More than Manhattan

The property had been in the family for 96 years, the farmer told us as he opened the door to the chicken coop. Lured up the driveway by a sign promising fresh eggs, we inhaled the fresh country air and quietude. Across the road, dairy cattle grazed in a rolling meadow bracketed by a forest in autumn-dappled hues of gold and orange. Awakened from their midday slumber, the hens muttered softly and skittered to the far side of the coop as he filled a carton with eggs in shades of toffee and the blue-green of Aracaunas.
“I lived in Wyoming for a while, ” he said. “Everyone knew I was from New York and when I told them Cheyenne was too much of a city for me, they looked at me like I was nuts.”
Say “New York” to most of us, and we think Big Apple. But sitting here in a maple forest in the Adirondacks, with rain pattering on the roof and fat-cheeked chipmunks scampering on the ground, we’ve learned there’s much more to the Empire State than Manhattan.
We spent two days in Allegany State Park, getting lost on the backroads of the rolling Amish country. Spotting road apples in both lanes, we knew we were in the right place, but it took a while before the first horse-drawn buggy came down the road at a lively clip. Visitors are told repeatedly not to photograph the Amish, which made for a day of furtive shutter-clicking from behind the bug-splattered windshield of the moving truck.
We passed picturesque farms with chickens in the yard, pigs and cows in the field and laundry snapping in the breeze on a clothesline – always white bedding and blue or black clothing. Men, particularly young bachelors, drove open wagons, while long-skirted women and children rode in covered buggies. We’d stop at vegetable stands or farms selling products and young women would flee indoors at our approach. I later deduced it was probably because we’d caught them outdoors with uncovered heads, as they always returned to greet us with smiles and bonnets on their heads.
We bought fresh-baked bread, cucumbers for a dime and more eggs, so large we couldn’t shut the carton, for 75 cents a dozen. The Amish we met were smiling and friendly and had the most gorgeous rosy-cheek complexions I’d ever seen – even the men, whose beards covered only the perimeter of their faces. Their lives appeared to be what much of the contemporary world seeks – healthy and peaceful and centered on family and community. I thought I wouldn’t mind trying the Amish life for a while. I could give up technology and tend the garden instead, but I’m not sure about the bonnet and long skirts.
The Finger Lakes were equally beautiful. We stayed in Watkins Glen State Park near a tumbling stream and hiked the dramatic gorge carved by eons of water. We visited charming towns, tasted local wine and bought cherry tomatoes for 25 cents a pint from the roadside stands nearly every home gardener sets up on the road.
We picked Concord grapes for snacks, and visited a U-Pick orchard on opening day of harvest, walking the rows with families pulling wagons heaped with kids and apples. We left with modest-sized bags of crisp-tart Northern Spies and juicy Jonagolds for 55 cents a pound, ignoring the old-timers' adage of “Spies for pies,” and eating them fresh off the tree instead.
Here was a place one could eat organic for little money indeed. Gardens were lush, trees bent heavy with fruit and fields colorful with purple autumn asters and goldenrod. Streams cut through hardwood forests at every turn, making us think ruefully of our water restrictions back home.
As we reached the higher elevations of the Adirondacks, conifers replaced some of the colorful deciduous trees and lakes dotted the landscape – there are 2,500 lakes in the protected Adirondacks forest and each little town has at least one. Here are the state’s highest peaks, rounded by glaciers and covered with balsam-scented forests in a wilderness area three times the size of Yellowstone.
Next time I meet someone from New York, I'll ask "which part?"
Photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast5NY?authkey=Gv1sRgCMT_-f3a6f7yEg&feat=directlink

