The Trachte buildings of Eken Park (And one from Sherman too)

Eken Park has several Trachte buildings.

There are at least two on Coolidge Street. 

This one is on Coolidge as well but I am not sure that it's a Trachte.

The most well-known ones in Eken Park are on Commercial Avenue. R.I.P. Resale Records.

And here's one from the Sherman Neighborhood. It's sneakily camouflaged.

Belleville: Ghost sign and Trachte buildings

It took me several visits but...

...I eventually noticed that Haight's Mobile Maintenance is housed in a pair of Trachte buildings.

I think there's a small shed in back too but a fence obscured most of it.

Trachte building?

Seen on Madison's south side.

It looks to be one but has been tricked out, given various face lifts, and so on. And so I am unsure. But the bit above the door looks very Trachtey to me.

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.

********

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

 

 

(Check out the postlude.)

Ghost signs and Trachte buildings - Columbus

Seen on a swing through Columbus today. I saw a couple more Trachte buildings that I wasn't able to get photographs of. Another day.

Trachte buildings - Bay Creek edition

Trachte buildings - Verona, WI

Trachte shed, Bloomer, WI

I found a couple Trachte sheds up in Bloomer when I was up there last year. While I was there last month, I spied a third as I was driving down Main Street and looking around.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 92: Tintype the Light Fantastic

(early-June 2023)

(Watch the prelude.)

For her birthday, my Frau decided that she wanted to have our portrait, as well as a solo one where she is sporting her fancy new tiara, done on tintype. Tintype is a kind of photography where the emulsion is on a piece of iron. Since the only place in anything resembling close proximity to us that does tintype photos is the H.H. Bennett Studio, that meant we'd be taking a trip to the local tourist trap, Wisconsin Dells. I’d been there many times when I worked for the Wisconsin Historical Society and so I knew of this old-timey photography method but this would be my first time actually having my photo taken with it.

Bennett moved to Wisconsin as a teenager, specifically to Kilbourn City, which is now known as Wisconsin Dells. He took up photography in 1865 and ten years later opened his studio that is now a historic site and where the Frau and I had our tintypes taken. The Dells area became famous, in large part, because of his photographs with the most well-known being one of a boy jumping between 2 tall rock formations.

I just looked this up and discovered that the boy was Bennett’s son, Ashley. Today, Bennett would have been locked up for standing by with a camera while his son casually made leaps where one small mistake, one teensy slip of the foot, would have meant certain death for the boy.

Bennett’s shop is well-preserved and visitors can imagine early Chicago area tourists stopping in to see his work or perhaps for a portrait after seeing his photographs of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Folks such as the Frau and myself who want a tintype taken are corralled into Bennett’s studio with its windowed roof and paucity of artificial lighting.

The camera is very basic – it’s a wooden box mounted on a tripod with a primitive lens.

All focusing and shot composition was accomplished by moving the camera. Talk of such luxuries as digital zoom and auto-focus would have been sheer madness in Bennett’s day. The photographer threw a black cloth over the apparatus and slid a carefully prepared sheet of iron into a slot in the back.

The Frau chose our background, we sat, and were very still for about 15 seconds. We were told that it was fine to breathe normally but I held my breath anyway. Can't be too careful, right?

With the exposure done, the plate was removed and placed in a tray where it received a bath of some magical developer elixir. Before our very eyes, the image of Madison’s premier power couple faded into being.

********

Since my Frau developed her mystery allergies/illness, she’s been spending much more time at home. Not only has her condition prevented her from working, but her social life has been severely interrupted. It has made me very sad to witness her go from being a social butterfly to a recluse. Well, not as bad as someone like Paul of Thebes, but she just spends much too much time at home these days.

One thing she’s done to occupy herself is to litter our deck with plants. Look at this coleus! Or is that two colei?

And that exhausts my knowledge of flowers here. But there are more photos.

Forgot. She grew a chili plant too, there on the left.

My contribution was a single coleus which I potted and put in our carport to add some color.

