come across as an ugly American.

The movie has been criticized for various reasons including the use of an artificial voice. A computer was used to generate a very Bourdain-like voice that reads the transcript of a voice mail the man himself had left for a friend. Although I don't understand the aesthetic reason for doing so, I don't have a problem with it on an ethical level. Documentarians have deceived viewers for ages. Some scenes from Nanook of the North were staged. Two of my favorite documentary directors, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, use reenactments and look for truth beyond that which a simple recitation of facts can give. This fakery may be high tech, but it's a quantitative difference, not qualitative, to my mind.

I recommend seeing Roadrunner, if you can.

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The bonus photo this time is pure Wisconsin and was seen at the VFW a few blocks from home.

Anthony Bourdain: Have Some Courtesy, Have Some Sympathy, And Some Taste

After a round of welcoming applause died down, the first thing Anthony Bourdain said was there was to be no Rachel Ray jokes. However Sandra Lee did come in for a drubbing as he described her as “pure evil” a few times. The first third or so of his routine consisted mostly of invective directed at various hosts of Food Network shows. However, he did offer some praise as well. Julia Child changed things for the better and people such as Ina Garten, who can actually cook in Bourdain’s estimation, make for good TV as viewers come away having seen honest to goodness skill on parade. To be perfectly honest, most of this was lost on me as I don’t have cable and consequently don’t watch any Food Channel programming. I recognized some of the names but really have no idea what these people are known for or what their gimmicks are. To the question of whether Sandra Lee can cook or not, all I can say is: who is Sandra Lee? Once he moved away from food celebrities I began to laugh more. He admitted to making fun of foodies but he’ll be damned if his daughter eats anything other than organic produce. Furthermore his wife is a co-conspirator in luring their daughter away from fast food by hook or by crook. One plot involves putting the girl to bed and two of them standing just outside her door talking just loudly enough to be heard on the other side. “Another boy who went to MacDonald’s disappeared tonight?” Despite this, Bourdain admitted to having an unseemly affection for the mac & cheese at KFC. The final part of his 90-minute monologue was dedicated to his tips for traveling abroad. He repeated many times throughout the night that he felt incredibly lucky to be able to travel around the globe, eat food, meet people, and get paid for it. It’s a dream come true. Likewise, he said that, if we the audience members go abroad, we should feel lucky to have an American passport and a few grand to spend. So don’t drop all that money just to have your picture taken in front of a Starbucks thousands of miles from home. And for God’s sake do your best to adhere to local customs. He described being at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul when he noticed some tourists including a teenaged girls wearing Daisy Duke shorts. Teenagers are teenagers but why would the parents allow her to dress that way? “Would dad wear a Speedo to the Vatican?” Bourdain talked about how he adores Japan but he’ll always be considered a gaijin, an outsider. Despite this, he at least tries to keep their customs and they appreciate his efforts. Courtesy was also the reason he couldn’t abide vegetarians. He said he’d met many poor people in his travels yet they opened their home to him and fed him. While he didn’t care what vegetarians ate at their own homes, when someone opens their door to you and gives of themselves through food, you should eat what is put before you. The Q&A was amusing although I admit that I was left in the dark fairly often as people made references to various episodes of No Reservations of which I’ve only seen a handful of episodes. One woman asked how he stayed so thin (“I eat shit that tastes good.”) while a former serviceman pleaded with Bourdain to do a show on military chow to shed light on how god-awful it is so that it can be improved. And of course someone had to solicit his opinion on a strictly local matter - the train. Why Madison audiences invariably feel compelled to drag visitors into local politics that they likely know nothing nor care nothing about is beyond me. One thing that I did find amusing was that his next season is slated to include a trip to Congo where he will attempt to retrace the steps of Charles Marlow, he of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Bourdain had arrived here in Madison just a couple hours prior to show time and was off to Florida the next day so there was no camera crew scouring the food scene here. However, he did have a Point Special brew with him onstage.