In William Kent Krueger’s most recent novel, the first page is about leafless trees, total darkness by 8pm, and the aches and pains of climbing out of bed.* There is no doubt in my mind that the seventy-four year old author wrote these words on a day much like today. Any writer, if he or she lives long enough, probably gets around to equating October with agedness. For a young writer, “the autumn of life” is a cliché to be avoided. For an old writer, it just is.

The following is my take on autumn and aging. I did, by the way, write the first draft of this blog before reading Krueger’s new book.

                                            *        *         *

 Autumn in the Upper Midwest usually descends quickly. This year it came in a day. October 5th was 85 and sunny; October 6th was 60 and overcast. One day I was in shorts and a teeshirt. The next day I was in jeans and a windbreaker over my teeshirt. My 18-year old dog went from summer lethargy to a hint of his old self.

My frame of mind shifted as quickly as the weather. I noticed the geese congregating in the marsh, even though they’d probably been doing so for weeks. I wondered whether the fall colors were late this year and was reminded that I’d know the answer to such questions if I just kept a personal phenology. I pulled Halloween decorations out of the rafters of my garage and, as I long as I was up there, took down the snow shovels and ice fishing gear. I went online to see when I needed to change the clocks.

My joints have also turned to fall. After a summer without pain, I now feel the change of temperature in my knees. I dug out heating pads from a cabinet in the bathroom, and I wrap them around my legs when I watch tv.

In spite of my achy knees, fall is still my second favorite season (next to summer). It definitely is the best time to kayak. The jet skiers are off the river, and lower water levels keep the large motorboats in the main channel. Canoeists and kayakers have the backwaters to themselves. I bring along a fishing pole when I paddle in the fall, but I rarely use it. The fish stop biting when the river turns (i.e, when the cool surface water sinks and water from the bottom rises), so I spend my time exploring places I’ve never been before.

I am writing this blog on the day after my annual flu and COVID shots. My arms and back hurt enough that I hardly notice my knees. Inoculations, at least for those of us who aren’t anti-vaxxers, are another part of autumn.

* William Kent Krueger’s new book is Apostle’s Cove. 2025, Atria Books.

For the topic of this week’s blog entry, I have two options. I could write about the dead fox in my garage, or I could write about my mom’s birthday party. On the off chance that someone from my family might actually look at my website, I thought it better to write about the party.

My mom turned ninety on October 12. She was one of sixteen kids, and she is one of five who are still alive. She has outlived my dad by more than forty years. She is healthy, her brain works fine, and she lives independently with my stepdad.

As part of the celebration, my siblings and I chartered a trolley and toured Door County. With thirty of my mom’s family and friends, we climbed the tower in Peninsula State Park, we painted our names on the Hardy Gallery building in Ephraim, and we sampled wine at Anchored Roots Winery in Egg Harbor. Only half of us did the tower, as the other half were as old as my mom and had mobility issues that kept them from even using the wheelchair ramp.

For me, the winery was the highlight of the day. We chose it because it had live music on an outdoor patio. I expected a folk singer, but it turned out to be Cathy Grier, a bluesy guitarist who was more Bonnie Raitt than Kate Wolf. She invited my mom on stage and asked her the secret to a long life. The question would have stumped me, but my mom, without skipping a beat, said, “Having fun and enjoying an occasional drink.”

After the tour, we returned to my mom’s house in Dyckesville, where the number of celebrants more than doubled. Tables and chairs had been set up in the three-stall garage, food and drink lined two of the walls, and a giant tv screen was put in one corner so guests could catch glimpses of the Packer game.

The trolley tour and garage party took place on Sunday. On Monday, the celebration continued on a much smaller scale. My sister Diane had invited Charles and Irina, friends from Belize, to the celebration. They run an open-air beachside restaurant on Ambergris Caye, and they brought with them lobster and hogfish* for a seafood barbecue. Charles showed me a different way to clean fish, a technique that bisects the skull and leaves half of the head on each fillet. He then grilled the fillets on one side only (skin-side down), and we spooned the flesh off of the skin when we ate. 

Ninety is a big turn on the odometer. It signifies beating the odds. I don’t expect to live that long; I am not sure I want to live that long. I was, however, happy to celebrate my mom’s ninetieth, largely because she was happy to celebrate it.

* An interesting factoid about hogfish is that they cannot be caught with hook and line. They won’t take a bait and must be speared.

Every October I Skype with a class of graduate students from Western Carolina University. My book Rediscovering Dewey is required reading for their course, and the instructor welcomes the chance for his students to have a conversation with the author. Before our meeting, the prof sends me a few prompts on subjects that the students would like to talk about.

This year some of students must have taken the time to look at my website, because they asked questions not only about the book, but also about some of my blog entries. They’d read my short personal essays about the Mississippi River and wanted to know what I thought contributed to a strong sense of place.

I am glad that I received the prompts in advance, because I’d never thought about sense of place in exactly that way. For as much as I value sense of place, for as much as I wallow in its presence whenever I feel it, I’ve never tried to break it down into its component parts. In some ways it seems better to leave it whole, just as I would never kill and dissect a frog to better understand amphibian ecology.

Rather than deconstructing my relationship with the Upper Mississippi River, I mentally ran down the list of the places where I’ve lived the longest and grouped them in terms of feeling at home. I realized that I feel closely connected to Green Bay (my hometown), Madison (my undergraduate years and my first time away from home), the redwoods of La Honda (my strongest immersion in nature), and La Crosse (my home on the Mississippi River and the birthplace of my daughter). I feel far less connected to Wausau (my home until I was seven years old), Boston (a rough patch in my life), Iowa (not sure why I never connected with Ames), and Taipei (where I always felt like a well-cared-for guest).

Two places defied categorization. The first was San Francisco. Even after living in “the City” for two years, I never got past it being some kind of fantasyland. Ed, one of my very best friends, has never lived anywhere other than the Bay Area. He and I should compare notes on this subject.

The other un-categorizable place was Minneapolis. It is an anomaly in that I’ve lived there three different times, and each time felt different. My first stay was 1974, and I didn’t last a year. I’d transferred from the University of Wisconsin to the University of Minnesota, then dropped out of college altogether to become a cookie maker for Pillsbury. When it was time to go back to school, I immediately returned to Madison.

In 1979, I moved back to Minneapolis for a masters degree, then four years later returned one more time for my Ph.D. Each residency became progressively better, to the point that when I left for the last time in 1986, part of me wanted to stay. Without doing too much analysis, I realized that the difference might have been that I’d made a home not of the entire city, but of Dinkytown, the small neighborhood adjacent the East Bank campus of the University. For most of the time I lived in the Twin Cities, I did not own a car, but my various Dinkytown apartments were all within walking distance to my favorite restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and live music venues.

Also one border of Dinkytown is the bank of the Upper Mississippi River. In terms of the River, I’ve come full circle.

Manyu’s friend Shu is back in China to visit her elderly parents, so her husband Stefan is on his own for a couple of months. On Wednesday we had him over for dinner.

Manyu fried up fresh bluegill fillets and made a beef stew in her multipurpose rice cooker.  After our meal I looked into my limited liquor supply to see if I could find an after-dinner drink. “I don’t have any liqueurs,” I said, “but there’s a bottle of maple-flavored bourbon. Do you want to try that?”

Stefan, who knows I like my bourbon straight, asked, “Why do you have a flavored bourbon?”

“I haven’t even opened it,” I said. “Someone must have given it to me, but it’s been here so long that I don’t remember who.” Then, without waiting for Stefan to answer my question about whether he wanted to try some, I broke the seal and put ice in two glasses.

I took a whiff from the mouth of the bottle. “Wow,” I said, “it really smells maply.”  Then I poured a double into my glass. “It even pours like syrup.”

Finally I took a drink. “It even tastes like syrup. If I wanted to, I could put this on pancakes.”

I poured some of the thick liquid into Stefan’s glass, and he took a sip. “I don’t taste any bourbon,” he said. “Are you sure that this isn’t syrup?” Stefan picked up the bottle to read the label. “This isn’t bourbon,” he said. “It’s maple syrup stored in a bourbon barrel.”

I took the bottle from Stefan and read the label for myself. He was right. “Why would anyone do that? And what we are going to do with the syrup already in our glasses?”

“What would happen if we added the bourbon ourselves?” Stefan asked.

I went back to my liquor cabinet, pulled out the Wild Turkey, and poured double shots into both glasses. Stefan stirred his drink with a dessert fork  that had been left on the table and took a sip. “Still too sweet,” he said, “but I think it’ll work.”

I tasted my concoction. “You’re right. I don’t want to add any more bourbon, but with half as much syrup, this wouldn’t be bad. I’m gonna let some of the ice melt before I drink any more, but it’s okay.”

After Stefan left for home, I googled maple syrup flavored bourbon. As it turns out, there are at least a dozen different brands of the stuff. There are also, like my bottle, a few syrups stored in bourbon barrels, and there is one bourbon stored in maple syrup barrels. I didn’t even know maple syrup came in barrels.

I’ve always thought of bourbon, with its corn base, Kentucky water, and oak barrels, as the most American of hard liquors. Maple flavored bourbon might have it beat.

The Upper Mississippi River is not as muddy as some people think. If the surface of the water is calm, I can usually see down four or five feet. Even then, any lack of clarity is due more to organic matter than to mud. I assume that downstream of its confluence with the Big Muddy (aka, the Missouri River) the Mississippi turns a milky brown, but up here it is relatively clear.

My ability to see below the surface does not mean that I have much of an understanding of what goes on down there. At best, I get occasional glimpses of life beneath the ripples, but these little sightings do more to add to the mystery of the river than explain it. The following are a few of the curious happenings that have contributed to my fascination.

• Once, while standing waist-deep in the river to help a friend level out a small dock that had been tipped cockeyed during high water, I accidentally kicked a gelatinous blob to the surface. My first thought was that I’d just dislodged frog eggs from the world’s biggest bullfrog. “Bryozoan!” my friend exclaimed. When he saw the confusion on my face, he explained that freshwater bryozoan are filter-feeding invertebrates that live in tight colonies about the size of a loaf of bread. He also said that bryozoan thrive only in clean water, so their presence beneath his dock was a sign of a healthy river.

• My favorite backwater paddling loop has long sandbars running the entire length of its two access points. Sometimes these sandbars are exposed to the air, more often they reside a foot or two below the surface. When below the surface, freshwater clams come out of the sand to feed. They pull themselves along too slowly for me to detect movement, but I can easily see the trails they leave behind in the sand.

• Fishing just below the Wisconsin Welcome Center on Interstate 90, I hooked into a river creature so large that it dragged me and my canoe for fifty yards before swimming into a fallen tree and breaking the line. It could have been a flathead catfish, a lake sturgeon, or a musky, although it did not fight like a musky. Maybe it was a snapping turtle. I did not mind that I was not able to land the fish (or the turtle), but I would have liked to have seen what it was.

• Paddling near Trempeleau with my daughter Clare, a northern water snake swam out of the aquatic vegetation along shore and charged our canoe. I didn’t think it would be able to get into the boat by climbing over the gunwales, but I didn’t want to give it the chance. I splashed water at it with my paddle until it swam away.

• Quietly fishing the slough behind Gundersen Lutheran Hospital, the water around me suddenly began to churn for thirty feet in every direction. I assumed that it was a school of fish, but chop on the water and sun glare kept me from seeing below the surface. I put on an artificial lure that dove only to a depth of five feet and casted into tumult. Whatever was there struck at nearly every cast, but I had a hard time setting the hook. Finally, after more than twenty casts, I finally hooked a fish and brought it alongside my canoe. I then realized that I was in the middle of a school of longnose gar. Once I’d identified the species, my next question was how to extract my lure from seven inches of sharp teeth. There are only a few things in the Mississippi River I am reluctant to touch, and prehistoric gars are one of them.

This is the third consecutive blog about the uniqueness of the Upper Mississippi River. I could easily stay on the subject for another month, but unless the next few days produce a new fishing tale to tell, I will move on to something else. 

I have written in various essays that I don’t have to catch fish to enjoy fishing. That is a true statement. I have fun on fishing trips where I never find the fish. I have places on the river I call my secret fishing spots, secret not because they guarantee fish, but because they get me away from all of the other boaters.

Not needing to catch fish, however, does not mean that I don’t like to catch fish. Every autumn the Upper Mississippi River experiences a fish feeding frenzy, and I always want to be part of it. For much of the month of September, I put aside my romantic notions about being one with the river and focus on catching fish.

At some point every mid- to late September, the water in the river cools enough for fish to come out of their summer stupor. The perch and bluegills begin to feed voraciously and so too do the larger bass and northerns. This goes on for about three weeks, then stops on a dime. I used to think that the fish stopped biting when the river turned over (i.e., when the water at the surface cools to the point that it sinks to the bottom), but now it seems to me that the good fishing comes to an end before the river actually turns. Maybe there is something else altering the fishes’ feeding habits. The reason does not matter much. I just know it happens.

When the fish are active, I cannot help but marvel at the biomass of the river. On any weekend during the fishing flurry, there might be as many as fifty fishing boats just within my field of sight. If the boats average two people, and each person takes even a dozen fish home (the legal limit on panfish is 15 of each species), three or four weekends of hard fishing would be a serious hit to a less productive fishery. On the Upper Mississippi, the impact is negligible. The Mississippi River faces at least a dozen threats to its ecological wellbeing (e.g., invasive species, mercury, agricultural runoff), but fishing pressure is not one of them.

