Nebraska

                    For a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun.
                                  – Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska”

In late 2006 I came across an interesting article on the annual spring sandhill crane migration from its winter habitat in Florida and Texas to its summer haunts in Wisconsin and Michigan and further north into the Canadian taiga.  I have long enjoyed these majestic birds during my many visits to central Florida, but usually there are only a few birds in any one location.  The idea of watching formations of hundreds of these birds with seven foot wing spans in flight, or huge flocks covering winter fields and marshlands along Nebraska’s South Platte River, immediately captured my imagination.   

I am sure my friends and colleagues were not a little dumbfounded and curious why, in early 2007, I announced that my wife and I were planning a two week late winter vacation to the Great Plains.  When others were dreaming of getaways to Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean, I booked round trip tickets from Baltimore to Omaha.  Yes . . . Omaha.  I had passed through the city a couple of time on cross-country road trips, but I had never considered the city, or the State of Nebraska for that matter, as a vacation destination.  And certainly not in winter.

Once concrete travel plans had been laid, I began to read up on the regions and places we planned to visit.  I considered as requisite the writings of Willa Cather (1873-1947) who moved to Nebraska from Virginia as a young girl and later wrote about the immigrant experience on the Great Plains. I read The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918).  So, too, the poetry and essays of Ted Kooser (1939 -) whose Delights and Shadows (2004) was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  He served as US Poet Laureate / Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress in 2004 - 2006, the first from the Great Plains, and he still resides in Garland, Nebraska in the heart of the Bohemian Alps.  But most of all, I deferred to Jim Harrison (1937-2016), one of my favorite writers who has had a long and deep love affair with Nebraska where two of his best known novels, Dalva (1988) and The Road Home (1998), are set.  “I need to know what the Great Plains were like in the winter,” wrote Harrison.  “And the kind of information I wanted could not be extrapolated from 37,000 feet or from a trip to the library.”  I myself had overflown Nebraska many times and I also wanted to have a closer look.

Harrison claimed that the best place to begin an exploration of the Great Plains is Des Moines, the capital of Iowa; “In order to experience the transition from the immensely fertile heartland to the prairies, and the Great Plains.”  I already had a good sense of the heartland having grown up there, and I have driven the stretch between Des Moines and the Nebraska border at the Missouri River.  I was anxious to get started and I set my sights for Nebraska, one of the few places Harrison believed “actually reminds you of what America thinks she is like.”  There one will discover “wonderful country with rolling prairie stretched endlessly before you, a dulcet greening brown folding in on itself, surely a sea of grass . . . where Sanity herself is never more than an inch away . . . . “   The air is “like an odorless perfume.”   How could I not start there?

It was a sunny but chilly March morning when we arrived in Omaha.  We picked up our rental car and drove along the city’s Missouri River waterfront, stopping for a light lunch at Billy Frogg’s Saloon in the Old Market district.  Hitting the road relaxed and refreshed, we headed west on State Route 92, eventually crossing the North Branch of the Platte River into the rolling glacial hill country known as the Bohemian Alps.  Prior to our trip I had read Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (2002) and was convinced I wanted to visit this region.

Turning north onto State Route 79 we entered this pleasant hill country just south of the North Platte, much of it between 1500 and 2000 feet in elevation.  This is open farm country – fields of corn and soybeans and evergreen wind breaks – with a smattering of tiny hamlets, most with fewer than 300 souls, northwest of Lincoln, the state capital.  These were established in the late 19th century by immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) and to lesser extent Germany.   Some older residents still speak Czech which has remained a language of commerce; primarily cattle, corn and soybeans.  Perhaps here I would find what Harrison was talking about . . . what America might really be like.  “We have about run out of secrets of a good sort in this country and more space might do the trick,” Harrison wrote in 1992.  “More hidden corners, more empty areas that the cartographers refer to as sleeping beauties.”

