Last winter
I discovered that Madison is home to a Victorian-era garden. There's nothing
surprising about some folks maintaining such a thing in town but I was
confounded when I learned that it is just a stone's throw from the
Capitol. And so, like the Schoenstatt Shrine from a couple entries ago,
investigating this garden was added to my to-do list for warmer weather. I
finally got around to it on a nice morning back in August.
I didn't know what to expect of a Victorian-era garden but, since I tend to filter life through movies, I had visions of Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract. Would it be a well-appointed greenscape dotted with mini-obelisks and privet hedges trimmed and shaped to the highest topiary standards?
It's located
in the Mansion Hill district which is so named because it features many mid-19th
century homes that were built by Madison's early elite. The old governor's
mansion is there and dates to roughly 1855 so it's hardly surprising that such a garden is to be found in this area. I suppose it's a bit like the SafeHouse in Milwaukee - hidden in plain sight.
Back in the days of yore as a college student, I lived a couple blocks
away for a year which makes my ignorance of it even more shameful. While I've been by it
many times in the decades that I have lived here, it's rarely been on foot. When I lived nearby, my perambulations usually took me away from it and towards campus. Perhaps I simply never stopped to read the sign or had simply forgotten about its existence somewhere along the way. For as long as I can recall, I've just assumed that this little patch of green belonged to a law firm or other such organization that made of one of the old mansions its home and was keen on showing off with a luscious and verdant yard.
As I have
conceded previously, I am awful when it comes to identifying plants and
wandering the garden I saw all kinds of wonderful flowers and shrubs but
recognized only 1 or 2 varieties. Because my Frau had pointed them out to me a
couple weeks before on one of our walks, I felt a small sense of pride at being able to ID the Tiger lilies.
I walked
around the fountain and ran into one of the many volunteers that cares for the
gardens on the opposite side. She was seated on a bench and enjoying a moment of Arcadian bliss amidst the fruits of her labors. After noticing me, we struck up a brief conversation wherein she answered my questions about a couple varieties of flowers but I think I forgot their
names 5 minutes later.
You can see
just how close to the Capitol Square the park is in this photo. Lake Mendota is
just a couple blocks in the opposite direction.
The garden was an oasis of peace and calm as the Dane County Farmers Market raged in the distance and people were going about their day enjoying the weather and the company of others, something largely denied them at this time last year.
I had been
out on my bike for a few hours at this point and was not only enchanted by all
of the lovely flora, but thankful to be able to take a breather and bask
in some shade.
********
The weekend
after my stroll through Period Garden Park, my Frau and I headed up to
Manitowoc on the shores of Lake Michigan. The occasion was a concert by Son Volt, the St. Louis band I have mentioned previously in these diaries.
It was a free show that was part of the town's summer music festival. Plus it would be nice to simply get out of town and be somewhere else. Joining
us was our friend Arch. He was going through a spot of personal turmoil so I tried to get
him out and about instead of moping at home. Plus he too is a big Son Volt fan. Thankfully,
he took me up on my offer.
We rolled into town in the afternoon and
immediately set out to find a late lunch. Walking towards a local brewpub, we
stumbled upon an exhibit of large format prints in an alley near the hotel.
It was put
on by the local branch of the University of Wisconsin System and a nearby
private college.
It
had been a few years since I'd last seen Son Volt perform. Plus, I think this was the
first concert I'd been to since the pandemic began. The band were in fine form
out touring in support of a new album that I was growing to like more and more with each listen. We were able to get up close to the
stage.
The band has
been around since 1994 and they played a nice set with songs from most parts of their career, although I did lament the absence of any songs from Wide Swing Tremelo. Singer/guitarist/band leader Jay Farrar – he's on the left clad
in black – is generally all business live. He normally doesn't talk a whole lot
to the audience beyond a "Hello" and the occasional "Thanks" but this night he was more verbose than usual and he even made a joke
about bratwurst.
After the
show when we were chatting about it, Arch noted a couple songs that brought
tears to his eyes. Not surprising considering some of the lyrics and events that were playing out in his life.
