The Corona Diaries Vol. 114: Getting cozy

(Listen to the accompanying sound track.)

(early October 2023)

Always a glutton for punishment, I returned to the Chippewa Moraine State Recreation Area the day after my spooky encounters. This time I glued myself to the familiar trails I have always hiked and have never once shared with a homicidal, axe-wielding maniac. To my knowledge, anyway.

While it was yet another overcast morning, there was no rain. The Circle Trail was, as always, simply gorgeous.

I again pondered how to plan a trip up here when there is more fall color. Perhaps senescence is creeping up on me but I would have sworn the Travel Wisconsin website I had consulted before driving north said that we were near peak color.

Not even close to peak, as I see it, but there were some great seasonal hues nonetheless. Just look at these red oak leaves!

As I do every year, I slowly traversed the trail, stopping at my whim. It’s such a relaxing place. Work seems a million miles away and my mind, lulled into a sense of ease by the quiet and solitude, wanders freely. It is nature's Calgon.

 

 

The Circle Trail is a bit over 4 miles long and I once read a description of it in a Best Hikes of Wisconsin book or article that said it took about two hours to walk, on average. I remember thinking to myself that it takes me about twice as long to hike it. When it comes to human locomotion on foot, it's usually about getting from point A to point B in the shortest time. But, if you're out on a hike, it seems to me that the opposite is true. Whoever takes the longest is the winner.

What's the point of going out into the woods if your goal is just to get back to the trailhead as quickly as you can? Why not just remain there and declare yourself the victor? I like stopping often to watch the woodland creatures scurrying about, to listen to the eloquent, rhythmic trills of birds and ponder what they're saying; to smell the earthy aroma of the land and trees; to feel the various textures of bark as well as the smooth yet tacky mushrooms that dot the trees; and to take lots of photographs because it takes me several shots to get one that’s in focus.

In that book I read a couple years ago about the benefits of being out in nature, The Nature Fix, the author noted that it doesn't take very long for salutary effects to take hold. Just 15 minutes can produce a noticeable reduction in stress. The more, the better, I say.

 

On my hikes here, I especially enjoy standing on the shores of the smaller lakes like the one above. The entirety of the lake is in my view and I can see the ring of trees that encircle it. There's just something about this sight that gives me a sense of comfort. It has a coziness to it. Odds are there's a lengthy compound German word for this sensation but "cozy" and "comforting" are the best English words I can think of.

My first encounter with this feeling came as a young boy. The first floor of my childhood home in Chicago was about six feet from the ground. There was a deck at one of the corners in the back that straddled the property line and being about six feet up meant the space below it was rather large. A burgundy picket fence separated our lot from the next door neighbor's.

Underneath the deck, that fence ran until it was parallel to the corner of the house and a small section ran at a 90 degree angle from the main length to butt up against the house to form a corner. A 4x4 deck post was there but there was just enough space for me to squeeze in behind it, for a time.

That corner, that space where the two sections of fence met had a coziness to it for my younger self. And today as a middle aged man I still love those kinds of spaces.

They have to be enclosed, but not completely. That is, the outside world has to be visible or, at least, its presence discernible. I don't find these spaces claustrophobic, just snug, if that makes any sense.

Corners usually evoke these feelings, though by no means all corners, but there are other spaces that do so as well. The intersection of Clover Lane and Sargent Street in my neighborhood is one.

Clover ends at Sargent and the intersection has a lot of trees around it. So, in the summer, the canopies envelop the space giving it that cozy feel. I suppose that a couple terraces overflowing with flowers add to the effect.

Whatever this phenomenon is, I try to take comfort in it when I can.

When my walk was over, I bid farewell to the Chippewa Moraine State Recreation Area until next year and took a leisurely drive east to Cornell down country roads that had no shoulder to speak of. They're mostly tree-lined but there are occasional openings that reveal more gorgeous kettle lakes. My destination was Moonridge Brewing where I’d get a couple-two-tree glasses of muscle relaxant. If I can get a dose soon enough after a hike, I can usually stave off at least some aches and pains.

