A week of walking to work
On Monday, I closed the green-painted lockless door of the four-unit I live in behind me, and turned toward the shore of Monona Bay. A black dog with a white front, fenced into his yard, tossed a faded red-and-blue twist of rope outside the fence and regarded me with a practiced sad-eyed pout. I threw the toy over the fence, and the dog leapt after it joyously.
Monona Bay was frozen pretty much solid on Monday, bare of wildlife save for a couple pair of ducks and geese. The walk up to Brittingham Park was still far from devoid of interest: the quirky yard with a faux sea serpent in the flower border and a gorgeous copper-greeny butterfly bench against a tree, hardy joggers and bikers and one or two walkers like me, trees budding leaves, even the ice patterned oddly by refrozen puddles.
At Brittingham Park, I cut over to Park Street; there’s a marginally shorter way through the “Triangle” apartment complexes, but it involves crossing major streets without benefit of stoplights, so I prefer the safer (if noisier) route. Campus is creeping down Park Street, it seems; buildings I don’t remember at all start shortly after crossing Regent. They aren’t grotesque excrescences, at least, though they don’t demonstrate any particular harmony with the rest of campus. Madison seems to have learned something since the 1960s, which produced horrible Van Hise, Van Vleck, and the triply-horrible Humanities building.
Students and faculty heading for classes and offices join me at Dayton Street or thereabouts, right where my bad knee starts bugging me. I can’t quite explain what it is about their dress that feels familiar and comforting to me, but something does. It isn’t that they dress the way I do, because nobody does that, not in Fairfax and not in Madison either.
On the way home that day, the dog who asked me to toss his toy to him thumps his tail disconsolately, watching a child bouncing a basketball in the driveway just outside his fence.
Tuesday is warm; the bay is puddled as I walk home, and a few spots have opened up near shore. There are a fair few For Sale signs out; I note the addresses, to look up prices online later. I find out that there’s a bizarre spread on lakefront property, from $425K all the way up to nearly $600K. One differentiator appears to be actual deeded shoreline rights, but some of it is doubtless “wishing prices” from the housing bubble. All the houses currently for sale are far too big for my taste. The shore drive does have smaller ones, but no one’s selling any.
Wednesday is wet, although the rain doesn’t really start until I cross Johnson Street—that last quarter-mile where my knee starts to hurt, again. I have my umbrella, so no harm done. On the way home, quite a bit more of the bay is open water, and I see—
“’Skrat!” I announce to David on walking in the door.
“You saw ’skrat?” he asks.
“Three ’skrat!” I answer proudly. “Sitting on the edge of the ice.”
Thursday morning opens up even more water, and before I reach Brittingham Park I count nine muskrats at once. There may be more, even, but now and then they slip into or out of the water, so it’s hard to get an authoritative count. At the park, a flotilla of small, stubby waterfowl has gathered near shore. I assume they’re coots, though I can’t see whether their beaks are the right color because the light is just wrong; my hunch is confirmed on the way home that evening.
Friday, the ice has lost all anchors against the shoreline, drifting lazily toward my side of shore and piling up in hand-sized chunks. The coots have gone to the other side of the remaining ice, but the muskrats are very much still in evidence, paddling for pondweed or whatever it is they do.
I quite like my walk to work. The bad knee isn’t seriously bothersome; I’m inclined to let it work out its own ill-temper over time. And five hours a week of moderate exercise is probably just what the doctor ordered; I got lazy in Fairfax, there being few places worth walking in. I could take the bus to work. But I don’t think I will, now that I’ve established a different habit.