Wisconsin 3

1. The Garden Under the Blazing Sun, Again.

2. Little Wagon Provided By Our Hosts.

Child #4 had broken his leg in May and had just begun walking again, with a tremendous limp, which prompted our innkeeper to produce this cart for going around the garden trails in. He did not stay in the cart very long however and ending up walking most of the way, being more discomfited by the heat than by his injury.

3. Group Photo of Boys, Cooksville, Wisconsin, 7/2012

It is not always so harmonious as this picture makes it appear, of course, but right now they are really best friends for the most part. They play and sleep and do everything together almost all the time. I do not want to make the obvious prediction and lament that it will not always be so, because maybe it won't be, in every case at least. I don't have a great feel yet for what kind of attitude to the family any of them are likely to develop in adolescence and adulthood. Even by age ten I already felt a great desire to be away from my parents and be alone all the time--I did not have any brothers--and even today though I know it is irrational and petty I hold them responsible enough for my lack of social popularity, my total lack of any talents that would allow me entry into one of the more dynamic sectors of society, and my inability to ever focus on and progress in a serious adult career that I cannot bring myself to behave around them with more than a cold cordiality, and if my wife did not insist on this as my duty I do not think I would speak or have any contact with them at all; certainly I would seek none out. I don't detect any signs of that sort of attitude in these children yet, but I hope I will not be surprised if they should develop such later on. Still, not to be maudlin, but when I bought a ticket for the 580 million dollar lottery drawing my oldest son was concerned that we would win and we would have to move out of our house and he would have to leave his school ('but your new school would instill in you the qualities of casual superiority and domination that will drive your less fortunate social competitors insane with envy', I tried to remonstrate, but he did not get it). This is the same child who wants a manual typewriter for Christmas, so there is truly reason to worry that being raised by me is setting him up for unpleasant disappointments when he gets out somewhat amongst the thrash and brawl of the world, and I think it likely he will make it out there at some point.

4. Wisconsin Has a Distinctive and Well-Situated State Capitol

State capitols are a recurrent theme with us. Children like recurrent themes. We live in one of these cities, and we went to school in another one, so this was a natural one to adopt. There are still quite a few that we have yet to visit in-depth despite literally walking past them on numerous occasions (Boston, Montepelier) or  passing frequently through the towns (Trenton, Harrisburg).

5. Horseplay in the Main Rotunda.

Wisconsin's capitol building is huge. They have their Supreme Court in there as well as the State Library and  several other governmental departments (the historical society?) that have separate homes in other states. The inside is the usual classic marbled and mildly ornate Victorian era U.S. capitol building, though this one has especially attractive antiquated light fixtures and signs.

6. State Street, Outside a Sports-Type Bar That Literary Types Probably Don't Frequent.

State Street connects the capitol building with the University of Wisconsin, to which we walked down and hung out for a while in the Union. Never having attended a regular University of any substantial size, let alone a sports and research colossus like this one, I am always fascinated to visit--just sitting on one of couches near a bathroom I saw three or four academics who exuded 'major league intellectual development' pass through and meet up with graduate students or junior colleagues, very often attractive and driven-looking young women, to take up whatever serious study they were collaborating on. This is all most heady stuff for me of course, so after letting me have a gander at a few commanding intellectuals and Big 10 co-eds and other college people my wife wisely nudged us back again towards the real world.

7. Another View Back up State Street Towards the Capitol

State Street is kind of a big deal in Madison I guess, for tourists anyway. It is not very big, compared to what a similar district would be in a major city, though I liked it. It has a lot of bars and cafes and college type shops, and the kind of shops that I guess appeal to the bohemian/college educated demographic. There were one or two fairly large used book stores that I would have liked to peek into. Unfortunately with so many children I could not actually go into any of these places, but they are the kinds of things that hopefully, I will live long enough and have enough time to do again someday.

