Caveat Lector

I like to think I don’t have many enemies. Plenty of people who dislike me, I have never doubted, and even more who disagree with me on some point or other, as is their perfect right… but not many who would go out of their way to cause me hurt. Maybe I’m wrong, but I do like to think that.

Found one, though, in my referrer logs today. Kind of an enemy-by-proxy, but there’s not much doubt in my mind he despises me, and would go to some lengths to cause me trouble. Non-physical harm, I fully believe, but harm nonetheless. And he’d go to considerably greater lengths to hurt my husband.

Long story, as these stories always are. I’m not going to tell it. Some of it isn’t mine to tell anyway. And it’s not worth it, as I’m not asking for sympathy or side-taking here, and the story in its entirety is so ugly that telling it would do little other than raise my heartrate, which is already hitting the stratosphere as a result of seeing that link.

Not out of anger, mind you. I confess I don’t have a great deal of respect for the actions of the individual of whom I write, nor for his character insofar as his writings reflect it, but I don’t hate him. Most of the time, indeed, he simply doesn’t matter. And I wouldn’t lift a finger specifically to hurt him; I just wouldn’t.

It’s just a decidedly weird and unpleasant feeling, knowing for certain that someone ill-disposed toward me, and highly ill-disposed toward David, is reading my weblog on a consistent basis. It makes me understand why David doesn’t often post here, restricts himself to the veriest trivia when he does, and gets nervous when I so much as mention him.

Rough world. Can be, anyway. Why invite further roughness? Why blog, if it only becomes a weapon in this man’s hands?

Eh. Because if I start regulating my actions by him, I might as well shut myself into a hermetically-sealed padded room this instant. There is nothing public David or I can do that this individual wouldn’t turn against us if he could. Nothing. He wants to see us unhappy just that much.

So I take a deep breath, and wave at him (hi!) because I’m pretty sure he’ll recognize himself, and realize that there really isn’t much, if anything, in CavLec that’s terribly damaging—or, at least, that’s damaging beyond what I deserve; some of what I write indeed merits hard knocks, and generally gets them.

There. That’s better. A little, at least.

La Crosse might have some things to stay for, but I refuse to spend more time in the culinary armpit of the universe than I absolutely must, so we left early Wednesday morning and headed for State Road 35, also known as the Great River Road. The river in question, of course, is the Mississippi.

“Great” doesn’t do this drive justice. Try “spectacular” and you’re closer. The wide, slow river is enough, but add the steep bluffs on one side and the green hills on the other, and, well, “spectacular” really doesn’t do it either.

North of Genoa, a bit upriver from Lock and Dam 8, there is a “wayside.” Most of the Great River Road waysides are simply quick turn-offs where you can stop your car and gaze, but this one is different. Recognize it by the “narrow and steep entrance” the sign for it warns you of, and for heaven’s sake don’t miss it.

The entrance is just as narrow and steep as the sign says, but Snub-Nose handled it easily. At the top, you find three short walking trails. I recommend walking them all, in the order 1-3-2. #1 takes you through pleasant woodlands. #3 takes you along a ridge overlooking the river, and has a couple of terrific stand-and-gawp spots.

#2, however, is the utter pinnacle, quite literally; it goes all the way to the top of the bluff, which as best I could tell is the tallest in the area. Watch the turkey vultures sail right overhead, and the rough-winged swallows do unconcerned aerobatics around them. (The swallows have nothing to worry about; turkey vultures are carrion-eaters, not hunters.) See the river disappear into haze to the north, and career into the Lock and Dam to the south.

This wayside has picnic areas, pit toilets, and drinking fountains also, by the way. Great place for a quick lunch. It was well-designed, too. From 35 I couldn’t even see it.

(Which leads me to a brief fulmination against the jerks who build gigantic follies where nobody can help but see them. Honestly, people, have some respect for the world, will you? Nobody particularly cares how rich you are, okay?)