We passed through Prague [pronounced Prāg] named for the capital of Bohemia.  It is home to the Beer Barrel Days festival and the world’s largest kolác (a Bohemian fruit pastry).  Most of these tiny villages are nothing more than a couple shops, a Catholic church and cemetery, and perhaps a post office and all interconnected by a network of unimproved roads.  Not much seems to go on here other than church on Sunday and the Friday night polka dances and fish fries at the local sokol cultural club.  Gone is the heyday when the Chicago & Northwestern and the Midland Pacific railroads served the area and carried commerce east to Omaha and Chicago.  We continue through Nimburg, Abie and Bruno (for Brno, the capital of Moravia) before heading south again, passing through Garland where Kooser continues to live and write.  Formerly known as Germantown celebrating its founders, the names was changed to something less Germanic in the aftermath of World War I.

Arriving in Grand Island, we turned west again on US 30 paralleling the South Platte until we reached Kearney.  Along the way numerous sedges of migrating sandhill cranes darkened the skies as the sun began to set.  The river valley and marshlands around Kearney are an ideal rest stop on their way to their summer mating grounds in Canada.  We spent the first night in Kearney and we treated ourselves to a relaxing meal at the Copper Mill Restaurant and the first one of many fine steaks I planned to enjoy over the next two weeks.  Harrison has written that it is difficult to find a good steak in the west except in Nebraska and Kansas.   I planned to put this claim to the test (more on this in a subsequent blogpost).

We were up early the next morning and drove down to the river to the former site of historic Fort Kearney to get a closer look at the sandhill cranes presently in residence.  This fort was established in 1848 as a way station for settlers headed farther west along the California-Oregon Trail, as well as housing for workers constructing the Union Pacific Railroad.  The nearby fields and riverside marshes were thick with thousands of cranes raising their cacophony of union calls (to keep mating pairs . . . they are strictly monogamous . . . and families together) on an otherwise quiet and peaceful morning.  Frequently traveling as far as 450 miles along the Central Flyway in a single day, they begin to arrive in the vicinity of Kearney in mid-February, and the peak migration occurs in late March or early April.  Most all will have continued north by late April.

Leaving Kearney we drove north by northwest on state routes 10 and 2 as we studied the lay of the land, the immense expanse of prairie grasses interrupted only by the occasional farms with their wind breaks and shelter belts.  Situated near the geographic center of the lower 48 contiguous states, Broken Arrow, with its pretty little gazebo on the town square, represents the eastern gateway to the Nebraska Sandhills, a region measuring roughly 150 x 100 miles between Broken Arrow and Alliance, in the west, and the South Platte River north to the South Dakota border.  This vast area of mixed prairie grass-stabilized sand dunes is prime cattle country and a roof to the northern extensions of the Ogallala aquifer below.  “Real secrets will emerge from the land that isn’t veering toward being used up,” Harrison wrote when he first arrived in the Sandhills.  “This was the actual reason I was headed toward Valentine, Nebraska . . . The Sand Hills [sic] are a splendid mood wrench . . . it is one of my secret places to go.”   We were following Harrison’s journey as we entered the Sandhills for the first time “with the fervor of a hermit headed back to an island remote from our collective madness . . . chatting it up with meadowlarks and the heifers.”

Continuing northwest from Broken Arrow on Route 2 we passed through the dwindling former railroad towns of Anselmo, Dunning and Thetford as we paralleled the Middle Branch of the Loup River, a major tributary of the South Platte River draining much of central Nebraska.  From Thetford we turned north again planning to follow US Route 83 through the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge with its many shallow lakes and one of the last sanctuaries of tall prairie grasses.  The town of Valentine was our final destination of the day.

One of the more frequent questions I ask myself over the course of a road trip is “I wonder what might be down that road?   I agree with Harrison that “obsession with the landscape is a healthy diversion;” what Juan Garcia Hortelano called “gramatica panda” [the earth’s grammar].  We crossed the North Branch of the Loup River where we spotted a road disappearing toward the far western horizon.  A single telephone pole was festooned with signs for cattle ranches somewhere down that lonely road.  We decided to make a short detour to see what we might find.

