Paddling In The Rain

I hadn't paddled much since the Boundary Waters trip where too much wind and too high waves brought back a measure of my old fear of the water. But I resolved this week to get back to it, paddling some of the smaller lakes in the parks around Mineral Point.

It was raining this morning. I went for a paddle anyway. The light sprinkle of rain was just a little cooler than the air, making it refreshing. I put my boat into glass smooth water and paddled across the finger of lake to the far shore under the linden trees, along white barked aspen. Lime green pods of hops trees floated on the surface, hinting at stormier weather prior.

A pair of birds skirted the shore, darting from back and forth from tree to tree, so I paused a ways out, with a view of a ferny bank, and ate my lunch in a light mist. My bird watching reverie was interrupted with the sound of something crashing overhead, and I turned my boat to see a squirrel tumbling from branch to branch high in an oak tree. The return to silence after the violent interruption brought back the sounds of chirping and twittering birds. I finished my sandwich and soda and paddled on and the pair of birds flitted along just ahead of me for a while.

Huge yellow and black swallowtail butterflies drifted along between the shore and my route once the rain stopped. A patch of swamp milkweed at water's edge hosted three of them on the many dense clusters of tiny mauve flowers. Stout black dragonlies skimmed along about eye level to me.

At the end of the lake where the stream feeds it and the water is shallow, I carefully paddled though patches of floating water weed to where I could see Canada geese and mallard ducks and a great blue heron feeding. Soon, the geese took flight, right overhead, so that I could hear the whoosh of their wings with each flap.

The lack of any wind that allowed the glass smooth water also allowed for silence, except for the sound of my paddle dipping into the water and between strokes, the sound of my bow cutting across the surface. When I slowed to a near stop, I heard birds on the shore. An occasional test chirp of a cicada. A catbird mewing over and over. Crows! A low raspy caw and a higher more melodic one.

As I drifted farther into the dense mat of floating green, I heard tiny barely audible plip plops. Was the rain starting back up? No, it was bubbles rising from under water, popping when they reached the surface, the product of some mysterious underwater process. Splay legged insects hopped about the water surface and clusters of small black flies vibrated on the surface of the muck. Tiny amber damselflies landed on the gunwale of my boat and on my life jacket and once on my hand.

I watched the blue heron, standing tail feathers deep in water, as it moved its head this way and that, with long periods of waiting between movements. Finally, it struck with a darting dive of the head and a great rustling of wing feathers, then froze with a fish in its bill. After a shake of its head, it began lifting each long leg in turn, walking toward the shallows, where it finally swallowed the fish after a series of motions where it let go of the fish and darted its head forward to move the fish backwards in its long bill. Then it began looking about the water for more prey, slowly moving back toward the deeper water. But something caught its attention and it thrust its bill into the water, apparently catching smaller fish or frogs again and again. Once it let out a loud squawking and did a sideways wing flapping dance before resuming fishing in the shallows.

Soon, a bit of a breeze came up and pushed my boat sideways, plowing a wide clear swath through the floating weeds, finally pushing me aground in the muck. The heron was undisturbed by my slightly closer approach, but soon, as if on some signal, hundreds, maybe thousands, of cicadas, first on the near bank, then on the far one, began their buzzing. The heron kept its head higher after that, clearly less relaxed than it had been, and eventually with a great slow graceful flapping, took flight, winging just a few feet above the lake's surface until at the last minute, it banked sharply up to land in a skeleton of a tall tree. If I took my eye off the tree, I would lose it in the branches, until it moved again, revealing itself.

Soon it began to rain in earnest and a riffle of waves patterned the surface, so I felt compelled to head back, past the massive rock bluff and towering pines and a half dozen different kinds of ferns. Sumac were beginning to show their flower stalks, bright lime green where they will be burgundy later in the fall. Grapevines dipped into the water from overhanging tree branches.

