Quarry Lane

If the movie Terrible No Good Very Bad Day has anything to teach that poor and most likely undervalued creature known as the La Crosse family, which finds itself yearly slogging desperately through the dead of winter during the longest short month known to the history of all calendars, it's that you might just as well expect to find a crocodile waiting for you inside the entrance of your house as anything else, or that the kangaroo, at large in your backyard as part of the well intended Australian outback party for your 12 year old, will drop kick you on your keester just as easily as

look at you. Winter in Wisconsin is a time for packing in as much daily trouble, sickness, destruction and overall menace as you can possibly find (what else is there to do?) and then always a little more, only so then to be confined, involuntarily, in your house to dwell not only on the events that have transpired, but those most certainly lurking in the ready.  It might all start with the teen-commandeered Toyota

whose tracks back directly into a mailbox purposefully shaped as conspicuously as possible to a cobblestone fortress, or later, a similarly teen-commandeered car backing into a closed garage, pushing it out like a crushed soda can.

All businesses will assuredly lose half their workforces, hospitals might become like second homes, pink eye, vomit, bm movements again monitored as you might a babe in toilet training.  Necks and backs, now contracted to muscles as stiff as plastic, will keep local chiropractors rubbing fists together with the prospect of job security from here until forever.

When pipes aren't freezing or faucets forming icicles, heaters are burning themselves up on the coldest night of the year mostly because they too are just plain bored by the monotony of churning daily with little respite.  The answer to it all?  Sunny Florida.  Wait.  Cancelled.  Check.  There is a wonderful scene at the end of the Terrible Day movie when the father, who has just made a scene in a Japanese restaurant as a flaming pirate, walks out into the alley and finally caves in to admit there are such things as bad days.  This is nothing.  Make the movie Winter in Wisconsin and we have ourselves something closer akin to real saga.

On to Bastogne, WWII

When looked at closer, WWII becomes a larger narrative of mass Allied surges and counter surges.  Following more specifically the testy relationship between Eisenhower and Patton, WWII tells the story of two forces constantly at odds with one another: Eisenhower, the coalition builder, who always had to administer to all Armies, Navies and Air Forces at all times; and Patton, the old Olympic athlete, who wanted to single-handedly (with his 3rd Army) win the war not by holding any ground in Europe but by gaining it as fast as possible, keeping sights on the throat of the industrial center of Germany itself.

Knowing this conflict all too well by the time of D-Day at Normandy, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery decided not to allow Patton in on the initial storming of the beaches for fear that Patton would not heed caution and certainly would not be tactically inclined to merely storm German fortresses in and around Omaha Beach.  Patton was not let loose with his Third Army until later, but from that point on he made the greatest and most positive impact of all the other commanders.

Patton's Third was commanded differently – sometimes, supplies willing, taking fifty miles in a day, town after town in France. The Third took the offensive and kept the retreating Germans so off guard that all the chief German commanders on the Western Front came to most fear Patton's resolve.  The German Army had been badly dismantled at Normandy and were in complete disarray.  Patton knew this.  While the rest of the Armed Forces literally had to wait for each other on their way toward Germany, Patton took ground quickly and gobbled up German positions.  Over and over again, when looking back at the D-Day (+) days of the War, German soldiers admitted the Allies could have taken virtually as much as they wanted through more like-minded forceful initiative.

A case of terrible irony for Patton, though, was that he outran not only his supply line and the rest of his Allied commanders, but he outran Eisenhower's 'broad-front' war strategy: the coalition as a whole was to attack the Rhine and German industrial center.  Days, weeks, months might go by for the Third Army without nearly enough fuel to continue Patton's offensive and he became bogged down in the dreadfully rainy Lorraine Region of France and there lost the initiative.  Some 1,800 troops died during this slog from Trench Foot alone.  Patton quipped that he hoped after the War that the Germans be given this part of the country as due punishment it was such an inhospitably muddy terrain.  Allies would learn later that this was the worst winter in 38 years.  Worst of all, and the very thing Patton anticipated, was that the Germans, sensing an ease of tension due to lack of Allied supplies, formulated the largest counteroffensive in the entire war at the Ardenne Forest, which would later come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge, where, again, Patton would heed the call, take the initiative, and roll north in what would become the Third Army's finest hour.

Pork Chop with Apple Cream Sauce

This informal weeknight dish can be put together in about as long as it takes to cook a good thick pork chop, but the results taste like something you might get at your favorite little hard to find French restaurant.  For prep, cut up two Granny Smith apples thinly – in any size that you eventually would like to eat

them.  As I cooked this batch of apples, I found that they do break down in the pan, especially with an added liquid, very quickly, so too thin and the apple loses its texture and crispness quickly if not careful.  Mince up as much of a shallot or two as you like – shallots are a more potent onion than a standard white, yellow or red, but by the same token, if browned to a crisp, adds crystals of flavor in a sauce.