A few miles down this road we arrived in Brownlee, the only town which also lends it’s name to the road.  It was nothing more than two or three farm houses and a scattering of out buildings situated along the banks of the North Branch.  Otherwise the road passed through mile after mile of rolling pasture land and ponds dotted with trumpeter swans.  Pheasants and prairie grouse skittered across the road in front of us, the only sound the crunch of the road, a meadowlark calling from a nearby fence post, and the wind coursing through the prairie grasses.  We briefly crossed into the Mountain Time Zone before we eventually reached State Route 97 which we followed  northeast to Valentine, losing the hour of daylight we had just gained.  This detour was sandhill country at its best.  Harrison claimed he would like to live at the end of a long road.  He would have liked this one.  He was correct.  Whose mood would not improve ensconced in this quietude?   

Valentine, Nebraska was my next trip target after observing the sandhill crane migration around Kearney and our exploration of the Sandhills themselves.  It is the center of a major beef producing area in the state.  “Beef is a pleasure food,” Harrison writes.  “And we desire pleasure because we live nasty, brutish lives.” Valentine is also home to the Peppermill Restaurant which according to Harrison serves the best steak found west of Chicago and “the best porterhouse of my life.”   This is pretty high praise in my book coming from such a roving gourmand.

That evening, after settling into our motel, we repaired to the Peppermill to sample its praiseworthy beef offerings.  How could I not order the 32-ounce Angus porterhouse which Harrison maintained produced strange dreams.  “Luckily food kills fear.”   I had nothing to fear but fear itself, yet had there been unrecognizable vestiges of some unknown anxiety, surely this steak would be required balm.   In his essay “Meals of Peace and Restoration,” Harrison cautions when trimming a two-pound porterhouse that you “don’t make those false, hyper-kinetic motions favored by countermen in delicatessens.  Either trim it or skip the trimming.   Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk.”  The steak was everything I hoped it would be and I did eat what I considered to be the acceptable amount of fat.  Afterwards we enjoyed a pleasant ramble through the nearby livestock pens to visit future steaks on the hoof.  

Back at the motel I read what Harrison had written about his time in and around Valentine.  He had spent months doing local research for two of my favorite of his novels – Dalva and The Road Home – both of which are set in the area.  Dalva tells the story of a middle-aged woman returning to her native Sandhills after years living in California.  She discovers the truth about her homesteading ancestors who had stood up to the US government in an attempt to assist the Lakota Sioux trying to protect their lands, their traditions, their future.  The Road Home continues the story of Dalva and the epic history of her Northridge family living in accordance with the traditions of the land.  “Along Route 20 the almost unpardonable beauty of desolation.  I could live along a creek in the Sandhills,” Harrison writes in his research journals.  “I’ve established no strong ties outside the field of imagination.” 

The next morning we ambled along the banks of the Niobrara River outside of town.  We watched a band of wild turkeys foraging as the males strutted and fanned their feathers for the ladies.  We visited the site of former Fort Niobrara east of town, a garrison post established in the late 19th century and converted into a wildlife refuge in 1912.  Today it is home to small herds of bison and elk, a vast prairie dog city burrowed below, and over 200 bird varieties.

Departing Valentine we drove west on US Route 20 through the northern fringes of the Sandhills retracing the same route Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Little Big Man (not the one portrayed in the 1970 film with Dustin Hoffman), and American Horse led their bands of Lakota Sioux.  At Merriman we turned north and soon crossed into South Dakota where we visited Wounded Knee and the Pine Ridge Reservation on our way into the Dakota Badlands and the Black Hills.   As chance would have it we would return to Valentine two weeks later as we made our way back to Omaha and I had one more opportunity to enjoy that two-pound porterhouse at the Peppermill.  It was no fluke; it was just as good if not better than the first.  That night I dreamed fearlessly.

