Burlington, Wisconsin: Liar Liar

Posted on July 17, 2023 by admin

If, in downtown Burlington, Wisconsin – not a very large place, since the entire town’s population is about 11,000 – you pay attention to your surroundings, you’ll start noticing plaques.

They honor winners of a contest put on at the end of every year by the Burlington Liar’s Club. I’ve read that the contest is for tellers of tall tales, submitted by entrants nationwide, but looking at this list of winners, I’d say only some of them count as “tall tales,” along the lines of a watermelon vine dragging a boy in its wake.

The rest are jokes. In the 1978 example, pretty much like one Johnny Carson would have told.

Newspapermen of nearly 100 years ago made up the Burlington Liar’s Club, but the thing achieved a life of its own, quickly evolving into the overseer of a not-very-serious contest with entrants from around the nation. No doubt the contest is unique in the nation, like the Nenana Ice Classic or the Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin’ Festival.

“The club started in 1929 as a joke,” the club website says. “A Burlington newspaper reporter wrote a story to the effect that these ‘old timers’ got together each New Year’s day at the police station, and lied for the championship of the city…

“… city editors, with an eye for interesting features, ‘put it on the wire,’ and the following December the Associated Press and other news agencies began phoning Burlington to find out if the city’s annual contest would be repeated…

“Letters began to trickle in from the four corners of the country commenting on the ‘contest.’ They furnished the inspiration for a real contest instead of a phony one, national in scope, and the Burlington Liar’s Club was formed to carry it on.”

Just the kind of thing to notice during a small-town walkabout. I was delighted. Who isn’t fond of the oddities in Wisconsin? The fiberglass fields and pyramids and Forevertrons.

One Sunday late in June, I took Ann to the southern Wisconsin camp she where is working as a counselor for the summer, and after I dropped her off, spent a little time looking around Burlington and environs.

The small downtown of Burlington, which at this point in history counts as exurban Milwaukee, is a handsome place, with most of its storefronts occupied.

That is, some handsome old buildings with modern tenants.

Nothing like a sturdy pre-FDIC bank building. Completed in 1909; that makes it pre-Fed as well.

I couldn’t not look it up. The Bank of Burlington in Wisconsin existed in various forms since the mid-19th century; it was prospering in 1916, according to this article from that year, posted by AccessGeneaolgy. A bank in some form or other was in the building until 2021, which Chase closed its office there. That hints that Chase was the last of a string of banks swallowing other banks in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Also: C.B. McCanna. That would be Charles B. McCanna (d. 1913), who organized the McCanna Cheese and Butter Manufacturing Co., and operated about 20 factories in the area. He was also president of the Bank of Burlington in his later years.

“In 1893, the company was reorganized as McCanna and Fraser, with McCanna serving as president until his death,” says the Wisconsin Historical Society. “In 1898 he founded the Wisconsin Condensed Milk Co., which soon became one of the largest producers of condensed milk in Wisconsin and operated branch factories in Pecatonica and Grayslake, Ill.”

You’ve heard of Wisconsin beer barons. Here we have a cheese baron.

I enjoy the old-fashioned approach of a 1916 article about McCanna, another article accessible via Access Genealogy. Of course, it wasn’t old-fashioned at the time, just standard practice in lauding business men:

“Dairying and the industries which are allied thereto have ever constituted an important source of the wealth and prosperity of Racine County, and among the most enterprising and progressive business men of the district are those who have turned to that line of labor as a source of their business development. One of the well known, successful and highly respected representatives of the business in Racine County was Charles B. McCanna, who became an influential citizen of Burlington and one whose activities constituted not only a source of individual success but also constituted one of the strong elements in the advancement of public prosperity.”

Dublin, Barcelona, Then Venice

Posted on July 9, 2023 by admin

After a mostly dry June here in northern Illinois, early July saw some rain, but not quite enough to end the dry spell. Out beyond the grass and gardens of the suburbs, it’s a “stressful time for corn and soybeans.”