A lull in the rain coaxed me down the other arm of the lake, where another inlet stream forms more shallows, and a brilliant display of pink Joe Pye weed was topped with dozens of dancing swallowtails, brilliant yellow in the low light of the overcast day.

I headed back in a light drizzle which seemed not to phase the ever present swallowtails, fluttering from one swamp milkweed patch to the next. The light rain held until I managed to get all my gear carted to the van and my boat tied to the top, and just as I made the left turn out of the parking lot, it began to pour.

It was a good day on the water.

Road Tripping

Sometimes I enjoy driving long distances because it is like a field trip with no theme. Instead of touring the cheese factory to observe cool new things and learn about cheese and the dairy industry or touring the tractor plant to get an inside look at an assembly line and electromagnets and welding and things related, you get a long rambling peek at thousands of interesting but unrelated things, leading to a trippy discombobulated mindset after a few hours.
There are the other vehicles and their wacky duct taped mirrors and garbage bag replacement windows. And the odd things other cars are hauling like three different kinds of barbecue grills on a trailer. And the weird things you can see through their windows like a office chair upside down in the backseat.
There are the things being hauled on trucks like giant machines with 'wide load' signs whose purpose you cannot discern and huge rolls of plastic tubing and many many nested truck bodies and layers of crushed cars and different sizes and shapes of lumber neatly shrink wrapped on pallets and wind tower blades that look elegant compared to the other riff raff on wheels.
There is the terrain. And the ecosystems. Flatter than flat land with no natural nature whatsoeveratall of Illinois give way rather abruptly to evergreens on steep hills in Wisconsin, followed by deciduous trees on rolling hills then fewer and fewer trees and flatter and flatter hills in Minnesota to hardly any trees at all that are not in straight lines in South Dakota.
And the fields. Corn. Corn. Oh, look more corn. Oh, soy beans. More corn. More corn. More corn. Ah, some baled straw, was that wheat? Between corn and corn? More corn. Again corn. Still corn. Corn as far as the eye can see. A pasture with cattle. Corn. Corn being chopped between corn waiting to ripen and dry to be picked much later.
And old landmarks like the rock formation and the army base at the same exit in Wisconsin and the truck-on-a-stick and the first Wall Drug sign a couple dozen miles before Sioux Falls.
And new landmarks like the cool nifty Minnesota visitor center that looks like a hybrid of an old grain elevator and a red barn and the increasing numbers of wind farms with their graceful sweeping motion and their classy white with silvery grey shadows.
And road construction zones and the variety in road construction marking devices and road construction equipment. Some of that makes you wish you could pull over and watch, but I bet that would piss off other drivers since there is often one lane each way and not much in the way of shoulder in either direction.
And the weird stuff that happens at gas station pit stops like conversations overheard about domestic fights and peoples' operations and the woman who was having a cell phone conversation from inside a bathroom stall while she went about her noisy business and I mean all versions of bathroom noisy business. Didn't ANY of those sounds carry through the phone to the other participant in the conversation? And with no hint of irony, at one point, she said "That was a really shitty thing for her to say to you. She is such an asshole."
Then there is the Groton speed trap. Really, does it do anything for the actual speeding rate to have a speed limit sign indicating a drop of 10 miles per hour at a curve? If people miss the sign because of the curve, isn't is just plain MEAN to make it a speed trap? Sure, the locals learn, but those of us 'not from around here' seem at a disadvantage. Would it not make more sense to move the sign a bit more out of town so that people see it before they begin to deal with navigating the curve and actually slow down on their own? Okay, the nice officer gave me just a 'warning' which I get to keep and use as a nifty book mark souvenir, but still. It took probably 4 minutes longer to get here because of that inconvenient stop.
All in all, I saw many interesting things and learned a few things too on my field trip with no theme today. I think I'll do it again in a week or so.

