birds of a feather

I biked in along the lake path to work again. Such birds there were on the waters of Lake Mendota! Ducks, geese, gulls, heron – you name it!





Numerically, it is an unusual day. Sixty years ago (meaning in 1950) on this day (meaning the 20th day of the 10th month), Ed was born – an event which he now chooses to ignore.

Fine.

Five years ago (meaning in 2005) today (again, the 20th day of this 10th month) he and I first met. All those rounded numbers! Multiples of five! Even this, of course, is something he would not view as special or important or worthy of mention.

But I do.

We became traveling companions of sorts on that day. It is a description that is nearly perfect: we navigate the everyday in the most absurd way – two people who have not a whole lot in common, except when we agree on something, which is not that often.

But neither do we disagree.





We think differently, he and I. We see things from our own histories and aside from the years I lived in New York as a kid (as did he), our histories don’t overlap much. I would never have done any of the things he considers important in his life and he would never have done things I consider important.

And yet, we sure as hell travel together in the most agreeable manner. And we have figured out how to get on a pleasant path, and we have figured out a whole lot of things about the other, so that different as we are, we are indeed quite good at navigating the everyday.



We did something different tonight: we ate out. And at a nice place, a new place – Nostrano on the Square. An acquiescence to the other: he, to my love (these days very rarely realized) of great food, me, to the understanding that he and I together do not typically search out great food in Madison.





Two birds, with few matching feathers. Funny how that works.

Tuesday

When is anyone’s best time to think? Walking somewhere? In the early morning hours, over the first cup of whatever?

What I need space for is not the great thoughts (we rarely want to indulge in those anyway), but for the sifting and sorting of ordinary things: what if I were to move this winter? How should I live so that there would always be sunlight streaming into my space? What will this week-end be like? What should I cook for dinner?

I bike to work despite the chilly morning weather so that I can garner time to think. During those twenty minutes, I sift and sort.





I’ll be so sorry when, in a week or two, the weather will push me back to the bus. There, for better or worse, I just people watch. No good thinking comes from that. It’s as distracting as the Internet.

For now though, I have my morning and afternoon rides.

Monday

The weekdays continue to be overloaded with work. I’m sorry about that. I wish I could think of evenings and early mornings as my own time, but they’re not that. I have, this week, more work than ever. Midterms, papers – all require my full attention.

So forgive me if at least this week Ocean is left with pictures from the lake path. So tame. So dull. So, for that reason, exactly what I need in my nonwork minutes: no distractions, no passionate detours. A smooth and uneventful ride.






But, is this what October has always been like for me? Let me answer this tomorrow. No, better yet – Wednesday. Tomorrow will be like today: a strain to find the minutes for an Ocean post. A real strain (I have a full day and night of work ahead. Sigh...)

crossing over

To me, the Ice Age Trail, in the process of slowly being built from one corner of our state to the next, has given us the best hiking. (The Chippewa Moraine segment from last week being a fine example of it.) So when Ed tells me there is an Ice Age Trail work day scheduled for this Saturday, I am really thrilled to spend at least the morning hours working with the volunteers and staff on trail improvements.

Especially on a day like this Saturday – cool, yes, starting off cool, but breezy and bright and altogether beautiful.

The segment where we are to work is one of my favorite local ones – near Gibraltar Rock and the Wisconsin River. Even the drive to it is lovely. And seasonal.









It’s a big volunteer day on the trail. I've rarely seen so many eager able bodies willing to give their time to this project. We join the prairie reconstruction group – hacking away at the aggressive sumac and cedar to create space for the natives that are just barely hanging in there.












At noon, the crew breaks for lunch. We nibble a little, but we’re mostly in a hurry to get going. Our plan is to head west. We hike out along the trail...





...and hit the country roads, weaving past a winter-ready landscape...







...making our way to Iowa.

Iowa. The most neglected by me neighbor state. It's not on the way to anywhere that I typically drive, and it has rarely been a destination state. I went there once, to a conference in Des Moines, many many years ago. But this week, during one of those “let me distract myself” web searches for good backpacking within a reasonable drive of Madison, I came across the Yellow River State Park. In Iowa.