Tears welled
in my eyes when they played "Tear Stained Eye". They always do. It's
from their 1st album, Trace, released in 1995 and so I have
had a 25ish year relationship with those four minutes and 21 seconds. For most of
the that time, the song is a rather plaintive country shuffle. Then towards the end,
Farrar sings:
Like the man said, rode hard and put away wet
Throw away the bad news, and put it to rest
If learning is living, and the truth is a state of mind
You'll find it's better at the end of the line
And a hint of hopefulness springs forth from the sadness. (But just a hint.) It's a great song that I have listened to countless times and it has seen me through a few rough patches in my life when relationships have ended. It was also part of the soundtrack of my drive home up from Louisiana after my father had died as I sped north on I55 towards St. Louis with his ashes in the back seat.
Son Volt's first album was written and recorded during a time when Farrar drove between New Orleans and Minneapolis on Highway 61 frequently. (See my entry on Dubuque.) Several of his songs reference the St. Louis area and "Tear Stained Eye" has the line "Ste. Genevieve can hold back the water". Ste. Genevieve is a town south of St. Louis (on Hwy 61!) that faced a serious threat of flooding in 1993. My understanding is that the residents were basically plugging holes in the town's dikes with their fingers as the Mississippi threatened to wash the town away.
After the more melancholy song, they followed it up with the lovely, upbeat "Windfall" with its refrain of "May the wind take your troubles away."
On a recent episode of the Political Beats podcast, one of the hosts opined that "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac had entered the Great American Songbook. Honestly, I am not qualified to debate the merits of that claim. But it was a good reminder that the Songbook isn't set in stone and that additions didn't stop in the 1950s. While, for me, "Great American Songbook" conjures up the likes of Gershwin, Ellington, and Guthrie, it should include tunes from my lifetime. I would offer that "Windfall" and "Tear Stained Eye" should be included as well, if they are not already considered a part of it by the Songbook's gatekeepers.
Many diary
entries ago I recounted my trip to Manitowoc in October of last year. Not long
after I got home, I realized that I had forgotten to check out the landing site
of a chunk of Korabl-Sputnik 1.
Launched on
15 May 1960, Korabl-Sputnik 1 was an unmanned spacecraft that allowed the Soviets
to research space flight or whatever it was they were keen on learning about.
When it came time to get the part that was supposed to return to Earth on a
course to terra firma, there was a malfunction and it instead went into
a higher orbit. It eventually decayed and the module fell Earthwards on 6
September 1962 with the vast majority of the craft burning up in the
atmosphere. However, a chunk survived reentry and landed in the middle of 8th
Street.
That piece
was eventually returned to the Soviets but a couple replicas were made and
here's one of them:
This
momentous occasion is marked by a ring in the middle of the street just north
of the intersection with Park Street.
In addition
to missing the Sputnik ring last fall, I also neglected to get a photo of a
silo with the Chief Oshkosh Beer logo painted on it. The silo is just north of
Fond du Lac, which is about 20 miles south of Oshkosh, but across Lake
Winnebago from the beer's hometown. I've read somewhere that the logo had been
painted on it decades ago and that the new paint job simply replicated the old
one.
Chief Oshkosh was first brewed as a non-alcoholic "near-beer" during Prohibition. When that fiasco ended, it was transformed into a real beer. It survived until the early 1970s and hasn't been brewed since but I am sure someone owns the brand copyright which means it may return someday.
********
Bonus photo time. I found a Twitter feed from Chicago a few months ago
that posts photographs of turrets around the city on Turret Tuesdays. I thought
it was neat idea and have started taking pictures of the turrets of Madison.
Here is the only pink one in town. This building is home to a Cajun restaurant
and, as far as I know, it has been a restaurant or supper club since it as long
as anyone can remember.