The Lake's Steely Grip

I've heard the tales of others' mishaps, dropped keys, eyeglasses, sunglasses, fishing tackle, favored barware dropped from the pontoon boat serving as party barge, tools dropped while assembling and dissassembling the dock or working on a boat motor, and the very modern versions with dropped cell phones and GPS devices. So when I am out paddling in my little canoe with my treasured camera, I have a system. The camera goes into the chest pocket of my life vest in a zip lock bag. When I am taking landscape photos of the scenery and fellow paddlers, the wrist strap of the camera is snapped into the strap that holds that pocket closed. I can take most pictures with the camera safely snapped into its combined pocket strap/wrist strap tether. When I need to reach out to take a shot of a shoreline flower or the leaves of an overhanging branch, the wrist strap goes around my wrist where it belongs. Alas, the weak point in that fine chain of safety procedures is the transfer point between pocket and wrist, and it was just such a weak point that allowed my beloved camera to be stolen from me last week. I was drifting under some overhanging shoreline branches trying to shoot a little bright green plant growing in a leaf litter filled gap in a tree root that had been eroded bare along the bank, when I decided I had to put the camera away and do some serious remaneuvering to get around an offending shrub that was blocking the perfect angle. I had slipped the camera off my wrist and was moving it to the vest pocket when my boat drifted me into a tree branch that snagged the camera and some other part of me or my boat then released itself to fling the camera out into the water. At least that is what I think happened. One moment I was sliding the camera into its plastic bag lined pocket and the next, I was watching bubbles rise about a foot and an half from my boat.
I stared at the bubbles, stunned. I cussed. I tried to look down into the water to see if it was visible. I stuck my paddle straight down in to see how deep it was: about 4 feet. When you can't swim, four feet under water might as well be fifty. There was no way I could go into the water along that shore of rocky boulders to ever try to get it back, especially not when out there alone. The lake had my camera as though in a steel trap, as though buried a dozen yards underground, as though on the surface of the moon. I would not be taking any more pictures with that one or even retrieving from it all the wonderful shots I had taken so far that day. I cussed some more. I cried. I called my husband on my cell phone, daring the risk of the loss of another electronic devise. He said it was just stuff and to enjoy the rest of my paddle. I cried some more. And paddled away, after one last look at the unphotographed pretty little plant growing in the tree root. And I paddled resolutely down the middle of the channel to the lake. With no camera to photograph it, I chose to avoid the shoreline with its taunting spring wildflowers and fresh green mosses and ferns and rock shapes and sculptural tree roots. I stayed out farther in the deeper water and paddled continuously, testing my stamina and my fears of the deeper waters. I paddled one landmark past the farthest I have paddled alone and then turned around to head for home. It was about then, in that last half hour before sunset, that the light wind diminished totally, and the clear bright light of the low angled sun made the shoreline trees glow warm and brilliant. The reflections in the water were perfect, rippled slightly in a uniform pattern, much like looking at a mirror made of antique rolled glass. I could read the words of the shoreline signs in their reflections, I could see individual catkins on the reflections of the birch trees, I could count the five individual needles that identify the shoreline trees as white pines in their beautiful perfect reflections. Ah, the photographs I could have taken. But I just paddled slowly, cognizant of the limited daylight left in which to make my way back to the home dock. I stopped now and then to drift and soak in the beautiful perfect views. It occurred to me at one point that the views were so perfect that it was as if there was no surface to the water and I was suspended above a perfect upside down world. I decided not to dwell on that thought too long, lest it rouse my latent fear of heights to combine with my suppressed fear of water which might come to bad result in my heightened emotional state of loss about the camera and joy about the beauty around me. So I paddled and drifted and enjoyed the amazing reflections of the beautiful nature of the lake.
And in case you are fond of details, I ordered a replacement camera last night. It was a $215 mistake.

Birthday Memories

When I was very little and my grandmother still lived in town, she would come out to the farm and we would go out to dinner at the Riverside Supper Club and we would get to order dessert.