I rolled into town, which like last time, looked as if it was deserted like in a Twilight Zone episode. It was slightly eerie. At some point a car drove down the main drag to dispel the notion that Cornell had become the municipal version of the Mary Celeste but I saw no one on foot. Much to my disappointment, I discovered that the brewery was closed. Not permanently, just for the day. Oh well. Maybe they were short on help. As long as I was in Cornell, I thought I’d get some photos of the pulpwood stacker that I had neglected to get the last time I was in town.

The stacker, or what remains of it, anyway, is a giant steel structure that looks like an oil rig that leans at 45 degrees. The enormous arm of girders and cross beams looked to have weathered the decades well. Big concrete pillars anchored the leviathan.

As the name says, the Cornell Pulpwood Stacker stacked pulpwood. Here’s the historical marker.

You would have never caught me crawling up that thing to make repairs, I can tell you!

Today a figure appropriately carved from a log sits at the base to serve as a reminder of its former glory keep watch over the site.

By the time I had wandered around the stacker and taken my photographs, my muscles had begun to ache a bit. My hike had done its work. And so I hit the road once more and made my way to Bloomer where I’d be staying the night. My first stop was to be the local purveyor of muscle relaxant, Bloomer Brewery, which, I thought to myself, had better be open or there's going to be trouble.

Luckily they were receiving the thirsty and so I avoided having to cause a ruckus which would have probably seen the local constabulary throw me across the town line into a ditch. I began my treatment with, if I recall correctly, a lighter brew such as a golden ale or a cream ale but then for reasons I cannot explain, my typical desire for beer that tastes like beer deserted me and I got a s’mores porter or stout or whatever style it was. Such novelty beers are strictly verboten in my workaday life. I love the taste of grain and adore the flavors that are produced when they're cooked but, while on vacation, I occasionally throw caution to the wind.

The rim of the glass was lathered with marshmallow fluff that had a dusting of crushed graham cracker. I don’t know. Maybe I was still shaken by yesterday’s spooky walk and spectral encounter at Valkyrie and so my guard was down. Whatever the reason, this beer was a big mistake.

I think the beer itself was OK but I couldn’t really taste it after licking away some of that goop to get clear a spot that I could drink from. All that sweetness dulled my tongue to the (theoretically) succulent maltiness of the brew. I did not eat all of the marshmallow but the damage had been done by the little I did.

My next one was not the beer equivalent of a novelty ice cream treat but I could barely taste it. Heed this cautionary tale - avoid novelty beers!

Having eaten a moderately hearty lunch at the brewery, I needed to get out and about so I didn't descend into a post-prandial lethargy and decided to cruise around town to see what there was to be seen. One thing I saw was an ever rarer fallout shelter sign at the entrance to a church or a church school.

No doubt the older parishioners smile to themselves when the young folk look at it and ask just what the heck it is.

As I cruised down Main Street, I spied what appeared to be a Trachte shed off to the east. I turned down the next street and went in search of it. After a couple wrong turns, I finally found it in an industrial area that was bordered by train tracks.

I have no idea what it is/was used for but it was neat to see a little bit of Madison history up north.

When I went back to the hotel, I immediately showered and then sprawled out on the bed with the air conditioning turned up to high. With the sun beginning to set, it was time to bring out the book I was reading, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris. It had been a long time coming.

I bought it back in circa 1999 in order to familiarize myself with the favorite era of Japanese history of the woman I was seeing at the time. She had been a Japanese language or Japanese literature or whatever other similar major the UW had on offer to aspiring nipponophiles. Her long hair and big eyes were captivating and her love of Japanese culture and history was quite alluring. It was impossible not to get taken in by the great enthusiasm and affection that emanated from her every word when she spoke about the early 11th century classic The Tale of Genji and its author Lady Murasaki. The Heian period, late 8th to late 12th century, was, as the kids say these days, her jam.