We followed the Great River Road to the mouth of the Wisconsin River, where we turned west on 60 toward home. The Wisconsin is rather like a scaled-down Mississippi: gentler bluffs, lower and rounder hills, a river just as slow but not so wide. Another wayside served us for lunch; cows in the dell opposite gave us the occasional baritone solo to accompany it. As we packed up to leave, a big old pileated woodpecker flew across the clearing into the woods surrounding. Them one doesn’t see often.

We drove up toward the Kickapoo Indian Caverns. Nice drive through a farm valley, but the setup itself looked so thoroughly kitschy that we decided to pass. Besides, we were both pretty tired by then.

So we drove home. We had considered a stop at Taliesin or Cave of the Mounds, but… some other time.

This isn’t exactly everybody’s idea of a vacation—no glamour, nothing exotic—but for me it was just about perfect, and I told David so every chance I could get. I’m not much of a traveller ordinarily, and the greater the distance or faster the pace, the worse the stress. This trip didn’t rush me and didn’t go too far for me to keep up. I couldn’t ask for better.

I saw things I haven’t ever seen before, learned things I didn’t know, and came home just pitifully grateful that places like Horicon Marsh and Kettle Moraine and Black River exist and are tended and cherished.

Mighty Plush Cthulhu now inhabits my home!

(You remember Mighty Plush Cthulhu, don’t you?)

The Goth-kitties lost several Sanity points apiece immediately upon Mighty Plush Cthulhu’s arrival. We put Mighty Plush Cthulhu on our coffee table, and Dream immediately tried to stalk It, but was distracted from that worthy goal by David’s emergence from the alcove. Dream then pawed at the box in which Mighty Plush Cthulhu arrived; I presume it still gave off loathly emanations.

David put Mighty Plush Cthulhu carefully on top of our globe, figuring that would be Mighty Plush Cthulhu’s preference, if It could say as much.

Mighty Plush Cthulhu now sits on the window sash in the office. Didi tried for It, but could not reach It. They know, though. The Goth-kitties know…

Thanks to Li for Mighty Plush Cthulhu.

I just got an email from Rana K. Williamson, proprietor of Notes from an Eclectic Mind. She happened on my citation of another Rana, and since she’s never seen anyone by that name, she asked if I could forward her email.

Well, I can’t. I don’t seem to have Rana’s email address anywhere. I don’t even know if “Rana” is her real name or a pseudonym (the blog name is suggestive, as “rana” is Latin for “frog”).

Nonetheless… Rana, meet Rana. Ranas, welcome to my blogroll.

I did some clicking around yesterday and discovered that white pelicans such as we saw in Horicon Marsh are actually living natively in Wisconsin nowadays, after a long absence. How cool is that?

Getting to where I could use some new bird books. The ranges in the old ones (my mother’s castoffs) don’t reflect conservation efforts.

Stevens Point is a potentially nice town that has fallen victim to some incredibly stupid civil-engineering decisions. I don’t think I’d ever live there—the Christian hard-right is strongly in evidence—yet a few simple decisions would make it a much more appealing place to visit.

Downtown is nestled into a pretty bend of the Wisconsin River. Boating heaven—except that some idiot built a bridge for Highway 10 whose sides are so low that no boat can possibly pass under it. Not even a kayak, I should think. Dumb. Dumb design decision.

And then there’s the main downtown square, framed by handsome late-19th-century brick buildings with jaw-bending Polish names inscribed on them. The main exit therefrom leads straight to the river. Maybe I’m too yupster for my own good, but this space is just crying to be a pedestrian mall with some outdoor dining, locally-owned shops, maybe a boat landing at the river…

Instead, it’s a parking lot. A PARKING LOT. Argh. Who runs this place, Lee Iacocca? Come on, Stevens Point. It’s too late to do anything about that damned bridge, but the square can be reclaimed. Do it.