Beer, Brats and the Street Where I Lived

Big-shouldered Chicago was a charmer, with drop-dead architecture, great food and people who walked up to you every time you stopped to look at a street sign to ask if you needed help. We fantasized living in one of the stunning condos on the Chicago River – maybe a converted warehouse loft – as we drifted along on an architectural history cruise.
We stayed with friend and former St. Helenan Gabby, enjoying catching up, some birthday bubbly and a dinner that showed she learned a thing or two during the years she spent with Julia Child Lincoln (fluffy, white) and Lily (short-hair, black) provided feline yin and yang. We walked the Loop, delighting in blue skies and balmy temperatures, rode the El and took pictures in Millennium Park to the lively mariachi strains of a free Latin music festival underway. The El into the city was itself a delight, not underground and claustrophobic like the Paris Metro, but running on elevated tracks, offering glimpses of weathered brick buildings, tree-lined streets and the occasional voyeuristic view into someone’s window.
And we ate: standing in line at 10:30 a.m. for Hot Doug’s, the “Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium.” After 45 minutes in line we were well-versed in the menu of specialty brats and eagerly ordered duck fat fries and the Sauternes duck and foie gras dog topped with chunks of foie gras, truffle aioli, foie gras mousse and fleur de sel. Be still my heart! Was ever a breakfast better? No wonder Doug’s a cult favorite, with Tony Bourdain among its fans. We ate outside where the throngs of eager customers couldn’t hear our moans of delight.
Hot tropical colors and shaken-at-the-table margaritas set the stage for brunch at the Rick Bayless paean to Mexico, Frontera Grill, where I had a tasty torta de elote, combining sweet yellow corn and the exotic black corn fungus. We hadn’t begun to see the Windy City, but it was time to move on and we left to retrace our path back to Milwaukee under gray skies and light rain.
With Happy ensconced at the Wisconsin state fairground not far from downtown, we headed into the city. Steep church spires pierced the moisture-heavy skies between modern high-rises and buildings seemingly plucked from the banks of the Rhine. So this was my hometown? The half-timbered architecture evoked der Vaterland, but I missed the hoppy smell of brewing beer, gone along with many of Milwaukee’s breweries.
But the residents still drink beer the way Napa Valley drinks wine. “Cheers”style neighborhood taverns offer two-for-one specials during Packers’ games, free beer on ladies’ night and Friday fish fries. We even spotted a rolling pedal-powered tavern in the historic Third Ward, its occupants hoisting steins of suds as they negotiated the streets, The darkened, beery interior of Klinger’s East triggered childhood memories of family visits to similar spots like the Elbow Room, where my Uncle Ralph served up cocktails to my parents and Cokes with cherries to my sister and me.
Living in the suburbs as a child, I remembered little of the city, so a drive along the lakefront and its solid European style mansions was a revelation. Nowhere else had we seen such a concentration of breathtaking houses mile after mile after mile, their backs to the vast Great Lake, their fronts often buffered from view by a forest of maples and beech.
Away from the lakefront we visited the Pabst mansion, the last of Milwaukee’s grand 19th-century mansions, the rest leveled over the years to build student housing for nearby Marquette University.
We hit the foodie high spots of town, wriggling into the tight wooden ‘50s era booths at Jake’s for the best corned beef since Katz’s in New York. Kopp’s Kustard (two flavors daily, served from the machine’s it’s made in) was silky and rich beyond Italy’s best gelato. Karl Ratzch’s sauerbraten, Black Forest veal and spaetzle did not disappoint, especially when accompanied by the Teutonic décor and a bottle of crisp Mosel. And we made a pilgrimage to Usinger’s, the mecca for encased meat-eaters, to stock up on their smoked pork chops, brats and other legendary products.
But the thrill of our stay was a drive to Wauwatosa, to visit 2471 N. 91st Street, the house where I lived from kindergarten through junior year in high school. I braced myself for the inevitable changes – a run-down neighborhood of barren sidewalks, the big street trees we knew having been planted long before Dutch elm disease came to town.
The streets were still tree-lined, although now mostly with maples, and the houses well-kept. I recognized our old house without seeing the address and we parked across the street. It looked better than ever! A huge addition in back was hidden from the street, making the house and the entire neighborhood, appear little changed. There, at the top left, was the window to the bedroom where, captive in my bunk bed with a miserable case of chicken pox, I read my horse books and sketched rearing stallions. There was the driveway where, one balmy summer evening, my friend Bobbie waited on her bike while I struggled to finish the awful stuffed bell pepper my mother had made for dinner.
It was here I collected marbles and trading cards, learned to ride a bike and roller skate, dodged snowballs from that mean kid from down the street as I walked home from school and smoked cigarettes with girlfriends in the upstairs bathroom.
I rang the bell and a pretty young blond woman appeared at the door. “I grew up in this house,” I began. “We lived here from 1951 to 1960 ands this is the first time I’ve been back.” Knowing it was very nervy, I asked if there was any chance we could look inside. She hesitated, muttering something about people who do this to “come inside and rob you.”
“I know it’s a huge imposition…” I continued. “We were the first family to live here.” She opened the door. The front hallway, staircase and living room with fireplace were the same, the carpeting we’d had replaced with hardwood floors. The dining room led not to a screened porch, but to an expansive new addition which included a large modern kitchen. But the milk chute was still there by the back door, now nailed shut. And the knotty pine paneled basement rec room was little changed, now as then a place for kids to play, with a grownup bar for adults.
Her young sons would be going to the same school down the street my sister and I attended, said Katie. The street had block parties and was full of young families. In fact, she continued, 91st was considered the best street in town. They loved the house and wanted to stay there forever.
Sometimes you can go home again.
Here are photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast4ChicagoMilwaukee?authkey=Gv1sRgCLXM-uDdup2oZA&feat=directlink

