Piccadilly Lilly: Back by Lunch

It might have been the early morning air or the too few hours of sleep from the short night before, but Kat did not to think very long about the note.  She looked over to the other side of the runway at Higgs's Airport office – no smoke rising from the morning wood stove yet – took the note back into the diner, flipped it over and wrote to Merle "back by lunch."  Merle would be in by 6:30 to start in the kitchen. If she saw him, she wouldn't get back in the Cessna,

that much she knew, so she hustled, almost sneaking, back to the plane, sat down in the pilot's seat, closed herself in, took a deep breath, looked out over the empty flat of the runway, quickly reacquainted herself with the instrument panel she knew well, hit the mix, pushed the carb, switch on, skipped the prime, hit the throttle and finally turned the master on and she was off, lifting at the column to gently rise up off the runway into the brightening turquoise.

Even though she had never flown as pilot herself before, she might very well have been the most experienced non-pilot of all the travelers at Lone Rock.  She was introduced to planes by her grandfather when she was young.  One Christmas, when she was nine, grandpa and dad were proud to have land the grand dame fortress Piccadilly at Lone Rock as part of a heritage tour.  Because they had been part of rebuilding the old bomber in Chicago, they were allowed to decorate the fuselage Christmas morning and Kat opened gifts huddled around a short but real pine tree decorated and sprayed with fake snow.

She'd logged hundreds of hours over in the other seat of her dad's Cessna '66.  She knew weather, wind and distance and most importantly could feel the interplay of machine and flight as well as anybody.  The morning had brightened.  She looked down at Lone Rock and had lost the details on the ground but gained the broad shapes of landscape geometry of Sauk County.

Piccadilly Lilly
(Totally untrue story of a totally true airport diner)

Lone Rock Airport, not far out of Spring Green, suited its name, thankfully thought Kat, on these quiet early mornings as she regularly got to the Piccadilly by 5:15. Just enough time to turn the thermostat back up to 70 and feel the one-room diner warm-up from corner to corner. She flipped through a handful of order sheets from Shel's County Meat, scratched out a few stock needs for next day's menu, then stirred up some of Merle's homemade oatmeal (dried diced-up back bacon and cubed apples was his secret). All this before 8:30 when the first wave (one, two, sometimes three) of single props buzzed up to the door step, noses bent like puppies sniffing people food.

This morning the body of a Cessna sat out in the lot glowing white as bone in the remaining moonlight.  A string of runway lights mirrored off of the windshield and down onto water streaks off the runway like set candles bright against the dark cement.

Kat set down her papers on the hostess podium and walked out to see if it was Ray's '67.  Ray had been flying-in daily from Waunakee for two years now, since Kat opened up here at the corner of the airport.  Ray wouldn't necessarily call if he didn't plan on flying-in for breakfast here and there, but the next morning you could overhear him telling the retired regulars all the who's the what's, where's when's and why's.  It was Ray and Kat's dad who helped rebuild the old Piccadilly B-17 Flying Fortress

way back and which inspired the name of the diner.  Kat hadn't heard anything this time around, and she knew Ray hadn't landed last night before closing.  She walked up to the small pilot's door and opened the latch.  The two-seater was empty, no doubt, the instrument panel completely dark except for the

dull hazy light of the outdoor lamp from out back.  On the passenger seat sat a white piece of paper though, so she stepped up, leaned in, picked it up and all it said was "fly me."

Pemmican at Fire Lake 

I found out the hard way that you have to choose wisely when to order the heavy fuel concoction of 'small plate' menu items Bison Bone Marrow and Lamb Fritter

when at the Radisson Blu's Fire Lake, a new contemporary northwest themed restaurant

connected to the Mall of America.  At at least fifty percent fat content, marrow, along with a shredded selection of meat, is a bit like eating a solid version of two Red Bulls, no caffeine needed – the protein and fat, even though a small portion, plenty, thank you, to keep a day long shopper moving those feet forward and up and down the escalators.  A good idea...if you ate it in the morning, more smartly, like the Voyageur of old used to.

The French Canadian Voyageur wasn't exactly shopping the fur section at Nordstrom's, but he could use the staying power just the same. He would wake at 2 or 3 every morning, pack up a makeshift camp along the riverbank – blankets and supplies protected under a birch bark canoe or larger York boat – douse the fire coals, gulp some chicory coffee

then head down stream for a standard 14-hour day of rigorous paddling (55 strokes per minute expected by the boss)

stopping only to portage at a shallow turn or for a much earned pipe break every hour.  Because these 'travelers' were neither hunters or gatherers, they had to depend on the prospect of trade with natives along the midwestern Red River Trail or more likely on sources of highly-preservable foods such as salt pork, or pemmican, a Native term for ground meat mixed with animal fat.

Voyageurs would carry their precious pemmican in rawhide sacks known as Tauraux (bulls). When the fat was from the udder, the sacks were known as "Tauraux fins" (fine bulls). But the really good stuff, "Tauraux Grand," was a mixture of meat with bone marrow instead of ordinary tallow.  I hope I don't stand out next time visiting MOA as I walk past Starbucks with my own rawhide sack of animal fat slung over my shoulder.

Hinterland Extended

The sky was so thickly overcast you could hang your helmet on it – rain on its way, again – and the forest so utterly empty of anybody else, bikers or otherwise, that I thought I might lose the trail to fog heading up to the peak of 'Porky Point' 

and run smack into Kassel Wilhelmsoe, the truest of hinterlands, Hesse.  

Levis Trow Mound, the real place, between Neilsville and Merrillan WI, is considered one of the great trail networks

in the midwest for mountain bikers, 

cc skiers and snowshoers alike.  It is a flat lowland experience, meandering through soggy 'swamp cuts,'  raw, silent, timber and brush landscapes miles off-highway, that open, when you are lucky, to widening views of the panoramic Clark County forest.

It's also a highland experience, rising up through rocky paths sometimes conveniently cut directly through limestone (don't frac this, please),

or onto some very creative specialty trails which, if not watched closely,

could lead you a little bit more intimately into those imaginary Kassel hinterlands than you might like.