December Musings

Another Wisconsin deer hunt has passed, and I am free (more or less) to roam in the woods again.  

When I was a kid, stories of deer hunting scared me to death.  My friends told stories of older relatives drunk off their butts and running around the woods shooting repeatedly at something that looked like a deer. Sounded like chaos to me.  Deer hunting in Wisconsin has become statistically much safer, if not safe.  

There were only eight "incidents" this year with the one fatality being self-inflicted.  A couple of elk were accidentally shot.  An elk is much, much larger than a deer, but apparently two people thought they were shooting the biggest whitetail doe ever. 

The most concerning incident to me is that a young woman hiker was shot in the thigh on the Ice Age Trail.  The hunter thought she was a deer.  These are the events that keep me indoors during the main gun deer season. 

This week I was back at Gibraltar Rock.  Between the cold morning and people slow to return to the woods after deer season, the trail and parking lots were completely empty during this week's hike there.

This is actually one of my favorite times of year to hike.  Overnight freezing temperatures firm up the ground without making it slippery. Most of the casual hikers don't venture out and don't know what they're missing.

 

At home, we started and finished a new reading project.  Justin was talking about something he heard about life in Siberia.  I suggested that he read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Justin isn't a big recreational reader, so we took it on as a family project.  Each night, Julia, Justin and I would take turns reading six pages aloud.  It took about a little over a month with a few days off.  

For those not familiar with the book, it's a novel based upon Solzhenitsyn's own work camp experiences in Siberia.  It focuses upon exactly one day from eyes open to eyes closed.  I read the book in high school under the careful scrutiny of my social studies teacher, Mrs. Ivonavitch, but I think I got a lot more out of it now as a voluntary read.  

It's a good book for the pandemic because the main character's focus is just on surviving in very difficult conditions.  There's absolutely nothing anyone would call exciting going on in the main character's life.  Just completing ordinary tasks becomes an exceptional challenge.  A crust of bread, thin fish soup with bones, laying brick, a fellow prisoner's bit of tobacco.  These were the subjects for our daily read.  

After finishing a book like that, one can't help but re-examine the small tasks that form the routines of daily life.  This week, I focused on making fried eggs in a new way.  My daughter and I love eggs over easy.  Juicy yolks for toast dipping.   Flipping the egg is the big moment.  A broken yolk means no yolk for dipping.  

Somewhere in my internet readings, I came across a French chef's video explaining how he fried an egg.  He casually melted a little butter in a pan.  Turned the heat to low.  Cracked the eggs into the pan.  Flicked a few drops of water across the eggs and covered with a lid.  The water turns to steam and helps to cook the tops of the yolks.  When there's barely a thin white membrane covering the yellow yolks, it's time to easily slide the eggs from the pan to the plate without need for a flip.

The result is a soft rounded white and a never-broken juicy yolk.

Simple Breakfast--Improved

 

Speaking of Allie, she is settling into her new San Francisco sublet apartment and making us all jealous with photos from sunrise walks before work.

 

First Look at the Badger Ordnance Works

There's a property not far from me that was the largest ammunition plant in the world.  Badger Ordnance Works was announced in 1941.  In less than a year, over a hundred area farmers were kicked off their land and forced to sell.  Of course, before the farmers, the Ho Chunk Tribe inhabited this area, which was once the largest prairie in all of Wisconsin.  Elk would come down from the Baraboo Range to graze here.  

The ordinance works  produced rocket propellant, smokeless powder, and E.C. powder from World War 2 through the Vietnam War and employed more than 23,000 workers.  E.C. powder was used in hand grenades. When the plant was built, a 75,000 foot fence circled around the 7500 acre property.  In 1977, it was placed on stand-by service.  

Eventually, the land was designated for recreational use.  The land is controlled by the State DNR,  the Ho Chunk nation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  

Unexpected Reflection

There is a plan to restore much of the property to the glorious prairie that it once was.  This was my first time to the property, and I really should have done a better job researching to see where the trails were.  

 On the map, the hwy 12 entrance is on the far left and center.  There is only a very narrow section of public land where I entered.  

Just about everywhere I turned, I saw signs indicating tribal ownership.

There were also a lot of hunters in trucks scouting for the deer hunt.  Callie and I mostly road-walked for about five miles. It's hard not to think about all of the chemicals used during the manufacturing process here.  Years after the plant closed, contaminated ground water continued to turn up at area residences, forcing the supply of bottled drinking water.  

 

A Different Kind of Hike

Yesterday was Justin's procedure at UW Hospital.  I dropped him off at the door and headed to Marshall Park Boat Launch on Lake Mendota.  I had a couple of hours to kill and did so by walking a circle route of about 1000 steps.  It was a pleasant walk, which I repeated about a dozen times to get some exercise in.  It wasn't nearly as interesting as the Ordnance Works, but the scenery was pleasant. 

Justin, who is twenty,  made it through his procedure:  a painful, unpleasant one.  Kind of an abbreviated colonoscopy without any anesthesia.  He couldn't stop talking about it afterwards and even had pictures for show and tell. The preliminary opinion was that everything looked to be ok.

Our family has some other good news.  After many interviews, my daughter Allie accepted her first professional job after college. She will work for a small marketing/advertising firm in downtown San Francisco, although work will be remote for awhile.  Allie also found a reasonable sublet in "The City."  

I'm very excited for her and maybe a little bit jealous.  I worked in San Francisco as a paralegal in my mid-twenties, and it is a very exciting place to be as a young adult.  Congratulations, Allie!

