Copeland



Some hopeful signs of spring upon us, the Cactus League season in Arizona over and our

Milwaukee Brewers a legitimate dark horse contender in the N.L. Central this season...what better way to build a bridge of interest between the dying of the boomtown sawmills and another long time La Crosse institution, baseball, than mention a word about our grandaddy city park.   

Not a lot of information is given concerning the advent of Copeland Park.  We do know, however, that Frederick Allen Copeland was the owner of the La Crosse Lumber Co. – one of the primary sawmills in the boom years of the late 1800's – and one-time mayor of La Crosse 1891-1892.  At the end of the boom, he donated the land along the Black River that would become Copeland Park. 30 years later, in 1936, a wading pool was installed to allow kids to keep cool and have fun in the

summer.  "A year later tennis courts were added.  After a few years of just land, the city decided to install a curb and gutters on the east side of Copeland Park Road (1941).  In  more modern times, baseball fans have come know Copeland as the highlight venue for hosting Stars of Tomorrow little league championships, Legion baseball, and now, appropriately named, the Loggers semi-professional team, bringing to La Crosse a steady stream of

ball players often on the cusp of pro stardom with names like Max Sherzer (2013 Cy Young Award Winner!) and Chris Sale, pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, among many others.

On a summer night, overlooking our river heritage at the Black River, as we watch from the stands of a recently made-over ball park, we might better appreciate the field's nickname "The Lumberyard."

Weeknight Cooking

Hamsteaks with Asparagus-Rice Salad

Of all the cookbooks I've bought and looked at over the years, it still seems hard to find The One that really matches my interest in cooking relatively easy but gourmet weeknight meals.  During the past year, however, I think I finally have in a little section in the Food Network Magazine called "Weeknight Cooking," an assortment of just those sorts of recipes I've been looking for.  Out of the ten in April's issue, for example, I feel like I probably could make each one and that they would all go over well here at home: Chicken Rice Soup, Foil-Packet Chicken Puttanesca, Cumin Pork with Beans, Oven Fried Fish with Potato Salad, Turkey Sausage Tacos, and others.   There were a few things that I thought stood out in the Ham Steaks with Asparagus-Rice Salad recipe on that list.  First of all, it calls for a rice concoction that I never would have thought of – cooked rice, mayonnaise, sour cream and some bits of chives and mustard.

My own batch didn't come out quite with the crisp (not gummy) texture that I normally like with rice, but the flavor was a perfect support for the chopped asparagus, which had been also boiled along with the rice, soft and pungent.  Underneath this bed of rice mix was simple hamsteaks, cooked on a hot pan for sear, and then asked to coat with brown sugar for a cooked glaze.  This very simple final step, sugaring, made a big difference, and the natural saltiness of the ham contrasted the sweet of the sugar.  Ham is one of the most potent meat selections that we have.  It makes sense then this gourmet concept would then be served with a much more subtle flavoring of asparagus rice.

Kid eyes weren't shocked; kid mouths opened and ate; there were soft mutterings around the table that sounded something like "that was pretty good."

Ingredient Fact:  Asparagus is often used as a companion planting to tomatoes.  The tomato plant

repels the asparagus beetle, and the asparagus may repel some harmful root nematodes that affect tomato plants.

Boom


The existence of natural resources can only partially explain the success of any given town.  When you live in La Crosse, you come to recognize that although all of us do experience some connection with nature, there is also a sort of industriousness here that seems woven into the cultural fabric.  If it seems that every third building in La Crosse is a bank, a bar, a church

or that one out of every ten trucks passing in traffic is for a different construction company, it has to be understood that we started as a lumber  boom town that survived the eventual total collapse of the white pine forest because of the industry and workforce that had grown up around the sawmills.

Boom, the term, has several meanings.  It can characterize huge economic momentum – often a town that starts from nothing based on the abundance of some natural resource. But also, it refers to a boom of logs, or a long platform of cut and floating logs to be milled.  La Crosse began as a fur trading outpost, but very quickly after it became the double boom of lumber (especially white pine in Wisconsin) and land speculation.

"Felling the timber and building sawmills at and near the Black River Falls were begun successfully in 1839.  The Mormon lumbering operations there (1841-1844) formed a part of the earliest La Crosse history....Myrick gave in his autobiography a list of eleven mills on the Black and its tributaries....In the La Crosse area the first sawmill was built in 1852 by local residents: Timothy Burns, F.M. Rublee, John S. Simonton, and S.T. Smith.  It stood at the southwest corner of Second and Badger Streets. This mill was the first manufacturing plant in the village of La Crosse that used steam power and was the first steam sawmill in the Black River territory."

We can imagine, by any commercial standards of any time in history, the sheer numbers associated with this industry and La Crosse's early years, by considering an annual output of its mills as less than 20,000,000 board feet in 1860 to nearly 178,000,000 (peak years) of 1890-1899.  The total number of men working in timber in 1899 was 1,785; by 1905 a mere 34 men worked here in milling.  Along with this boom came many many things, but two that might stand out to show us our city roots are: a seasonal work pattern based on lumbering, in which lumbermen could ride the rivers and mill from spring through fall, but would 'go into the woods' during the winter months to chop and harvest.  The other, more unfortunately, was, frankly, the absolute greedy nature of the timber industry of the time.

 Lumber practices in those early days of exploitation were nothing more than harvest and move on, harvest and move on, literally leaving total decimation behind.