A Truly Great Crabcake

Two days ago SallyAnn and I drove to Annapolis where I received the first of my two COVID-19 vaccine injections.  Two days earlier we made the same trip so she could get hers.  It is a thirty minute drive from our home on the edge of Washington, DC and an easy trip in light mid-day traffic.  The injections went without a hitch and it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that we are both very happy to be vaccinated and look forward to returning to Annapolis for the second round of injections in a month. 

We took the opportunity of being in Annapolis to treat ourselves to a celebratory take-away lunch from O’Brien’s Oyster Bar and Seafood Tavern, one of our favorite eateries in our very historic state capital on the shores of Chesapeake Bay.  Located at 113 Main Street adjacent to the City Dock, the building housing O’Brien’s has a long and varied history.  Built in 1774, it first housed the Rose & Crown Tavern when Annapolis was an important colonial port, and later Maryland’s capital.  The Maryland State House, just up the hill on Main Street, is where the 1783 Treaty of Paris was ratified on January 14, 1784 thereby ending the Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the United States by recognizing American independence and establishing the boundaries of the new nation.  From November 26, 1783, to August 13, 1784 it housed the US government thereby serving as the first peacetime capital of the United States until it moved to New York City.  On December 23, 1783, George Washington came to the State House to resign his commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and establishing civilian authority over the military.  His decision prompted King George to say "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."  Washington returned to private life at his Mount Vernon, Virginia plantation until his election as president on April 30, 1789. 

Over time 113 Main Street has been synonymous with various taverns, eateries and other establishments catering to captains and sailors, merchants and businessmen, legislators and lobbyists.  Word has it that the upstairs was at one time a house of ill-repute.  Fran O’Brien (1936-1999), an offensive tackle with the former Washington Redskins, bought the building in the 1970's and opened O’Brien’s which is decorated with memorabilia from his football career (has also played in Cleveland and Pittsburgh), the sports heroes of the nearby Naval Academy, and the history of Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay. 

We have been eating at O’Brien’s for several decades . . . our go-to spot for lunch when we are in town . . . and we have come to the easy conclusion that they serve the best cream of crab soup . . . period.   The only other that comes close is served at Cooper’s Tavern, in Baltimore’s Fell’s Point neighborhood (another favorite).  And the Maryland crabcake (as a meal or a sandwich) is both very large and absolutely delicious; no fillers . . . just large chunks of succulent sweet crab meat shaped into a thick patty.  Other favorites are the oysters from the Choptank River on Maryland’s Eastern Shores along with excellent Middleneck clams and mussels.   Unfortunately these were not practical for takeaway but I look forward to our return when we can once again belly up to the bar for some nude oysters served over ice with a tall, cold beer.  And kudos to O’Brien’s for partnering with the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a locally based non-profit that designs and promotes restoration and repopulation strategies for the Chesapeake Bay and beyond.  Used shells, which are in short supply these days, are recycled to create and sustain oyster reefs.  They don’t belong in landfills.  Better to return them to the Bay.

We both ordered the soup and I had the crab cake while SallyAnn enjoyed a large crab pretzel.  We ate in our car parked at the end of the City Dock with a pleasant view of the harbor where it opens onto the Bay.  Not what we are used to but a treat just the same!!

Resurrecting Old Scribbles

I have been keeping a regular journal for the past 50 years; ever since I left to attend university in West Germany in the summer of 1971.  These journals (now numbering several dozen volumes) contain everything from the very mundane – weather, routine events of the day and other miscellaneous notes, jottings and doodles – to the fairly remarkable and my reactions to important historic and cultural events.  Most of all, they serve to help me put my past life into its proper perspective and to provide context for the evolution of my thoughts and beliefs over the course of time. 