Last week I wrote that I am in awe of the Mississippi River. I said this because I marvel at its role as a hardworking river of commerce. Imagine how I would feel if I could also observe all of the natural interactions that occur below the water’s surface. They must be amazing.

In July and August I did not get on the Mississippi River even once. I walked along the river almost every day, but never put a boat in the water. Last Wednesday I finally went fishing from my canoe and, with the first cast, wondered why I’d waited so long. 

I initially stayed off the river because of poor air quality. In La Crosse and in much of the Upper Midwest, fires in Canada turned extended time outdoors into a health hazard. On days when the Air Quality Index was not in the red, 90℉ temperatures, high water levels, and strong winds kept me from going out. Also there were almost no fishing boats on the river. The fish weren’t biting (partially due to the high water), and while I don’t need to catch fish to go fishing, a positive fishing report probably would have got me out.

There are two other reasons I’ve been slow to spend time on the river, and I am not pleased with either one of them. First of all, the logistics of paddling are becoming progressively more difficult for me. The most challenging task is the transporting of boats. My days of easily tossing around canoes and kayaks are over. Every outing requires four awkward handlings of a long and clumsy watercraft. There is getting the boat on the car in the first place, taking it off the car at the river, putting it back onto the car after the paddle, and then lugging it back into the garage at the end of the day. This is enough exertion that I feel it in my back and shoulders. If I do not hurt immediately, I will the next day.

The second reason I’ve been paddling less often is that I am increasingly locked into my daily routine. I fear I have turned into an inflexible old man. My schedule is to write until 10 or 11, workout at the Y, eat lunch, take a nap, and walk my dog in Riverside Park. If other pursuits, even those as pleasurable as fishing and paddling, interfere with my routine, I feel a bit off. John Muir once wrote that writing interfered with his time outdoors. I sometimes feel the opposite and view a day on the river as time away from my writing. Even though I agree with Muir in principle that experiences worth writing about should take priority over the actual writing, I don’t like anything (e.g., dogs, wives, riverways, or trails) to keep me from my computer and my pen.

I tell myself that walks in Riverside Park are a good senior citizen substitute for paddling. This, of course, is self-deception, but I have noticed that there are benefits to walking along the river that I don’t get from paddling. For example, a walk in the park gives me a heartfelt appreciation of where I live. When I paddle the backwaters of the Mississippi River, I am at peace and I am in awe of the natural beauty, but I do not feel a sense of place. Apparently I need a human element for that to happen. When I walk along the river in town, I see paddlewheels, barges, wharves, and cafes. I feel the human history of my rivertown, and I think, “Wow, I live on the Mississippi River.”

When I spent two years among the redwoods in northern California, I never stepped out of my cabin in the morning without feeling the mystique of the trees. When I lived in San Francisco, I marveled each time I wrote the name of the city on the return address of an envelope. Now it is life on the Mississippi that stirs me, but it is more the symbols of the working river than the river itself that gives me pause. I wouldn’t have predicted that.

By the time you read this, my friend Dave will have had a hip replacement. Last week he asked Stefan and me to join him at a corner tavern for a last outing before his scheduled surgery. Over two pitchers of beer and a large tray of unshelled peanuts, Dave, Stefan, and I discussed a myriad of subjects. I learned more than I wanted to know about joint replacements. We wondered why marijuana-laced drinks in Wisconsin are legal when marijuana gummies are not. We discovered that we all lived in Minneapolis at the same time during the 1980s.

Late in the evening I asked whether either of them ever use ChatGPT. Stefan said that he now uses it almost exclusively. In his opinion, the information on ChatGPT is more reliable than either Google or Safari, and it is now his primary search tool.

He then opened his phone to show me a photo of his front yard. Except it wasn’t his front yard. It was an AI-generated image of what his front yard would look like if he wanted to improve the property’s curb appeal. A few things on the house itself had been changed (i.e., a new front door, different trim on the windows), but the most noticeable alteration was a mulched flower garden in the center of his lawn.

“I uploaded a photo of my front yard,” Stefan said, “and ChatGPT redesigned it for me. I’m thinking about making some of the changes.”

That night after I got home I was too awake to go straight to bed, so I ChatGPTed my front yard. The image it produced took the railing off my front porch, replaced my old Adirondack chairs with less battered outdoor furniture, and removed one of the bushes from the front of the house. It also added a mulched garden in the exact spot where a big chunk of my lawn had died the previous winter. AI may have noticed my feeble attempts at reseeding and chose to replace damaged turf with flowers and ground cover.

The next morning I showed the image to Manyu and told her that I wanted to put in the garden. Her reply was immediate and emphatic. “Before you do anything to the front yard,” she said, “clean up the jungle in the back.”

Manyu’s point was valid. If I wasn’t taking care of the mulched garden that I already have, why would I create a new one? I immediately went to work on our backyard. I trimmed, maybe over-trimmed, three bushes that had grown to twice their preferred size. I pulled weeds until my compost pile overflowed with yard waste. I transplanted a dozen perennials, moving tall plants to the back and moving short plants to the front. I dug up a large clump of chives from our flower garden and put it in our vegetable garden. I even asked my next door neighbor if I could trim his mulberry tree where it drooped over the fence onto our property.

With yard work comes minor injuries. My garden gloves are in my back pocket more often than they’re on my hands, so I am especially susceptible to small cuts and scrapes. I’d already nicked one finger with a pruning saw and put a couple of rose thorns in my palm when I unwittingly dug the blade of a round-point garden shovel directly into the heart of an underground wasp nest. It’s a wonder of nature how these normally unaggressive hive of insects transform themselves into a unified killing machine when a person messes with their home.

I had to make a dash for the house, unaware I had wasps in my hair and in the weave of my wool jacket. Only after shaking out my hair and tossing my jacket back outside was I able to assess the damage to my exposed skin. I had two stings on my face, one on my right hand, and somewhere between six and eight on my left hand. I don’t remember, but I may have used my dominant left hand to brush wasps away from my face.

My first thought after assessing my injuries was that my left hand really hurt, my face and right hand not so much. My second thought was that I’ve probably been stung by individual wasps or bees forty or fifty different times over the years, but this was my first swarm attack. My third thought was that none of this would have happened had I stayed away from ChatGPT.

I sat at my writing table this week and tried to think of one thing I do better at age 71 than I did when I was in my twenties. I came up with nothing. My paddle stroke might be more efficient, but any improvements in technique are offset by the fact that I’ve lost power in my stroke. Years ago I came upon an old man sitting alone in his beached kayak. I don’t know how long he’d been sitting there, but he was waiting for someone to come by who could help him get out of his boat. Ten years from now, that might be me.

I am comfortable with my age-related physical limitations. I can no longer ride rollercoasters, I can’t get out of a chair quickly without feeling lightheaded, I run awkwardly, and I misjudge the trajectory of fly balls off a bat. (I blame this last one on my old man eyes. There is a point in a ball’s flight when it turns as fuzzy as the tiny print in a paperback novel, then comes back into focus when it is a few feet from my face.) The loss of dexterity, strength, and hand/eye coordination has been gradual, and I have learned to accept it.

I am less okay with the waning of my mental acuity. Unfortunately I experience it everyday in my writing. I think that I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog that good prose now comes slowly for me.* This lack of speed, however, is not a concern; writing is not a race. I worry more that the overall quality of the writing may not be what it once was.

When I was young, I could start writing with only a half-baked idea, and the process of writing would fill in the gaps. Sometimes a small digression in the prose would take me down a path that was more interesting than the original concept. This level of creativity does not happen any more. The act of writing still helps me to clarify my thoughts, but rarely does it produce fresh ideas.

I once thought that the problem might be that I wrote freehand as a young man and have since switched to a keyboard. With that in mind, I’ve gone back to using pen and paper once or twice a week. My voice shows up better on the handwritten page, but the overall quality of the writing remains the same. My neurons just aren’t firing like they used to.

Occasionally I regret having not made full use of my writing skills when they were at their peak. More often I relish the fact that I can still write at all. My days of riding rollercoasters, running 5Ks, and playing left field are over, but I can write everyday.

* It took me three two-hour writing sessions to produce this blog. Even if I include the 500 words that went into my scrap file instead of the published blog, that’s barely 150 words an hour.

I walked into the public library last Monday, and all of the books on the first floor were gone. In their place were stacks of 2 x 4s and an architect’s rendering of a library renovation. If I read the diagram of the new floor plan correctly, and I think I did, most of the books are never coming back. In their place will be a meeting room, a lounge, and a series of small independent shelving units arranged at various angles. Even if all of those shelves are to be used for books, they will not hold one twentieth the number of books that were in the room only two weeks ago. Basically the space is being repurposed from a book repository to a contemporary community center.

As I was studying the new layout, one of the librarians walked up and asked me what I thought. I immediately asked her where the books were going.

She replied, “Before the non-fiction was upstairs, and the fiction was down here. Now everything will all be upstairs.”

“Will it all fit?” I asked.

“It’s all up there already. We did have to shrink our collection a little bit, but we were due to do that anyway.”

I pointed at the shelving units in the drawing of the new layout and said, “I assume those are book shelves. What will go on them?”

“I’m not sure. New acquisitions for sure, but other than that, I don’t know. It is supposed to be done by January, and then we’ll see.”

I’m not sure that I like having the main collection of books on the second floor. No, let me restate that. I’m sure that I don’t like it. It somewhat relegates books to a secondary role. Soon the main floor will be for socializing, while the books for solitary reading will be tucked away out of sight. When people step into a small town public library, shouldn’t they be immediately surrounded by books? Even if they are there to use a computer or pick up a DVD, the design of the building should force them to walk past the reason that libraries were created in the first place.

Libraries have always been a kind of drop-in center, but they were a drop-in center focused on books. Now not so much. When I sat down to write this blog, I wondered whether librarians are being trained to handle their new roles as social directors. I went to the website of the University of Wisconsin’s Library and Information Studies Program and discovered that library schools, while now much more about digital information than cataloguing, are still focused on content. There is nothing about clientele service. There was a capstone course called User Experience, but just the term “User” suggests that the course is about people sitting in front of a computer terminal and not people interacting with each other.

I like 90% of the innovations that libraries have made in last twenty years. I check out DVDs and audio books. I use the online catalog from home, and I renew my books without taking them back to the library. I was thrilled when my library started a hand tool library – and now that I avoid getting up on ladders, I borrow their 20-foot tree branch trimmer at least once a year. I do think that they made a mistake in doing away with library fines, but I was told by a librarian that the few dollars collected from fines was never worth the hassle. I will adapt to this latest trend in library design, but just for today I will complain that I have to walk up a flight of stairs if I want to be with the books.

I understand why people might be indifferent to professional sports. Obsessive fans, cocky athletes, privileged team owners, and government-funded stadiums all combine to create a pastime that a reasonable person might find unappealing. Having said that, I think that occasionally there are moments in sports when even the non-fan should take note. What happened in Milwaukee last Wednesday afternoon qualifies. The Milwaukee Brewers won their twelfth baseball game in a row and set off a local excitement that is now the best sports story of the summer.

Last week the Brewers’ twelve-game winning streak triggered a longstanding promise made by a local hamburger chain. George Webb, a Milwaukee institution that dates back to the 1940s, hands out free hamburgers (one per customer) whenever the home team wins twelve games in a row. For the third time in history (1987, 2018, and now 2025), George Webb is about to pay up.

To appreciate the magic associated with this event, a person needs to understand two parts of the story. First of all, the Brewers aren’t supposed to be good. This is an era where big city teams acquire the best players by offering them salaries that small market teams cannot afford. Milwaukee is the smallest market of all and must compete with a comparatively small payroll. It does this by fielding a team heavy with players too young to have yet signed their first eight-figure contracts. This year the Brewers, with a starting lineup of rookies, second-year players, and non-superstar veterans, are showing that money is not the only way to win games. They are the Bad News Bears of major league baseball.

Secondly, George Webb restaurants are dinosaurs. They are remnants of an earlier time. They are a small Milwaukee-based franchise that has not rebranded itself in seventy-five years. A friend of mine once compared them to an Edward Hopper painting, and that description is apt. George Webb restaurants are what every trendy diner wishes it could be.

I have been to a George Webb restaurant twice in my life, and both times were before the age of seven. I recall a long white counter with a row of stools and two large side-by-side clocks on the wall. The two clocks differed by a minute, and I was told that it was because all George Webb restaurants are open each day for 23 hours, 59 minutes. I’ve never understood that part.

Brandon Woodruff, the Brewer’s starting pitcher for Game Twelve, said that he was unusually nervous during warmups. He didn’t want to be the person who was responsible for the entire city of Milwaukee not getting free hamburgers.*

Woodruff did win, and Free Burger Day is set for August 20. The event couldn’t be held the day immediately after the winning streak, because the restaurant chain needed to make special arrangements with its burger and bun suppliers. Thousands of people will line up that day, not because they want to save a few dollars, but because they want to be part of a happening. I won’t be driving four hours to join the fun, but I thought about it.

The big money teams (e.g., Dodgers, Yankees, Cubs) will probably rule the day once the playoffs begin, but this likelihood makes Free Burger Day all the more important for the city of Milwaukee. Fans in New York or LA might get a World Series parade this year, but they won’t get free hamburgers.