One year when I was fairly young, I had a birthday party at my house with cousins and second cousins. The house was built when I was three years old, so it was maybe my 4th birthday. My cousin, born the May before me, was my greatest hero, after my dad. I remember informing him that now that I had my birthday, I was the same age as him. He insisted he was still older by a half year. I said there were not half years, that I was the same number of years old as he was, and we fought and I screamed at him and cried and I remember being so upset that my dad had to come pick me up and hold me above the fray to try to comfort me and tell me that, yes, we said our ages in full numbers, but that Lee was indeed born in the summer before me and would ALWAYS be truly a half year older.

On my twenty first birthday, I lived in a house with three other girls and there were goings on that I didn't put together and several times, they needed to borrow my car and once I found a cake pan under the bed when I was looking for laundry but still did not put things together. My boyfriend took me to dinner and then wanted to 'stop by the house' that I shared with the girls and STILL I was clueless and there they were to surprise me with a party. They brought out the cake and there were looks exchanged. Finally the story came out that they had made an elaborate layer cake with frosting decorations and had stored it in the oven but then one of them had turned the oven on and ruined it, so they had to secretly repair it before the party.

On my thirtieth birthday, I was traveling for business to Columnbus, Ohio, where a favorite cousin lived and learned that her son and I shared a birthday. So on his sixth birthday and my thirtieth, I went to a party with little kids and his mom and I drank too much wine and played pin the tail on the donkey.

One year after 30 and before 40, my friend Dorothy had us all over for dinner. I had talked of a white layer cake with lemon filling and white frosting with lemon zest that my mother had made for me when I was too old for angel food with confetti baked in, so Dorothy called my mother for the recipe. Apparently having repressed my teen years, mother had no recollection of that sort of cake and poor Dorothy was embarrassed to have called and bothered her. But she looked up recipes in books and made her approximation of the lemon concoction and it was grand. But mostly, I was touched at all the effort she went to!

On my fiftieth birthday, I was in South Dakota at a nursing home with my mother trying to rally the forces and get her motivated to be more mobile so that she would eventually get out of there. A giant box arrived, which I assumed was get well flowers for her, but was actually three dozen alstromeria for my birthday! They lasted the entire 2 weeks I was there and I rearranged the last stragglers to leave for her in a smaller vase just before I left: It was one last little thing I could do for her before I left her to her caregivers.

This year, I am at the lake house with 11 Boy Scouts and 5 of their dads. We chatted and they played games until past midnight last night and this morning, got up around 6, when I had to open my gift which was a griddle so that we could make pancakes for them all for breakfast. They are ice fishing and I am making chili for their dinner. The views are lovely of the snow covered ground and the bare trees against the snowy lake and all is well at 52.

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

After a week alternating between the redwood forest and Pacific beaches, where I said on a frequent basis such exclamations as "This is so beautiful!" and "Isn't this amazing?" I drove through a portion of the driftless region of Wisconsin today, in its leanest time of year, late fall, after the leaves of autumn are all gone and before any picturesque snow has accumulated. And as the hills rose and fell, as the sunlight shot from behind clouds, as the rolling land and the overlaid patchwork of fields and pastures was revealed to me, I once again exclaimed "This is the most beautiful place on earth." It is and I get to make it one of my part time homes. That is a delight.

Wisconsin Screws

While shopping for screws to mount hooks on the deck rail for wet bathing suits at the Wisconsin lake house, I came across these drawers in the hardware aisle. Could there really be, in the land of dairy where locals are affectionately referred to as 'cheeseheads', such a thing as cheese head screws?

Turns out, information courtesy of several online encyclopedias and hardware description sites, that screws can be classified by their screw portion and by their head portion. A "wood" screw had a portion of the shaft near the head that is free from threads. The idea is that when attaching a piece of wood to another, the threaded portion will bite into the wood below and but not into the thing being attached. The thing being attached to the wood will merely be pulled into it tighter, rather than the screw being pulled deeper into that thing being attached. A "machine" or a "sheet metal" screw has threads all the way along it, because it holding stiffer parts to each other that can be held in position more accurately prior to beginning screwing.