Every once in awhile I like to revisit an earlier volume in order to reflect on the events of a particular day years ago to ascertain if I would react the same way today.  And if not, why?  These explorations can be edifying when viewed under different circumstances and with the advantage of hindsight.  Sometimes they might dredge up something long buried in the deep recesses of my memory but thankfully not completely forgotten.  To wit:
______________

Dateline: Basel, Switzerland / Schweizer Bahnhof
February 16, 1972
I left Freiburg early this morning having taken the tram from my flat to the Hauptbahnhof [central train station].   I stopped at the A&O [the neighborhood market] on the way to pick up travel provisions for my backpack – an assortment of sausages such as Landjäger and hard salami, some hard cheeses and a couple boxes of Camenbert, a few Brötchen [rolls], and a large bag of Studentenfutter [a version of trail mix].  This is what sustains me on my train travels.

Today I am headed south, first to Neuchâtel to visit with Steve Dodd whom I have not seen since he visited Freiburg in November for our “American Thanksgiving Feast.”   And I have not been back to Neuchâtel since earlier last fall when Jeff [Berry] and I went down for that totally insane wine festival.  After a couple days there I will continue on to Montreux where I hope to meet up with Rick [Bethea] and Martha [Hill] for a railway trip through the Alps via the Chemin du fer Montreux Oberland Bernois to Luzern.

I took the train south to Basel’s Badischer Bahnhof located just over the West German-Swiss frontier.  After clearing border formalities and exchanging some Marks for Swiss Francs, it was a pleasant walk through town and across the Rhine to the Schweizer Bahnhof [Basel’s central train station].  This is the routine I follow whenever I travel south from Freiburg.

I have over a two hour wait for my train to Neuchâtel; enough time to enjoy one of my favorite diversions whenever my travels bring me to the Schweizer Bahnhof.  There is a pleasant little luncheonette located just off the main waiting hall which serves some of the best Kartoffelsalat [potato salad] I have ever tasted.  I first sampled it as a side dish with grilled sausages, yet on subsequent transit visits I often ordered just a plate of potato salad.  Sometimes two plates as I have done today.  It really is that good and a meal in itself.

I grew up with my mother’s potato salad and for much of my life it has been the gold standard by which I rate all others.  There was nothing special about it – chunks of boiled potato mixed with mayonnaise, French’s mustard, chopped pickles and salt and pepper to taste – but it was my mother’s and I could not get enough of it.  Living in the environs of Milwaukee I had been introduced to German-style potato salad with its vinegar and stone-ground mustard dressing.  It is often served warm and it is an ideal accent to many standard German dishes.  I have enjoyed it time and time again since arriving here in Europe.  What makes it special are the crumbles of bacon added to it.   Sagenhaft [amazing]!!

But there is something different about this particular Swiss-style potato salad that makes it almost irresistible.  One of the “secrets” perhaps is that the potatoes are boiled in a mix of beef and chicken broth rather than water.  Thinly chopped onions, white-wine vinegar, salt and pepper are then added to the boiling broth and then the pot is left to cool as the potatoes marinate.  Once cooled, the potatoes are sliced into thin medallions over which the warm broth and a mixture of oil and vinegar are poured.  Some fine chopped parsley on the top and it is ready to serve with a tall glass of Warteck beer.  A marvel in its simplicity. 

There is something comforting knowing that this treat awaits me any time my travels bring me to Basel.  I just wish I could box it up and take it with me on the train.

______________

I swear I can still taste it today five decades later.

 

Treason

The fact that the United States Senate voted on February 13 to acquit the XPOTUS on charges that he incited the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol came as no surprise to anyone.

A significant majority of the Republican senatorial “jurors” had announced their verdicts prior to the beginning of the trial.  Ignoring the Democratic House managers acting as the prosecution, each of whom presented a most compelling case supporting conviction, almost all of the Republican senators voted for acquittal.  The seven Republicans who joined their 50 Democratic colleagues voting for conviction evidenced great personal courage by putting their country before party in the face of strong condemnation from their partisan colleagues and the Republican powers that be in their home states.

And don’t let Mitch McConnell fool you that his vote to acquit was purely on procedural grounds.  Earlier he had urged the House to impeach the president.  Now he called such an impeachment unconstitutional.   The vote was not on the question of procedure.   The vote was to convict or acquit.  As simple as that.  McConnell joined 42 fellow Republicans in acquitting the XPOTUS.