The more board feet cut, the more profits.  Men worked day and night in order to raft or railroad lumber south or back east.  Some thought the resource was ever-replenishing, "The pine of the Wisconsin forests is practically inexhaustible."  This type of thought process broke many sawmill towns.  Not only did it take generations for any kind of timber regrowth, but Wisconsin, for many years had an almost impossible time selling itself to immigrants because stump fields made for very poor farm fields.  The cautionary tale of the boom is bittersweet for us, bitter because we did not start with a strong sense for resource preservation, but sweet because our town survived where others did not due to our work ethic, manufacturing, perseverance, and an ability to learn: Wisconsin has become one of the true state leaders in the practice of

natural resource conservation.  Blue collar La Crosse has come to embody, in many ways, a hopeful motto that labor itself might be good, but wise labor is even better.

Postcards from Mexico

Oriole Restaurant

Only a short walk from the beach, Oriole is an open air grill.  We ate here often because it was thirty feet from the pool and extremely casual.  Little kids melt down at the pool, need some food quick, and head in here.  Not so little kids get salty and hungry, dash in, and before you know it a gourmet burger on the way, or a light batch of prawn tacos and some guacamole.

Kaffeine Cafe as seen from the roof of our room

The sheer luck of getting located in a rooftop room overlooking the coffee shop was better than good. The smell of the morning brew rising up to your room in the air, itself bright and blue by 7 a.m., and a symphony (or cackle) of palm-nesting birds made mornings a time to look forward to.

Flavours Restaurant

Flavours restaurant was hoppin' at all hours since this happened to be (as advertised) a family friendly resort, and this the only buffet on the grounds.  We could see from our rooftop suite the red-eyed parents of infants and toddlers pushing their strollers towards Flavours very early in the morning.  Once in, the cooking was tremendous and fresh: chicken and beef satay on sticks by night, hand-picked, made on the spot omelets by morning.  The surroundings surprisingly intricate and cool to look at.

Las Palmas Poolside Bar and Grill

A long narrow pool curved along the center of the resort complexes offering two swim up bars,

Lizards and Las Palmas.  At the back end of each there was a little cantina in the shade.  Families would sit in half submerged poolside lounge chairs then wade over to the bar for food and beverage.  A constant breeze swept through the palm trees.  Once in awhile a faint cry or giggle from a poolside infant or toddler.

Tsuke Japanese Restaurant

If every city had a Tsuke Japanese Restaurant (or two, maybe three), we'd all be happier campers.  Authentic Japanese food is an adventure in micro-portions and fresh crisp ingredients.  Here

we chopsticked a little bit of everything from Vietnam phyllo wraps, lemongrass pork, fish roe sushi, cold calamari, to the gigantic hit of the entire trip – Jan's new favorite sweet goodness – coconut gelato (haylado).

Rooftop dining

Very possibly though the best meal of the entire trip was room service breakfast the first morning on the rooftop of our own room under the pagoda sun screen.  The mini pancake, the banana granola, and the simple hash brown tastes that much better underneath the morning Mayan sunshine.

Postcards from Mexico

'The Hut' in the far distance on the water horizon (Julia with hand on rail)

I'm not sure how better to get to know a beach than to live on the milky blue water itself for a day.  The Azul Fives offered a rentable wooden thatched hut for a day, we took the opportunity and sat hovering over the gently rolling watercolors for 8 hours.  The hut was equipped with speakers

for iPod music, a small bar, a dining table and two large 'sea-beds' for lazing.  The hut rose up from

the water at the far end around six feet and you could either jump directly off the platform, a bit beyond the extended buoys into ten feet of water, or slowly climb down a metal ladder into the water where a giant artificial reef sat at the bottom for the purpose of smoothing out the incoming waves.  The girls spent hours climbing the reef, which we came to call the 'whale' because of what it looked and felt like standing on it,

'The Whale' artificial reef in the water off the corner of the hut

and timing the crest of waves for a fun ride.  We might sit in the sun and read for twenty minutes, cook half of our bodies, spin, cook the other half, then walk to the diving platform, jump in and snorkel over the reef to cool off.  At noon, Gabriel, our attendant for the day, took our order from Sea Olive Restaurant, and came back with salmon, flank steak burgers, tuna, and Julia's

favorite resort guacamole (even the tomatoes and onion were good!). Carly by that time in the trip had had too much sun and was forced to wear a sunhat and shades wherever she went, including the 'whale,' but it probably saved her from

fully blistering.  Later Abby got a facial treatment at a beachside spa hut and Jan did, as she hoped for, a little bit of nothing.

Postcards from Mexico

Rooftop of Sky Suite at Azul Fives Playa del Carmen 

It never ceases to amaze that in a span of four hours a traveler can go from the dull gray hues of the subarctic midwest to the splashing blues and whites of the Caribbean along the Yucatan Peninsula.

Sun beds, a table and self-fillable jacuzzi on the open rooftop

It also never ceases to amaze how unusual it is to land in Cancun with such high expectations of the sun city and countryside only to be confronted with an hour-long taxi drive to your resort along a highway through a Mexican wasteland consisting of shells of old business buildings, residential shacks, and one pump gas stations.  Cars abandoned along the road simply look too hot to work.  Cerveza signs (Mexican water) litter every corner of every block.  Then your driver takes his turn off the highway

Ground transportation and dancing sunkids

and into the coastline jungle. Before you know it, you reappear as if inside a new world of beach retreat – from third world to out-of-this-world in six blocks.  The Azul Fives in Playa del Carmen is

Infinity pool and swim up bar

the neatest and best thought-out hotel we've ever stayed at.  Uninterrupted white beaches extend back northward to Cancun and south toward Tulum.

Sand beach from the north looking back toward Azul Fives

Directly out the center of the resort, the infinity pool opens to layers of green and blue where a wooden deck extends out to a thatched hut.  No cold here.  At 85 degrees the breeze is welcome.  Reading a

View from rentable hut at resort (Julia on chair)

a book on the beach chair isn't homework.