* “Brewers keep rolling, win free burgers with 12th straight victory.” August 13, 2025. ESPN. Found at https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/45969498/brewers-keep-rolling-win-free-burgers-12th-straight-victory.

Wednesday evening I attended a guided tour of La Crosse’s Myrick Park Arboretum. By most arboretum standards our tree museum is unimpressive, but if a variety of tree species with identification plaques at the base of each tree makes for an arboretum, then the La Crosse version qualifies. It is basically a three-acre plot where the municipal parks and recreation department, along with a local garden club, planted a bunch of trees in a largely unused part of a city park. I don’t know whether trees have to reach a certain size before a place can be called an arboretum, but our collection of trees only just recently received its official Level I arboretum designation. Level I is the lowest level of accreditation, generally given to spots where the display of trees is not the primary purpose of the site (e.g., cemeteries, golf courses, city parks). The tour was a celebration of the designation.

I had to smile when I first walked up to the archway where the tour was to begin. The attendees were a cross-section of La Crosse’s senior citizen environmental community. Of the people I recognized, and I recognized three fourths of the twenty people there, all were in their sixties or seventies. All, at one time or another, had served on the board of a local environmental organization. Friends of the Marsh, Mississippi Valley Conservancy, Wisconsin Conservation Corps, and the La Crosse Park Board were all represented. These people were serious amateur naturalists; none of them were tree novices.

Within the first ten minutes of the tour, it degenerated into small groups of three-to-five people moving about on their own. Each time Jay, our tour guide, finished talking about one tree and moved on to another, a small group remained behind to study the first tree more carefully. Soon Jay was talking to no more than five people, with everyone else strung out behind.

At one point three of us questioned the accuracy of one of the plaques. The plaque identified the tree as a pin oak, but we didn’t think that the indentations between the lobes of the leaves were deep enough to be a pin oak. Sue, a local graphic artist known to be a soft touch by any environmental group in need of her talents, had a tree identification app on her phone. The app confirmed that the tree was a pin oak, but it gave a genus and species name that I knew could not be correct. All oaks are of the Quercus genus, and her app gave a genus name that I’d never heard of. She fiddled with the app for a while and discovered that the tree was sick, and the listed genus and species name was not for the tree, but for the fungus that was infecting the tree. That is a sophisticated app.

My chance to shine came when several of us encountered a tree that stumped everyone except me. There was no plaque, and no one in the group other than me had ever seen the species before. I, to my surprise, flashed back to my dendrology class of fifty years ago and immediately knew the tree to be a dawn redwood. I explained that the tree was once thought to be extinct, but then was discovered growing inside the grounds of a Chinese monastery. Because of its unique history, it has become a popular tree in arboretums. I did not tell the group that of all of the genus and species names that I had memorized for my dendrology class, the one I remember best is the one for the dawn redwood. Metasequoia glyptostroboides. I remember it not because it was easy to remember, but because it was so difficult. In working hard to remember the name, I must have seared it onto my brain.

Back in my professional naturalist days, a popular debate was whether nature-based environmental education should focus on ecological concepts or on the names of plants and animals. Because of my dendrology course, which was entirely the memorization of names, I always thought that the debate was a false one. Concepts and names are both important, and a full understanding of a concept is impossible without knowing the names of the creatures that best illustrate the concept.

For me, summers in La Crosse should mean fishing from my canoe once a week and biking every other day. So far this year, I have gone fishing twice, and I’ve been on my bike a half dozen times. The infrequency of these favorite outdoor pursuits has nothing to do with my septuagenarian body and everything to do with the outdoor conditions. The temperatures have been uncomfortably hot, the air quality has been at hazardous levels, and the rivers have been running at near flood stage. Sometimes the thermometer readings have been so high and the air quality so bad that I don’t even walk my dog.

All of this points to climate change. The temperatures have been gradually rising for years, the air quality is due to fires in western Canada, and the high water is the result of frequent hard rains. The rain has actually been welcome, as precipitation helps the native plant life stand up to the excessive heat. 

I once thought that my northern location and the Upper Midwest’s abundance of freshwater would protect me from the harshest effects of climate change. I may be wrong on this. The number of tornados is up, as are hailstorms, and I recently added the word “derecho” to my vocabulary. Derechos are straight-line winds as strong as those from a hurricane. I don’t know what causes a derecho, but this summer is the first time I’ve ever heard the word used to describe a weather occurrence. Everyone over the age of twenty has personally witnessed climatic change just within their lifetimes, so I am not sure how some people are able to deny its existence. There are those who seem ready to embrace unfounded conspiracy theories, but not believe a phenomenon that stares them in the face.

During the spring of Clare’s senior year at Grinnell, she and I talked about potential jobs for her after college. My daughter knew that she wanted a career related to sustainability, but was not sure what that meant. When I mentioned my own career in environmental education, her response was, “No offense, Dad, but I don’t want to do environmental education. It may have been an option for you fifty years ago, but now there’s not enough time.”

This is the situation my generation has left for our kids.

Video clips of masked ICE marauders rounding up people in city parks got me thinking about my wife’s status in the United States. Manyu is a naturalized citizen. Her place in the US should be as secure as my own, but I am no longer sure that it is.

I remember well Manyu’s citizenship ceremony. It was at the federal courthouse in Madison. She was one of about sixteen people being inducted that day. Half of them wore the traditional garb of the country from which they came. I do not recall the exact date, but Clare was still in a baby carrier, so it must have been late 1999 or early 2000. 

The judge was exceptional. After she administered the oath, she said, “Sometimes my job is terrible. I see the worst examples of humanity that there are. Today is the opposite to all of that. Today is an honor and a joy, and I am proud to be the first person in the world to welcome you as citizens of the United States. No one can ever tell you that they are more American than you are. They are not. Congratulations.”

During the induction ceremony, two old people had been sitting at one of the attorney’s tables. I’d assumed that they were legally required witnesses, but I was wrong. The judge introduced them as representatives of the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution. I should have known something was up when the judge quickly slipped out the door behind her bench, but I was slow to see what was happening. Each of the old folks then gave a 5-minute speech about what it means to be an American. Every word out of their mouths was patriotic platitude. I’m in the gallery, getting angry and thinking, “Hey, inductees! You are Americans now. You don’t have to sit here and listen to this drivel.”

I looked at the new citizens, and Manyu was the only one not giving the old people her full attention. Instead she was looking at me in the gallery, and with her eyes was saying, “Calm down. I know what you are thinking, but no one else is bothered by these people. They are just welcoming us. Let them have their moment.”

I do not recall any of words from the DAR/American Legion speeches. I am sure that “freedom,” “liberty,” and “God bless America” were in there somewhere. The judge’s comments I remember almost word for word. “No one can ever tell you that they are more American than you are. They are not.”

Last week Clare called me about a lost car key. It was really lost, not I-can’t-remember-where-I-put-it lost. She’d misplaced her backup key years ago, so now she was left with no key at all. Clare handled the problem on her own, but she first called me to ask whether she should go to a locksmith or to a car dealership. For two very different reasons, this short conversation with my daughter brought me back to the days when I was her age.

First of all, I knew that Clare’s new key fob was going to cost about $400. Clare joked that replacing her car key was going to eat up her pay raise for the year. The joke was an exaggeration, but not much of one. Four hundred dollars is more than what I paid for my first car. It is exactly what I paid for my second car. I’d bought it from the guy across the hall to move from Boston to Washington, DC for the summer. Our agreement was that if the car didn’t make it to Washington, he’d give me my money back.

Clare’s phone call also made me think of something else, something that has nothing to do with car keys or cars. The call made me realize that, as a young adult, I don’t remember ever asking my own parents for advice about anything. I liked my parents and I respected them, but once I left home, I considered myself on my own. I can’t say for sure, but I think that my mom and dad felt the same. I believe Clare to be as self-sufficient as I was at her age, but the relationship that she has with her parents is different from the one I had with mine.

Going to college, switching colleges, dropping out of college, returning to college, getting married, getting divorced, going to grad school for a masters, moving to Minneapolis, then to Boston, then to San Francisco, then returning to grad school for a Ph.D. were all big decisions. Usually I told my parents about these decisions before I acted on them, but I never asked them for their opinion. My mom always thought whatever I did was fine. My dad expressed his displeasure only twice. The first time was when I dropped out of college. The second time was when Lisa and I decided to get divorced. He had no qualms about criticizing my decision to drop out of school. Commenting on the divorce took a lot out of him.

Was my relationship with my parents different from Clare’s because the times have changed or because we were raised differently? The answer is that we were raised differently because the times have changed. By time I was seven years old I’d disappear for an afternoon, and my mom and dad had no idea where I was. When I was in high school, my parents had no say as to what classes I took, and while they were adamant that I go to college, they had no hand in the college admission process. Once I was in college, my folks never asked me about my major. They never asked whether I had enough money. They did wonder what I planned to do after college, but did not object when I told them that my plan was to travel until the grace period on my student loans ran out.

Which parent/child relationship is better? Maybe Clare needs to figure things out for herself. Maybe I am supposed to put my years of acquired experience to good use by helping my daughter avoid at least a few mistakes. Maybe Clare just wanted to know how to get a new car key, and I shouldn’t make a bigger deal of it.

About once a month I have a long telephone conversation with my friend Ed. When I spoke with him last week, he’d just returned from three months in Spain and France. One of the first things that he did upon returning home was to book airline tickets for his next trip, this one to Mexico.

One of the reasons Ed and I have remained friends for over forty years is that we have much in common. We are the same age, we read the same books and have similar opinions about those books, we have the same political views, and we have the same recreational interests. Where we differ is that I have become a bit of homebody and Ed wants only to travel. I am content to sit on my own front porch to write, and Ed prefers his writing to be in coffee shops all around the world.

Ed speculated that he and I differ in this one respect because I moved frequently in my twenties and thirties, and he did not. I’d lived in Boston, San Francisco, Taipei, and a dozen other places before the age of forty. Ed, until a recent move to Bodega Bay, never lived more than thirty miles from his childhood home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Even though Bodega Bay is a small piece of oceanside paradise, Ed now needs to travel. I not so much.

For the last couple of years I have justified staying home because I need to care for an aging dog. Not wanting to ask anyone else to watch my deaf, hobbling, and nearly blind pet makes sense, but it does not explain why I lack a strong travel itch. Manyu and I talk about the places we will go after Jack dies. We also talk about moving back to Asia, and I think that that move will more than likely happen. Manyu has wanted to move back to her home side of the world for decades, and I currently am less than enamored with life in the United States.

My homebody tendencies have nothing to do with my house, nor with an attachment to the city of La Crosse. All I want is a stress-free base from which to write, exercise, and play. La Crosse serves this purpose well, but if Manyu and I relocate to Taiwan or Thailand, I’ll adjust and make a new home of wherever we wind up. The only question I have is whether I can live half a planet away from our daughter.

There are four viable routes between my mom’s house and mine. All of them include a stretch of Highway 41 in the eastern part of the state and 40 miles of Interstate 90 in the west. In between there are options, no single one any better than the others. Last week I made the drive from Green Bay to La Crosse. I’d planned to take Highway 10 off of Highway 41, but missed the exit. I took Highway 21 instead. That turned out to be a mistake.

All was going well until I hit a detour just east of Necedah. When I saw a sign that read “Detour 43 miles,” I pulled over to the side of the road and took out my Wisconsin Gazetteer. The Gazetteer is a compilation of detailed maps that supposedly show every backcountry road in the state. I assume each state has it own map series, and the Wisconsin version has 95 maps, each one covering a 25-mile x 35-mile section of the state. I usually use the maps to locate potential put-in and take-out spots for paddling. On this day I was looking for an alternate route to a 43-mile detour.

My first potential shortcut was 19th Street West. Calling the road a street makes it sound like it passes through a town. Nineteenth Street West does not. Its entirety is in the middle of a remote oak barrens. I took what I thought was going to save me 20+ miles, but the road ended after three miles. I looked back at the Gazetteer and saw that the mistake had been mine. I should have taken 9th Street West, not 19th. The map clearly showed 19th Street as a dead end.

I went back out to the designated detour, headed north, and then turned east onto 9th Street West, the road I should have taken in the first place. This time I got five miles. There I encountered a sign that read, “Caution: High Water.” Apparently in the flatlands of central Wisconsin, “high water” means that same thing as “underwater.” Just beyond the sign, a creek flowed over the road. I stopped the car and got out to see whether it was safe to drive through the water. There was another man on the opposite side of the creek doing exactly the same thing. He looked at the swiftly moving water, looked at me, and then shook his head. I nodded in agreement, and we both got back in our cars and drove away in the directions we’d come.

Before I got back to the designated detour, I came to the intersection of 9th Street West and 5th Avenue. Whoever named the roadways in the area must have had a sense of humor, as 9th Street is not much of a street, nor is 5th Avenue much of an avenue. Ninth is a shoulderless two-lane with a creek running over it, and 5th is a pair of tire ruts. Still I took the ruts, as the Gazetteer showed 5th Avenue going all of the way through. After a mile I came to a birch tree that had fallen across the road. Someone, probably someone with a banged up pickup truck, had come before me and shoved the tree just enough for a vehicle to pass by. I probably should have turned around right there (not that there was a place to turn around), but I continued on. The ruts became less defined, and I eventually came to a sign that read, “No motorized vehicles beyond this point.” If 5th Avenue does go all of the way through, it goes through for hikers and mountain bikers. Again I had to turn around.