In Stevens Point’s favor is a lovely, personable reference librarian in the main public library. (Speaking of bad design, by the way… the exterior of this building is disgracefully ugly.) I didn’t catch his name, but he’s a white-haired, bearded gent who speaks fair Finnish. He’s the right sort. Hope the library system can hang onto him.

We drove out County Highway P to Route 54. Cranberry country. Yes, cranberries—Wisconsin regularly dukes it out with Massachusetts for the honor of top cranberry producer; eat that with your Thanksgiving dinner. Eventually we found an unlabeled and practically un-signed road that leads through Black River State Forest. Once you’re on said road, you find out that it is an official “Wisconsin Rustic Road,” which I suppose is why it’s not labeled.

The forest is gorgeous, and I heartily recommend the drive through it—but beware of getting out of the car, because there are ticks everywhere. We did our level best to keep them off, but both of us still ended up bitten. No sequelae as yet (I can’t even find my bite site any more), and let us hope there will be none, because ticks are nasty.

We stopped off at a wildlife-observation tower. The critters in Black River are shy; this is clearly not a heavily-human-travelled area. Even the geese resented our presence, swimming off with loud remarks about how the neighborhood was going to pot. We did see a number of cowbirds and a pair of great blue herons.

The south end of the forest drive opens onto County Highway O, which winds through hills and valleys as impressive as anything in Kettle Moraine. It is possible to tell that you’re nearing the end of the glaciated area; outcrops of sedimentary bedrock start to peek out here and there. It’s not clear why the glaciers spared southwest Wisconsin, but spare it they did. The bluffs get right steep and dangerous-looking as one nears La Crosse.

Which, while I’m complaining about places, is the culinary armpit of the universe if you’re vegetarian. You can eat anything in La Crosse as long as it comes from a dead cow or a dead sea-critter. There’s a huge opportunity for a restauranteur whose menu can do better than “Vegetarian Selection.” I won’t mention the name of the Chinese-Thai place we finally ate at. I will just say that what was billed as pad thai might have made an acceptable lo mein, but was about as Thai as I am. And I’m not.

One of the nice things about this trip was that plans were pretty loose. I used to be a plan-it-to-the-gills anal-retentive, but I am learning.

So on Monday we went to Oshkosh, since it appears to be the most happening of the Lake Winnebago cities. We had a bit of trouble avoiding Memorial Day parades on the way out of Appleton, but after a few white-knuckle moments we were back on the nice one-lane state and county roads.

Oshkosh is indeed a nice little burg. Reminds me of Bloomington, if you add in the lake, and I liked Bloomington a lot. When I’m back on the job market after library school, I may well seek out college towns of this general description. I’ve no objection to Madison-type cities, but I do love smaller towns as long as they’re not hopelessly conservative.

We drove to the north end of Menominee Park, walked around a bit, said “awwwwww” at some very young baby ducklings, and then drove back to the south end where all the action is. Early as it was, the place was filling with joggers and proto-picnickers and whathaveyou. Didn’t seem to bother the plovers and killdeers, though, nor the geese and their goslings.

At eleven the boating station opened up, and we rented an aquabike on a whim. This is an odd-looking contraption with three big hollow wheels, the two back wheels being ridged so that they propel the thing a la paddle-wheelers. It’s dead easy to use, less confining than a paddle boat (and you get to sit close together with your co-biker, which I found quite pleasant, thank you).

We pedal-paddled past a half-submerged log that turned out to have a turtle on it. Turtle blinked at us, turned his head, considered dropping off into the lake—but we stopped a little way away from him, and he only waved a friendly if rather oddly-shaped paw at us and went back to his sunning.

There’s a large orange-brown fish in Wisconsin that gets a kick out of coming to the surface of the water and thrashing about a bit. David and I have called them “water monsters” for years, because we didn’t (still don’t) know what they were, and because the thrashing brought to mind bad Loch Ness Monster moments.

We had a couple of water monsters surface right under our front wheel. We could have reached down and grabbed them. Wow. Coolness. No monsters were damaged in the making of this blog. They swam with us a bit and went under again.