But let’s make no mistake here.  This vote in no way acquitted the XPOTUS.   We all heard what he said that morning to incite an insurrection and we witnessed the murderous violence that ensued.  What the vote did demonstrate, however, is that 43 members of the US Senate – all of them Republicans – have now openly sanctioned an attempt by the President of the United States to overthrow the US government in violation of both his and their oaths of office. 

May these spineless traitors never wash the shame and blood from their hands.

Happy Losar 2148 - Year of the Iron Ox

Losar Bey Tashi Delek!  Wishing  my fellow Buddhists and everyone happiness and good will.  May you achieve good life and abundance as we celebrate Losar - the Tibetan New Year.  The Tibetan year is composed of either 12 or 13 lunar months, each beginning and ending with a new moon.  Tomorrow will mark the first day of the first month of the Tibetan lunar calendar and the beginning of a three-day festival welcoming a new year.  This celebration predates Buddhism as a gesture by farmers to thank the gods for a good harvest.  It has since become a predominantly Buddhist festival celebrating the commencement of the New Year.
 

Surely a Man's Best Friend

My family was never a committed pet family.  When I was growing up I had a few sporadic pets - a parakeet, a hamster and some gerbils, an Easter chick, aquarium fish, a chameleon, and some tadpoles that grew into frogs.  None of these lasted very long and all were soon forgotten.  We did have a couple of cats for awhile before they went their own way as cats are known to do.  One of the reasons we never had a real family pet was the fact that we moved around a great deal due to the nature of my father’s job (he was a consulting engineer), and larger pets would have presented unnecessary complications.

Once I left home for college in 1969, when my folks put down more permanent roots in Milwaukee, they acquired a large black poodle and my dad, for some very odd reason, bought a mynah bird and tried to teach it to talk.  But all it did was shit all day and that was the end of that.  After a couple of years my folks realized the dog was just too much to deal with and they found him a home where I am sure he was much happier. After I returned from studying in Germany I stayed at home for a few months while I was dealing with some medical issues and I became the proud owner of a beagle puppy to keep me company.  He was a troublemaker from the start and when I returned to university he was shuffled off to my aunt and uncle’s farm in Michigan where he lived a long and I am assuming happy life.  My parent returned to their normally quiet lives and that was the end of Rogers family pets.

It was never a practical idea to have a pet during my student days.  Either they were not permitted where I was living, or I simply did not have the time or inclination to deal with one.  After my wife and I got married in 1974 and were living in Tucson we did have a hermit crab and a pair of gerbils, and when we finally moved here to the Washington, DC area in 1976 we adopted a young kitten whose company we enjoyed immensely.  We watched her grow to maturity and she produced a litter of three, two of which we kept.  Three cats proved too much for our small apartment and we found a nice home for the youngsters on a nearby farm.  We mourned mama cat when she was struck by a car and killed in 1980 and we buried her in the Japanese garden of my parent’s home outside of New York City.  Our son was born the following year and there was no longer time for pets. 

He was around three when my wife’s brother, who raised dogs in Florida, gave her an Australian Sheperd puppy for her birthday.  We picked it up at the Baltimore airport and from day one she bonded with my wife and son, but it was also clear from the outset that she wanted nothing to do with me.  President Harry Truman was alleged to have claimed that if you wanted a friend in Washington, get yourself a dog.  Such was not the case in this instance.  If I was in the house she was as far away from me as possible, often hiding under our bed upstairs.  She gradually learned to tolerate my presence later in life and we all had a few years to enjoy her company.  When she passed we place her ashes under our bed where they remain to this day.  It seemed only fitting.  We talked about getting another dog, but our son went off to college and our busy schedules were such that it was just not in the cards.