8. The Great Windmill of Cooksville

The whole place is attractively laid out. I found the whole are of South Central Wisconsin to be aesthetically pleasant. Obviously there are Wal-Marts and strip malls in places and parking garages in the cities and so on, but only a small part of the geography there is blighted in this way. For the most part, as I noted in an earlier post, it does not look all that different from what it would have looked like 50 or 60 years ago. Maybe some of the smaller towns would have been more bustling, but even these did not look so badly off as some of their counterparts in upstate New York and Pennsylvania.

9. Hitting the Road Out of Wisconsin

This is one place I really don't know if I will ever get back to. It would be nice to be able to skewer that whole region of the country a la Evelyn Waugh or even a third rate hack New York writer and say "Good riddance" and have all of the sneering people in our haute literary intelligentsia nod approvingly at my taste and sensibility, but unfortunately I actually liked it there, and I cannot summon up that necessary feeling of revulsion for geographically inferior locales that the would-be second and third rank urban intellectual needs to be able to produce in such instances.

Wisconsin 2

I'm going to do two short posts in a row to get the rest of the Wisconsin pictures out of the way. 

1. Amusement in Wisconsin Dells

We spent most of the second day at Devil's Lake State Park in Baraboo, in the central part of the state, about an hour to 75 minutes from our home base. As it is the most popular of all the Wisconsin State Parks as well as I believe the oldest, it has something of an iconic status there. The lake was similar to the kinds of places we go to at home and unfortunately it was 99 degrees so it was too hot to hike, especially with two babies in backpacks and a five year old, but I still enjoyed it, as I am interested in what people and doing things are like in different places. The beach and picnic area were a lot bigger and much more crowded than you would see in most similar places in New Hampshire or Vermont. The park store sold beer (of the Budweiser/Miller variety) and people were drinking it right out in public all over the place, which I liked, as it reminded me of being in Europe. Usually if you carry a couple of beers into a park in New Hampshire and drink them subtly away from the main paths and without making a spectacle of yourself nobody will harass you but technically I don't think you are supposed to have them. Wisconsin people seem to largely contain whatever rowdiness they indulge in within their private group, and tend not to be confrontational towards strangers, so it was an easy place for me to hang out.

2. Mirror Maze at the Dells

The guys missed going to the Mirror Maze in Tennessee I guess. Wisconsin Dells was about a half-hour up the road from the park and it is a fairly infamous tourist hell/amusement mecca akin to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge so we took the children there for a couple of hours because of course these kinds of outrageous places with block upon block of over the top amusements are exciting to them.

3. A Last Wisconsin Dells Picture

4. More Dramatic Prairieland, Seen From Car.

I thought the landscape was quite beautiful and striking there. It had not rained in something like 2 months when we were there and these clouds hovered teasingly over the parched landscape for several hours before  finally letting out about a ten minute shower, which didn't do much. The next day however, there was a quite heavy storm in the afternoon and evening which lasted three or four hours that was much welcomed by the local populus.

5. Next Morning, In the Yard Behind Our Rented Historic Farmhouse

I had wanted to find some kind of moderately placed cabin or old style family accomodation such as we had stayed in in Alabama and Tennessee and I was having a hard time, partly because I started so late in the season and partly because there were not a lot of places like that in the area I wanted to stay in (around Madison) as I guess that is not a big area for tourism. But I found this place on a site called VRBO.com and it sounded too good to be true, being an entire house, old (but with completely up-to-date renovations and furnishings) and quite inexpensive, especially by the standards of the northeast. But it was for real, and even in late June there was still a four day block of dates open in mid-July. So it was quite a stroke of luck that we ended up staying here.