I returned to the designated detour. The Gazetteer showed that I had two more shortcuts to try (4th Street West and 1st Street West), but I was done exploring. Had I just followed the detour signs in the first place, I would have already been back on Highway 21. Because I’d taken a series of useless side trips, I still had 30 miles of detour to go.

Last summer Manyu cleaned the inside of our car and threw out my dog-eared Gazetteer. She assumed that because we now have maps on our phones, paper maps were obsolete. I explained to her that the Gazetteer was for intentionally getting lost, not for finding the quickest route from one place to another. I dug my book of maps out of the recycling bin and put it back in the car. In my efforts to find a shortcut, I’d have been better off had I left it in the trash.

There are four viable routes between my mom’s house and mine. All of them include a stretch of Highway 41 in the eastern part of the state and 40 miles of Interstate 90 in the west. In between there are options, no single one any better than the others. Last week I made the drive from Green Bay to La Crosse. I’d planned to take Highway 10 off of Highway 41, but missed the exit. I took Highway 21 instead. That turned out to be a mistake.

All was going well until I hit a detour just east of Necedah. When I saw a sign that read “Detour 43 miles,” I pulled over to the side of the road and took out my Wisconsin Gazetteer. The Gazetteer is a compilation of detailed maps that supposedly show every backcountry road in the state. I assume each state has it own map series, and the Wisconsin version has 95 maps, each one covering a 25-mile x 35-mile section of the state. I usually use the maps to locate potential put-in and take-out spots for paddling. On this day I was looking for an alternate route to a 43-mile detour.

My first potential shortcut was 19th Street West. Calling the road a street makes it sound like it passes through a town. Nineteenth Street West does not. Its entirety is in the middle of a remote oak barrens. I took what I thought was going to save me 20+ miles, but the road ended after three miles. I looked back at the Gazetteer and saw that the mistake had been mine. I should have taken 9th Street West, not 19th. The map clearly showed 19th Street as a dead end.

I went back out to the designated detour, headed north, and then turned east onto 9th Street West, the road I should have taken in the first place. This time I got five miles. There I encountered a sign that read, “Caution: High Water.” Apparently in the flatlands of central Wisconsin, “high water” means that same thing as “underwater.” Just beyond the sign, a creek flowed over the road. I stopped the car and got out to see whether it was safe to drive through the water. There was another man on the opposite side of the creek doing exactly the same thing. He looked at the swiftly moving water, looked at me, and then shook his head. I nodded in agreement, and we both got back in our cars and drove away in the directions we’d come.

Before I got back to the designated detour, I came to the intersection of 9th Street West and 5th Avenue. Whoever named the roadways in the area must have had a sense of humor, as 9th Street is not much of a street, nor is 5th Avenue much of an avenue. Ninth is a shoulderless two-lane with a creek running over it, and 5th is a pair of tire ruts. Still I took the ruts, as the Gazetteer showed 5th Avenue going all of the way through. After a mile I came to a birch tree that had fallen across the road. Someone, probably someone with a banged up pickup truck, had come before me and shoved the tree just enough for a vehicle to pass by. I probably should have turned around right there (not that there was a place to turn around), but I continued on. The ruts became less defined, and I eventually came to a sign that read, “No motorized vehicles beyond this point.” If 5th Avenue does go all of the way through, it goes through for hikers and mountain bikers. Again I had to turn around.

I returned to the designated detour. The Gazetteer showed that I had two more shortcuts to try (4th Street West and 1st Street West), but I was done exploring. Had I just followed the detour signs in the first place, I would have already been back on Highway 21. Because I’d taken a series of useless side trips, I still had 30 miles of detour to go.

Last summer Manyu cleaned the inside of our car and threw out my dog-eared Gazetteer. She assumed that because we now have maps on our phones, paper maps were obsolete. I explained to her that the Gazetteer was for intentionally getting lost, not for finding the quickest route from one place to another. I dug my book of maps out of the recycling bin and put it back in the car. In my efforts to find a shortcut, I’d have been better off had I left it in the trash.

Ron, my stepdad, is in his mid-eighties. He has never lived more than five miles from his childhood farmhouse. He rarely leaves Wisconsin. He had been to Madison only once in his life and that was to watch his granddaughter play in a softball game. Ron is a good guy, has been good for my mom, but is not much of a traveler.

Last Christmas Ron mentioned that he’d like to see the State Capitol Building before he died, so Manyu and I offered to treat him and my mom to a long weekend in Madison. Somewhat to my surprise, he accepted the invitation, and last weekend we made the trip.

The “big city” of Madison overwhelmed the man. He would not have been any less comfortable had I taken him to Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. To him, the buildings were massive (they aren’t), the traffic was horrible (it isn’t), and the University of Wisconsin’s campus is too big to take in on a first visit (he is right about that). I am not sure that Ron enjoyed the weekend so much as endured it.

Still he was able to take the State Capitol off of his bucket list. We went to the Capitol, to Madison’s excellent weekend farmers’ market, and to the Terrace at Memorial Union. My daughter lives in Madison, and my mom saw got to see her granddaughter’s apartment for the first time. Clare’s boyfriend, Chase, took us to his company’s annual employee picnic. Chase works for Epic, the big health records software company, so the event was substantially more than hotdogs and lemonade. All of the Epic campus’ 30+ buildings were open for touring. Each building has its own fantasy theme, but because Ron has limited mobility, we visited only Wonderland and the Emerald City.*

One of my sisters had driven my mom and Ron to Madison, but it was my job to drive them home. I sensed Ron relax the moment we left the Madison city limits, and then he spent the next three hours recapping the trip. “I can’t believe the crowds” (only the farmers’ market was crowded). “I can’t believe all of the construction” (there was a surprising number of new apartment buildings going up). “I don’t know how people live like that” (except for the cost of housing, I consider Madison to be the most livable city in the state).

My mom had a fun weekend, and for her, any time with Clare is time well spent. As for Ron, I don’t know what to think. I thought that he would have rather stayed home, but the moment he got back to his house, I heard him on the telephone telling his friends about his grand adventure.

* I do not remember all of the other buildings I’ve seen on previous Epic visits, but Hogwarts, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Deep Space, Jules Verne, and Star Wars stand out.

In March I wrote a blog about changing fitness centers. My former gym, the recreation center on the UW-La Crosse campus, is a wonderful place, but it has limited hours when students are on break. I did switch facilities, and I am now with an organization that seems to draw me in once every couple of decades. As of June 1, I am back at the Y.

I have been associated with four different YMCA facilities, each one showing up during a different phase of my life. YMCA No. 1 was the downtown Y in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was a classic urban 1960s Y, meaning it had yet to include adult fitness as one of its offerings. Instead it was a rooming house for single men as well as a recreation center for kids. I took swimming lessons there when I was seven, and I hated them. One of the tests to progress from “Minnow” to “Fish” was to tread water for one minute without the use of my arms. Even as a kid, I sank like a rock, and no amount of kicking was going to keep my head above water. I don’t remember how long I took lessons at the Y, but I do remember that I never made it to Fish.

YMCA No. 2 was the West YMCA in Madison, Wisconsin. I did my undergraduate internship there, which then turned into a part-time job as weekend building manager. I had a good run there, but it confirmed that my professional destiny was to work in the outdoors and not in a building.

YMCA No. 3 was the highlight of my professional career. In the early 1980s, I was a naturalist for a residential environmental education program in the redwoods of northern California. The program was run by the County of San Mateo, but the grounds were the summer camp for the San Francisco YMCA. I was employed by the County during the school year and by the Y over the summers. For a young man from the Midwest, living in a coastal redwood forest was magical. When I first interviewed for the job, I remember thinking that I’d work there as a dishwasher if it came with room and board. The only reason I left was to start my Ph.D. program.

And now I am at YMCA No. 4. Other than the fact that the pervasive smell of chlorine reminds me of my childhood swim lessons, I think that it will function well as a workout facility. The exercise machines that I use at the Y are identical to the ones I used at the university. The only difference is that the people exercising alongside me are seventy years old and not twenty. I exercise midmorning, and I assume that everyone under sixty-five years of age is at work.

I haven’t used the Y’s swimming pool yet, but I should jump in just to see if I can tread water without using my arms. I suspect that I am more buoyant now than I used to be. I’d be thrilled if I still sank.

A large patch of my front yard died over the winter. I am not sure why. The damaged area is directly below a maple tree, so maybe the grass doesn’t receive enough direct sunlight. Maybe the lack of snow this past January failed to insulate parts of my yard from subzero temperatures. Maybe my limited use of chemical fertilizer failed to give the turf the nutrients it needed to fight off some kind of disease. All I know is that a chunk of my front yard did not come back this spring.

The best repair strategy would have been to tear out the entire dead area and start over from scratch. However, when I showed up with a hoe, I noticed a few blades of young fescue trying to poke up here and there. While it makes no logical sense, I did not have the heart to destroy my yard’s valiant effort to survive. I put the hoe back in the garage and replaced it with a hand trowel. My new plan was to hand dig around the small living portions of turf and only reseed the areas that were 100% dead. This quadrupled the amount of work I had to do, so instead of repairing the entire damaged area in one fell swoop, I attacked the problem square foot by square foot. Breaking down the task, I had to:

• Choose a 15-square foot plot for reseeding
• Dig out the dead sod from that area with a hand trowel
• Mix grass seed with top soil in a wheelbarrow
• Tamp grass seed and top soil into the bare spots I’d created
• Cover the newly seeded area with burlap
• Water daily

In two afternoons of work I was able to repair a 10’ x 3’ area, which was about a fifth of the total damage.

The morning after reseeding I was sitting at my writing table in the living room. I looked at the window, only to see two mourning doves poking their beaks through the burlap and eating my grass seed. The whole reason for the burlap was to keep the birds off. I went outside, chased the birds away, and covered the burlap with a sheet of clear plastic. The plastic lasted only half a day as I came to realize that I couldn’t water the area if it had a waterproof covering. I decided to share my grass seed with the birds.

The next morning I again checked out my handiwork and discovered that the burlap had been completely pulled away from the reseeded area. I’d used lawn staples to pin the burlap in place, so mourning doves wouldn’t have had the strength to make this happen. I assumed squirrels were the culprits, and this was confirmed when I went outside to discover several holes dug into the fresh topsoil. The squirrels weren’t even after the grass seed. They just wanted soft ground for burying their finds. When I complained to Manyu, she said, “Good, then maybe they won’t dig up my potted flowers.”

On a related matter, Clare is thinking about buying her first house. She and her boyfriend go to open houses most Sundays. While I try hard not to tell my responsible twenty-six year old daughter what to do with her life, I couldn’t help but say, “I don’t think that you should buy. You have it good right now. Do you really want to use your evenings and weekends on home repairs and yard work?”

 I know that I don’t.

As usually happens, I came back from my annual Canadian fishing trip with the fishing bug. Last Saturday Dennis, Buzz, and I went fishing on the Upper Mississippi in Dennis’ boat. The sky was blue, the fishing was lousy, and the day was a good reminder that retired guys shouldn’t get on the river Saturdays or Sundays. Weekdays are relatively quiet, an occasional barge, but not many recreational boats. On weekends the river transforms into a pleasure craft superhighway. Even the backwaters, which we usually have to ourselves, had other boats and jet skis. 

It was inaccurate for me to say that the fishing was lousy. I should have said that the fishing was unusual. For the entire day, we did not catch a single panfish. No bluegills, no perch, no crappies. Instead we caught bigger fish – mostly bass, but also a couple of walleyes and northerns. 

Dennis caught the first fish. It was a nineteen-inch smallmouth bass. When he was about to put the fish on a stringer, I said, “You should let it go. A big fish like that is a good breeder.” To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether this general rule about fish reproduction applies specifically to bass, but I’ve long been in the habit of releasing big fish and keeping slightly smaller ones. In fish jargon, the medium-sized fish of each species are sometimes described as “good eaters.” 

Dennis grudgingly agreed, but had me take a photo of him and his fish before releasing it. He then texted the photo to his wife, who immediately replied, “Good job. Fish for dinner.” 

Dennis replied, “Oops, I don’t have the fish. Steve made me let it go.” 

Five minutes later, Buzz asked, “Dennis, was that the biggest bass you’ve ever caught in your life?”

Dennis replied, “Buzz, I think that it was. That might’ve been the biggest bass I have ever caught in my life, and Steve made me let it go.” 

“Yeah,” said Buzz. “Steve also lost the biggest northern I’ve ever caught in my life. He put it on a stringer and then didn’t tie the stringer to the boat.”

“I tied it,” I said, “but the knot came out.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Buzz said. “I think that the same stringer also had the biggest bass in my life. Steve released both of them while they were attached to each other, so I assume they died a slow, agonizing death. I should have warned you. Now whenever I catch a big fish, I don’t let Steve near it.” 

“I am sensing a pattern here,” Dennis said. “Do you remember that time we fished Lytle’s Landing from our kayaks?”

“I do,” said Buzz. “Didn’t Steve make you release that big northern because it was twenty-five and three quarters inches long and not the legal twenty-six inches?”