It’s an easy trip. Two hours along the Wisconsin River.





We pick up a Subway foot-long five-buck sandwich and eat it by the road, listening to the birds outside. My, Wisconsin is a pretty state.


Then, over the Mississippi...





... to Marquette, Iowa...





...and a dozen miles north until we reach the state park.

The Yellow River State Park is, I read, Iowa’s best hiking experience. Two dozen miles of trails, wild camping permitted, bluffs, heavy inclines – we read all this and it sounds nearly perfect.

But it’s late when we get there – just before 4. The ranger station is closed. No matter: we've printed the maps and there are additional ones posted outside.

We top our water supply at the one park water spout, amidst a bevy of hunters.

Hunting season here? I ask, knowing too well that Wisconsin’s hunting season is as complicated as anything, but then, we’re not in Wisconsin.
Oh yes, the hunters tell us. Muzzleloaders this week-end.
Ed explains to me the concept of hunting this way but I hear only one thing – quit worrying: they can't shoot far, nor with great accuracy. Sort of like shooting with a barn door – he tells me.

I imagine small barn doors trying to make their way to a target, but not quite making it.
We don’t have anything blaze orange, I remind him. And what good is my bright orange t-shirt? It’s getting cold. I need my jacket over it.

Still, we set out into the forest, with my t-shirt off and plastered to my backpack. Sort of like a flag.  (I’m surprised that no one else is wearing blaze orange. Except for the hunters – for them it’s mandatory.)

We set out just as it turns 4.





I’ll say this about late afternoon hiking: the colors are pretty.




But it’s slightly disconcerting to watch the sun go down without any idea as to where you’re going to pitch the tent. We pass one clearing intended for backpackers. It’s pretty enough, but it seems early to stop.

An hour later we pass another. We had expected slow going and high inclines. We find it quite the opposite – easy stuff and, therefore, rapid progress over fairly untaxing ascents and descents.





We’re still not ready to stop. We discuss the idea of pushing forward. There will be very little light left if we continue to the next clearing. And we’ll have to take it, however good it is, because there wont be another chance before darkness falls.





And so it would be our unfortunate luck that the one other group of backpackers in the entire state park has already set up camp there. Not wanting to camp within eyesight of anyone (I know, I'm not reasonable here, but to me -- this is why one camps: to have nothing between you and nature), we take a side path that seems not to be part of the trail system.

And this time we’re really lucky. After making our way across a stream, we arrive at a lovely, if a tad overgrown clearing. Before us, a ridge creates a natural boundary. The moon is now bright and the quiet is magnificent.





We pitch the tent and tonight we know to put the cover in place. Ed boils water for a pack of Curry in a Hurry (basic rice and beans with spices and a lot of organic language on the cover; we’ve had it before – it’s quite satisfying if you've hiked long enough to not mind the ho-hum nature of it).

The stove is out, the garbage is packed away. It's 7:30 and quite dark outside.
How many New Yorkers did you bring? – Ed asks.

One. Didn’t you take some?

Left them in the car. Can we split yours in half? 

Of course, We never read late anyway. By eight, the flashlights go off and the first wave of sleep hits us.

...until the late night howl. It seems just a few steps away, even though I tell myself noise carries well on a quiet night.
It's a wolf? --  I ask. Ed has woken up too, it's that close.
No, probably not.

Coyotes then?

That sounds right.

I don’t remember, do coyotes pounce on people? I say this, at the same time that I am in awe of a night where coyotes send off a cry into the dark.

Go to sleep.

What’s that other noise? A moan, repeated again and again.

A cow. Go to sleep.

Attacked by the coyote pack?

Go to sleep.

It is cold in the tent. Even with the cover, we are definitely feeling the chill. Both Ed and I bury deeper into our bags, using the hoods to keep the head and face warm.

I’m asleep again, until someone flashes a light into our tent.

Ed, someone’s out there. I listen to the crunch of retreating footsteps.