After we gave the bike back, we went into the little zoo. There’s a quite nice wolf habitat with three inhabitants, the world’s only brachiating porcupine, the inevitable prairie-dog town… but the fun part is the petting zoo, stocked by a couple of local farms.

They had a pair of the sweetest-tempered burros you could ever wish for. Now, I like burros on general principles, but these were exceptionally nice animals. One walked up to me to be petted despite perfect awareness I hadn’t any food for him. So I scratched his wiry-haired forehead and rubbed his back for him, and he stood quietly and let me.

I want a burro, I do. Do you think I could keep one in the back yard?

The drive to Stevens Point (during which I magically avoided getting us lost, despite roadwork-related detours) took us through more of the farm country we’d gotten used to from previous days’ travel. Plenty of placid cows, red silos, and plowed cornfields.

We didn’t feel like driving to dinner, so it was our good luck to find a Japanese place across the street from our hotel that served vegetable sushi of various sorts. Not up to Wasabi standards, but quite good nonetheless.

Okay, so esker is from Old Irish (thanks, Rana!), kame is Scottish from the same root as English “comb,” which is bewildering because I don’t see what kames have to do with combs at all, and drumlin is part Irish Gaelic, part suffix.

Freaky.

Supposedly there were boats and aquabikes and similar fun things for rent at Fond du Lac’s Lakeshore Park. Well, we looked and didn’t find them. (Why none of the promotional material actually gave directions I can’t say.) So we tooled out of town and headed for Kettle Moraine State Forest, Northern Unit.

First we stopped off at the Ice Age Visitor Center, which has a great overlook around back. Lovely, not-to-be-missed view.

Now. The short course on glacial topography. Glaciers pick up a whole bunch of junk as they roll over the landscape. Glacial topography is the effect of various ways of dumping that junk. Some junk gets dumped at the edges of the glacier as it moves; that forms moraines. Some junk gets dumped into holes in the ice by meltwater; that forms conical hills called kames. Some junk gets dumped by streams running under the ice; that forms snaky ridges called eskers. And some junk gets dumped when a leftover chunk of ice sinks into the ground as it melts; that forms little lakes and ponds called kettles (because they resemble them).

Junk can also do pretty impressive damage to solid bedrock. In some places, it got whirled around by currents and actually drilled into the rock to significant depths, forming a pothole.

(Isn’t this terrific terminology, by the way? Love it. Still trying to find out the derivations for most of it—“moraine” is obviously French, but “esker?”)

You can find all these things in Wisconsin, which got a major glacial makeover in the last Ice Age, and most of them in Kettle Moraine State Forest.

We walked a substantial part of the Zillmer Trails. (If you’ve been there, we started out on the yellow trail, cut across on the red, and came back on the yellow.) There were trilliums everywhere, white three-petaled flowers pretty enough for a bridal bouquet, as well as red columbine, wild geranium, and some flowers we don’t know. (We’re even more amateurish botanists than birders.)

More warblers, and another scarlet tanager, but the ornithological highlight of the day was a pair of eastern blue grosbeaks. (Grosbeaks! No, indigo buntings! No, grosbeaks! No, indigo buntings! Yeah, okay, grosbeaks. Brownish stripes on the wings. The obliging creatures returned to the tree we were watching several times until we had this sorted out.)

We stopped for a bit to enjoy the silence under a little stand of spruce. David says he thinks the pine needles damp out the noise; I think he’s right.

We drove through the forest after our hike, getting lost a couple more times (for as small a town as it is, Dundee should not be so confusing!) and ticking off a rather rude group of motorcyclists, but the drive was very much worth the momentary annoyances.

We stopped at Butler Lake briefly, and then went on to the Parnell Trail Area to climb the observation tower. My word, what a place! It must be spectacular in fall; it’s plenty gorgeous in spring.