6. Background Patio. We Didn't Hang Out Much Out Here Because It Was Still 99 Degrees Every Day.

Mercifully the house had air conditioning. The owners of this house lived in the barn, which had also been most attractively renovated, across the yard. The gentleman was a minister of some kind, I cannot remember the denomination--I don't think it was Lutheran--I believe retired, as he looked to be at least 70. His wife was quite a bit younger, probably somewhere in her 50s. I needed to replace one of my tires, and the man was extremely helpful, and found a place where I could get a decent used one for $40 without getting the usual hassle about I needed to replace all my other ones too. He even went out to the place with me. There was a prominent poster up advertising an upcoming tobacco festival that was sponsored by a cigarette company and all of that, which he stared at rather intently for several minutes so that I thought he was going to be roused to anger and go off on a long declamation about this event, which old people sometimes will do out of nowhere when something agitates them. However after taking in all of the information he merely stepped back and told me that tobacco was the main crop in that part of the state and quite a big deal and how worrisome the ongoing drought was and so on. The bit about tobacco growing being prominent in the area surprised me, but after that I paid closer attention to all the farms we were driving by and indeed it was so.

7. View From the Backyard "Prairie" of the House, Barn and Weathervane.

There is another picture of the weathervane in the next group. It was an awesome weathervane. Nobody in New England seems to have anything like it. I don't know why.

8. Flower Identification is Not My Strong Suit

The minister's wife (I did not find out what her profession was--she was a little more businesslike than her husband--or I assure you I would refer to her by her own position). had carefully arranged this wild looking and very beautiful garden over about a fifteen year period; she admitted that we were seeing it in something close to its perfectly realized condition. I don't usually go in much for vegetation pictures, but these seem quite vivid and interesting, set off against the totally parched grass and something in the effect makes you feel how hot it was. It's a telling picture.

Wisconsin! Part One of That

After crossing the Mackinac Bridge we drove across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and entered Wisconsin at the town of Marinette, which is north of Green Bay. I read somewhere in the course of my researches for this trip that the rectangle between Duluth, the Twin Cities, Green Bay, The Mackinac Bridge and the Canadian Border is the largest swathe of territory in the lower 48 unsullied by any interstate highways. What I saw of Wisconsin, I liked. I could even imagine myself living there fairly contentedly if I had to, which is not a sense that I get most places. Culturally, the German/Scandinavian/Polish vibe is not alien to me, as my grandparents on my mothers' side were of this stock, and one thing I do lament about New England is the dearth of beer gardens and places to get schnitzel and sauerkraut and liverwurst and all of that sort of food which I like and used to eat quite a bit in my childhood in Pennsylvania. This is purely hypothetical of course, as I don't have the level of career that would justify such a dramatic move, besides which I doubt my wife and children would ever consent to go beyond the borders of New Hampshire or maybe Vermont, if indeed they would even consider leaving our house. I also self-identify as an East Coast person, the northeast in particular, as even though I moved around quite a bit in my youth I have always lived in the U.S. 1/I-95 Maine to D.C. corridor and I still respond to its particular rhythms and manners and such whenever I recognize them. But still, maybe growing up in Wisconsin would have been better for me...    

1. Entering Marinette, Through the Windshield. Taken by my oldest son. The camera was too slow to catch the "Welcome to Wisconsin" sign, but this makes something of a similar effect.

2. Gas Station, Waupun. About an hour east of Madison (?) Note the nearly treeless prairie in the background.

3. Along US 151 Going to Madison. The place definitely has a distinct look. I will add here, probably not for the last time as it was the dominant feature of our time there, that this trip took place in July in the midst of a drought and a brutal heat wave, and without air conditioning in my car, to boot. The temperature at the instant of all these outdoor pictures was no lower than 97, and usually was 98 or 99. It was grueling.

4. More Sample Roadside Views. The extreme heat and the length of this day's drive (approximately 9 hours) aside, the roads in Wisconsin are pleasant to drive on for the most part. This is a U.S. highway rather than an interstate, so there are occasional crossing roads, but it is four lanes and you still go fast, and it's old and more connected to the life around it than the interstates, although Wisconsin had some decent ones of those too: 39/90/94 from Wisconsin Dells to Madison was a nice drive. There are a lot of four lane high speed old U.S. highways, which tend to be scenic and enjoyable as long as the road isn't in too bad of shape, which is usually the case in Pennsylvania. Similar routes in the East would be U.S. 301 on the eastern shore of Maryland, and some of the old parkways in New York, like the Taconic State.