Almost that time of year again

 Yes, Thanksgiving is coming up, and Christmas is never far behind, but I'm talking about hunting season, which starts this Saturday.  More than half a million deer hunters are expected to head to the Wisconsin woods this year. The Department of Natural Resources estimates that the ten day gun season contributes $1 billion to our state economy.  

Bow season has already started, but I generally continue my hikes until gun season.  I have to admit that a recent incident in Kettle Moraine State Forest gave me pause.  A horse was shot with an arrow--while a person was riding it.  The rider wasn't injured, but the horse had to be put down.

This week, I went to Gibraltar Rock twice at pre-dawn.  Hiking in the dark is almost a guaranteed way to find solitude.  By the time that I reached the top, the sun was just coming up.

Normally, we head to Kentucky for Thanksgiving for a big family gathering.  In this year of the pandemic, it will just be the three of us at home.  Instead of having a big turkey, we are going to have a duck with lots of sides.  I doubt that that anything will go to waste.

I've read that some states are experiencing grocery store shortages.  Not here yet.  We do seem to be running out of staffed hospital beds. The problem is that they are running out of healthy staff, not beds.  We have heard that at least one area hospital isn't routinely testing its staff anymore.  Only staff with symptoms gets tested. 

I've got to take Justin to the doctor for a flu shot this week, and then he has outpatient surgery scheduled for the following week. Julia has to take him for a drive-thru Covid test before the surgery can happen.  Allie is getting lots of interviews in California, but nothing has clicked into a job yet. 

Seeing Things in New Light

One of the reasons that I like to travel is in order to see and experience new things.  It's easy to forget that there are still a lot of new things to discover close to home.  

There's a town just east of Lodi called Poynette, which isn't that different from Lodi.  The two towns have a lot in common. Most of the people in both towns are conservative Republicans. Both have a Piggly Wriggly grocery store.  Both are small towns surrounded by a lot of natural beauty.  

However, many people choose to focus on things that separate us.  

Callie and Elvis, barely tolerating each other

 

Our schools are better.  Our sports teams are better.  Those folks are rednecks.  These are some of the things I've heard over the years. 

This week I went to Pauquette Park in downtown Poynette to start my daily hike.  Somehow, despite visiting that park countless times, I never noticed the small stone next to the parking lot.

Huh.  Poynette should have been Pauquette, except for someone's bad handwriting.  When I got home, I got on the Wisconsin Historical Society website and found out a few things about Mr. Pauquette.  He was half-Indian and born in Missouri in 1796.  Pauquette moved to Portage, Wisconsin in 1818.  For several years he worked for the American Fur Company and operated a trading post.  He was fluent in French, English and several Indian languages.  Serving as a translator for General Dodge, Pauquette was killed by an Indian in 1836.  

Pauquette Park leads to the trailhead for the Rowan Creek Fishery property.  It was a beautiful day, so I was concerned that the trail might be more crowded than I liked.  As it turned out, I didn't need to worry.  Recent rains left significant parts of the trail underwater.  

 

But the trail was better than it looked. Once I tiptoed through the water and mud, the ground rose a bit and was mostly dry.  We didn't see another soul during the entire hike.  We did see something else that I have never seen before, despite hiking this trail dozens of times.  

In my defense, there was no sign or stone to mark the spot.  There was an unmarked path that I probably never noticed when the foliage was full.  Even with the leaves fallen, I almost didn't see it, blended in with the trees.

I have no idea what the story is with this wood carving in the middle of the woods of this public property, but finding it made my day.  We hung out for a bit there and then here.

Another great day for a hike.

Vote

 Every blog should have at least one very short post...

View from the Edge

Self-Improvement

I don't have any stellar hikes to blog about this week.  The weather has changed, and hunting season is underway.  This time of year, I basically have two hikes.  The first one is a City of Lodi walk that occurs before dawn.  The second is my country road walk which is only safe to do during daylight hours.  I've been able to get my five miles in each day,  which makes Callie happy and keeps me from getting too fat.  

Things are also slow on the brewing front.  After keeping my kombucha culture alive and well for about a year, I've decided to shut that down until at least spring.  I just wasn't drinking that much kombucha anymore.

My sourdough culture is doing well, and I use it regularly.  I don't make bread every week, but we have sourdough pancakes at least weekly.

Because I've been mostly home-bound this month taking care of Justin, I have tried to find some things to keep from going stir-crazy.  One of my more successful endeavors was to take a free online course from Yale called, "Moralities of Everyday Life."  As one might expect, it doesn't teach what constitutes a moral decision, but it does spend a lot of time examining the roles that biology and environment play.  Professor Bloom also sorted out the role of values:  care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/oppression.

Another interesting part of the course was a discussion of liberals vs. conservatives.  We know deep down that most Republicans aren't complete idiots, and that most Democrats aren't complete idiots. Sometimes, however, we fail to recognize other people's perspective, which may involve a different weighting of values.   The key to bridging the present divide is to understand viewpoints different from our own. 

That doesn't mean agreeing on every point, but we need to stop thinking of one another as enemies in every context. And we need to listen to other viewpoints so that we can find the common ground upon which we  do agree.  

Speaking of listening, Mary Gauthier, one of my favorite musical artists, played a virtual concert at the Kerrville Folk Festival, which included a talent competition for new folk artists.  They have a youtube web page with a whole lot of good new folk music.  Again, highly recommended if you enjoy the genre. Folk music has come a long way since Peter, Paul, and Mary.  The voices of new folk musicians and songwriters, young and old,  give me another reason for hope during these difficult times.