Why did the wild turkey cross the road, somewhere in Sheboygan County? So Dorothea wouldn’t feel bad about getting lost again, natch. We knew we were going north, which was the right direction, so we knew if we kept going we’d have to hit Route 23 eventually… and eventually we did. We drove west to the shore of Lake Winnebago, and followed that north to Appleton.

Where I got us lost. Again. Turned the wrong way on 441, and ended up in Neenah. Nobody hire me as navigator; I’m bloody hopeless.

We found a really terrific Indian restaurant in Appleton, called Sai Ram. Highly recommend it. The maitre d’ was rather surprised when I correctly identified the music playing as the soundtrack from Lagaan.

We spent the rest of the evening tossing out suggestions for the next day, but more on that anon.

We’re back, after a truly terrific trip. I’ll tell you all about it, but it’ll take me a while. Days, probably.

David came to the house late Saturday morning with an earnestly cute little red snub-nosed car (beware grotty popups). This little critter behaved like a champ the whole trip, despite some pretty horrible things we did to it because David hasn’t driven a car in years, and I haven’t in… um, rather more years. Bravo, Snub-Nose, and if I ever break down and buy a car I hope it’s half as pleasant.

Travelling by car is sinfully luxurious to one accustomed to business travel by airline. No worries about packing tight; if the trunk isn’t big enough (it was, and then some), the back seat will do and is more convenient anyway. No metal detectors, no security personnel with wands ordering me to take off my shoes and turn over my waistband, no crowds, no lines at the gate, no narrow airplane aisles, no safety spiels, no—

Ahem.

We dropped a housekey with two friends who graciously (at the absolute last minute) agreed to look in on the Goth-kitties. (Who were well-fed, clean, and healthy when we got home. A mite freaked out, but that’s only to be expected.) Then we headed out East Washington Avenue toward Horicon Marsh. After a bit of getting lost (we did a lot of this), we found the DNR Field Office at the south end. A kindly volunteer in the office gave us maps and advice, and we set off down the trails into the marsh.

This walk was where I burnt my hands. No one to blame for it but myself; should have thought to sunscreen them but didn’t. They still hurt, and the stress to them seems to have caused a minor attack of pompholyx, but damp cotton gloves quiet their complaining.

But, oh, what a walk! Red-winged blackbirds everywhere, of course (why Wisconsin’s state bird is not the red-winged blackbird I am sure I don’t know; there’s plenty more of them than there are robins, and they’re sure more dramatic-looking). But also bobolinks, more yellow warblers than I knew existed, goldfinches, scarlet tanagers, a flycatcher of some variety (yes, we’re very amateur birders), blue-winged teals, Canada geese, and—but let me tell the story.

Over a ridge to our left we saw a big white bird flying heavily. “Hm. Osprey? No, wrong shape. An egret, maybe?”

“Pelican,” David suggested.

“No bloody way. There aren’t any pelicans in Wisconsin. Must be an egret. Drat, it’s gone below the treeline. There’s a trail up to that ridge.”

We climbed it, and got a look into a series of pools. Not one white bird, but four.

“Egrets. Told you.”

“No, they’re not. They’re swimming. Egrets stalk. And look at that one throwing back its head! Did you see the pouch under its beak?”

“Be damned. You’re right. They are pelicans.”

Sure enough. We checked the bird book when we got back, and they were white pelicans. Wisconsin is an unlikely spot for them to migrate through, but apparently not out of the question.

After our walk we drove up the east side of the marsh to the Marsh Haven Nature Center. David’s mom has been bugging us for years about a ground squirrel that she once saw in Governor Dodge State Park. We’d never managed to see one. But there in the Marsh Haven lawn it was, standing up to look us over. Handsome little bugger, about the size of a chipmunk but longer and leaner.

We stayed the night in Fond du Lac, eating in a nice Mexican place. Across from us was a family with two children whom I did not even notice until David pointed them out, they were so quiet—well-behaved children, something one does not see in Madison. We drove out to Lakefront Park near sunset to climb the lighthouse and look at the lake.