Back in
September I took some time off from work and headed north as is customary for
folks in southern Wisconsin/Chicagoland. The Frau had surgery in June and a lengthy period of
recovery ate up all of her vacation time so it was to be a solo trip. I
carefully scheduled it so as not to interfere with any big projects at work and yet
be early enough in the month so that I could expect fair weather. After
announcing my trip to her, the Frau pointed out that I would be out of town on
our wedding anniversary. Oops! I swear to you, dear reader, that this was not intentional. Still, she gave my voyage her blessing and received a
wooden cat-shaped puzzle box in return. It is hard to believe we've been
married 5 years!
On the way north I drove by a silo with a giant Chief Oshkosh Beer logo painted on it. I was a couple miles down the road before it occurred to me that I should have taken a photo. My guess is that I was absorbed in a song by Rush instead of contemplating photo ops. This is rather odd because the scenery was prime photo material. While most of the trees were still green, the landscape was dotted with orange and yellow and red.
My first
destination was Manitowoc on the shores of Lake Michigan, the titular town of comedian Charlie
Berens' Manitowoc Minute. I have not
spent much time in eastern Wisconsin. Well, north of Milwaukee, anyway. I've never even so much as set foot in Door County so I figured it was about time to check out more of this part of the state. Manitowoc is just north of Sheboygan
where I believe I have distant relatives.
A cousin I
never knew I had until a few years ago has been assembling a
family tree and she sent me a German-language newspaper notice announcing the
marriage of my great-great-great grandfather Heinrich (originally
from Hanover) to a Fraulein Henriette (born in Wesenstedt) in Sheboygan Falls (just west of Sheboygan) in
1845. I think the family name was anglicized at some point by folks in Sheboygan.
And so I
learned that I am of northern German extraction. However, I still reserve the
right to wear lederhosen on occasion. I've also learned that I have a little
Dutch blood in me and that a great-great-great uncle served in the Civil War. Or was he only 2x great? I cannot recall now.
My first stop was the Wisconsin Maritime Museum
where the big attraction was the U.S.S. Cobia, World War 2-era
submarine.
While I
dearly wished that my brother was with me to indulge his enormous interest in World
War II, I was still excited to go aboard. (I have toured U-505 at the
Museum of Science and Industry, but that was ages ago.) I kept thinking about
the movie Das Boot while taking the tour, especially those tracking
shots following men as they pass through the bulkheads as they are running from one side of
the boat to the other. Oh, and about how much I'd panic and freak out standing
there watching rivets pop as the compartment I was standing in filled with
water. There were thousands of switches, valves, and levers and it's amazing to think
that men actually knew what each and every one did without having to consult the thick manuals to be found scattered around the boat.
When we got to the galley I was surprised to see what appeared to be ceramic plates neatly stack on shelves with no visible way to stow them securely. If a depth charge were to go off just a few fathoms too close, wouldn't they all fall to the deck and shatter? Maybe I just missed a safe storage compartment or the plates I saw were simply for show and the ones that would have been aboard when the sub was on active duty were made of Bakelite or some such thing.
There's
much more to the museum than the submarine. Some friends and I are playing a
Pathfinder game (think Dungeons & Dragons) in which we are pirates so it
was fun to be surrounded by all things maritime. Yes, we drink rum while
playing. We even drank bumboo a few times after our characters had plundered some town and decided to go upscale with their grog. Manitowoc has a long shipbuilding history and the museum showed it
off proudly. I learned a lot from the exhibit that explains how the hulls for
schooners were built.
The history
of Great Lakes shipping was fascinating as was seeing how the cargo ships built
in Manitowoc kept getting larger over the years. There was also a shipwrecks
section. I knew about the Rouse Simmons, which sank just north of
Manitowoc's shores in 1912, as I'd attended a lecture by one Fred Neuschel when he was
here in Madison several years ago to discuss his book Lives and Legends of
the Christmas Tree Ships. The Rouse Simmons was carrying a load of
Christmas trees from Wisconsin's pinery (what was left of it, anyway) to Chicago when it sank during a nasty
storm in November 1912.