We dated very briefly and, although I had bought the book, I was unceremoniously dumped before I had dug in. With my main motivation of impressing a pretty lady now gone, I put reading the book onto the back burner as I pursued new frauleins. I never ran into another woman enamored of the Heian period and so the tome remained on my medieval history bookshelf collecting dust. One recent day as I was scanning my bookshelves looking for something to read, it occurred to me that I am getting to a point in my life where I really ought to start reading more books that I've meant to read over the years because, if I delay much longer, they'll go unread.

Published in 1964, The World of the Shining Prince is ostensibly for the layreader. But it has that academic sheen to it. I suppose this is still the time of The Great Books of the Western World where your average middle class Joe is presumed to be able to read Milton in its original early 17th century English and endowed with the ability to comprehend it without any helpful annotations.

Despite a fairly staid writing style, the book was quite interesting. The 2 centuries previous to the Heian period saw Japan appropriating any and everything it could from China much the way they pillage American culture today and come away with a profound love of baseball and Elvis. But as the 8th century became the 9th, the Japanese became more insular and began to generate their culture themselves rather than borrowing it from across the East China Sea.

As the title indicates, we’re talking about court life here, not the lives of the rural peasants. Chinese was still the language of choice in administrative, religious, and academic matters (like Latin was in the West during the Middle Ages) but Japanese became more common in literature during this time.

Buddhism came ashore and mixed with the native Shinto religion while the various superstitions that reigned such as directional taboos and a panoply of demons and ghouls were likely derived from older Japanese folklore.

At court, gentlemen were expected to be aesthetes of the highest order with a great sensitivity to beauty in art such as painting as well as more utilitarian things like gold inlaid boxes that held scrolls. Good calligraphy and the ability to compose verse was important for both men and women while courting. I cannot recall all of the details but the man would write a 31 syllable poem to the woman he was looking to get it on with. She’d reply and courtiers would fall over themselves to inspect her calligraphy to make sure it was up to snuff and everything was done in strict order. Quite a bit different and much more eloquent than a meager swipe to the right on a smartphone.

A very interesting book made all the more so by the fact that I knew precious little about the Japan of any time period going into it.

I woke up the next morning to find it rather muggy out and that the smoke from those Canadian wildfires had settled in overnight giving the town a hazy golden glow.

I got fuel – both coffee and gasoline – and cruised around town a bit more as I had a little time to kill for I had an appointment in Eau Claire at noon o’clock and the trip wouldn’t take me very long.

My youngest stepson had been shacking up with his girlfriend there until recently when she unceremoniously dumped him and kicked him out. He was now living with us in Madison and I had volunteered to stop by the apartment to fill my car up with as much stuff of his as it could fit.

I decided to wander the streets of Bloomer once more to see if I had missed anything yesterday and ran across a couple more items of interest. First was a restored ghost sign for the Hotel Anderson on Main Street.

 

There's a coffee shop on the ground floor and it looked like the upper storeys were now apartments. Perhaps tourists from Illinois stayed there while on vacation back in the 20th century.
 

I also found that the sign for the old telephone company was still around. The building was now home to an internet service service provider, I believe.

Instead of taking Highway 53 all the way, I exited it before Eau Claire and took some backroads. I ended up at this intersection where county highway workers no doubt had a good laugh over a couple cigarettes and coffee when putting up the signs.

In Eau Claire, I stopped at a coffeehouse for more go juice and then at a dentist's office where some statuary had caught my eye back in August but a chance to take photographs eluded me.

Noon rolled around and I zipped over to the apartment. The kid’s ex-girlfriend was very kind and helpful. Much to my delight, I found that she had packed up his stuff and done so without seeming to have intentionally destroyed anything. She even helped haul some of the boxes to my car.

