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.