I chuckled to myself when I saw a life-sized cardboard standup thingy of Tami Thomsen, a diver
who was at the Wisconsin Historical Society when I worked there. My memories of
her are of someone who was rather short tempered and complained about her computer more than giving us a chance to fix it. Despite
a disagreeable disposition at times (she could also be very friendly, truth be told), she is a highly accomplished diver. A selection of
her photos of various wrecks and detritus in Madison area lakes was published
in the paper last year.
To help make up for the fact that I'd be away on
our wedding anniversary, I bought the Frau a t-shirt emblazoned with "I'm a lady
with the vocabulary of a well educated sailor" across the chest.
My
next stop was the old lighthouse and so I started walking along the river path
out towards the quay. I looked up as I was taking some photos only to see the S.S.
Badger coming into port. It is a ferry which takes people and their
automobiles across the lake to Ludington, Michigan.
I'd never
seen it before and it was much larger than I had expected. But I suppose it was
my expectations that were really off. I mean, it had to be large in order to
haul cars across Lake Michigan and be profitable, right? It was an awesome
sight to see it pull in and I was genuinely startled when it dropped anchor.
And it reminded me of how little I know about sailing as I was surprised to see
that it turned to the north side of the mouth of the river and then backed into
port on the south side.
After this,
it was off to the old lighthouse. My understanding is that it had fallen into
disrepair and was to be scrapped when it was sold to a billionaire who'd always
wanted his very own lighthouse. (Must be nice.) He whipped it into shape and
now you can walk out to it.
While you
cannot go inside, you can go up one level and peer in through the windows or
walk out to the front. It was, methinks, my first visit to a lighthouse so it
was really neat. I must admit that, when I was walking out there, I flashed
back to the Neptune speech by Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse, one of the
most disturbing films you'll ever see.
Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead
Winslow! HAAARK! Hark Triton, hark!
If you've
never seen the movie, the infamous scene is here.
I spent the
rest of the afternoon wandering around downtown. You can't miss the Briess
malting facility. I suspect that the vast majority of the beer I drink had its
grains malted at Briess.
The facility
in Manitowoc is huge. (There's a smaller facility in Chilton, about 30 miles to
the west, which I had seen earlier on my drive here.) I'd bet it was 4
square blocks at minimum. When I opened the curtains in my hotel room, the
Briess mural loomed large in the distance.
Briess
wasn't the only place to have a mural. They were all over downtown, in fact. I
guess that they're a cheap way to at least give the appearance of
gentrification.
This one of
"The Great Wave off Kanagawa" was done to honor Manitowoc's sister
city in Japan that I cannot recall the name of.
And of
course I took photographs of any ghost signs that I came across.
This looks
to be for Princess Ice Cream which rings no bells with me and my cursory search
of the Internet has yielded nothing.
The county courthouse was built in 1904, if I
recall correctly, and it was a magnificent building.
There were
several buildings having their facades restored which was a good sign. But I
really don't know how well or how poorly the town is doing. I spied some empty
storefronts downtown but there are empty storefronts everywhere these days. My
impression was that Manitowoc was doing alright but had obviously seen better
days. They seem to be doing a good job marketing themselves as a maritime town and
showcasing its proximity to water. In addition to the maritime museum, I saw anchors
adorning a park and the river path, a bar & music stage on the riverfront,
the city's shipbuilding history portrayed in murals, and so on. Playing to
their strength, I suppose you could say. It's on the way to Door County so I
imagine that it gets some of that tourist traffic.
After checking into my hotel, which was much
better occupied than I would have thought considering the pandemic, I had
dinner at a brewpub a couple of blocks away. During my meal a co-worker texted me saying that
his wife really likes a bakery in Manitowoc but that she couldn't remember the
name. The Internet told me that there were a couple just north of downtown so I
set out on foot to get my dessert plus some treats for my friends whom I would
be seeing in a couple days. One of the bakeries had kolache! I bought prune and
poppy seed.
I returned
to the hotel and had a little dessert before testing the mattress for firmness
and comfort as I did some reading. (The further adventures of The Vinyl
Detective.) Tomorrow I would hit the road for the banks of the Oconto River.
Bonus photo
– our neighborhood has a big cock and here it is.