As I cruised down the road headed for home I was sad that my vacation was over. My hikes were simply wonderful and I enjoyed investigating Bloomer. But it was back to the workaday world and to being a stepdad to a very lost young man. I had to lend the kid support and try to convince him to rub some dirt on that wound and get back on that horse.

He is 24 and it’s all too easy for me to look back when I was at his age and sigh “Kids these days” in an exasperated tone. I was on the rebound too at that time of my life but I was gainfully employed and self-sufficient. Still, I have a lot of sympathy for him. He is welcome to stay with us. It’s fun to have him around. The kid has a long way to go and I’ll be there to help him. As they say, every journey begins with a single step and I am focused on getting him to take it.

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Bonus photo. This time we have statuary from Mankato, Minnesota.

 

 

(Check out the postlude.)

The Corona Diaries Vol. 75: Slowing Down for the Towns That Time Forgot

(late October 2022)

(Check out this entry's rant. Er, prelude.)

Heading west out of Osseo on Highway 10, it’s about 10 miles to the town of Strum which greets you with this Potemkin village-like facade.

Although you are welcomed in Norwegian, I don't think there's much Norwegian heritage on display in town. There's the Viking Golf Course but that's about it. To the best of my knowledge, there's no restaurant offering lefse wraps like the Norske Nook down the road in Osseo, no bakeries with lefse and sandbakkels. I didn't notice any Norwegian flags.

That was one of the things that struck me when I moved to this area - the lack of ethnic character. OK, there were the Ole & Lena jokes which supplanted the Polock jokes that I knew from Chicago but that's all I can recall. My hometown is full of ethnic enclaves but I found nothing like that in Trempealeau County. I don't doubt that Norwegian culture could be found in pockets here and there and that I, a mere teenager, simply missed them, but there was nothing of any scale. No Syttende Mai parades, for example.

It doesn’t take long before you’re out of town and on your way to Eleva. Originally called New Chicago, the legend I always heard was that its name came about when someone was painting the word "Elevator" on the side of a grain elevator but couldn't finish owing to the weather and/or onset of winter. A few months go by with a giant "Eleva" in the middle of town and the name stuck. More likely it's a corruption of a French name.

Eleva is a rather nondescript town like Strum. Its claim to fame is an apocryphal tale that Jesse James and his James Gang buried some loot or gold in the area after their raid on the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. Legend has it that they buried their booty either by Chimney Rock to the south of Eleva or near Hamlin, a town that was to the east. However, the raid on the bank was a failure and the robbers came away with a paltry $26.70.

Hamlin was a stop on the Tomah-Hudson Stage Coach Line and something of a town on the make by the 1880s. Prosperity came to a crashing halt when that railroad line I mentioned in my last entry bypassed Hamlin. However, it proved a shot in the arm for Eleva which got a rail stop. I think the Hamlin Cemetery is all that remains of the town.

I caught 93 north in Eleva. As I mentioned in my entry about this drive last year, the views from the ridge just north of town are spectacular.

Back in the autumn I found this photo (and a couple others) that were taken atop the ridge back in 1914.

I sent the site to my friend Jason who promptly went out on a hunt for the spot where the photos were taken. He is fairly confident that he has found it.

My next destination was the Hadleyville Cemetery. Halloween was approaching, after all.

Hadleyville was a small town that used to lie about 2 miles north as the crow flies from where I lived which was 10 miles or so north of Eleva. Since the cemetery is dated to 1859, I assume the town was also founded that year. It dissolved sometime during the Great Depression. Wikipedia cites a source claiming that the general store was across the street from the cemetery.

A friend and I were discussing this extinct community one time and wondered if the little grocery store that we used to stop at on our bike rides was part of the town. It was called Hazen’s, I believe, and was a bit west of the cemetery.

Here is what it looks like today.

An aerial map from 1939 shows the structure although it has been added onto over the years.