Feeding kids, I've found you never want to overpower with any onion, but at the same time, used sparingly, even a kid might comment that the dish, whatever it is, was better because of it.  While browning the shallots in one pan, place the thick portioned chops, spiced with salt, pepper, and the small but aromatic small leaves of thyme, onto a medium to high pan heat, making sure that the chop creates a brown exterior, but not so much heat that the two inch center doesn't get done.  I usually go

for a barely visible fleshy pink color even in a chop, which ensures that we don't get the old school dried out version, but instead a juicy version, which makes tummies smile and kids ask the question when they get pork chops again.  The meat preparation is important because there is a funky sauce that is going to go over them and that is the challenge of presentation.  As the chops cook, add the apples into the pan with the shallots and let the slices pick up the bits of brown onion until you can feel the slices soften, then a cup of apple cider (recipe calls for hard cider), and let reduce to something closer to a thick sauce, then chop up four or five softened prunes, add those, and again wait for them to break down some.  The final step is the part that turns this very simple recipe from a fruit and chop combo to something a bit more gourmet – add a cup of heavy cream to the apple, shallot, cider, prune combination and let that thicken.

The richness of the cream works wonders on the acids and fruits from the liquid.  Pour the sauce sparingly over the kids' portions so not to overwhelm the simplicity and edibility of the chop.  If done well, the fork with a slice of chop on it will seek out every last dollop of the apple cream sauce.  No need to talk much about onions, prunes or cream, just that this is a 'repeatable dish."

Sand Dollar

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
    –Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea"









The old man's granddaughter could not have articulated such things, but the raw beach sunshine which had shone on her cheeks as she landed her small kayak onto the shore of the Caya had brightened her mood.  What seemed like the long paddle from one island to another was over and her arms, still so young, were not sore.  She thought of it little as they approached a small inlet of the shore where there were no people, just the bleached out dunes and driftwood and the shells, astonishingly, several feet thick.  The grandfather, youthful feeling himself now in his limbs, had already set the nose of his kayak deeper onto the shore.  "By god, Zeus has arrived!"

He had kidded some with his granddaughter before, that he spent his life as a sheller, but he certainly knew enough that these conditions upon the shoreline were the magical moments that shellers do dream of.  Sometimes, he had heard, the shells here on the Captiva, Sannibel, Caya Costa shoreline could grow upwards of four feet thick – most certainly, very possibly, the best shelling in the world because of the islands' unusual orientation to the ocean.  "I see here many, many dollars!" he said quickly, filing through a hand full with the same sort of bright eyes the treasure hunters would hold.

"Dollars?" the granddaughter asked mildly, now, quite quickly, inside her element of warmth and sunshine and this bold treasure chest that surrounded the both of them against the silence of a shoreline that seemed created just for them.  

    "Yes, choose as many as you would like.  One for me, a hundred for you.  Don't forget one for grandmother though.  I will tell you right now that if you mention sand dollar to her you had better produce one. Ask me how I know."  The young girl could only imagine what this meant.  Behind them, the silhouette of a regatta lined the horizon starkly against the setting of the sun.  The splash of the bright water was not something you put words to but came to absorb and come to love without thinking of it.  A beach with many people was one thing; a beach with nobody else, as here on the Caya, was something of the imagination.

"Grandfather, I would like to make a deal with you," the girl said now, much more absorbed than the grandfather with the treasure before her.  The ideals of dolls or toys or TV had long left her.  What was quite real was the jewelry lining the beach for free.  "I will find you the Junonia for your sand dollars," she said, not looking at him, but stooping over in what was called the 'Sanibel Stoop," which is the automatic obsession of aligning the mind with the sand and the shells.  

   "Oh, those are one in a million though, please understand."  Few had been found, let alone silly novices in these arts.  "But yes, if you say so, I would gladly give you my dollars for the Junonia."  The sun had settled down into a pink plateau up above the watercolors of the sea.  Sand under the feet felt warm and formed tightly around each toe.  

"I think tomorrow it would be easy to paint the shells we find," she said.  The grandfather smiled.  If it was tomorrow that the great earth should take him, his work would have been done.  