June 25, mid-day, at a cornfield in southern Wisconsin, which is suffering a drought as well. Moderate drought for the county that includes this field, at least as of the end of June.

The field looked healthy to my untrained eye, but for all I know that’s what a stressed crop looks like a few weeks into a drought. I might be up that way again next weekend or the next, and I’ll stop by for a look at the same field if so.

I had the opportunity to spend most of a weekend in Los Angeles in early June, so naturally I did. To visit some of the places that I considered but didn’t have time for in pre-pandemic 2020, because that’s how I think, though I didn’t make it to La Brea Tar Pits this time or earlier. Like the Cloisters on the other coast, it’s a place that still eludes me.

On the other hand, I made a point of going to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice this time.

Though named for the place in Italy, Venice has a distinctly American history, invented as it was ex nihilo by a real estate developer looking to reference the Old World in the newest part of the New World, namely California. Not just any developer, but one Abbot Kinney, whose career was circuitous and strange, the way business men could be in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Not only that, the arc of history in Venice is very much American: an initial flowering, subsequent decline, much demolition and disfigurement in the name of modernization, years of scraping along the bottom, an effort to save its meager remnants, gentrification and insane property values – all within the span of about a century, specifically within the 20th, though spilling into the 21st. Which is an affluent time for Venice of America.

“When it opened on July 4, 1905, Venice of America boasted seven distinct canals arranged in an irregular grid pattern, as seen… in Kinney’s master plan for the community,” KCET says. “Totaling nearly two miles and dredged out of former saltwater marshlands, the canals encircled four islands, including the tiny triangular United States Island. The widest of them, appropriately named Grand Canal, terminated at a large saltwater lagoon. Three of the smaller canals referred to celestial bodies: Aldebaran, Venus, and Altair.

“Soon, a second set of canals appeared just south of Kinney’s. Linking up with the existing network through the Grand Canal, these Short Line canals (named after the interurban Venice Short Line) were apparently built to capitalize on the success of Kinney’s development. Their origins are uncertain, but work started soon after Venice of America’s 1905 grand opening, and by 1910 real estate promoters Strong & Dickinson and Robert Marsh were selling lots in what they named the Venice Canal Subdivision. Built almost as an afterthought, these six watercourses are the only Venice canals that survive today.”

The rest, the originals in their irregular grid and with their celestial names, were long ago filled in and paved over – that would be the demolition and disfigurement.

I arrived in the neighborhood fairly early in the morning, early enough – I realized later – to park on Venice Blvd. within walking distance of both the canals and the beach, which is more difficult later in the day. Venice Blvd., near the ocean at least, also happens to be the locus of a handful of residents living in parked RVs and, for those who can’t swing that, tents in the boulevard median.

The canals form a neighborhood unlike any I’ve seen and, I have to say, flat-out gorgeous in our time.

Public sidewalks run between front yards and the canals, with occasional footbridges crossing the canals. This arrangement, I’ve read, is the result of renovation that occurred in the early 1990s. The only vehicular street running through the neighborhood is Dell Ave., which connects with alleys behind the houses with the wide expanse of LA streets. The way residents drive in and out of the area, that is.

The yards are lush, at least they were in June. Temps weren’t that warm the day I visited, and the skies fully overcast and sometimes drizzly, since southern California seems to be in some kind of weird weather bubble these days. Made for a good walking environment, though.

Hard to believe the area spent much of the 20th century as a slum; a quick look at Zillow’s estimates puts no property along the canals at much less than $2 million, and many a good deal more, with a scattering of new houses under way as well. Such is real estate across the decades.

Milwaukee Hipster Doughnuts &c.

Posted on September 29, 2022 by admin

Time for an autumnal break. Back to posting around October 16, when the tree colors will be bold and the winds (probably) brisk, at least around here. Expect photos.

Out last stop in Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon, as a light rain fell, was Chubby’s Donuts, spotted by chance and visited on a whim.

The place has a mascot atop. Hard to tell just how chubby he is.