Then came Morgan, a wonderfully intelligent black lab who will be 14 in July.  He does not belong to us, but rather to our oldest friend in the area.  We have known him since he was a puppy and we always enjoyed him when we visited our friends.  He loves everybody and Morgan has become a friend for life.  When one of our friends passed away much too soon Morgan had lost his best friend.  Since his mom worked he was left home by himself much of the time.  Not long thereafter I developed some mobility issues and so I began to visit Morgan to spend some time with him and keep him company.  He afforded me unconditional love and companionship when I could use it the most.  The bond was sealed forever.

Since then Morgan frequently visits our house and he has made himself completely at home.  He has spent several weeks at a time with us, including two Christmas holidays, when his mom was visiting family out of state.  He is true blue loyal and follows me everywhere I go although I often suspect he is hoping something tasty might fall on the floor, or that I will give him a treat if he is a good boy.  He has me wrapped around that constantly wagging tail.  

Morgan has been a frequent visitor throughout these months of sheltering at home during the Covid-19 pandemic and his presence has been particularly soothing.  There is nothing better than to have him at my side when I am working in my study, or at my feet when I am reading in my easy chair in the den.  This is the kind of dog Truman must have been referring to.

“It seems that nature has given dog to man for his defense and his pleasure,” Voltaire wrote in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764).  “Of all the animals it is the most faithful: it is the best friend a man can have.”  Morgan is truly that.
 

Free As a Bird

                                                       tous les noms d’oiseaux

I have always enjoyed watching birds. Someone once said that birds have a lot to teach us.  All we have to do is listen to their songs.  Even sad birds sing.  I’m not a birder as such; I don’t necessarily search them out and maintain a life list of every bird I have encountered.  I’m content just to watch them, either on the wing or just flocking around our bird feeders looking for a free hand out. 

There is something exceptional watching birds go through their habitual activities, whether it be a pair of bald eagles soaring on a thermal overhead or a family of loons navigating a peaceful lake, their haunting call echoing across the water.  Or a flock of snow geese or a sedge of sandhill cranes lifting in unison from a marsh to continue their annual migration.  Or a squadron of pelicans assembled on an abandoned jetty preening and drying off in the sun.  A murder of crows working over the corn stubble in a winter field.  Red-wing blackbirds perched on cattails on the backwaters of the Chesapeake Bay.  Pheasant and ruffed grouse flushed from woodland puckerbrush.  To “name all the birds” in French without ever referring to a particular bird, is considered a minor insult. But how can this be when the world is full of birds of every name, size and description?  Each gives us pause to consider what it is to be free as a bird.

This morning, as I sit by the kitchen window with a good book and a cup of coffee, I am watching flights of neighborhood sparrows and finches arriving at our feeders for their morning repast.  Those who won’t fit on the perches of the crowded feeders patiently await their turn on the nearby bushes and fence.  A couple of squirrels sit on a tree limb developing a hopeless strategy to commandeer the feeders for themselves.  Soon a pair of purple grackles make unsuccessful passes trying to find purchase on these small feeders.  Red-wing blackbirds and cedar waxwings, being somewhat smaller, show them how its done as the sparrows waiting along the fence watch with what I can only imagine is smug amusement. 

What better way to begin a new day than to watch our bird neighbors begin their own?  They are the wind beneath my own wings.
 

Along Garrison Road - Some Special Boyhood Memories

My family moved around a great deal when I was young.  My dad worked as an industrial engineering consultant for a firm based in my native Chicago and we would frequently travel with him to locations where he might be working for an extended period of time.  One of these places was Toledo, Ohio, where we lived for a time in 1958-1959 when dad was working on a project for the Otis Elevator Company.  We rented a modest two story house in the 4400 block of Garrison Road, in the DeVeaux neighborhood on the northwest side of Toledo, which dead ended at the end of our block and the North Branch of Shantee Creek.  It was wonderful.  There were other kids around my age on our block and we had a nice big backyard to play in and a room I did not have to share with my little sister.  I could walk to Elmhurst Elementary School just a couple blocks away.