“He did,” said Dennis. “What he didn’t do was mention that I was supposed to squeeze the tail fin of a fish to get an exact measurement, and that squeezing the tail adds an inch to the total length. There is something unattractive about that man when it comes to fishing.”

Readers of my blog need to endure this particular fish story only once. I, on the other hand, will be listening to it being told and retold by Dennis and Buzz for months and years to come. 

Photo by Jack Buswell

Each one of our Lake of the Woods fishing trips generates a fishing story or two. This is what happens when seven guys fish ten hours a day for six straight days. Our most recent outing generated more than the usual number of good stories, but the best ones did not happen to me and are not mine to tell. One incident, however, is mine, and it deserves mention – not because it was extraordinary (it wasn’t), but because it demonstrates how one small twist to normal fishing can materialize into a fishing tale.

One of the reasons my friends and I have camped at the same backcountry site for 10+ years is that we now have several favorite fishing spots. A half dozen underwater ledges reliably produce walleyes, one particular hump is almost always good for smallmouth bass, and there is Pelican Bay for days we want to fish for northern pike. Pelican Bay is a pseudonym. Even though almost no one reads my blog, I am reluctant to publicly reveal the actual names of any of our favorite fishing spots. My fishing buddies and I actually do call the place Pelican Bay, because the first time we ever boated there a dozen white pelicans stood on shore where a small creek flowed into the lake. We’ve not seen pelicans there since, but the name has stuck.

The shallow bay has enough islands and lagoons that we can fish the area for the better part of a day, but we almost always start out at the inlet where we first saw the pelicans. Jack and I boated right up to the mouth of the creek, and I immediately had a follow up. Follow ups are when a fish trails a lure, comes close enough to the boat to be seen, but then does not strike. Sometimes a fish follows the lure for most of a cast, but then veers off as the lure nears the boat.

I casted in the direction that the fish had gone and had a second follow up. It was a different fish, slightly smaller than the first, but it too swam away when it noticed the boat. Jack and I each made a dozen more casts in the immediate area, but could not attract a fish.

We then motored off to fish other water, but an hour later Jack suggested that we go back to the original spot to see if we could catch the one that got away. On my second cast, I had another follow up. When I turned away from the water to tell Jack that I’d missed a fish for a third time, the fish struck. I must have left my lure dangling in the water, and the fish had circled around to attack it. A reel makes a wonderful whining sound when a big fish engages the reel’s drag. Fishermen often refer to it as “singing.” I had my back turned when my pole started singing.

I slowly brought the fish to the boat, and Jack netted it for me. It was a northern pike, which I already knew as I’d seen the fish once or twice before. The fish went well over 30 inches, not a lunker as far as northerns go, but a good sized fish. Years ago Jack and I hauled big fish completely into the boat to measure them, but now we net fish and try to leave the net suspended in the water. The larger the fish the more it needs the buoyancy of the water to support its weight, so if we can remove the hook without lifting big fish into the boat, we do so. Twisting and turning in the net, a fish is impossible to measure, so the best we can do is estimate (and possibly exaggerate) its size.

That is my 2025 Canadian fish story. If the northern pike had struck my lure normally, I wouldn’t mention it. Because it hit when I wasn’t paying attention, it has become part of my personal fishing lore.

Last week was my annual fishing trip to Lake of the Woods in Canada. For the second consecutive year, the weather tested our mettle and led to post-trip discussions about how much longer old men can boat into the backcountry and sleep in tents pitched on granite outcroppings.

Last year the challenge was frequent rain and a storm that threatened to swamp our boats. This year it was constant cold and wind. I wore every piece of clothing I had for the entire trip, and we never got rained on because it snowed instead. Usually I write in my journal once a day while on the trip. This year I made only one entry all week, as my hands without gloves were too numb to write. For six of our seven days on the lake, the wind came out of the east northeast. Weather out of the east is unusual; weather out of the east for six straight days almost never happens.

Setting up camp in Lake of the Woods’ remote interior means good fishing and welcome solitude. Bad weather has little effect on the fishing and actually enhances the solitude. Most years we have to share the waters with fifteen to twenty other boaters. This year strong winds and whitecaps kept the day visitors away, and we saw only five other boats all week.

I think it is age rather than unseasonably cold weather that is dictating the theme of this blog entry. At age sixty-one, I would have written about catching my first musky or my biggest lake trout. At age seventy-one, I now want to write about sore knees, aching back, and the amount of effort it took to drag myself out of my warm sleeping bag each morning. A person can continue to participate in strenuous recreational pursuits well beyond the age it makes logical sense, and for this I am grateful. My days of contact sports have been over for decades, but lugging a backpack, sleeping on the ground, and filleting fish with numb fingers should be done right up to the end.

I have been back from Canada for two days. If this trip is like the others, thoughts about the aches, the the mishaps, and inclement weather will quickly fade, and only memories of good fishing, peace and quiet, exceptional scenery, and time with friends will remain. I’ll probably write another blog about the trip in a week or two. I do have a fish story to tell.

What am I to think when a piece of writing that was once easy to read now becomes difficult? Either my well-honed mind is picking up nuances that I missed in earlier readings or my worn out brain is showing signs of age. I have very little doubt as to which of these two possibilities is more likely. Last week I had trouble reading Civil Disobedience. Thoreau has never been easy for me, but I have always thought of him as the most accessible of the Transcendentalists. Now I can’t even say that.

Civil Disobedience is not the first book in recent years to give me trouble. In the past twelve months, I can think of three excellent novels that were put aside because the prose overwhelmed me. The real question is not whether my brain is slower than it once was; the question is how best to read now that my brain has slowed. One option is to stick to light fiction and avoid the tough stuff. I’ve probably been doing that subconsciously already, but I don’t want to entirely give up on challenging prose. I especially want to keep reading personal essays, in part because they help me with my own writing.

I decided to try something new with this recent reading of Civil Disobedience. When I was in my twenties, my first wife, Lisa, was somewhat critical of the way I read books. If she picked up a book after I’d read it, she’d complain about the many comments that I’d written in the margins. She didn’t care whether I defaced the pages, nor did my comments have an affect on her own enjoyment of the book. She just thought I was reading the book incorrectly, too focused on the details and missing the big picture.

Without admitting to myself that Lisa might have had a point, I decided to try reading Civil Disobedience without getting hung up on any one sentence or any one paragraph. I still highlighted a few exceptional sentences (e.g. “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad”), but I also skated over confusing passages that, in the past, would have brought me to a stop.

I am not sure that I learned anything new by reading Civil Disobedience in this new way, but I did read it in its entirety. Now I am thinking about using the same method to take on Emerson and Marcus Aurelius. It seems better to read these guys and glean something from their writings than to not read them at all.

About five years ago I switched from monofilament line on my fishing poles to fluorocarbon. I really don’t know the difference in terms of chemical makeup, but fluorocarbon is less stiff than monofilament, and it comes off the reel with less resistance. Fluorocarbon, however, has a tendency to curl, so a year ago I switched to braided line. Braided line does not curl, but it is so strong that it is hard to break when a lure is permanently snagged on something at the bottom of the lake. Sometimes the only way to free snagged braided line is to cut it with a knife up at the pole. This can leave 20 or 30 feet of line dangling in the water. This is bad for the ecological integrity of the lake, and it also is a quick way to use up all of the line on a reel. The solution to this problem is to use braided line with a fluorocarbon leader. Most of the line on a pole is braided, but the last few feet is fluorocarbon. Whenever line needs to be intentionally broken, a hard steady pull will snap the fluorocarbon right at the lure – and no line is left in the water.

The downside of this braided/fluorocarbon combination is that it is difficult to find a reliable knot for connecting lines of different diameter and different consistency.

The best knot for tying fluorocarbon to braided line is the FG knot. I don’t know what FG stands for. I have watched two or three instructional videos on the FG knot, and I have watched a friend of mine tie the knot a half dozen times. As of last week, I had yet to tie it correctly. Every time I think I have it right, the knot fails to hold.

In preparation for my annual Canada fishing trip, I decided to sit on my front porch and practice the FG knot until I had it down. I bought new line for all of my poles, I brought out nail clippers to snip the tails off my knots once I had them tied. I watched a how-to video a final time, and then I sat outside on one of my two faux Adirondack chairs to perfect the troublesome knot.

I was on my front porch for so long that the two kids who were riding bikes in the cul de sac stopped to ask me what I was doing. When I told them that I was tying knots, they wanted to learn. I wasn’t about to teach kids how to tie a knot that I couldn’t tie myself, so I redirected their attention by asking them whether they’d ever casted a fishing pole. Rollin, about age four, hadn’t. The older Alice said, “My uncle Jim took me fishing when I was young, but I’m almost seven now.”

I found a hookless plug in my tackle box and put it on one my poles. Then the three of us went out into the street and I showed them how to cast. Rollin went first. His first cast was actually pretty good, but when he tried to retrieve the plug he turned the crank backwards. On that particular reel, turning the crank backwards unscrews it from the body of the reel, and it quickly became detached. Rollin thought he’d broken my fishing pole.

I reattached the crank and let Alice try. With most spinning reels, there are three distinct steps to a successful cast: pinning the line to the rod with a finger, flipping the bail, and lifting the finger off the line just as the cast is being made. Alice carefully went through the three-step sequence, but timed the finger release poorly. Her first cast sailed sideways right into my neighbor’s cedar tree. The reason I’d gone into the street in the first place was to get away from trees, but Alice had found one anyway. I was not surprised. She’d only done what I sometimes do even after years of practice.

Rollin and Alice’s mom must have been watching us from her house. When she saw me climb into the cedar tree to untangle fishing line, she came out of the house and walked up to us. I assured her that the kids weren’t bothering me, and I suggested that each kid should have two more casts before she took them home.

For nearly twenty years, there were only three young kids living on my street, and one of them was my daughter. Lately several of my former neighbors have died or moved to retirement homes, and the street is being repopulated with families with kids. This is wholly a good thing.

I might have figured out the FG knot, but I won’t know for sure until I hook into a big fish.

Thirty years ago, when my cousin Tom bought a mom-and-pop resort in northern Wisconsin, I helped him run the place during his first two summer seasons. I tended bar, worked as groundskeeper and, as much as my limited skills allowed, served as handyman. The resort came with an extensive set of tools, but they were spread out between Tom’s basement, his two-stall garage, the bed of his pickup truck, and a tool shed on the far end of the property. If a project was small, I sometimes spent as much time looking for tools as I did making the repair.

One of the first improvements Tom made to the resort after he’d settled in was to build a large workshop alongside the garage, and one of the first things he did after the construction of workshop was done was to move all of his tools to a single location. Once the tools were compiled, he discovered that he had six hammers, two dozen screwdrivers, and enough crescent wrenches to supply a small hardware store. Tom pointed out that I had helped to create this overabundance of tools, because during my two summers at the resort, I preferred buying new tools to scouring the resort for the old ones.

Last week I was reminded of Tom’s cache of tools, not because I was organizing my own tools (which I should probably do), but because I was getting a tackle box ready for my annual Canada fishing trip. The wide disbursal of my fishing gear was reminiscent of Tom’s tool collection.

Even when my fishing gear is organized, which it seldom is, it is still spread throughout my garage. There is a big tackle box for my Canada trip and a small tackle box for fishing from the confines of my kayak. There is a sled containing my ice fishing gear. There is an old tackle box with a broken latch that holds any lures not currently in use, and there are two well-stocked tackle boxes from a friend of mine who died a few years ago. Dave’s widow had me take them away not long after he died, but to date I’ve been reluctant to dig into my friend’s gear. It probably is time to add his lures and hooks to mine.

I hauled out all of my gear and spread it out across my front porch. As expected, I had too many of some things, not enough of others. For example, I use weighted alligator clips to measure water depth. These clips often sit next to the cash register at bait shops, so I sometimes grab one as an impulse purchase. I need one for each of my two tackle boxes, but I currently own ten. Between my two tackle boxes, there were a dozen Mepps spinners, and Dave’s two boxes contained an additional twenty. I have enough spoons to get me into the next decade, and Dave left me with a lifetime’s supply of deep divers.

I am possibly short of Rapalas. Rapalas, both floating and diving, are among my favorite lures, but they are delicate. Under the chin of each of the balsa wood minnows is a plastic scoop that makes the lure wriggle like a wounded fish. If the scoop shifts even slightly, the wiggling action ceases and the lure is useless. Unfortunately I cannot tell which ones are damaged just by looking at them. I have to reel them through the water to feel whether they still have the right action. As I sit on my front porch and sort through these lures, I might have more Rapalas than I need or I might have a small pile of useless balsa wood.

Clare wants to replenish my tackle box as a birthday present, but it turns out that I am in pretty good shape. I’d like a few more Rapalas just in case. I could also use a Little Cleo or two, a bottom bouncer, and as many panfish hooks as my daughter cares to buy. If she gets me these things and I put new line on all of my poles, I’ll be set both for my Canada trip and for my upcoming summer on the river.

Years ago, somewhere in one of these blogs, I wrote that I like to write, but don’t need to write. I may have to revise that observation a bit. For the past two weeks I’ve skipped my morning writing sessions, and my days feel off-kilter as a result.