The doughnuts, which are really round dough-rings each about the size of an onion ring, come in bags, and are dusted liberally with cinnamon and sugar. Pretty good, but I’m not running up to Milwaukee just for them.

On Monday evening, we went to west suburban Westmont to visit my old friend Kevin, and participate in a trivia contest at a local restaurant. That was a first for me, unless you count the contest at one of my former companies, at a company event ca. 1999, that netted me some movie tickets.

I don’t remember all the various categories now, but as usual, some were easier than others, and our team (Kevin, Jay and I) came in second, partly on the strength of us knowing all eight of the comic strips in the visual part of the contest. Everyone got a piece of paper with eight single panels illustrating each comic, but without any captions, and you had to name the strip for each.

They were The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, Nancy, Garfield, The Family Circus, Bloom County, The Adventures of Tintin and Beetle Bailey.

I thought they were easy. Maybe it’s a generational question: who among the younger set is going to know that many of them, much less all?

Then again, I remember a high school English teacher of mine expressing wonder that any adult — including a highly educated friend of his — would spend time reading the funnies, so perhaps he wouldn’t have done very well at naming them either, despite being of the generation who grew up with Terry and the Pirates (for example).

Another category was songs with the word “love” in their titles, which of course includes a lot of possibilities. Name the artist, given the song title. We didn’t do that well — flummoxed mostly on the newer songs — but God help me, I knew that the Captain & Tennille had a big hit with “Muskrat Love” (1976).

What I didn’t know, until I happened to hear about it on the radio a few years ago, was that the Captain & Tennille’s version of “Muskrat Love” was a cover, and that the band America had done an earlier one. It was written and first recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey, of all people. In any case, it’s one of those songs not that you’ll always remember, but which you’ll never forget.

St. John’s Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

Posted on September 28, 2022 by admin

What do we think of when we think of Milwaukee, the result of years of history but also modern lore, only a part of which involves anything as consciously planned as advertising? Beer.

Found on a wall at a food court at the former Pabst Brewery complex.

What do I think of? Beer, yes, but also the astonishing number of large churches for such a mid-sized city. Every time I go there now, I see at least one I hadn’t seen before, inside and out.

Such as St. John’s Lutheran Church, which has been a congregation since 1848. A year of mass movement of Germans out of Germany, for sure, though I imagine most of the original congregants were Germans already in Milwaukee. It was the last place in town that we saw as part of this year’s Doors Open event, arriving in the mid-afternoon on Sunday.

The current church building dates from 1890, a design by Herman Schnetzky and Eugene Liebert, two German architects who came to Milwaukee in the late 19th century.

Inside, a curious feature: lights running along the ceiling arches, added in the early 20th century. Over 800 bulbs, I read. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a church. Adds more than a touch of luminosity to the place.

The altar, hand-carved in Germany long ago.

Four prophets from the Old Testament: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.

Those were the west transept windows. The east windows featured Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

An organist was practicing on the church’s sizable organ, a 2,500-pipe instrument. He had a nice touch.

The pastor was also around — a young man, maybe no more than 30, and not long out of seminary. Had a nice chat with him about the church and a bit about the various Lutheran groups, which I can never quite keep track of. A synod here and a synod there. He seemed like a personable fellow, which you really ought to be if you go into that line of work.

The Brewery District, Milwaukee

Posted on September 27, 2022 by admin

Our visit to Milwaukee on Sunday took us, in the mid-afternoon, to what it now is known as the Brewery District. Once upon a time — for a long time — Pabst was brewed there.

The sign hangs between some handsome buildings. On one side, the cream city brick Malt House, originally developed in 1882 and former one of the world’s largest brewery-owned malt houses, according to the district’s web site (who else would own a malt house?). Now it’s apartments.

On the other side, the Brewhouse Inn & Suites, a hotel that was once the brew house for the Pabst operations.

“The Pabst Brewery closed in 1996 leaving a seven-block area of downtown Milwaukee vacant,” the site says. “For over a decade, historic structures deteriorated until real estate developer and philanthropist Joseph J. Zilber purchased the site in August 2006.

