On The Fold

As we were leaving town on this latest trip we wondered, darkly, who will die this time? It was not idle speculation.

In 2012, when we were in Colorado, a long-time jogger friend died of a brain tumor. The next year, when we were in Oregon, another friend from the jogging group passed. Two years ago we cut short our “really-get-know-Ohio” tour to get home in time for the memorial service for yet another jogger, close friend and former college professor who unexpectedly dropped dead from a heart attack. While less sudden, the neighbor couple that lived across the street from us for more than two decades died within a year of each other. Both times we were out of town and missed the memorial service, as we did when the wife of a friend and former professor died a few years back. If there is a silver lining to this litany it would be that all of these people were relatively old, somewhere north of 70. 

It didn’t take long on this trip for the pattern to continue but this time there was no silver lining. Kelly Allen the 50-year-old minister at Betsy’s church was leading a retreat on Friday, June 3 at a Presbyterian conference center in the Hill Country when she had a stroke. Kelly never regained consciousness and was declared brain-dead just prior to the start of the 11 a.m. Sunday service two days later.

At this point we’ve been reduced to just hoping that anyone we know who can still fog a mirror can somehow manage to hang on until we get home (and I'm being very cautious every time I go out for a jog!).

 

The Friday that Rev. Allen had her stroke we drove a couple of hundred miles northwestward from Madison to encamp in a state park near Chippewa Falls, which is about 100 miles due east of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Chip (an affectionate nickname I’m going to use to avoid having to repeatedly type “Chippewa Falls”) is a town of about 15,000 that is sort of like a suburb of Eau Claire (henceforth to be shorthanded as “EC”), which is a town/city of about 65,000.

Our home at Lake Wissota State Park. In the early 1900s the Wisconsin-Minnesota Power Company (Wis-Sota, get it) dammed the Chippewa River to create the lake to power a hydro-electric plant that is still in operation.

EC is home to one of Wisconsin’s many excellent state universities and seems to be “newer and fresher” than Chip, with a relatively optimistic look and feel to it. Chip on the other hand looks a bit more like the kind of place that may need a sprinkle or two of Trump’s magic dust to make it great again. Chip is, however, home to the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company and it is also home to something called the Northern Wisconsin State Fair.

The later factoid provides a nice segue for me to ruminate a bit on Wisconsin’s geography and demographics.

If you fold a map of Wisconsin in two Chip/EC is right on the fold; an odd place it might seem to host the Northern Wisconsin State Fair. While the location may be a bit off geographically, it’s probably not such a bad choice demographically because most Wisconsinites live in the southeastern part of the state, a tilt that is steadily increasing. Wisconsinites creatively refer to the woodsy, rural, northern part of the state as “Up North” without getting too specific about where north begins and south ends. The fold in the map, I suppose, might be a logical point of demarcation and - all things considered - Chip is probably not as crazy a choice to host the Northern Wisconsin State Fair as it may appear on first blush.

There are nearly 5.8 million people living in the state, which is a million or so fewer than live in either the Houston or Dallas metro areas, and about the same as the combined San Antonio and Austin metro areas.

One-third of the people in Wisconsin live in the four counties that straddle the 80-mile I-94 corridor that connects Milwaukee and Madison. If you throw in the two counties in the southeastern corner of the state below Milwaukee, which are essentially suburbs of Chicago (Beloit and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville), you’ve accounted for 40 percent of the state’s population. Not only is this six-county corner the most populous part of the state it’s pretty much the only part that’s growing. Nearly half of the 72 counties in the state are losing population and most of those are “Up North.”

Beyond the southeast corner of the state the only area with any significant concentration of population is the 100 or so miles along the I-43 corridor that connects Green Bay and Milwaukee on the eastern side of the state. About one million people live in seven counties along this corridor.

So, if you’re keeping up with the math here, that’s about 60 percent of the state’s population concentrated in 13 counties in the southeast corner near Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, and on the eastern border that abuts Lake Michigan, from the northern Milwaukee suburbs to Green Bay.

Green Bay, by the way is also “on the fold”, about 200 miles due east of Chip. I’ve always imagined Green Bay as being in the far northern reaches of the state but it’s really closer to Milwaukee than it is to Lake Superior.

This concentration of population (and wealth and jobs and education) in urban and suburban pockets clustered along interstate highways, juxtaposed by large swaths of decline in rural areas, is very similar to demographic patterns and trends in Texas. But something about Wisconsin that is very noticeably not like Texas is the jaw-dropping concentration of white people. Eighty-two percent of Wisconsinites are non-Hispanic whites compared to 43 percent of Texans. That explains why is not uncommon for us – at a restaurant, a ballpark, a grocery store – to look around and marvel that every single person in the place is white.

 

We stopped in at the family-owned Yellowstone Cheese Factory a few miles outside of Chip (and right after a heavy rain). One of the owners told us they converted to making cheese from a dairy operation because the milk prices were too unpredictable. Predictably, we happily made our contribution to their bottom line.

Another noticeable difference between Texas and Wisconsin is the agricultural landscape. Unlike Texas the family farm still seems to exist in Wisconsin and the rolling hills in the south-central part of the state are dotted with tidy farms, round-topped silos and well-kept, sturdy houses and barns. The corn here is just beginning to poke out of the ground whereas, on a trip we took along the Texas Gulf Coast about two months ago, the corn stalks were at least six feet tall and have probably been harvested by now.