Since I retired seven years ago, my morning routine has been writing followed by exercise. From about 7am until 10, I drink coffee and write. From 10 until noon, I either ride my bike or go to the gym. Even if I do nothing else afterwards, there is a sense of completeness. I am a strong supporter of wasted days, but doing nothing afternoons and evenings is more enjoyable when I exercise my brain and my body in the morning.

For the past two weeks, however, I have not written in the morning. Jack, our dog, had surgery, and his recovery is not going well. He needs 24-hour observation, and I’ve taken the midnight to seven shift. I sleep very little during the night, then crash once Manyu gets up. I still go to the gym before noon, but I sleep through my usual writing time. My original plan had been to adjust my internal clock by four or five hours, but that has not worked in terms of writing. If I sleep through my morning writing session, it is lost. Writing later in the day is not as much fun, nor are the results as good. This blog is a good example. I wrote the first draft after dinner. It’s not horrible, but it’s not going to make my “Top 100” list. Apparently I am an old man who cannot handle change.

Jack is making incremental improvements, and he recently came off his pain medications. Hopefully he will stop staring into space and tripping over scatter rugs. Once Jack comes out of his fog, so might I. It can’t come soon enough.

When I lived in Taipei in the early 1990s, I read Atlas Shrugged. It is not the worst novel that I ever started, but it may be the worst novel I ever finished. I was new to Taiwan at the time and had yet to find a bookstore with an English language section. I was content to read anything I could find.

The number of novels I’ve read in their entirety and strongly disliked is few. The number of novels that I’ve liked, but have failed to finish, is a bigger number. Of those, Moby Dick and The Grapes of Wrath are the two that bother me the most.

I have read the first fifty pages of Moby Dick at least a half dozen times. Each time I am engaged in the book right up to Melville’s lengthy description of rigging. I should just skip the part about lines and capstans and masts, but it somehow feels like cheating not to read each and every chapter. Because of my stubbornness in this regard, I have yet to get the Pequod out of Nantucket.

I have a harder time explaining why I have never read all of The Grapes of Wrath. In terms of tight prose, I set Ivan Doig, Wallace Stegner, and John Steinbeck apart from other writers, so reading Steinbeck’s masterwork should be easy. I’ve read all of his shorter novels, and Cannery Row is one of my favorite books of all time. Still I have never finished The Grapes of Wrath. I own a paperback copy, but my days of reading small print are over. I could get a hardcover version at the library or at a used bookstore, but have not. I could even read the paperback in small doses, savoring a couple chapters before my eyes start to ache, but instead I wait a year and start over from the beginning. Apparently I read the same way I write, always going back to the beginning and working through the old stuff before taking on the new.

I have been thinking about the good books I have yet to read because I’ve recently been making frequent trips back and forth to Madison. At first, it was for doctor visits with my brother-in-law. Now it is for veterinary visits with my dog. To relieve the boredom of Interstate 90, I decided to get a book on tape for the drive. Last week at the library, I held audio versions of both Moby Dick and The Grapes of Wrath in my hands. I settled on The Grapes of Wrath, and a round trip to Madison (two and half hours each way) brought me almost to the place in the book where I last stopped reading. The Joad family had just loaded up their truck to head West.

Like Tom Joad, I once snuck out of a state to start a new life in California. Tom couldn’t leave Oklahoma because he was on parole for murder. I couldn’t leave Massachusetts because my old Vega panel truck couldn’t pass the state’s auto emissions test. Tom Joad and I were just two bad boys destined for the road.

I did not participate in any of the Hands Off demonstrations two weekends ago. I was glad that the events were happening. I was especially pleased that hundreds of people in my own community of La Crosse lined one of the busiest streets in town with signs of protest. I could have easily participated. Instead I watched clips from local news outlets and saw a number of friends and acquaintances doing what I had not. I watched them on tv and sensed that I would not have exhibited the same enthusiasm and need to be heard as they did.

I am old enough to have participated in demonstrations during the last years of the Vietnam War. Even then I felt more an observer than part of a movement. I did not cheer when someone with a bullhorn shouted out self-righteous indignations. I did not join in when a guy with a guitar led us in song. My strongest recollection of the antiwar demonstrations on the University of Wisconsin campus was a conversation I had with a cop while both of us were standing at the back of the crowd. We weren’t even talking about the protests, but about the Senate Watergate hearings that were being held at the time.

I have not attended any big protests since college. I have gone to several smaller ones, demonstrations where I thought the crowd would be so small that the appearance of another human body would make a difference. I once participated in a protest of George W. Bush’s forest management policies, and there were only six of us in attendance. A news crew showed up to talk to us, but I don’t think their segment ever aired.

While I’d never planned to join any Hands Off demonstration, I quietly hoped that Clare would. My daughter lives in Madison, which was the site of the state’s largest gathering. I might not have much faith in the peaceful expression of public outrage toward the government, but my daughter is too young to possess similar cynicism.

As it turned out, Clare did not participate in any demonstration. She had planned to, but our dog Jack had surgery four days before the Hands Off event. His recovery was going poorly, so our daughter skipped the demonstration in Madison to help Manyu and me care for our dog. I put that down as a valid excuse.

While Clare was home, however, I made sure that she and I watched A Complete Unknown, the recent movie about Bob Dylan’s early years in New York. It reminded me that on the list of people I most admire, Pete Seeger is near the top. Unlike me, he never gave up on the power of peaceful resistance.

I am thinking about switching gyms when my current membership expires. For the past five years I’ve been going to the recreation center on the UW-La Crosse campus. I like everything about the place, except for the fact that its operating hours coincide with the university calendar. When classes are not in session, the building sometimes closes. There are at least twenty days a year when I can’t use the facility.

The YMCA in town just went through a renovation, so I checked it out as a potential place to exercise. I used to belong to the Y, but never felt entirely comfortable there. The hallways were a rabbit warren, the entire building smelled of chlorine, and a small group of old men used the men’s locker room as their private athletic club. There was a lounge just off the showers, and half-dressed septuagenarians hung out there for most of the morning. They drank coffee, read newspapers, and complained about kids running around the Y unsupervised. Occasionally a few of them would leave the lounge to spend a few minutes in the locker room’s sauna. Their presence shouldn’t have bothered me (I am a septuagenarian myself), but it did.

The most noticeable change in the Y building was a remodel of the men’s locker room. New lockers and a new shower area. The lounge and the coffee machine were gone. The sauna had been moved to the pool area. The place still smelled of chlorine, but the old men were nowhere to be seen. Apparently eliminating unnecessary amenities in locker rooms scatters old men in the same way that closing garbage dumps disperses bears.

Still I am not sure whether I will move my workouts to the Y. In retirement, the campus recreation center has become my last contact with college students, and I need a regular dose of decent young people if I am to have continued hope for the future.

If I relied on the popular press to explain Gen Zers to me, I’d come away believing they were all arrogant, self-serving jerks. The media suggests that for every Greta Thunberg or David Hogg, there are a thousand kids who dream of being influencers. A particularly disturbing article was a recent one about Harvard students who do not consider “selling out” to be a pejorative term. Rather it is used as non-judgmental shorthand to describe the inevitable loss of idealism that comes with a six-figure salary straight out of college.*

On a recent trip to the rec center, I mentioned to a student worker who oversees the front desk that I hadn’t seen her in a while. With a big smile on her face, she explained, “I’m student teaching this semester and can only work weekends.”

“You are student teaching, and you still find time to work here?” I asked.

“I love student teaching,” she replied, “but it’s unpaid. I need this job to pay my rent.”

Cece might never earn six figures, but she’ll also never have to justify to herself why she sold out. How am I supposed to give up being around such people?

* An editorial in the Harvard Crimson rationalized selling out by claiming that a young person can do more good by working for The Man and donating 10% of a massive salary to charity than by working for a non-profit at lousy pay. This lame excuse reminded me of my years reshelving case reporters in the Harvard Law School Library. During that time, more than one law school student told me, “Rich people deserve good lawyers, too.”  See https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/26/climaco-harvard-sell-out.  Also https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/business/gen-z-college-students-jobs.html.

I am thinking about switching gyms when my current membership expires. For the past five years I’ve been going to the recreation center on the UW-La Crosse campus. I like everything about the place, except for the fact that its operating hours coincide with the university calendar. When classes are not in session, the building sometimes closes. There are at least twenty days a year when I can’t use the facility.

The YMCA in town just went through a renovation, so I checked it out as a potential place to exercise. I used to belong to the Y, but never felt entirely comfortable there. The hallways were a rabbit warren, the entire building smelled of chlorine, and a small group of old men used the men’s locker room as their private athletic club. There was a lounge just off the showers, and half-dressed septuagenarians hung out there for most of the morning. They drank coffee, read newspapers, and complained about kids running around the Y unsupervised. Occasionally a few of them would leave the lounge to spend a few minutes in the locker room’s sauna. Their presence shouldn’t have bothered me (I am a septuagenarian myself), but it did.

The most noticeable change in the Y building was a remodel of the men’s locker room. New lockers and a new shower area. The lounge and the coffee machine were gone. The sauna had been moved to the pool area. The place still smelled of chlorine, but the old men were nowhere to be seen. Apparently eliminating unnecessary amenities in locker rooms scatters old men in the same way that closing garbage dumps disperses bears.

Still I am not sure whether I will move my workouts to the Y. In retirement, the campus recreation center has become my last contact with college students, and I need a regular dose of decent young people if I am to have continued hope for the future.

If I relied on the popular press to explain Gen Zers to me, I’d come away believing they were all arrogant, self-serving jerks. The media suggests that for every Greta Thunberg or David Hogg, there are a thousand kids who dream of being influencers. A particularly disturbing article was a recent one about Harvard students who do not consider “selling out” to be a pejorative term. Rather it is used as non-judgmental shorthand to describe the inevitable loss of idealism that comes with a six-figure salary straight out of college.*

On a recent trip to the rec center, I mentioned to a student worker who oversees the front desk that I hadn’t seen her in a while. With a big smile on her face, she explained, “I’m student teaching this semester and can only work weekends.”

“You are student teaching, and you still find time to work here?” I asked.

“I love student teaching,” she replied, “but it’s unpaid. I need this job to pay my rent.”

Cece might never earn six figures, but she’ll also never have to justify to herself why she sold out. How am I supposed to give up being around such people?

* An editorial in the Harvard Crimson rationalized selling out by claiming that a young person can do more good by working for The Man and donating 10% of a massive salary to charity than by working for a non-profit at lousy pay. This lame excuse reminded me of my years reshelving case reporters in the Harvard Law School Library. During that time, more than one law school student told me, “Rich people deserve good lawyers, too.”  See https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/26/climaco-harvard-sell-out.  Also https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/business/gen-z-college-students-jobs.html.

For the past two weeks I’ve been walking Jack along the river in Riverside Park. Every day there are people fishing from the riverboat wharf. Although I never saw anyone catch a fish, just watching them cast their lines fueled an itch. I checked the 10-day forecast and saw only one warm day before a March snowstorm was expected to roll in. I called Dennis and Buzz to see if they wanted to go fishing one time before we got hit with another shot of winter. Both wanted to go.

The outing was planned for Tuesday, but Monday night Buzz called to tell me he was sick. Not an hour later Dennis emailed me to say that he’d had an accident while cutting firewood. He was okay, but would be incapacitated for the next week. Manyu needed to use our car on Tuesday, so I couldn’t go alone. The fishing trip was off.

Then on Tuesday the trip was back on as quickly as it had been canceled. Manyu, who thought she would need the car for most of the day, was already home when I returned from a late morning bike ride. I grabbed a quick sandwich, strapped a kayak to the roof of our car, and was backing out of my driveway by 1:30.

Because of strong winds, I decided to fish Brice Prairie Channel. The Channel is a narrow stretch of water that runs adjacent Lake Onalaska. The lake is actually a reservoir on the Mississippi River, and when the reservoir was created, the Army Corps of Engineers put in a string of barrier islands to protect the eastern shoreline from wave action. Brice Prairie Channel is the strait between the barrier islands and the mainland. The fishing there is not exceptional, but the islands provide shelter from the wind.

I launched my kayak at a canoe landing maintained by a local Boy Scout troop and paddled to my favorite fishing spot on the channel. The spot had changed. More accurately, the spot was gone. For as long as I’ve been fishing Brice Prairie Channel, there had been a small patch of open water between a pair of fallen trees. The configuration created ideal fish habitat. Now neither tree was there. They had been far too big to float away on their own, so one of the nearby landowners must have had them removed. The shoreline definitely looked less neglected with the dead trees taken out, but I’d lost my fishing hole.

I fished the spot anyway and did have little bit of action. The first outing of the year is always a test run, and there are usually bugs to work out. My first problem was that the 4 lb. test on my reel had frayed over the winter, and my line broke at the slightest tug. My second problem was that I put my cell phone in the river.

I’d overdressed, and after the first half hour, I needed to take off an outer layer. This easy task is not so easy in a kayak. I was able to wriggle my arms out of the sleeves of my windbreaker, but I couldn’t get it completely off. The jacket was long, and I was sitting on the bottom of it – and I could not lift my butt and pull up on the jacket at the same time. I decided to leave the jacket where it was, tucked between my torso and the backrest. Some of the material had bunched up in the small of my back, but not enough to make it uncomfortable.