********

Driving down County M south of Madison, one sees some pretty scenery tucked in the rolling hills. I discovered that there is a fairly new bike path in the area, the Oregon Rotary Trail, that has a trailhead just west of the town of Oregon, population ~ 12,000. The paved path winds its way through the gentle hills and the Swan Pond Waterfowl Production Area and ends on the northwest side of Oregon.

And so one morning I threw my bicycle into my car and headed southwest out into the countryside. The small parking lot had one car that presumably was owned by the laughing young couple on the trail walking towards me.

Off I went.

There are signs at the base of the hills that tell you exactly how steep they are and I discovered that anything over an 11 degree incline gets me worried about cardiac arrest as I pedal upwards and onwards.

It was a lovely day and the grassy field near the trailhead presented me with an opportunity to go all Terrence Malick/Emmanuel Lubezki/Néstor Almendros with my photography.

All that was missing was a lovely young woman to run her hands across the top of the grass.

I wasn't too far from Swan Pond. It is unclear to me what makes it a waterfowl production site. Is there a swan factory there? A duck forge? Maybe it is kept in a state that is optimal for waterfowl to engage in some, er, amorous congress, shall we say. Perhaps certain plants are the waterfowl equivalent of mood lighting and a mirror on the ceiling. However waterfowl are produced, I was near water and so there were plenty of red-winged black birds about.

 

 

Coming out of a wooded area, I spied a deer out in the distance.

 

It didn’t run away immediately but instead slowly, cautiously put some distance between us, looking back to make sure I wasn’t showing any hostile intentions.

I made it to Oregon ere long. Oddly enough, I hadn't seen much in the way of waterfowl on the trip there. The northwest side is a weird mix of conservation park and industrial buildings. There is scrub dotted with small ponds next to a concrete factory, for instance. I also discovered that Trachte had facilities down here. It was all newer stuff on their lot, though. None of their vintage steel buildings with the barreled roofs.

 

While I had been to Oregon previously, it was always a bee line to a friend’s house in a slightly newer part of town (1970s vs 2000s) and I’d never wandered its streets before or seen the downtown. I biked east a little ways and found myself amongst some stores and banks, but it wasn't the old part of town. So I returned to the area where the trail begins.

As I rode down one street, I saw a pair of sandhill cranes on a patch of grass in front of the concrete factory. After taking a couple photos, I continued on. I rode around the area and through a section of the conservation park and then returned to the spot where I had seen the cranes lazing about.

There I found that they had crossed the street and were on the sidewalk beyond which was just a field of grass and small trees.

 

 

Unsurprisingly, they wanted nothing to do with the human so they ambled down a short hill into the scrub. They slowly walked through the grass, making sure the apeman didn’t come too close and everything just seemed calm and idyllic.

And then I saw a savage example of nature being red in tooth and claw unfold before me as the gentle birds were mercilessly attacked!

 

The cranes must have wandered into someone’s territory because a pair of red-winged black birds started diving at the them in a ferocious Blitzkrieg just like the Luftwaffe! OK, well maybe not. But they did seem to annoy the cranes a lot.

I felt a bit badly as the cranes didn’t mean any harm; they simply wanted to get away from me and then they found themselves running, well, strolling, a gauntlet of angry black birds. Having been attacked by territorial red-winged black birds myself, I could, as Bill Clinton once said, feel their pain.

I like this photo because you can see the full wingspan of the attacking black bird and the crane has this “Oh brother. Not again.” look on its face. Plus, there’s what I think is a female red-winged black bird down at the bottom presumably gushing over her mate’s bravery and derring-do.

“Oh, Harold! You’re so rugged!”

The cranes eventually got tired of being accosted and left. With the action over, I continued on to the trail.

At the very start of it I noticed a killdeer just standing there looking around.

 

 

I got back to my car just as it began to get really hot. It had been a very nice ride and it was now time to go home and do chores.

 

********

Bonus photo. Here’s a fine photo of Grabby relaxing in the sun.

 

(Take me to the postlude.)