The heads are named for their profile shape. A head that tapers down into the object is called 'flat' because it ends up flush with the surface when screwed in. There are a number of names for screws that stay above the surface, such as dome, round, pan, and button, that describe the profile of the shape that stays above the surface. An 'oval' screw is not quite accurately named, but has a part of the head that is sunk below the surface and a bit that domes up above the surface to catch the screw driver. A cheese head screw is a special form of the raised head. The head is cylindrical and deep, like a teeny tiny wheel of cheese there on the surface, according to definitions I found, though the pictures on these drawers, taken with my phone, seem to show them with rounded edges and not all that deep. At any rate, cheese head screws is a name that makes me chuckle.

Flora . . . and Fauna

Flowers with sucking bugs and spiders and spider webs and dead sucked dry bugs caught in webs remind us that there quite a bit going on out there in the pretty pretty woods. Find the fauna in these lovely floral portraits. Delight in the dead mosquito carcass. Remember you can click on a photo to have it shown large on your screen, then use your back arrow to come back here.
Spider with complex tiny web network.
The spider is behind stamens at upper right of center with its legs drawn up close to its head. Other objects are dead things caught in webbing.

Two sucking bugs, one yellow, one paler.

Spider lurking. No web, so this is apparently an attack spider.

Weevil with pollen on its back.

Fine webbing between upper ends of flower tubes with a dead bug well-encased in webbing.

Compass Rose

The first time I saw this idea was on the floor of a stone house that was hand built by one of my heroes, a local naturalist. His house is on a river, and his water source is a spring that flows through his house and out to the river. His staircase echoes the shape of his wife's baby grand piano! Some of his crown molding is grapevine split into quarters. I loved the hand crafted touches in his beautiful home. We have been trying to fit a compass rose into every remodeling project and building project since and finally, at the lake house, it seemed right. This granite tile is set into the slate floor of the foyer, revealing the orientation of the house in relation to true North. Up north, where we came from in North Dakota, up north where we spent lake vacations at Star Lake when the kids were younger, up north where the Boy Scouts went on High Adventure paddling and are going again in a couple weeks. If you were looking at a map of Lake Redstone, knowing where true North is might help you understand where our lot is in relation to the southern bay of the lake. Knowing the cardinal directions might help you understand where the sun will rise and set in relation to the houses amazing windows and views. The design has an abstract sail as a North arrow in honor of the little sailboat my kids and their dad rescued from the garbage and restored to use. The bur oak represents the prairie savanna that covers the rolling hills of the region. The sugar maple represents the maple-linden woods that shelters the stream edges and valleys. The white pine grows to towering heights along the shores of the lake on the sunnier drier slopes, and our lot whose slope faces nearly north has hemlocks that drape their graceful branches near the shore where we put in our canoes and kayaks. Some day, I hope to carve this design into a linoleum block, reversed of course, so that I can make prints of it.

Last Light of The Day

The end of a perfect spring day on the lake.

Head of a Dead Fish

Found: Head of a Dead Fish
Where: On the Railing of the Stairs to the Lake
Why: Unknown
Message: Be Careful Where You Put Your Hand

Spring Farm

Twelve Turtles

Reflections of Perfection

White on White on White

Clouds. Birch. Serviceberry.

In The Artist's Garden II

Bruce is a ceramic artist, wall muralist, potter, art instructor, and gallery owner. Bruce is an historian, neighbor, comedian, jokester, expert in local goings on, and friend. His gallery is on Commerce Street in Mineral Point. He lives above his gallery and his studio is under his gallery, with a walk out to the back garden. There, I have been privy to education, advice, stories, and some verbal abuse. It isn't always clear which.