Go to sleep.
A hunter. Yes, we’re just about an hour before sunrise. They can start shooting now. And they do. We listen to the sound of rifles from the hills.

I want to see the sun come up, and so I force myself to crawl out of the bag to raise the tent flap. The cover is brittle and stiff. Flakes of ice fall on my arm.

Deep frost has come to Iowa.









Let’s stay put until the sun thaws us out, Ed suggests. He’s picked up his half of the New Yorker again.

No, no – we need to get going!

Soon.

At least, can we have breakfast?

Out comes the pot, the water, the coffee, the pouches of instant apple cinnamon oatmeal.

And once you’ve moved yourself this far, you may as well pack up and head out.





Still, it’s almost a quarter to ten before we’re on the trail. (Compared to last week’s 8:15.)

But it is warmer now. Ed has put away his flannel shirt, and I’m down to two layers to keep me warm.

The trail is a mixed bag of hiking segments, horse trails and dirt road. There are designated campgrounds where you can camp with your horses and we pause there to watch people get their horses ready.





A rather significant creek runs through this park (the Big Paint Creek) and there are opportunities for trout fishing as well.










Iowans are justifiably proud of these wooded hills.





At the look-out points, we come across an occasional person who’ll ask where we’re from. We then get the standard line – most people drive through on 80 and never get to see this! They wave their hand over the expansive view onto the ridge that borders the creek below.They wait for our affirmation. And we oblige. Best hike in Iowa! -- we confirm.





And it is magnificent. But what you do not want to say is that we’re spoiled there, on the other side of the state line. We have so many ridge lines and lakes and streams that it seems almost unfair. Minnesota robbed Iowa of its rightful share, it seems. Their best is like one of our many. Or, is it that I have become fully addicted to our state's unique beauty?





Still, it is quite pretty here on a Sunday afternoon. We munch on nuts and dried apricots again and spend a while listening to leaves fall. I do ask one local hiker – how come the leaves have mostly dropped? We’re further north, and we’re not done yet in Madison.
The warm spells, followed by these cold nights – he speculates. It’s as if one day they were just starting to turn and then they dropped.


We climb down the ridge (so many leaves, so easy to slide down and land on your butt – and I do...) and rejoin the road to the car.

Back over the Mississippi...





... to our own cornfields (and pastures). These particular fields come with a modern twist.






Life. The familiar, but not so much  as to keep you rooted to one place (one state?), or to one way of proceeding. Even if after you do try something else, you're so happy to return home.

daybreak

...the first rays touch the vegetables at the Westside Community Farmers Market.





I buy berries, too. Because I can this year. Raspberries in Wisconsin, in the middle of October.






And now we're off.

the last of the red hot (warm) October days...

A lot of biking today. None of it recreational. To get to this meeting, to get downtown, to lunch, to work again – spin those wheels.

These are my last days of cycling for the year. Oh, I could continue, but it becomes too hard to fight the cold wind in the morning when dressed for teaching that, for me, begins at 9:30 and ends when any warmth from the day has fizzled out.

So I’ll end soon, but for now, I am intensely spinning those wheels.

I bike through a mixed palate. There are beautiful colors out there, sure and I do take photos when they seem especially pretty.






But there is a lot that looks spent and tired. A mixed bag, you might say.





Still, the skies look good for this week-end and so Ed and I are heading out again early Saturday. A different grab bag of outdoor events, but one that will again put me outside the range of WiFi until late Sunday.

Until then.

underwater

Forgive me. I feel slightly submerged.





I have a huge load of work to do (forty five exams to grade, paper assignment to write) and, because it continues to be lovely outside, I want a week-end off, which means that my evenings now are packed solid.

I’m swamped. Or swimped, if you prefer. Or – underwater.

And to think that just a few minutes before, biking to work in the early, early morning, the world seemed so ... right side up.

green

Much overused term these days. I cook a green dinner does not mean that I cook a dinner with greens. Nor that I am green at cooking it.