Our time is Toledo was relatively brief; just over a year, but it is memorable for a series of “firsts” for me.  I was quite the baseball fan when I was a kid.  In the mid 1950s I was living with my grandparents on their farm in southwestern Michigan when Dad was on a couple brief assignments and I was starting school.  I became a Detroit Tigers fan almost by osmosis; just about everyone in Michigan supported the Tigers back in those days.  Add to this the fact that my folks and I lived briefly off Six Mile Road, in Detroit, when I was a wee tyke. The Tigers are a venerable charter American League franchise, one of eight major league teams. Tiger Stadium, its home turf, was opened in 1912 and would host the team until its final season there, in 1999 (at that time tied with Fenway Park, which opened the same day, as the oldest major league ballpark).  I saw my only Tigers home game in the summer of 1958, when Dad and I drove the roughly 50 miles from Toledo to Tiger Stadium to watch the hometown Big Cats play the hated pin-striped New York Yankees (I still can’t abide them).  I can’t remember who won that game, but I do remember Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra each hitting homers, and Al Kaline putting one out of the park over the distant left field fence for the Tigers.  Dad was happy to see my mom’s hometown hero Charley “Smokey” Maxwell play for the Tigers. [http://lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com/2010/08/when-baseball-was-fun-remembering.html]  Regardless of the intervening years and occasional shifting alliances as I moved around the country, the Tigers have always had a soft spot in my heart.

I recall another day that summer when the mother of my best friend on our block took the training wheels off his bike to teach him how to ride.  Not to be outdone I asked her to remove mine, too, and a few hours later we were both riding up and down Garrison Road and around the immediate neighborhood like we had been doing it all our lives.  What a sense of freedom.  We would frequently ride down to a drugstore at the corner of Garrison and West Sylvania Avenue to buy penny candy and baseball cards.

That same summer the Hula Hoop craze infected America.  Similar types of hoops made from natural materials had been used in various cultures for centuries, but it was the Wham-O company (it later gave us the Frisbee, Hackey Sack and Silly String which was big during my freshman year in college) that manufactured and distributed brightly colored hoops made of sturdy Marlex plastic tubing that mesmerized children throughout the late 1950s.  Everyone had to have one and the kids in my neighborhood would meet in one yard or another (when we were not riding our bikes) for Hula Hoop contests.   I got so I was pretty good at it.  Christmas 1958 was marked by the release of Alvin and the Chipmunks singing “Christmas Don’t be Late.”  They all wanted something special and Alvin chimes in “I still want a hula hoop.”

That same Christmas I received my first pair of hockey skates and a hockey stick and my dad fashioned a small rink in our back yard by packing down the snow and spraying it with water.  I practiced skating and slapping a puck into a make-shift net after school and soon joined my friends to skate on Shantee Creek at the end of our street.

Another memorable event occurred in November 1958 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to town.  It was his second visit to Toledo as president, each time joining friends and local politicos to hunt ducks at the very private Cedar Point Club situated in the Little Cedar Wildlife Area along the Lake Erie shore(now Maumee Bay State Park).  My father had served under Eisenhower in the European Theater of World War II and so we went out to the Toledo airport west of town to watch the president arrive on board Columbine III, a Lockheed Constellation and the first presidential aircraft to used the designation Air Force One.  His limousine drove so close I could have reached out and touched him and my dad managed to snap a photo of me as Ike slowly passed by.  It was my very first presidential encounter (I have met three others).

When Dad’s contract was up in Toledo we moved downstate to Cincinnati.  I have already written about my adventures there [http://lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com/search?q=Cincinnati].  Although I have passed through Toledo on occasion on my way to someplace else, I have never been back to the old neighborhood.  I have studied it on Google Maps and Google Earth and it does not appear to have changed noticeably in the intervening 62 years.  Our block of Garrison Road is still a quiet, tree-lined residential Street. The creek at the end of the street has been routed underground and the original Elmhurst Elementary has been replaced by a newer and larger building at the same location.  The backyard of our old house now has an in-ground swimming pool where I used to practice skating. 

Perhaps it is time to make the effort to drive down along Garrison Road and revisit the scene of so many vivid memories of my childhood.