Nature Journal

"The ice on the lakes has secured the shores and islands, has adjusted itself to the form it must keep until spring.  The woods are ready, and the zero hour approaches, an even greater silence settles down over the north."
–Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point, "Coming of the Snow"












28 November


Without knowing it, or trying much, the lake changes its art in one night; along its beaches only two months previous, people lounging on its soft sands dipping toes into water and seeing the great pool as a playground, wide, brown, warm, inviting, a gift of recreation and habitat, depending on who or what is using. The coming of the first snows and the canvas tightens, issues a set of differing colors – in the sun not only do the deep browns turn glass blue, but diamonds are everywhere possible, sharp spectrums, churning and catching refractions, leaving the eye to behold new recreations.  In all, the lake is the mystery.

A painting is but a manufactured thing, dry, brittle, representing only other things.  Under the art of the ice, the water still lives.  When the child kicks down the heel onto the thin crust at the shore, it is fun to crack, pick and throw, but it is the visible soft brown folds of the sand below and the deepening a few feet out that is hidden that attracts as well.  How could such an art, so massive, be so quick to form?  Under the weather of a warming day, how could it as easily melt?  Where do the diamonds go?  Part of the the power of the seasons is to see in comparison how small our own brush.

Nature Journal

"In the marsh, long windy waves surge across the grassy sloughs, beat against the far willows.  A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind."
– Leopold, from "November," A Sand County Almanac















22 November


We follow the wind another day. This time, after some bike travel back to the low side of the Oak Trail in the deep valley of north Hixon, we ride south and west toward the RR tracks at the old nature center.  As we slog through the near frozen sodden trail and grass of the golf course, we hear a train approach, heading north, so we stand and wait.  The train slows and stops, the caboose but dead weight one hundred feet south of the old crossover.  We ride over rugged rip rap, carry our bikes over two sets of tracks, looking at the tail end of the train right at eye level, only to find a relatively new chain link fence with no access to the old parking lot.  I heave one bike up over the top.  Parts of the handlebars and gear cables stick in the sockets of the fence and it stays suspended on the other side, so I tempt my luck and try the same with the second bike. It too sticks in the fence and doesn't drop to the ground.  So we climb up and over, land on the ground, then casually pick up the bikes and let them gently to the ground and take to the weaving trail which leads down to the tunnel underneath the overpass.  There's little snow left on the ground, but its blustery, slate gray now, the afternoon sun doing its trick disappearing again over the ridgeline.  An old favorite trail, hugging the shoreline of the great La Crosse River marsh, connects Hixon to the Myrick, and is easy to bike, an occasional bridge

constructed over small gullies.  Out on the water the year's first thin sheen of ice.  A trio of white swans splash in the middle where it is still open water.  Out of the cover of the forest wind slips over the surface of the land unobstructed by anything more than the occasional patch of reeds or deeper in, the goliath cottonwoods.  As the bluffs rise up on either side of the Mississippi, here in the marsh is where the creeks come to filter and grow lush forms all summer.  Here at first freeze you can just about the hear the long exhale of the backwaters as the season rests.

Nature Journal: Bliss Road

"The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playful swirls, and the wind hurries on."  – Leopold, from "November," A Sand County Almanac














21 November

With all of the Hixon Forest Trails available in November, when you try Oak, up along the near side of the approach of Bliss Road, you know you're taking off a few degrees and that the day just got colder.  The sun coats the south face and its grand monuments of limestone as if a favored friend.  That warm blanket coats as well the soft underbelly of much of the Forest Hills Golf Course, the first thin snow stays puffy, bright, always alluring to the cross country skier who knows that once the tracks are laid  it's nothing more than smooth skimming over the greased surface of the artificially rolling hillocks.  Up here on Oak, however, the north face, it's a denser world, at least in the growing months – fern, Jack O' the Pulpit, some near old growth white oak that needs its own forest management scheme for handling overgrowth.  We parked and walked down onto a still leafy trail.  Golden maple leaves and the crusty fly-aways of the oak rattle to surges in the wind like careful instruments then gradually turn dormant again.  The great old trail is lean and narrow.  A few other foot tracks and one large continuous knobby pattern from the morning has formed a map of previous motion.  It's always nice to know that others take their chances with the cold too and chase the sunspots that dazzle off the open points of limestone ledges. Those then point to the bright sea of the course below their cold horizons.  We know that oaks of any species were virtually wiped off the face of the state of Wisconsin over a century ago, so here, inside the near-old growth, is as close at it gets to the raw wildness that always seems to teem in less organized patterns: fallen timber coated at its base with a rim of fungus and leaning over the entrance of a naturally forming gully which no doubt has seen many times a violent stream of run-off from the steep contours above, cut out by Bliss Road.  Rocks have fallen over the years down this north slope and now hold a light snow over their broad backs.  By mile two, the woods are no longer about the city of LaCrosse, but about a particular type of forest, serene here, no movement, not a cardinal or deer this afternoon, not a bluejay, not even a squirrel storing hurriedly its last pile of nuts now that mother nature has sent her first warning shot over the bow of the bluffs.  As we reach the bottom and cross back inward toward the golf course, there's less cover and the wind makes itself known, biting at the earlobes and reminding the neck of its own innocence.  The cold of white eyes match that of the ground below and instinct looks upward toward cover.  Old Oak Trail is no longer quite as friendly and we have to toe straight up over slippery leaves and lose our breath, now itself coated, brittle and reminding of just what's in charge of the north slope.

Loraine

It would have been nearly impossible to predict, but by the early 1920's Madison had taken over as the state's top spot for visiting conventions over its larger sister city Milwaukee.  Located in between Chicago and Milwaukee on the southern end and Minneapolis to the north, Madison found ways to attract visitors through its progressive planning, blooming arts and entertainment scene and, as always, its purposefully preserved natural beauty.  This newfound interest in the small outpost city, can be best evidenced by parallel growth in its early hotel industry.  "Never in Madison's history were so many hotel rooms added in such a short time.  In just four months in 1924 Madison's Capitol Square suddenly boasted 450 new hotel rooms.

The million-dollar 25-room Loraine Hotel opened in May, and the $300,000, 200-room Belmont Hotel opened in September.  Business at the Loraine was so good that its owners added 150 rooms just a year after it opened."  Only a few short decades after its very inception, Madison, in many ways as a result of the inexhaustible work from a trio of key leaders  – Doty, Olin, and John Nolen, famous city-planner) – had

John Nolen, recruited by John Olin to plan Madison, was renown 
for his abilities in the U.S.

become a known destination nation-wide.  Early patronage by the likes of Mae West, Ethel Barrymore, Harry Truman stayed at the Loraine.  Frank Lloyd Wright himself, the UW-Madison Alum. and dreamer for the eventual Monona Terrace, stayed at the hotel, stranded in a snowstorm in 1957.  At the time of being built, the Loraine became a subject of controversy because of its projected height.  Nolen, in his 1909 all-encompassing plan for the city of Madison, desired for there to be a height restriction on all future building in the city so that the prestigious state capitol

building would never be overshadowed by sure-to-come skyscrapers.  The initial legal decision went against this view-preserving stance because such actions should only be struck, the courts said, if a safety and health issue was at stake.  "Anti skyscraper forces appealed the case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and won.  Since 1924 all buildings have conformed to the height restrictions.  Thanks to Nolen and his disciples, the dome of Wisconsin's capitol will forever dominate the Madison skyline, a rare but dramatic instance in which beauty triumphed over business."  Today, the Loraine still stands as business office space and luxury condominiums.  The Capitol dominates the city skyline from every observable angle.