“The results include seven apartment developments, three office buildings, two hotel properties, two breweries, restaurants, banquet halls and two public parks. In addition, the Brewery District is home to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health and No Studios, an incubator for the growing film industry in Milwaukee.”

Not that much of the district was open on Sunday. The spot participating in the Doors Open event was Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery, a retail complex formed from some of the old brewery buildings.

“Great care has been taken to ensure that Blue Ribbon Hall, The Great Hall, Captain’s Corner, Captain’s Courtyard, Guest Center, King’s Courtyard, and the original Gift Shop have all been restored to their original glory,” the separate Best Place web site says.

Enter one courtyard and there’s good old King Gambrinus.

Not actually that old, since it’s a 1967 reproduction, in aluminum, of an older wooden statue that had fallen apart.

In a separate courtyard, Frederick Pabst.

Died 1901. I saw his grave last year and his mansion some years before that. He was a beer baron among beer barons.

Doors Open Milwaukee ’22

Posted on September 26, 2022 by admin

My brother Jay is in town for a visit, and part of the visit included heading up to Milwaukee on Sunday for the Doors Open event.

Except for rain late in the afternoon, it was a fine cool day for gallivanting around, looking at buildings. First we went to the Basilica of St. Josaphat and then the Tripoli Shrine Temple, owned by the Shriners.

I decided to take a few detail shots at the temple, such as the top of a door handle, wall décor and a hanging bit of masonic symbolism.

Plus something to remember the guide by.

From there we sought lunch, which we found — takeout, so we had it in the car — from a place on Wisconsin Ave., east of Marquette U. Breakfast food for lunch.

Also on Wisconsin Ave., the main Milwaukee Public Library branch was part of the event, but unfortunately not on Sunday, so we didn’t get in. The sign shouldn’t have been left up.

Later in the afternoon, we spent time looking around the site of the former Pabst Brewery complex, now handsomely redeveloped, and capped things off with a visit to St. John’s Lutheran Church. The last two of those were new even to me. Though not that big, Milwaukee is dense with sights.

On the way home, we couldn’t very well pass up a short visit to Mars Cheese Castle.

The rain was done by then, leaving a rainbow over the Interstate.

Sculpture Milwaukee, 2019

Posted on September 18, 2022 by admin

Doors Open Milwaukee is next weekend, and I’m planning for it.

During the 2019 event, we happened across another public art event, one not confined to a particular weekend, but rather a particular year: Sculpture Milwaukee.

“Sculpture Milwaukee is a non-profit organization transforming downtown Milwaukee’s cultural landscape every year with an outdoor exhibition of world-renowned sculpture that serves as a catalyst for community engagement, economic development, and creative placemaking,” is how the organization’s web site puts it.

I don’t know about “community engagement” or “creative placemaking.” I would just say the org puts up different interesting sculptures to look at every year, but maybe that’s my editorial instinct for jettisoning publicist puffery coming into play.

Anyway, that year we saw works on E. Wisconsin Ave., including “Seraphine-cherubin” from “Teaching Staff for a School of Murderers” by Max Ernst (1967).

I’ve forgotten most of whatever I once knew about Dada, and had to look him up to make sure he wasn’t the one who peed on a pile of books in public. I don’t think he was. Who was that? I know I heard that story in college. I don’t think I want to feed verbiage along those lines into Google, however.

“Pensive” by Radcliffe Bailey.

The thinker depicted is W.E.B. Du Bois, according to the sign near the work.

One more: “Magical Thinking,” a work by Actual Sized Artworks (Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades) (2019).

That sounded familiar. I have run across their art before, specifically in Evanston.That was in the early spring of 2010 on a short family outing.

Tempus fugit.

Around Lake Michigan Bits & Pieces

Posted on August 22, 2022 by admin

Here’s a set of facts that only I’m likely care about, but I find remarkable anyway.