5. Daughter, Holding Up Well. For being trapped in the car all day in biblical heat (I actually don't remember how hot it was in the Bible, but I always imagine it as being often rather toasty).

6. I Couldn't Decide Between the Two Daughter Pictures, So I am Including Them Both.

7. The Parking Lot at Little Norway, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Odd as it may sound, Little Norway was the germ of the whole trip, being this year's lucky selection from the 1966 Encyclopedia's family vacation recommendations. This is a small sight that, going at as leisurely a pace as possible, stopping multiple times for drinks and ice creams, and scouring every display in the gift shop, it is hard to stretch into a three hour outing, so it sounds slightly ludicrous to say that this was the purpose of our going all the way to Wisconsin, and it wasn't. That said, once we were there I would have been disappointed if we hadn't gone to see it. Here is their website, by the way.

8. Getting in Touch Simultaneously With Our Feminine Side and Our Viking Side. In the gift shop. You get taken on a guided tour around the place, and as we had to wait for a half-hour or so for that and it was 99 degrees out, we hung out inside for a while. The tour was actually very enjoyable. The place is old-fashioned, privately owned and maintained by the same family since the 1920s. There are no iPad guides or any kind of computer things. An actual person, in our case a very pleasant young lady, who admitted however to being of German rather than Norwegian descent, takes you around to all the buildings and points out dusty artifacts and tells stories about them. I hadn't realized how much I had lost, and how I missed that sort of leisurely interaction with other humans.  

9. Boys on the Steps of the Stave Church. Built in Norway for the Norway Exhibition at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and acquired by the museum in the 30s. This is the only building that was brought to the museum from outside, and it is stuffed full of souvenirs and tools and weapons and furniture and things like that. The other buildings were built by the immigrant farmer who settled the land way back when as a shrine to the homeland.

10. View of the Upper Part of the Imitation Stave Church. All of the encyclopedia's recommendations for sights to see in Wisconsin are rather odd in their decided unspectacular-ness. For one thing there are only four places listed; most states have around six to eight, and the big western states with lots of national parks often have ten or more. Those four sights were Little Norway, Devil's Lake State Park near Baraboo, which we also went to, the world's largest grain elevator in Superior, which is way up at the northwestern tip of the state adjacent to Duluth, Minnesota--I am not sure if this site even exists anymore, as I was unable to find anything referring to it on the internet--and Wisconsin's first state capital historic site, which was about an hour west of where we stayed, getting near the Iowa border, and which looks like a pretty modest site as well, as it seems to consist of two old clapboard buildings sitting in the middle of the prairie. But as I say, we really did have a good time. My children are quite good about doing this retro kind of stuff to this point, they make an honest effort to enjoy themselves and get something out of it. Maybe this is because we don't hang out with other people, who are cool and involved the whole cool modern lifestyle, or maybe it is just our personalities, and we can't adapt to or thrive in our actual present environment. 

11. The Little Norway Trail. The layout is kind of reminiscent of a European park or campground, I think.

12. The Food Storehouse. You may note how the grass is all brown and dried up from the drought. If you go to their website in all the pictures the place is lush and green. I actually think there is something about our pictures--it must be the crispness of the light--which looks better.

13. The Spring House. 

14. Happy Campers. No doubt just glad to be out with father getting introduced to America. Besides, if they thought this was hot, how are they going to deal when we go to Big Bend and Arizona and Death Valley and Vegas in some future July.

Happily there was a little lake not too far from this fine attraction, and we were able to get in some swimming before heading back to our historic farmhouse for dinner. All of this still to come...