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.

Olin

As a blank slate "paper town," there were many forces in the early years of Madison's formation that could have taken over and become the city's signature approach to development.  Before the turn of the 20th century and not far beyond, there were two chief competing interests vying for power in frontier cities: factory and manufacturing on one hand, and beautification on the other.  Chicago might well be considered a city that moved in the direction of factories and manufacturing.  Madison, though,

John Olin

through the leadership and insight of a few early settlement visionaries, became a city devoted to its natural resources, parks and "pleasure drives."  If Doty began it all as a visionary founder who would 'plat' an entire city from nothing but raw land and water, it was John Olin who took that plat and promoted early direction for development.  Olin has been deemed a "citizen extraordinaire," not so much because of his personal demeanor (he was cold, austere, and extremely direct with words), but because he devoted the better part of two decades promoting to a community of leaders the absolute need to cherish and uphold the dignity of Madison's natural surroundings.  He somewhat famously remarked that he saw that his job was the "creation of an intelligent public sentiment and the promotion of correct opinions."  Besides being an outstanding professor and lawyer, Olin was president and the driving force behind the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association. "When he began, the city had fewer than four acres of public parks, but when he turned the reins over to others in 1909 the city had 269 acres of parkland and had raised more than $250,000 in donations for the

acquisition, development, and maintenance of parks...he did most of this fund raising by sending out penny postcards to association members, reminding them to send in their annual five-dollar contributions.  Nearly one in ten Madison households belonged to the organization."  Olin created a very focused two-prong initiative to maintain and showcase Madison natural resources; he lifted up the sentiment and civic responsibility of the common man, but he also "persuaded city leaders that Madison required a comprehensive city plan at a time when few had even hear of urban planning."  It was Oin who made the imaginative arrangements to seek out one of, if not the, greatest urban planners of the day, John Nolen.

As a modern observer looks back at these two extraordinary leaders (Doty and Olin, soon to come Nolen), we can begin to understand the sort of roots of civic responsibility that is the true cornerstone of Madison city culture.  A sort of early consciousness of one's place within geography and nature was established.  Despite an understandably tremendous pull toward increased black smoke from factory smoke stacks – there was a very strong

Yahara River and bridge, east Madison, an original project initiated by Olin

tendency during this time to equate the smell of black of smoke with good pure progress – Madison held out and did not give in to the sometimes false logic.  Olin and other leaders embraced the expertise and leadership of early UW professors and put it to real use.  City planning was not merely an act of bureaucratic city officials, but a combined effort between an educated public, visionary leaders, and professorial expertise.  This would come to be known as the "Wisconsin Idea," a hopeful integration of talents from every level of society.

Doty

The eventual building of the epic Madison Civic Center known as the Monona Terrace was decades, if not a full generation, in the making.  Frank Lloyd Wright, UW-Madison alum, and eventual designer of the building never saw it himself, yet this very project, unknown to many who admire his work, consumed more of his time and effort than any other project in his lifetime, which consisted of over 700 buildings or residences.  Placement, timing, type of construction and funding would all play a part in the long and difficult history of a place that now nearly outshines the capital itself in terms of scope and nearness to the waters of Lake Monona.

James Doty would have known and understood the critical positioning of this stretch of shoreline, for

he essentially founded Madison and promoted this area over 18 other candidates as the capital of the state.  As the Native Americans had known previous to Doty, the naturally occurring isthmus between two such generously sized lakes, is not particularly common.  The isthmus back in 1829 was primarily flat prairie with a smattering of oaks, so that to a developer and promoter of the frontier settlement, it might have looked like a handmade gift to build.  Doty created a Capitol plat map,

1836 plat. Square to left center the high point of isthmus and chosen for
sight of capital. Monona Terrace eventually directly south.

laying out blocks in a radial patter, the likes of which was not as common in the U.S. as it was in Europe, in this emphasizing the street structures to build around the high point of the 70 foot hill the capital would be built on and to emphasize the extreme natural views southwest.  It would be down this large corridor of view, once named Monona Drive, now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, that had also sparked Frank Lloyd Wright's imagination, even as a young Madison draftsmen who was at that point commisioned to design boat houses to beautify a shoreline that had been marred by fish shacks.

Riverside Bakery

Ladie's Wafers are the first of what looks like hundreds of French cookie options to come from the French Cookie Book.  As with all things French, it also looks like French cookies are as much about the look of things as the taste or filling-ness of things.  The great chocolate chip cookie is as tantalizing as anything else round and chocolate on earth, but it's not necessarily supposed to be aesthetic as well.  French cookies have swoops, they have layers, they have varying shapes, icings and they have those

pastry bags as pipers and ice cream style cookie scoops so needed to complete.  Voila.  To get started, the authors begin with "this simple cookie...the prototype for many of the fancier cookies...are thin round disks with browned rims that, with a soupçon (very small quantity) of imagination, recall the rope rings used in that game."  Whatever the origin, the Palets de Dames is a stand-by French cookie based off of a creamed butter and sugar batter.

After the equipment arrives, next up, Cats' Tongues

and after that Bruxellois, Brussels Rum Cookies.