Pine


The ancient Chinese poets used
to carve their poems into pines
then disappear into the halo mist.
They would ride up to the rim
of mountains with mouths full of words,
each one a rock, a moon, or crow
swinging down onto craggy rock,
its claws' scratch loud against
the sounds of nothing else but breath.
There against the robin's egg blue
of the sky is where he imagined
the children might someday sit and overlook
the goliath of city or bent village.
Off in the distance the glass shore
of some frozen lake, the charm
of a windmill singing old tin.
What better voice for audiences
who climb the world to hear from
than the sturdy rock pine whose trunk
rises up from patches of paper snow
to instruct all there is to know?

Pinus Strobus

"When Winter has locked up the soil and dispersed the birds and denuded the hardwoods of their leaves, one needs to be assured that things will one day grow again.  At such a time a young pine, green above the snow, talks louder than many voices."

–"Pines Above the Snow," Aldo Leopold

The beauty of the high-country, so to speak, in the coulee area is that the landscape – geography, species and perspective – quickly changes from the low country.  Here in the La Crosse area, we are geographically defined / blessed by the Mississippi River Valley, which offers us both the low-lying marshlands and the relatively high-flying bluff lands.  For those who explore the high-country, we come to know a different, and dare say, less known pattern of rock and vegetation.  Glaciated sandstone meets pines; white birches meet the blood red dash of a solo cardinal; hackberry the barbed wire farm fence set from previous generations.

The favorite of all, though, has got to be the naturally occurring pine trees that sprout up at the rooftops of limestone displaying a hardiness, a rawness, that quickly transports you from suburb to the realm of real forest.

There can be hardly a doubt that the allure of the pine is that it's imperfect angles tell a story of ancient survivability and beauty at once.  To find oneself under the erratic dome of the pine stand, especially one that grows out of stone, is to find something, finally, peculiarly, purely natural.

One percent of old-growth white pine forests still stand in America.  Wisconsin used to BE white pines.  We eliminated those forests altogether through a period of lumbering history that might equal nothing short of a brief moment of earth time.  White Pines nationwide are now a species on the extinction list and a hand full of scientists have to work full careers just to conjure enough resources to study them properly out west so to even get them on the proper list.

Expose yourself to the gnarled beauty of the pine, learn that its Native American symbolism – that it was considered, once, the peace tree, and eaten during periods of starvation for its abundance of vitamin C – and it doesn't take much effort to find yourself in awe of pinus strobus.

Chicken & Apples in a Pot

The Sunday meal had to be Chicken & Apples in a Pot, you see, grandfather said, as he trussed the back legs of the fryer with the longest sprig of rosemary that he could find.  "There are things that you miss out on when you cook the chicken in pieces, only so many juices can be maintained."  To boil the harvest of the garden underneath the well-butchered chicken is, without doubt, the French peasant meal to end all others.

This was nothing more than one more lesson that had been imparted onto my memory.  I did not go to the culinary school proper, but I always wondered if that was quite necessary, surrounded, as we were, by the daily harvest of the growing seasons, the chickens, the cows, and the perennial attention of the 'growing' god itself, the sun.  Grandfather took few tasks lightly, but when addressing the "Old French Recipes," as he called them – often with a slight tear of sad joy in the corner of his eyes – he thought little and moved through the mechanics of a recipe as if he were the mother of an infant changing a diaper, wringing a cloth, or tending to a warming fire.

"You see," he said, "where we grew in Toulouse was a vineyard before that is what we called them.  We would hang our feathered chicken for a time over smoke in the smokehouse out back, the very same smoke that our ancestors used to infuse into the grapes of the wine itself, and let the extra drippings release for only a short amount of time.  Once you have the chicken inside into the kitchen, now we season it, like this, inside and out, cut up your two apples in fours then stuff the cavity with them, along with sprigs of rosemary and thyme.  Cut a head of garlic lengthwise and stuff that into the cavity as well.  Can you see the aroma?  Can you smell the sweetness and earth come together?

When you fill the cavity with the harvest, you understand that that will move its way up into the meat and into the skin.  The juices are more than the meat, but the vegetables as well."  The cavity had now been fully stuffed with the apples and the herbs.  "I want you to brown these pearl onions, then add the cut mushrooms and then the baby carrots.  We used to make sure parts of our patch of the garden with carrots were over seeded so that they would come up small.  Use these."  Outside the door of the kitchen the donkey brayed.  The herding dog came wagging up to the stoop of the entrance thirsty from a days work.  "Ahh, as I have said, hunger carries in the wind."  The full chicken was placed onto the vegetables then the chicken stock poured on the pot on the top of the stove until a boil came.  "I can see it steaming now.  Add a pinch of salt.  Some pepper.  Smell the thyme.  Now we will test the hunger of the farm by placing this into the oven for an hour and half.  Our test is to see which of the herbs we taste first."