My recent trip with friends to the UP and back began on July 30 and ended on August 7. Fifteen years earlier, in 2007, I took a trip with my immediate family to the UP and back, from July 30 to August 7. I didn’t know about the coincidence until I read a previous posting of mine. I wish I could say that I’d taken a July-30-to-August-7 trip 15 years before that, in 1992, but no: Singapore and Malaysia was June 29 to July 10 that year (I had to check.)

Both were counterclockwise around Lake Michigan, but such is the richness of worthwhile sights in that part of the country that the two trips touched only at one point: the Mackinac Bridge. And in the fact that we spent time in the UP.

Is it so different now than 15 years ago? Except for maybe better Internet connectivity (I hope so) and maybe a worse opioid problem (I hope not), not a lot seems to have changed.

The UP’s population in 2020, per the Census Bureau, was about 301,600, representing a decline from 311,300 in 2010 and 317,200 in 2000. Truth be told, however, the UP’s population has never been more than about 325,600, which it was in 1910. After a swelling in population in the 19th century, especially after the Civil War, numbers have held fairly steady, meaning an increasingly smaller percentage of Michiganders and Americans, for that matter, live in the UP.

A spiffy public domain map.

Of course, the trip started in metro Chicago, and our first destination was BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Chicago in Bartlett, Illinois. A striking piece of India within short driving distance of home, I once said, and I’m pretty sure my friends agreed with that assessment.

Next: Indiana Dunes National Park. I had in mind we’d walk along a trail I knew, and a beach I liked, but no parking was to be had on a Saturday in summer. We were able to stop at the the Century of Progress Architectural District for a few minutes, and amble down to the beach for a few more from there. They liked that, too, and I’m sure had never heard of that corner of Indiana.

Across the line in Michigan, we went to Redamak’s in New Buffalo. Crowded, but it was then that we collectively decided, though it was unspoken, that good food in a restaurant setting was worth the risk of the BA.5 variant. I’m glad to report that none of us had any Covid-like symptoms during the entire run of the trip.

Those were my first-day suggestions. Now my friends had one: Saugatuck, Michigan, which is actually two small towns, the other being named Douglas. I’d seen it on maps, but that was the extent of my awareness. Turns out it’s a popular place on a summer Saturday, too. Especially on the main streets.

Once we found parking, the place got a lot more pleasant. We wandered around, looking at a few shops and buying ice cream for a short sit down.

A small selection of Saugatuck businesses vying for those visitor dollars (no special order): Uncommon Coffee Roasters, Glik’s clothing store, Kilwin’s Chocolate, Sand Bar Saloon, Country Store Antiques, Bella Vita Spa + Suites, Tree of Life Juice, the Owl House (“gifts for the wise and the whimsical”), LUXE Saugatuck, Santa Fe Trading Co., Marie’s Green Apothecary (“all things plant made”), Mother Moon book store, and Amazwi Contemporary Art, just to list only a fraction of the businesses.

Not a lot of neon, but there was this.

I liked the little public garden. Rose Garden, at least according to Google Maps.

And its sculpture, “Cyclists,” by William Tye (2003).

At the Frederik Meijer Park & Sculpture Garden, we encountered a flock of what looked like wild turkeys.

The marina at Mackinaw City, from which boats to Mackinac Island depart, and a highly visible structure nearby.

You can be sure that we spent that afternoon on Mackinac Island.

Besides the Mackinac Island Ramble (that’s what I’m calling our walk there), we took a number of other good walks on the trip.

One was at the 390-acre Offield Family Working Forest Reserve, near Harbor Springs, Michigan. Its excellent wayfinding — clear and immediately useful signs and maps — helped us through its mildly labyrinthine paths that curve through a lush forest with no major water features, including parts that had clearly been used as a pine plantation.

Clouds threatened rain but only produced mist in the cool air. Wildflowers might have been a little past peak, but there was a profusion, and a rainy spring and early summer put them in robust clusters of red and blue and gold and white, near and far from our path. Everywhere a damp forest scent, wonderful and off-putting at the same time.