But if I step out in the morning, and I go to the market, and I say – hey, there are still greens to be had...





(I buy the brussel sprouts)

And If, on my way down Bascom Hill I note that the grass is no more no less green than it had been this summer...





...there wont be a doubt that we’re talking about green the color. There is still some of that left. Not for long, but it’s still there.

reflection

Is it a useless skill to be able to reinvent your life frequently? If X does not work out, you move to Y. Then Z. Then A, then B and so on.

You could argue that this smells of a restlessness that stands in the way of success. Giving up already? Stay with failure for a while! Savor its bite!

Someone said to me last week: of course you’re selling your condo. You’re so restless!

But here is the good side: I am never surprised when life takes an odd direction. It’s that? Okay: I’ll do this then. Exciting!

(Typically I can fully engage in the novel twist before I even realize that I am in an altogether new place.)

I thought about this today as I biked to work – taking a longer version of the bike path. I had time. The weather was magnificent.





The colors were those of a warm fall morning.





The light was gentle and kind.














I did not think about this on the way home, even though again I took a detour – this time away from the lake, so that I could stock up on lightly salted nuts from Trader Joe’s (no place has lightly salted nuts at their prices). I thought, instead, how lucky I was.

A colleague said to me yesterday that I looked so, well, cheerful. I take no credit for that – I have been cheery since birth. Whoa, she’s so giggly/smiley/cheerful/happy – I’ve heard versions of this all my life.

But, too, cheer is aided by luck and I thought this afternoon how luck had been with me just this morning, when I lectured in a brand new shirt that I discovered, minutes before class time, has the unfortunate inclination of popping open at the bosom with no provocation on my part.

(Yet another advantage that men have over women – if their shirts pop open, no one will laugh.)

My shirt remained closed all day long.


But the ride back was grueling. All those nuts in my backpack. All those blasted low salt nuts.





(Three of today's photos were snapped straight from the seat of my bike, in motion. Maybe you can tell which ones. Maybe not.)

summer maybe

You have to earn your rewards. Time off, restful pleasures – you can’t grab them as you please.

Unless you’re a goose or a squirrel.











And even there, I can only speculate about how many hours were spent on flying south or burying acorns.

I have many more thoughts on the subject of squirrels and hoarding nuts and the need for geese to fly south, but I can’t indulge this just yet. You guessed it. I have work to do.

But soon. Unless one of those youthful hunters hunts me down or I lose all use of my typing hands, I’ll get to the pressing musings on work and pleasure and life as we know it soon. Summer maybe.

Chippewa Moraine

There’s the crunch of leaves and then silence. And then the leaves again, closer this time.
Squirrels – Ed says. I’ve been listening to them.

It’s their evening dance, I guess. Most every other animal appears settled for the night. Not so the squirrels.

Though it’s not really night yet. The first dazzle of stars is becoming visible, but it’s just past seven. Still, within a few minutes, we’re both asleep.

As usual, I wake up frequently. It’s the way I sleep – one stretch, than another, some long and dreamless, many with the usual stories running through them. This night I know why I'm waking. It’s turning cold. I was sleeping on top of my sleeping bag after supper, now I’m loosely inside. Several hours later, I’m zipped up solid.

When we had pitched the tent in the forest of the Chippewa Moraine (a tad over 200 miles northwest of Madison) on a tiny isthmus between two lakes, it was so warm that we kept the tent rain cover off. It’s splendid to have nothing but  fine mesh between you and the forest (it's been so warm that there are still the occasional mosquitoes). Until it gets cold. Then you wish you had thought less about the splendidness of it all and more about setting up the protective layer against a crispy cool night.


But oh, the weather! It’s the unseasonable warmth of this October that pushed us up here to begin with. Initially ambitious, we thought of going up to Michigan’s UP this week-end. No, too much driving for a two day trip. Ed suggested a ridge trail just a couple of hours north of Madison. Lakes! -- I tell him. We need to wake up to the noise of the waterfowl and a mist rising above still waters!

