Tag: Wisconsin
-
RESERVES OF STRENGTH
‘Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.’ Rachel Carson, Silent Spring In the summer of 1978, I worked as a naturalist at Interstate State Park in northern Wisconsin. I loved plants and figured I knew every plant in the park by both its common and Latin names by the end of the summer. I was…
-
PASQUE FLOWERS FOR THE MINORITIES
‘For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.’ Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac When I was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point I took a nature literature class and read A Sand County Almanac. The book was written in 1949 by University of Wisconsin professor Aldo Leopold and became a pivot piece of literature in the environmental movement and helped pave the way so that I would…
-
DANCING ‘SHROOMS
We’ve had a wet autumn, and mushrooms are popping up all over the yard. It reminds me of the times when I’d see wild mushrooms and salivate and go out and collect them. And it reminds me of the time when I almost wrote my obituary after eating mushrooms. During the summer of 1979, I was the park naturalist at Interstate State Park in St Croix Falls, Wisconsin. I had spent three summers as the naturalist, and I knew the Latin name of every tree, flower, fern and moss in the…
-
FROM AMERY TO ADELAIDE: THE CONVERGENCE OF TWO LIVES
Amery is a dinky little town in the far north of Wisconsin. It’s a town of fewer than 3,000 people where pretty much everyone knows everyone else. I spent my formative years there and always consider it to be my home town. I feel very much aligned with life in northern Wisconsin yet life’s twists and turns led me to live in South Australia. If you took a globe and stuck a pin in Amery and tied a string to it and tried to find the furthest habitable place on Earth…
-
HITCHHIKING TO THE MORRAINES
FIVE-DAY BLACK & WHITE PHOTO CHALLENGE – DAY 5Kettle Morraine State Park, Wisconsin – 1978Scanned from Kodak Plus-X negative film To conclude this B/W photo challenge, I’m going to go back to one of the first rolls of black and white film I ever shot. You may think that I’ve got an incredible memory to recount these stories from long ago. The truth is I often have travel journals to consult and that was the case of this trip in 1978. Or so I thought. I pulled out the notes and…
-
MY BARBER LARRY
In the four years I lived in Madison in the late 1980s, I only let one man cut my hair, Larry the barber. I have never been fussed about my hair and hated going to fancy hairdressers who would offer you a Chardonnay. I just wanted to come out with hair shorter than it was when I came in. And Larry and the College Barber Shop on Madison’s State Street was the perfect solution for me. Larry and I would talk and talk. He always remembered how much I paid for…
-
DAY 11. Madison, Wisconsin
In May of 1986, I finally figured out that I didn’t know diddly squat about anything so after five years of living and working in Central America, I packed my bags and came looking for an education. I really didn’t know where to go but I flew in to Chicago and then at the last minute decided to take a bus to Madison, Wisconsin and check out the University of Wisconsin. The bus dropped me off in front of Memorial Union. I pulled my life’s possessions – a backpack and a…
-
THE ELK MOUND TOUR
I was born in Southern California and didn’t move to Wisconsin until I was 10 years old. As a result I always felt like a bit of a foreigner here and that probably explains why I left Wisconsin after finishing university and spent most of my adult life living overseas. What I didn’t know at the time though is that my ancestral roots are very deeply embedded in Wisconsin and my ancestors were some of northern Wisconsin’s original homesteaders. I was keen to get in touch with my Wisconsin roots so…
-
CALLING ALL WEBERTS
Grab a map of Germany and find Frankfurt in the centre of the country. Then trace your finger about 100 kilometres northeast and amongst the forests and fields you’ll find the tiny hamlet of Olberode. In 1364 four brothers Adolf, Christian, Frederick and Eckhart cleared land at the site and the village of Olberode was born. Now, 650 years later, Olderode is throwing a big anniversary party and is inviting its lost sons and daughters to return to their ancestral homelands this September. In the mid-1800s emigration fever struck Germany and…
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.