On August 5, our last full day in the UP, we had lunch in the small town of Grand Marais, on the shores of Lake Superior. As tourist towns go, it’s minor league, but all the more pleasant for it. The extent of souvenir stands at the main crossroads was a single enclosed booth, staffed by a young college woman who was maybe a relative of the owner. The selection of postcards was limited, but I got a few.

Right there on the main street of Grand Marais is the Pickle Barrel House. You can’t miss it. We didn’t.

Afterward, we found our way to the eastern reaches of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, since the town is considered the eastern gateway to the lakeshore. That end of the lakeshore doesn’t have the pictured rocks, but there’s a lot else.

One trail on lakeshore land took us down to a beach on the south shore of Lake Superior. Sabel Beach, by name. You climb down a couple of hundred stairs to get there, but see the vigorous Sable Falls on the way. The way wasn’t empty, but not nearly the mob city on the southern shore of Lake Michigan or the waterfront at Mackinac Island.

Another lakeshore trail took us along Sable Dunes, which only involved a modest amount of climbing — not nearly as much as the Dune Climb at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — though sometimes the path underfoot was sand without vegetation. On the whole, the dunes support a full collection of the sort of hardy yellow-green grasses and bushes and gnarled trees you see near a beach. For human hikers, the dunes eventually provide a more elevated vista of the lake, which reminded me of the look over Green Bay last year.

We spent two nights in Newberry, Michigan. Still no more signs of møøse than the last time I was there. I did have the opportunity to take a short walk around town. This is the Luce County Historical Museum (closed at that moment), which was once the county jail and sheriff’s residence. It’s complete with a time capsule on the grounds for the Newberry centennial in 1982. Planned re-opening: 2082. That’s optimism.

A few other nearby buildings.

Saint Gregory’s Catholic Church.

We encountered rain much of the last day of the trip, August 7, so mostly it was a drive from our lakeside rental near Green Bay (the water feature) in Wisconsin home to the northwest suburbs. We didn’t stop in Milwaukee, though we buzzed through downtown on I-94, which offers a closeup of the skyline.

We did stop at Mars Cheese Castle before we left Wisconsin. How could we not do that?

Around Lake Michigan ’22

Posted on August 8, 2022 by admin

A little more than a week ago, I took a pretty good picture of three dear friends, two of whom I’ve known for over 45 years. From left to right, Tom, Catherine and Jae.

We were on the second day of our drive around Lake Michigan, counterclockwise, which took us from metro Chicago through northern Indiana, Grand Rapids and parts of western Michigan, Petoskey and environs, Mackinac Island, both Sault Ste. Maries, parts of the eastern Upper Peninsula, greater Green Bay and other parts of eastern Wisconsin, and back to metro Chicago.

Leaving on July 30 from our starting point at my house, we drove my car on crowded and less crowded Interstates, state and county highways, and a host of smaller roads, including National Forest roads cutting through lush boreal territory. Returning yesterday to my house, my friends flew back to Austin today; they had arrived from Austin two days ahead of the trip.

We’d planned the trip via email and Zoom, beginning back in early spring. I was the informal guide, making suggestions and offering bits of information I knew from previous visits to Michigan, upper and lower. But my friends were hardly passive in the course of our travels, digging up information via cell and making their own suggestions based on their own familiarity with some of the territory. Catherine had overseen arranging our accommodations, and everybody drove at one time or another.

We stayed in five different peer-to-peer rental accommodations along way, all entire houses that could provide us enough bedrooms, bathrooms, food prep and dining areas, and, in most cases, space to sit outdoors, once with a view of the waters of Green Bay.

Enjoying the outdoors was one of the main goals of the trip. For me, certainly, but especially for them, escaping the high heat of central Texas. They often remarked on the cool air and reveled in it, checking periodically to learn the temps at home. Three digits in Austin wasn’t usual. I don’t think got higher than 85 F. where we were. Standard night temps in both Michigans generally came in the 60s F.

