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.