Bathroom Amusements

It was at a folk music festival many years ago. We set up 'camp' at a table under the main tent, where my mother stayed for most of the event, listening to the main stage entertainers, as the kids and I came and went to smaller workshops and to shop the vendors. We came back to her at one point and she was obviously suppressing some sort of serious laughing fit. We tried to get her to tell us what was up but she would not. Finally, a group of women at the adjacent table gathered their things and left. And the story came out. As she had been sitting there, one of the women left that group to use the porta-potties. When she returned, one of her companions asked how the potties were. The response was that there was not much of a line and they were pretty clean and they even had a shelf to hold your purse. Well, you know and I know and Mother knew and the kids knew that porta-potties do NOT have purse shelves and I bet you know or can image what object at the side of the porta-pottie this woman had mistaken for a purse holder. My kids thought it was about the funniest thing they had ever heard, and it became a family joke when grandma went to a restroom to ask her when she came back if there was purse holder in there. We all just thought it was the most hilarious thing. So years, many years later, my son and I stop at a rest area on the way to Milwaukee and guess what is in my restroom stall? Yes, a purse holder. Of course, my son is going to completely think I am lying to him, continuing the joke. So I MUST take a picture of it, and in this day when nearly every cell phone has a built-in camera, why, I could actually DO that. Of course, the ridiculousness of the fact that I am in a rest area restroom taking pictures of the accoutrements is not lost on me, and I am snickering uncontrollably. What if someone comes in? Can I convince them I am a rest facility reviewer for the Wisconsin Travel Association? So of course, I come out chortling and my son asks what is going on and I tell him there was purse holder and he give me the "Yeah, right. How gullible do you think I am?" and so I pop open the phone and show him the pictures. Yeah, it's a cheap running joke in our family, but this time, I have pictures.

Special Flower

Nodding trillium (Trillium cernum) is much more rare than the similar white trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) and I have seen it only once in the wild and once again in this garden behind Rolli's building. It is wonderful with its waxy center and pure clear white petals, but few see it since it faces the ground. But the point of the flower is not for us to see it, now, really, is it? The point is for it to be seen by its insect pollinators. These include beetles which would be crawling along the ground and be attracted to the scent of the nectar, and bumblebees which often have barely enough warm and energy to fly in the early spring and so buzz along a few inches over the ground cover and so might actually fly up to visit this flower.

From The Road

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Travelling the winding hilly roads is a special joy this time of year.

The American plums were in frothy blossom and the oaks were just leafing out, giving them a pale mint green soft focus effect, a giddy change from their stark winter sculptural bareness. Last fall's harvest had been mostly turned under, rendering the black stripes of fields darker, and the recent rain had turned the green stripes brilliantly emerald. With no time to stop and take real photos like I felt called to do, I could only snap out my window now and then and hope to capture some small bit of the wonder that is spring-at-long-last in rural Wisconsin.

On the Water

It was a beautiful day to be on the water. I cannot swim and I have been afraid of the water all my life, but I do so love to be in it and on it. So the first paddle of each season is always a challenge. But after my appointment that ran late, it was sunny with pretty clouds floating across the sky. With little wind and few boats on the lake, the water was calm. It was a good day to get used to the boat and the paddle and find my balance.

Quiet

It's quiet here on a Sunday afternoon, and anyway, it's early in the season for much lake action. I thought about a paddle, but I would just get cold and hurry back, so against the worst aspects of my personality, I will be patient for warmer weather. There are thick piles of clouds that let the sun through for a few minutes now and then to make brilliant sparkling diamonds in lines on the surface of the water. There are little birds flying just over the surface of the water, circling and dipping and darting, barely missing each other in their acrobatics. Catching insects, I assume, but I do not know what kind they are and that bothers me. Alone here, I have time to see if we have any bird identification books, or I guess I could try to look it up online. The view to the water is at its best this time of year, I suspect. The branches are nearly bare so you can see the lake water and the shore beyond, but there is a bit of green leafing out at the tips of the branches so the trees are not so barren as they are in the winter. It looks deceptively springlike, until you venture out without warm enough clothing. It's quiet here, no boats, no people, just birds and squirrels and the creaking of the house as it heats and cools.