Was it part of Hadleyville? A definite maybe.

Here’s a satellite view of the cemetery and its surroundings today.

1939:

It appears that, within 10 years, all traces of the town had vanished except for the cemetery.

When I was in Milwaukee in October, my friend who is from this area told us a tale of how her father brought her and her brothers out here one Halloween for a little spooky fun. Things did not go as planned.

I presume Joseph D. Hadley was a founding father of the town. He was surely related to one, at least. The cemetery has plenty of space for new residents and the latest marker I found was for a poor child who died at 17 days old and was buried there in 2021.

Several tombstones had a picture at the top like Mr. Hadley’s. I must admit that when I saw this one:

I felt that it looked like something from a Monty Python animation scene. As if it was going to push an animated man in a bowler hat into the Argument Clinic or some such thing.

One thing that struck me as I walked around the cemetery was that there were no people with Scandinavian surnames interred there. The area is infested with Norwegian-Americans. Recall the Norske Nook in Osseo; the Strum welcome sign is in Norwegian; the golf course in Strum is the Viking Golf Course. Almost everyone in the area is an Olson, Nelson, Johnson, Skogstad, and so on.

Although I wished the sun had peeked out from behind the clouds more frequently, it was a fairly nice day. Not too chilly. A few cars passed by as the road the cemetery is on intersects with a couple state highways and some backroads which take you into Eau Claire about 10 miles to the north.

It was quiet and peaceful but, at one point, I noticed the cawing of crows. No surprise as they seem to need little cause to give their piercing call. But the cawing seemed to continue for longer than normal. So, as I returned to my car, I decided to see what the hubbub was all about.

I saw this scene in a tree which, perhaps, stood behind the site of the Hadleyville general store.

Those two crows were reading that eagle the riot act. How many minutes had it just sat there perched on the branch ignoring the insults? However long, the eagle just didn’t care and sat there calmly as the crows hopped from branch to branch in search of an even better spot from which to let loose their corvidian invective.

Eventually the eagle took off towards the cemetery and I made my way north in search of a little something to break my fast. My destination was about 35 miles up the road: Bohemian Ovens in Bloomer.

Bohemian Ovens Bakery and Restaurant is known for its kolache. Now, growing up, my Polish grandma made kołaczki, which were diamond shaped cookies filled with jam or jelly. And the dough was made with cream cheese. My Frau and I encountered the Czech kolache last year in Cedar Rapids, you may recall. Those were larger and round with a flakier, more bread-like dough.

I found that Bohemian Ovens made sweet as well as savory kolache. Furthermore, theirs were pasty-like with the filling enclosed in a bready dough. I bought samples of both kinds. Here was my breakfast, ham & cheese kolache:

It was very tasty. The enclosure was a very light, fluffy dough and really hit the spot. I also brought home a package of peanut butter Nutella kolache. These were smaller with a dollop of frosting on top.

Heavenly stuff!

From Bloomer it was maybe 12 miles to my next stop – the Chippewa Moraine State Recreation Area. I was there last year in mid-November and was hoping to find a few trees that still had leaves this time around. And, unlike last year, there was no rain in the forecast. Even a little sun here and there was to be expected.

On my way there I passed by some ruins and I just had to pull over and check them out.

A collapsed outbuilding, I guess.

A set of stairs that lead to nowhere…I presume there was a shed there at some point.

When I arrived at the recreation area, I found a school bus parked in the lot with a bored looking driver behind the wheel just like last year. A group of kids was running around by the interpretive center with some trying their hand at a demonstration featuring a two-man crosscut saw. We were up in the pinery, after all.

I put on my new boots which I had bought in Osseo and hit the trail. Last year I went left at the intersection so this year I went right.

Just like last year, the scenery was spectacular.

It was a lovely day – perfect for a hike. And there were indeed trees that still had leaves. This place must look simply incredible when the trees are at peak colors. Still, the trails were gorgeous.

