Yesterday we put on our travellin’ shoes, climbed into the orange Aveo, and headed north and east to Appleton, the northernmost of the Fox Cities. Our goal was the Bubolz Nature Preserve and their Saturday maple-syrup tours. Snow crunching and shifting underfoot, we tromped through their sugar bush to see the sap dripping from the trees into decorated plastic buckets, thence to be dumped into an immense boiling pan over a wood fire for evaporation and caramelization. Eventually you take it out and filter it, and then it’s syrup.
Of course I bought a big jar to take home. How not?
The star of the show in absentia was a pileated woodpecker, who had gone and made abstract sculpture out of a dead-but-still-standing tree trunk. He’d taken a two-and-a-half-foot tall by half a foot wide by half a foot deep hollow out of that thing, and the pile of shavings on the ground before it was more than respectable.
After that we found our old favorite eatery, Sai Ram, discovering that it’s really every bit as good as we remember it. I’ve never had lighter pakoras, and the masala vegetables were absolutely divine. In the same little strip-mall is a genre-specific bookstore, used and new; I found another Melissa Scott novel and a James Tiptree Jr. anthology, while David dug up an anthology of antique (1930s) skiffy.
We drove downtown, found a place near Lawrence University to park the car, and wandered about College Avenue for a while. The Outagamie history museum is small, but has some fun tidbits in it, and the Houdini stuff is almost as good as their advertising suggests. After that and a peek-in-shop-windows stroll, we got back in the car and I drove home. I think people go insanely fast on Highway 26, but I’m a notable fuddy-duddy about highway driving.
This morning I was feeling decadent, so we drove over to Bluephies for a tasty brunch. David suggested a drive through the Arboretum, and by pure chance we arrived at the Visitor Center fifteen minutes before a scheduled nature walk, a big old redtail hawk wheeling and soaring overhead. So we did that, crunching and slipping over more snow, and damned if there weren’t some hints of spring: a carpet of green watercress on one of the open springs, turkey and deer tracks everywhere, tufts of coyote fur, cardinals furiously claiming territory, and last but not least, the humble skunk cabbage poking its odiferous shoots up in the marsh.
I like these weekends. They are immense fun, and they keep me comfortable behind the wheel of a car. I’d still be happier if Community Car would let me in, but oh well—something to look forward to when I’m forty.