Two meals a day was the norm: a mid- to late-morning breakfast and a late afternoon dinner, or a very late breakfast and a late dinner, at least as these things are reckoned in North America. So on many days, our meal schedule was more like that of Mexico City.

Food variety has trickled down to the lakeside and inland burgs of the upper Upper Midwest, though perhaps not quite as much as in large metros. Whitefish, the star of a lot of UP menus, had top billing in some of our meals, but we also enjoyed hamburgers and other meat — including one tasty UP pasty — pizza, pasta, breakfast fare, bar food, Italian and Asian, plus chocolates and fruit, such as Michigan cherries and UP jam. We prepared our own meals sometimes, did takeout a few times.

Coffee by morning, wine by night, though I only participated in the latter. Familiar wines were available in every grocery store we visited, and my friends sought out coffee ground as locally as possible: one bag from Sault Ste. Marie, for instance.

Meals and wine drinking were a source of convivial times, but hardly the only one. We talked and conversed and bantered at the table, as we headed along roads and as we walked trails. Shared personal histories were revisited, stories of our long periods apart were relayed, and opinions shared. Odd facts were floated. There was punnery, especially on the part of Tom, a born punster.

We visited one city of any size, Grand Rapids, and many smaller places, a few museums, a sculpture garden, some riverfronts, shopping streets and resort areas, a grand hotel, an historic fort, churches, a Hindu temple, a wooded cemetery, two lighthouses, forests, clearings and beaches, a massive sand dune, waterfalls, rapids and the clearest pond I’ve ever seen. The three Great Lakes we saw stretched to empty horizons — except when Canada or the opposite shore of Green Bay were visible. We crossed the Mackinac Bridge once and the international bridge between the Sault Ste Maries twice.

We walked near the shores of Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan. The northern woods and the beach ecosystems were fully flush here in late summer. Jae, who knows a good deal about flora, shared some knowledge about the flowers, trees and fungi we saw in profusion.

Though we caught a few showers in daytime, and the last day was mostly rainy, most of the storms rumbled through at night, adding to the restfulness of whatever sleep we each had. None of the storms were lightning-and-thunder dramas, but some were impressive in their downpour. My friends expressed their satisfaction with the cool light winds that often blow in corners of the UP.

There were a number of travel firsts, mostly for my friends. This was the first time any of them had been to the UP, and the first time they had seen Lake Superior, whose aspect I’m so fond of, and their first visit to the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. The trip included Tom’s first known visit to a national park, though later we determined that it was probably his second park. Also, it was the first time two of them had ever been to Canada, since we popped across the border for one night in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

For me, a mix of new and places I saw long enough ago that they were almost like new.

When I dropped off my friends at O’Hare earlier today, we agreed that they trip had met expectations. And more.

Apron Replacement

Posted on July 25, 2022 by admin

Not long ago, the village sent me a note — a low-tech, paper note, stuck in the door — that soon my “apron” would be replaced. It took me a moment to figure out that meant the section of my driveway that’s between the street and the sidewalk. Turns out the village meant not only that, but the sidewalk next to it as well.

Technically, the apron isn’t part of my driveway, since the it’s beyond my lot line. But I use it all the time as if I owned it because it leads to my driveway. The advantage to it belonging to the village is, of course, no fee for the replacement above the taxes I already pay.

We had time to move the cars to the street where, we were assured, they wouldn’t be ticketed for overnight parking. And they haven’t been. Soon workmen and big machines came along.

Wooden boards were erected to contain the concrete in its liquid-ish moments.

Pouring concrete.

I don’t have an image of the finished apron and sidewalk, but it’s a bright white hard surface. I didn’t sign my name or initials on it, or let the dog paw it. Also, there’s no imprint by the contractor, or a date, as you see elsewhere sometimes — and for a long time.

Such as the sidewalk in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood earlier this month.

Not the contractor, but the city’s imprint. It was an old slab of concrete, but it’s held up fairly well for more than 80 years in the chilly Wisconsin climate. Will my new apron hold up so long? Till the turn of the 22nd century?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Wisconsin