Thirty minutes later I noticed that the jacket had shifted, and half of it was dragging in the river. I then remembered that I’d taken my phone with me, but wasn’t sure which pocket I’d put it in. It was, of course, in the pocket dangling over the side. I usually do not take my phone on the water, but I thought the trip might produce content for a blog and I wanted a photo to accompany the text. If I felt the need to bring my phone, I should have stored it in a ziplock bag, but that’s another one of those bugs that needed to be worked out. 

When I got home, I googled “wet phones” and learned that iPhone 13s are water-resistant. If my phone is water-resistant in the same way that my lightweight hiking boots are water-resistant, I’ll be buying a new phone. When I tested my phone, it seemed to almost work. The screen lit up and the number pad worked, but the speakers were muffled.

I also googled “How often do people replace their phones?” All of the responses were either AI or Reddit, so I did’t trust any of them. One AI response read, “People typically upgrade their phones every 2 to 3 years, although some upgrade annually, while others wait until their phone stops working.” That useless piece of information, while perhaps accurate, confirms my low opinion of AI.  

Five times in the last week I told myself that I should keep some kind of phenology. This realization is an annual event, and it always happens a week or two before the first day of spring. It is when the change of seasons becomes obvious and I wonder whether spring is early or late this year. If I’d been keeping a record of such sightings year after year, I’d know how 2025 compares to 2024 or, for that matter, to any year since I moved to La Crosse three decades ago. I should keep a phenology, but I don’t. 

1) The first hint of spring is always Buzz, Dennis, and Gerard (three of my card-playing buddies) tapping their maple trees. To me, it still feels like winter, but the trees and my friends sense the change. This year has been hit or miss in terms of sap. Because the temperatures have been on a rollercoaster, the sap runs, then stops, then runs again. My friends are not sure about the quality or the quantity of this year’s syrup.

2) Next came the opening of the Mississippi River. The startling part of this year’s spring thaw was not that it came early or late, but that it came quickly. I walk Jack in Riverside Park as soon as the afternoon temperatures get into the 40s, and this year it seemed that the 40s and 50s were skipped over entirely. The weather jumped straight into the 60s, and the river went from frozen to completely open in a matter of days.

3, 4) Last Tuesday I was in Madison for the day. On the way home, I stopped for gas at the Kwik Trip outside of Sauk City. Adjacent the gas station is a water retention pond that has become a small permanent marsh. Already the male red-winged blackbirds were there to establish territory. Two days later I saw a pair of tundra swans in the La Crosse River Marsh. I do not know whether they are on their way to Saskatchewan or are among the handful of big birds that migrate no farther north than La Crosse.

5) In November I always bring my bicycle into the house and put it on a stanchion to make it stationary. I don’t bike inside more than a dozen times all winter, but it is there for days when the gymnasium on campus is closed. On March 14, I carried the bike outside, lubed the chain, put air in the tires, and went for my first real bicycle ride in nearly five months. After a winter of ellipticals, weight machines, and stationary bikes, putting in the miles along the river made exercise fun again. I took off my bike helmet for the last few blocks of my ride, and I felt like a wild man.

• A weather-related observation that is not necessarily seasonal: On Friday night I intentionally left my car in the driveway so the predicted rain would clean off some of the salt. On Saturday morning there was a thin layer of reddish mud over every inch of the vehicle. The news explained it as dust picked up by strong winds over Texas and Oklahoma and deposited as dirty rain over Wisconsin.

My current writing project is a series of essays about life as a middle class Wisconsin dad raising his daughter alongside a first generation Asian American mom. I am two years into the project, but only recently have I been sending draft chapters to my biracial daughter for feedback. A week ago I spoke to Clare on the phone about a chapter I’d written on Manyu’s obsession with Clare learning to speak fluent Mandarin.

Early in our conversation, Clare said, “You know, Dad, I speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent, but Mom doesn’t.” With my very limited comprehension of Mandarin, how would I know that? I did not even know Mandarin came in accents.

In 2008, Manyu, Clare, and I moved to Taiwan for a year. The reason was largely to improve Clare’s Mandarin. For one full academic calendar, she attended a Taipei public school and spoke Mandarin with everyone except me. At school, her teacher and most of her classmates were Taiwanese.

This is where things gets complicated for anyone not familiar with Taiwan’s history. In Taiwan, the non-indigenous population is made up of two major subgroups. One subgroup is the people whose ancestors emigrated from the Chinese Mainland in the 1700s. In English, they are often referred to as Taiwanese. The other subgroup are the children and grandchildren of the Mainlanders who emigrated to Taiwan with Chaing Kai-shek in the 1940s. In English, they are often referred to as Han.*

Clare’s teacher and classmates were mostly Taiwanese. Only a few were Han. The Taiwanese people have foods and customs that are distinct from anything on the Mainland. They also have their own spoken language (Taiwanese). While Mandarin is the official language of Taiwan, it is the second language to about 80% of the island’s population. All Taiwanese people speak Mandarin, but probably not inside their homes. They apparently also speak it with an accent. When Clare told me that she spoke Mandarin with an accent, she was saying that she spoke Mandarin like a Taiwanese person. My wife is Han and does not have the accent.

I am describing the difference between Taiwanese and Han as if I know what I am talking about. I don’t, but that is only because the people from Taiwan aren’t sure themselves. The distinction between Taiwanese and Han was huge for Manyu’s parents, but is becoming less important with each succeeding generation. When I met Manyu in the early 1990s, Manyu considered herself Han, not Taiwanese. Thirty-five years later she does not know what she is. If pressured to put a name to her heritage, she will say that she is “Chinese from Taiwan.” Clare, on the other hand, considers herself a daughter of mom from Taiwan, so she is  Taiwanese. 

This blog is a longwinded way of saying that I only recently learned that my daughter speaks Mandarin with an accent.

*Taiwanese and Han are English words for differentiating the 18th Century emigrants from the 20th Century immigrants. The Mandarin words for the two groups are bénshěngrén (本省人) and the wàishěngrén (外省人). Bénshěngrén means “provincial people,” and wàishěngrén means “outside province people.”

This week I watched five different DYI videos on three different subjects. The first two were about filleting a walleye. While the demonstrations did not teach me much that I did not already know, they were strong reminders that I don’t get my fillet knives sharp enough. This led me to watching two videos about sharpening fillet knives.

The big question I’ve always had about sharpening knives is whether I should run the edge of my knife toward the whetstone or away from the whetstone. One video did it one way, and the other video did it the other. The two videos did concur on the final step, which is to remove the burr that forms along the cutting edge during the sharpening. If I have ever created a burr while sharpening a knife, I never noticed it.

I won’t fillet a walleye until I catch one, and I probably won’t sharpen my knives until I have a fish to fillet, so the information in those four videos has been mentally put away for future use. The video that I did immediately use was one that showed me how to change the hatchback support struts on a 2011 Subaru Outback.

The video started with a hatchback dropping on its own and hitting a kid in the head. (The kid wore a bicycle helmet for demonstration purposes.) This confirmed that I had the right video. As always, the step-by-step demonstration made the undertaking look like a quick five-minute fix, so I headed to the auto parts store for the necessary parts.

The woman behind the counter at the store hit a few keys on her computer and then asked me whether my Subaru was a station wagon. I’ve had the car for nearly fifteen years, but I never considered it a station wagon. I’m 70 years old. To me, a station wagon is a rusty white Ford with fake wood side panels.

When I said that I didn’t know whether my car was a station wagon, an old guy who was stocking shelves looked out the window of the store and read off my license plate number. The woman plugged the number into her computer and said, “Yeah, you have a station wagon.” Even though I understand that my whole life exists in cyberspace, I was taken aback at how easily a clerk in an auto parts store was able to access my information.*

The woman grabbed two new struts from the shelves behind the counter, but before she handed them to me, she put a big L on one and a big R on the other. She said, “Left and right are different, but there’s nothing anywhere that tells you one from the other.” After I got home, I realized that she was, as far as I could tell, correct.

The video got one thing wrong, and it got one thing very right. It got wrong the removal of the three bolts that held the old struts in place. My socket set didn’t look any different from the one used in the video, but the guy in the video easily slipped his socket wrench over the head of every bolt. My sockets did not fit into the tight space around two of the bolts, so I had to go in sideways with an open-ended wrench. The guy in the video took ten seconds to remove the bolts. I needed ten minutes.

What the video got right was the very last step. The struts are connected to the hatchback by a ball and socket. A ball on the outer edge of the hatchback needs to fit into a socket on the end of the strut. The amount of pressure needed to pop the ball into place was the kind of pressure I associate with breaking something. I don’t think that I would have pushed hard enough if I hadn’t seen the guy in the video do it.

The new struts worked perfectly. I immediately asked Manyu if we needed go grocery shopping. I wanted to experience the joy of putting groceries in the back of my car without propping up the hatchback with my snow brush.

* When I got home, I tried accessing my car online and discovered that the make and model of my car are public record, my name and address are not.

I cannot remember the last time I wrote an essay or a book chapter where the original introduction survived the final edit. I ramble when I write, yet I value concise writing. By the time I get to the heart of a topic, the first several paragraphs of a piece don’t always fit. I needed them to get me to where I wanted to go, but the reader doesn’t need them to come in behind me. Overall I delete more than half of what I put to paper, but it is a necessary part of the process. “The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap… Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.”* 

From what I have read about book proposals, the proper way to pitch a non-fiction book to a publisher or literary agent is 1) outline the entire book, 2) complete a few chapters, 3) submit query letters, and 4) have a full proposal ready to go should a publisher or agent express interest. The goal is to have a contract in hand before dedicating the next few years to a writing project that might not otherwise see the light of day.

I, however, cannot write that way, or at least I choose not to write that way. First of all, I do not have enough name recognition for a publisher to want a contract with me based simply on an idea. Secondly, if I did find a publisher prior to completion of a manuscript, he or she would hold me to a deadline. Deadlines were fine when I wrote papers in graduate school, but now I want to be the one who decides when a manuscript is ready.

My distaste of deadlines is linked to the fact that the pace of my writing has slowed with age. My best writing today is neither better nor worse than my best writing from forty years ago, but it does take me four to five times longer. I am retired now, so the time factor is largely irrelevant. I do, however, sometimes wonder what would have happened had I started writing full-time back in my prime.

• This Taoist quote comes from the Inner Chapters (Chapter 26) of Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu is the second most important ancient Tao text, second only to the Tao Te Ching itself. The final line of the quote is, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”

Last week Manyu and I drove Manyu’s brother to Madison for a medical appointment. It was scheduled for 3pm, and the plan was for Clare, who lives in Madison, to grab some carryout Chinese food and join us for an early dinner before we headed back to La Crosse. I’d miscalculated the driving time, and we arrived early. The doctor saw my brother-in-law right away, and we were done at the clinic a full hour sooner than we’d expected.

Manyu immediately called Clare. She was already at an Asian food court near the East Towne Mall, but had yet to place an order. We told her to skip the food, but that we still wanted to see her for a short time before we started on our drive home. Clare said that as long as she was on the eastside of town, she was going to go to Costco. She knew that La Crosse did not have a Costco, so she suggested that we meet her there.

I would have rather gone to a coffee shop, but my brother-in-law and his wife wanted to shop at Costco. On the drive over, I didn’t remember ever having been to a Costco. I should have been more interested in seeing one than I was.

Clare met us outside the main entrance, because customers can’t even go into the store without a membership card. Once she brought us inside, I realized that I had been to a Costco before, but it had been just after my family moved to Taipei in 2008. I’d been to a Costco in Taiwan, but never in the United States.

After Clare gave me a tour of her Costco, I wished La Crosse had one. The aisles were wide, the employees were friendly, and other big box stores would do well to have as many staff members on the floor to help confused shoppers. The seafood looked good, and my sister-in-law got excited when she found octopus.

Manyu bought an oversized bottle of vitamins, and my in-laws half-filled a shopping cart with meat and seafood. Clare picked up a few grocery items that she can’t get elsewhere, and she also got a life-sized Pikachu stuffed toy. Until then, I didn’t know how big a life-sized Pikachu was. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg cheese and a three-pound container of peanut butter pretzels.

I don’t usually buy peanut butter pretzels, because I tend to eat them until my stomach hurts. Now I have a year’s supply that might last me a month. I consider peanut butter pretzels the best snack food innovation in my lifetime. When I got home that night, I googled peanut butter pretzel and found an old NPR story about their origin. “The technology to make a hard pretzel shell stuffed with peanut butter didn’t even exist until the 1980s… It’s a process called co-extrusion — basically, an outer tube pumps out pretzel dough, while an inner tube pumps out peanut butter filling onto a conveyor belt. The whole thing is then sliced up and baked in a giant 100-foot oven.”* The article did not explain at what point in the process the salt goes on. Maybe that’s common knowledge.

* Found at https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/21/280284547/trader-joes-caught-in-sticky-lawsuit-over-peanut-butter-pretzels.

Manyu does not get overly excited about Christmas, and I’m lukewarm to Chinese New Year. As much as we appreciate each other’s cultures, our love of particular holidays remains tied to our individual childhoods. Clare is both her mother’s daughter and her dad’s little girl, so she gets excited about both.

Clare and her boyfriend Chase came to La Crosse last weekend for Chinese New Year, and we had a total of eleven people at our New Year’s dinner table. (New Year’s was on Wednesday,  but we celebrated it on Saturday so Clare could be there.) There was Manyu and me, Clare and Chase, my brother-in-law’s family of four (an older daughter is back in Taiwan), and three people I’d never met before. A big part of Chinese New Year is the food. Manyu cooked for an entire week, and Clare and Chase brought an ice cooler of egg tarts and vegetarian dishes. I’d recently dropped the four pounds I’d gained over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now I am starting over again.