Last time we camped, the mist did indeed rise up over waters (not so still then -- it was the Wisconsin River) in breathtaking wisps of pink. That kind of image stays with you. Up in the Chippewa Moraine, there are more than twenty lakes within a day’s hike. The Ice Age Trail, that old friend of ours, passes right through – up one ridge, down the next, through a mixed forest of birch, maple, oak, and conifers.





The perfect backpacking week-end. Not true: one thing that I suppose may have been a bit less disconcerting. These two days have been designated as the days of the youth hunt in Wisconsin. Kids can hunt deer, so long as they have an adult with them. If you’re hiking, you’re advised to wear blaze orange. A warning that even dogs take seriously.





Not Ed though. Wear the vest, I tell him.
I’m wearing a bright red t-shirt.
...the color of maple leaves right now, I point out. But I let it go. I’m his shield We’re traveling together this time.


The Chippewa Moraine is just north of the small town of Bloomer.





And just outside of Bloomer, we come across a rally.





Harley people, Ed says. Having, for business reasons attended many a motorcycle rally in years past, he talks freely about the image of a Harley person, about the styles of bikes. To me, Harleys are loud. I can’t imagine Ed on a Harley.

Did you ever own a Harley? 

No, but I had an Indian. A 1948. 

Loud? 

Of course.
Why did you have it then? 
Cheap.


We’re sitting at a picnic table outside the Chippewa Moraine Ice Age Interpretive Center. We have with us a Subway to split for lunch. Below, a prairie stretches toward one of the lakes and beyond.










Shortly after 1, we set out. Not a heavy duty hike – four hours (nine miles) out one day, then, circling a bit more, five hours (eleven miles)  back the next. But what a hike! We are amidst a canvas of intractable, at once vivacious but also muted and gentle color.











In spite of the noise of the occasional gunfire, we come across no hunters and only once do we sight a white tail deer. Frogs, we do see frogs.





Snakes, too. More than one.





And over one of the lakes, loons croon with that characteristic plaintive song of theirs.





The trail continues mostly through county parkland and Ed reminds me that much of the dedicated forests are there for hiking because hunters have lobbied hard for their preservation.











When the trail leaves the county forest, it climbs up to a prairie that is beyond beautiful. We talk about the difficulties in establishing a prairie on land that for too many decades has been losing the battle with quack grass and creeping charlie. Still, when you look at these meadows you think nothing is impossible and you tell yourself – we should do this back at the farmette. Maybe.





Camping is free and unrestricted, here on county land. We pick our spot on the isthmus. I’m surprised that there are still a few mosquitoes out at dusk. Ed lights his ancient stove and boils water for the pouch dinner we’ve taken along. The sun sets on the lake at the foot of our tent.
















...at night, a crash rouses both of us. Falling branch, Ed mumbles. But it’s not. There is a further sound of twigs breaking. Deer. It must be deer. I know I’ll spook them if I go out to explore. I stay in my warm bag and the noise quickly fades, replaced by a windy patter of falling leaves. When a gust picks up, it sounds like rain. A dry rain hitting our tent. From a starlit sky.


Morning. Maybe the best part is now. For those wisps of predawn mist over the lake.





...for the pink sky and birdsong....

Ed boils water again, this time for pouches of apple cinnamon oatmeal.


 


We pack up camp and by 8:15 we’re back on the trail.





Up one ridge, down the next, pausing every now and then, for the gold studded prairie...











...and the lakes...





...and a snack of dried apricots and nuts. The sky is a touch less blue this morning, giving us a chance to see it all in different light. Morning light.





And then, afternoon light once more.





A mix of trees, a mix of colors.






The perfect, fair-weather backpacking trip. Worth the nearly four hour drive.

On the way back to Madison we stop at an Eau Claire mega-Target. Ed picks up a pack of Dove mini ice cream bars.

There are 17 little bars in there!

It was the best deal per ounce...

I understand that, but that is a lot of ice cream calories!

He takes out a handful and we distribute the rest to the people in line.

Don’t tell anyone, but Wisconsin is one hell of a beautiful state.