I suppose there’s a trade off to be made. If the trees have full canopies, then views of the many kettle lakes would be obscured from the trail. Later in the autumn, you get views of the lakes but little colorful foliage.

At one spot I found evidence of a beaver that had been hard at work.

When I walk the trails, I alternate between looking up – the sky, potential bird sightings in the trees - looking around at the lovely scenery, perhaps to spot a deer (or a bear), and down at the ground so I don’t step awkwardly onto a rock or tree root and take a tumble. It’s easy to get lost in one’s thoughts.

On one stretch of the trail, I was looking up, down, and all around, my thoughts in the clouds. Then I looked down and saw this:

I took evasive action so that I didn’t step on it. Like that eagle, it just didn’t care and didn’t move an inch. I knew it wasn’t a timber rattlesnake and figured it was non-poisonous. Even when I stooped down to get photographs, it remained still. I think it’s a garter snake of some variety.

Not 10 steps up the trail from my serpent friend I spied something long and thin on the ground and the primitive fight or flight part of my brain yelled, “Snake!!” No doubt my pupils dilated as much as they could to take in the potential threat as a small dose of adrenaline shot through my veins. Closer examination revealed it to be a moss-covered stick. That’s evolution for ya.

The sun did indeed peek out occasionally and made for some nice photo opportunities.

I don’t know what it is, but I have a thing for moss covered rocks and trees.

Towards the end of my hike – about 4.5 miles – I came upon a sign.

I realized that I had gone the “correct” way around this time. Plus, I think it offered some important wisdom: Slow down. It asks the walker to “take a few minutes to relax before finishing your hike.”

This.

This is exactly why I went up north. To slow down, relax, and spend some time when I am not slave to a clock. To get out of bed when the sun rises instead of at the insistence of an alarm app on my phone (or a hungry cat, for that matter). To go about my day at a leisurely and deliberate pace instead of being pulled here and there by the demands of work and everything else that would have my time.

The recreation area is rather large and encompasses much more than the area I hiked. My walk took me along a short segment of the Ice Age Trail but it continued to the southeast. I drove around the area, including down a designated scenic road for a spell. The land is just gorgeous. One road is a narrow two-lane affair with no shoulder and no stretch that goes straight for more than 100 feet, it seemed. I took it at 35MPH the whole way and took in the scenery.

Evening approached and my stomach was insistent that I put food in it. It was back to Bloomer where I could get a beer and dinner at the Bloomer Brewing Company.

I arrived just after opening and was the only person there for a little while.

The bartender was a young woman who didn’t look old enough to legally consume the beer she was serving but that may just be a sign of me getting older. I asked what was happening in Bloomer these days and she unenthusiastically replied with something about a high school volleyball tournament. She may have been distracted by a slate of opening duties yet to be performed or was simply a young person who was eager to leave the confines of a small town and seek her fortune elsewhere. Or maybe she just wanted to be out with friends instead of being at work.

My first beer was a Hog Breath. The brewery didn’t give a style for it but it was a stout or some kind of dark ale.

It had a faint smokiness along with a maple syrup sweetness. The latter ingredient was a nice Northwoods touch. Being served cold and an abundance of fizz kept it from being cloying. It was a nice, hearty drink to relax with after a hike.

I was pleased to see people trickle in. First was an older couple and then a younger one. A trio of women who looked like they had just gotten off from work shuffled in to start the weekend. The place was not full when I left but it was slowly getting more crowded. Hopefully it’ll be around when I am up that way again.

My next destination was a hotel room in Chetek. The plan was to relax and then get to the Chetek Bakery in the hope that they’d have some Swedish limpa bread on offer.

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Bonus photo. It’s Grabby again. She’s been sleeping on my backpack on the dining room table a lot lately. Sometimes, though, she must be moved to accommodate eaters. Here she is shortly after being awakened from her slumbers.