A tradition of the New Year is to hand out red envelopes containing money to all of the kids in attendance. Manyu gave one to Chase. She explained to him that it would be the only one he’d ever get from her. He was already too old to receive New Year’s red envelopes, but because he was a white guy from Nebraska who’d never been a given a red envelope as a child, she was making a one-time exception.

With a room full of Taiwanese people in my house, I asked them why English-speaking media coverage about Chinese New Year was calling it the Year of the Wood Snake and not just the Year of the Snake. The question stumped them. To their knowledge, none of the Asian news outlets was calling it the Year of the Wood Snake, and they’d never heard the term before. They did say that wood is, along with fire, earth, water, and metal, one of the five “processes,” and 2025 might be both a snake year and a wood year. If it was a wood year, they thought it might be a good thing. Snakes are courageous, but also intimidating and tenacious. Wood is a soft element, so its influence might temper the snake’s aggressive tendencies.

Xīn nián kuài lè. (trans. “Happy New Year”). 

The main loop of northern California’s Muir Woods is a wide and clearly marked trail. The most heavily trafficked sections have split rail fences on either side. The parts that are not fenced have signs reminding people to stay on the trail. Near the entrance is an interpretative sign explaining that the park’s redwood trees have shallow root systems and are susceptible to soil compaction. No reasonable person would threaten the health of some of the world’s tallest trees by stepping off the trail. 

Yet, on my first trip to Muir Woods, I saw a curiously shaped tree fifteen yards off the main pathway, forgot where I was, and walked up to the tree to get a better look. I was a mile down the trail, well away from the crowds, but a National Park Service ranger appeared out of nowhere and told me that I had the choice of either following the park rules or being escorted out of the park.

About six months after my visit to Muir Woods, a hiking companion and I took a bus to Yosemite National Park. We got dropped off in the Valley and immediately asked a park ranger for advice about a good six-day backpacking trip. When she learned that we didn’t have a car to drive to a remote trailhead, she told us to catch the bus to Tuolumne Meadows and hike back to the Valley. “The trip,” she said, “takes only three days if you stay on the trail, so don’t stay on the trail.”

Whenever I go hiking, I stay on the trail at least 90% of the time, but it is important that I am free to venture off trail whenever I want to. Anyone who backpacks knows the feeling that comes with leaving the main pathway and setting off in a direction no one else has gone.

Muir Woods and Yosemite National Park are two very different places, so I would expect them to be managed differently. Muir Woods has over a million visitors a year, yet is smaller than New York’s Central Park. Yosemite, with the exception of Yosemite Valley itself, is underutilized and is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Still the directives from the two National Park Service rangers sent two distinctly different messages. One ranger basically said, “Nature is right over there, but you can’t get any closer.” The other one said, “If you aren’t going to immerse yourself in untrammeled nature, what you are doing here at all?”

When I was seventeen years old, my girlfriend dragged me to the a movie version of Othello. Only a week earlier I’d made her go to Billy Jack, so it might have been her way of getting back at me. The movie (Othello, not Billy Jack) was two and half hours long, and I was lost for the first half. I got that Iago was a bad guy and that Othello was about to screw up, but otherwise I did not know what was going on.

Midway through the movie there was an intermission, and when the movie resumed after a fifteen minute break, it was if I’d taken a Shakespeare class during the interim. I suddenly understood dialogue that had been gibberish to me only minutes earlier, and I came close to enjoying the movie.

I recalled this old memory, because something similar happened to me last night. For the past week, I’d been struggling with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message. In it, he blends trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine with his belief in the power of the written word. I wasn’t buying any of it. The connections he was trying to make felt forced, and I thought the writing was more concerned with the attractive flow of the prose than with saying anything worthwhile. Had Between the World and Me not been one of my favorite books of the past ten years, I would have put The Message aside and grabbed any one of four other books waiting for me on the table next to my bed.

But I stuck with it, and this evening, from the first moment I opened the book, the message of The Message jumped off the page. I was immersed in the content, and I found myself back to my old habit of making comments in the margins. Through the first eighty-five pages, I’d been bored and confused. Starting with page 86, I was hooked. Coates hadn’t done anything differently, so the change had to be me. As with Othello, I needed to adjust myself to a style of writing not familiar to me.

With Othello and The Message, the transition from confusion to comprehension came suddenly. It doesn’t always happen that way. With one of my favorite books of all time, Walden, it came much slower. It, in fact, took years. I’d tried Thoreau’s classic a few times as a teenager and never got past the “Economy” chapter and its lengthy discussion about the price of nails and garden seed. A couple of years later I slogged through the entire book when it was required reading for an American lit course in college. There I liked it better than Sister Carrie and Bartleby the Scrivener, but not nearly as much as Huckleberry Finn. I did however, realize that Walden was not a book to be rushed through as an assigned reading. I gave it another shot the following summer and then again the summer after that. Since then I have read the book another seven or eight times. I pick it up periodically, because 1) it is brilliant in sections, and 2) it is my fallback book each time I unsuccessfully try to understand The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I am still waiting for the day when Emerson makes sense.

Last week I was putting together an early draft of a new essay, and I wrote, “In spite of my blind spot when it comes to Clare, I do not think that my daughter is the best thing to ever come out of Wisconsin.” The sentence was to be the lede for a description of the one thing I do consider the best thing to ever come out the state. That one thing the Wisconsin Idea. In a nutshell, the Wisconsin Idea is the belief that all the teaching and all of the research taking place at public universities need to be shared with more than those fortunate enough to attend college. As a result, the first extension agent in the country, maybe in the world, was hired in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Idea might be the most egalitarian concept to ever come out of higher education. The Morrill Act was designed to allow the common man (and eventually the common woman) to go to college.* The Wisconsin Idea says that the Morrill Act didn’t go far enough.

Composing the sentence about the best things to come out of Wisconsin led me to wonder what other noteworthy accomplishments and ideas had originated in state, and I decided to create a Top Ten List. In a matter of seconds, I came up with six “bests.” Those six, in the order that they popped into my head, were the Wisconsin Idea, my daughter Clare, Les Paul’s solid body electric guitar, John Muir, Earth Day, and A Sand County Almanac. I hesitated for several seconds, but then added the Republican Party. It makes the list because of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, not for any of the regressive politics of the past forty years.

I thought a little longer and then added the Green Bay Packers. The Packers make the list not because so many Wisconsinites live and die with the on-field success of the team, but because the organization is owned by the community and not an egotistical billionaire. In some ways, Packers’ ownership springs from the same value system as the Wisconsin Idea.

That left two slots on the list that I had trouble filling. There are several towns in Wisconsin that lay claim to certain firsts, but I doubt the veracity of any of them. As you drive around the state, you may encounter billboards on the outskirts of towns that welcome you to the home of the ice cream sundae, the home of toilet paper, and the home of the hamburger. If I actually believed that any one of these basic joys of life actually originated in Wisconsin, it would be on my the list. I, however, am skeptical.

I do have two placeholders for the last two slots in my Top Ten List. I am ready to replace either of them as soon as something better comes to mind. One is the first American kindergarten, and the other is the first rails-to-trails bicycle route. If Wisconsin had had the first kindergarten in the world, that would merit a permanent place on my list. Even the first one in the country deserves recognition, but if Margarethe Meyer Schurz hadn’t established the first kindergarten in 1856, someone else in Iowa or Pennsylvania or Kentucky would have replicated the German idea a year or two later.

And as far as rails-to-trails, converting abandoned railroad beds into recreation corridors is one the least appreciated good ideas in all of outdoor recreation management. Someone sometime must have had a revelation and realized, “Hey! Much of what people do in nature is linear. Why do we need to set aside a hundred thousand square miles of land so visitors can hike and bike in a straight line?” That realization was a small and simple stroke of genius.

So here, in alphabetical order, is my list. As a Top Ten List, it’s not particularly impressive, but it shouts Wisconsin.

Clare (my daughter)
Earth Day (thanks to Gaylord Nelson)
the Electric Guitar (Les Paul’s solid body design)
the Green Bay Packers (and their 500,000+ owners)
Kindergarten (the first one in America)
Muir, John (America’s greatest naturalist)
the Republican Party (the early years)
A Sand County Almanac (Aldo Leopold’s environmental classic)
the Sparta-Elroy Bicycle Trail (first rails-to-trails)
the Wisconsin Idea (a surviving remnant of Wisconsin’s Progressive Era)

* Women were not allowed to attend Harvard until 1963. Instead women went to its sister school, Radcliffe. The University of Wisconsin, which had no sister school, opened its doors to women in 1863.

I vaguely remember when my second grade teacher told our class that we would live into the 21st Century. That was in 1961, and my classmates and I could not project that far into the future. At age seven, the 21st Century was six more lifetimes away.*

Last week I typed in the date for my first blog of 2025, and my initial thought was, “Wow! We’re a quarter century into the new millennium, and I’m still here.”

A comparison of a moment from1961 with one from 2025 could have, maybe should have, given me insight about the passage of time. It did not. Even when I intentionally tried to draw meaningful conclusions, I came up with only clichés. Did I think that life was better back in the 60s than it is now? Would I like to go back in time and relive my childhood?

As to Question No. 1, I don’t think that life was better in the 60s than it is now. I do worry about climate change, but otherwise humanity is slowly moving in a good direction. We take just as many steps backwards as we do forwards, but some of the progress gained going forward is retained even when we regress. 

As to Question No. 2, I don’t want to relive my childhood. My overriding recollection of the 1960s was that I was present for them, but missed almost everything. If I went back as a kid in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I’d probably miss the significance of the decade all over again. Conversely, if I was given another shot at the 70s and 80s (i.e., my late teens and all of my twenties), I’d go back in a heartbeat.

Last week I watched three new stand-up comedy specials on tv: Nate Bargatze, Neal Brennan, and Craig Ferguson. The three comedians have different comedic styles, and after having seen several specials from each of them over the years, I would say that their material seldom has anything in common. This time, however, their specials all had the same overriding theme, which was this; none of us who grew up in the 20th Century belong in the present time. Nate Bargatze went so far as to suggest that he has more in common with the Pilgrims than he does with his daughter.

In last week’s blog, I wondered whether I had one more big accomplishment left in me. This week I am thinking that it is time for me to hang up my spikes. I should do what so many other baby boomers seem unable to do, which is to find a hobby, enjoy life, and stay out of the way. With age comes wisdom, but part of wisdom is knowing when to hand over the reins.

• The photo is of Mrs. Van Beek’s 1961 second grade class. I didn’t even remember that such a photo existed, but Chris Zilles, the little girl standing on the far left, brought it to our 50th high school reunion. Between the two of us, we were able to identify all but four kids in the picture. I am standing in the back row, second from the right.

At a recent neighborhood Christmas party, a guy from down the street joked that he worries about me if I am not sitting at my living room window each morning when he heads off for work. Apparently I have become a local fixture, and something’s not quite right if I am not in my spot by 7am.

It occurred to me that if I sat in a chair every morning with nothing in front of me and did nothing more than stare out the window, my neighbors would think that I was a lonely old man. Because I sit at the window with a pen, a notepad, and a laptop computer, they assume I am mentally engaged and that gazing out the window is part of the writing process.

I am far from lonely in my retirement, but I have somewhat withdrawn from the outside world. The surprising part is not the dysfunction that I see at the national and global level, but rather how little all of that dysfunction affects my day-to-day life. When I look out upon my cul-de-sac, I see only pleasantness. Dog walkers wave to me as they pass by, the birds behave as if I’m not there, and the squirrels actually climb up on the window sill to show me their walnuts before they take them to wherever they take them when the ground is frozen. 

When I sit in my writing nook I sometimes make the mistake of checking out the morning news on my laptop. When I do, two annoying thoughts sometimes take me out of my calm. The first is that the major events of the day, while seldom affecting me personally, have or will have an impact on the lives of my daughter and her fellow twenty-somethings. My own adolescence and early adulthood included Vietnam, race riots, Watergate, and the assassinations of our best leaders, but there was always the sense that “this too will pass.” Today’s problems, maybe because they have been sneaking up on us for decades (e.g., climate change, income disparity, xenophobia), feel more engrained and more permanent. 

The second disruption to my peace of mind is the sense that the mess we’re in is partially the result of people like me having stayed out of it. I spent my entire life teaching at various universities. The image of eggheads in an ivory tower is a false one, but that does not mean that college campuses don’t reside in a bit of a bubble. That bubble is one of the reasons I became a professor in the first place. For decades, I told myself that I was fulfilling my obligation to society by helping students define their environmental ethic. It was good work, but none of it ever required personal sacrifice. Taoist writings state that people cannot divorce themselves from the problems of the world. At best, they can hope that their direct involvement won’t be needed. I have gone through life telling myself that I was not needed.

I like retirement very much. Overall I haven’t felt this carefree since graduate school. Still, one of the few things that does bother me at times is the suspicion that, in addition to raising an intelligent and caring daughter, there might be something else I was meant to do or am still supposed to do. Mark Twain said that one of the great days of life is the one where we figure out why we are here. I’m still working on that.