One night in EC we went to a “minor-league” baseball game. I use the quote marks because the Northwoods League is composed entirely of college baseball players who are not paid. They use wooden bats (aluminum bats are used in college, wooden in the pros) and the purpose of the league - which has 18 teams in small towns and cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois (and one in Canada) – is to give the players a chance to show off their skills to scouts in an environment similar to what they would experience if they are drafted and play in a professional minor league.

We stumbled serendipitously on this college/minor league hybrid when we stopped by a quaint little stadium in a lovely EC municipal park to look at a statue of Hank Aaron, who began his professional career there in 1952 (when EC had a real minor league team). We were standing in the empty stadium looking around when a guy about our age from Minnesota walked up and started chatting. He turned to be the father of the owner of the team, the Eau Claire Express. Pretty soon the son/owner, a guy about Tex’s age and a business-major graduate of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, stopped by and we got a complete primer on the team and the league. It is a far more complex operation than we would have ever have imagined for a league that doesn’t even pay its players. The EC Express employs a half-dozen full-time, year-round staff (including the field manager) and 80-some seasonal workers to handle promotions, advertising, food and beverage, ticket sales, transportation, etc.

Needless to say we returned that evening to witness the Willmar (Minnesota) Stingers beat the EC Express 7-4 in an error-filled game in which ground balls struck by the wooden bats slowed noticeably in the thick infield grass. The players on these teams come from schools all over the country; USC, Fresno State, Pepperdine, Baylor, Kentucky, North Alabama, etc.

The view from our seats.

The view of our seats. Can you find Betsy? (Hint; she's eating popcorn and drinking beer).

Hammerin' Hank played minor league ball here...

...and so did Bob Uecker who, by the way, is still calling play-by-play of Brewers games on a Milwaukee radio station.

Although we spent three days in the area and traveled around a good bit by both vehicle and bicycle we were never able to get a good handle on exactly how all the roads tied together. They were all in great shape, there were lots of them and traffic was light - but we could never quite figure out how to best get from point A to point B. I always felt like I was lost.

Despite these challenges we were able to ride the Old Abe bicycle path from our state park home to the Leinenkugel’s Brewery near downtown Chip where we sampled the product and browsed the extensive gift shop.

Betsy avoids the shadows as she crosses Lake Wissota on the Old Abe bike trail.

We didn't bother with the Leinenkugel's Brewery Tour and went straight for the samples.

Now you are probably wondering; who the hell is Old Abe? OK, fine, I’ll tell you – but remember – you asked about it, not me.

The story goes like this. In 1861 an Indian named Ahgamahwegezhig (I’m not making this up, it’s on Wikipedia so it has to be true) took an eaglet from a nest and soon sold it to a trader who soon sold it to a group of guys who were recruiting volunteers from Chip and EC to fight in the Civil War. They paid $2.50 for the eagle to serve as the company’s mascot and named him Old Abe in honor of the newly-elected president. The company, known as the Eau Claire Badgers, spent three years fighting in battles along the Mississippi River, including the sieges at Corinth and Vicksburg, MS.

Old Abe flew off a few times and survived several near misses from Confederate fire but returned to Wisconsin with the EC Badgers in 1864 where he was presented to the governor after a parade to the Capitol. The state promptly classified him as a “war relic” and gave the bird a two-room apartment in the state capitol (I swear I am not making this up, it’s on Wikipedia!). For nearly two decades after that the bird represented Wisconsin at events around the state and the country, including the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876.

In 1881a fire broke out in the basement of the capitol building that, apparently, no one knew about until Old Abe raised an alarm. They got the fire out without too much damage but Old Abe inhaled a lot of smoke and died a month later. The carcass was promptly stuffed and put on display in the Capitol rotunda.

However, as is often the case with war heroes, time passed and memories faded and Old Abe was moved to a less conspicuous place in the Capitol then, a few years after that, to the State Historical Society’s new building.

However, as is often the case with war heroes, politics and veterans groups intervened to resurrect history (or a version thereof) and convinced Gov. Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette to have Old Abe returned to the Capitol in 1903.

Old Abe had the right stuff!

The timing of the move was unfortunate. In 1904 there was (another) fire in the Capitol and this one destroyed the stuffed carcass of Old Abe (along with the Capitol, which basically burned to the ground). Since 1915 (when the current Capitol building was first occupied), a replica of Old Abe has presided over the Wisconsin State Assembly Chamber and we saw it in person (so to speak) during our tour of the Capitol a few weeks ago. Another replica is on display at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison and there is a stone sculpture of the famous bird at the top of the Camp Randall (a.k.a. UW football stadium) Arch. In addition Old Abe has inspired other noteworthy symbols; perhaps most significantly the “Screaming Eagle” symbol of the U.S. Army’s 101^st Airborne Division.

All of this is a very, very long way of saying that we rode our bikes into town to a brewery, drank some beer and rode back. It was a great bike path that utilizes former railroad rights of way and is well on its way to becoming a continuous 70 miles or so that will link the state park and the two cities. In the short time we have been here in Wisconsin we've concluded this state may have the best and most extensive bike paths we’ve ever seen.

We’ve moved on now to the shores of Lake Superior (which is unquestionably "Up North") but that will have to be documented in a future post because this one has prattled completely off the rails and needs to be brought to a merciful, albeit abrupt, end.