Midwest Memories

“Have you ate yet?” The voice called out from a small group gathered at a nearby campfire as I made my way toward the river in the gathering dusk. Before long we had joined Bruce, the source of the inquiry and a cook at the local Mexican restaurant, and the camping couple from South Carolina he was visiting for drinks and bacon-topped pork loin with carrots and potatoes, all wrapped in foil packets and roasted in the campfire. Visiting daughter, son-in-law and three kids drove up, and soon it was a party at the city campground on the St. Louis River in Cloquet, MN.
It was the beginning of our stay in the Midwest, whose residents proved to be consistently chipper, chatty and cheery. Where else would the gas station guy run ahead so he could open the door for you? Everyone seemed so genuinely nice.
North Dakota’s rain carried through to Minnesota, but we liked what we saw of Bemidji’s pretty residential neighborhoods. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was deep forest and gorgeous beaches that could double for the California coast, delicious Cornish pasties and signs that advertised “Bear Bait” down the road. (OK, it’s not Yellowstone, but still…)
We moved into Wisconsin and bought succulent smoked whitefish from the Halvorsen dock in Cornucopia, “Wisconsin’s northernmost village,” on the shores of Lake Michigan. The country was quintessential Wisconsin rural, with picturesque Scandinavian red barns, rolling fields of corn and grazing Holstein dairy cattle.
I eagerly awaited our entry into Door County, the thumb of Wisconsin’s mitten, and a place I remembered lovingly from family vacations a half-century ago. I braced myself for changes that weren’t shocking as I had anticipated. The road still passed through miles of orchards, the limestone soils of the peninsula producing notable cherries and apples. The little towns had condos now and modern inns, but the rustic cabins still remained, along with the skinny white church steeples and bobbing boats in the harbors. Ephraim’s drive-in and 100-year –old Wilson’s ice cream counter were still in operation. And every mailbox and business bore a Scandinavian name. My peeps! Perhaps my love of this place as a child had been genetic. I loved it even more now.
We camped in a sunny spot near the water surrounded by birches and maples in the very campground we’d camped in when I was a child. Little of the park looked familiar, but I remembered singular places, like the Eagle Tower built in the 1930s, which I again climbed to get a bird’s eye view of the islands in the bay and the town of Ephraim in the distance.
We took our bikes on the ferry across Death’s Door to Washington Island and peddled the length of the island, stopping for a local wheat beer at the oldest continually operating tavern in Wisconsin. We passed sun-dappled forests of maple and beech and sweetly pungent dairy farms under cobalt skies, visiting the beach of smooth limestone pebbles that sits on the same Niagara escarpment as the famed New York falls.
But the greatest shock of recognition was a stop at Gills Rock at the tip of the peninsula, where the waters of Green Bay meet Lake Michigan. I remembered coming here with my mother and buying smoked fish wrapped in butcher paper, eating the oily sardine-size chubs while sitting on the rocks and tossing the skins to the hovering gulls.
We stopped at the docks and talked to two men processing fish in a large building. I told them of my memory, of the little outhouse-size shack I remembered. “It’s still there, although it hasn’t been used in years,” they told me. I found the little shack of my memories, but the fish we bought at their store up the road was whitefish. The chubs of my childhood have become so rare they’re no longer fished.
Later in the day, we purchased fresh-off-the-tree Honeycrisp apples from grower Seaquist, who mixed comical tales of tourists in the orchard and histories of apple varieties in a delightful singsong Swedish accent.
Wisconsinites tend toward plump. Traditional fish boils are big in this neck of the woods, cheese curds are popular snacks and restaurants advertise specials like “old-fashioned pot roast.” But an ironic trend has appeared in the restaurants of America’s Dairyland – margarine. Virtually illegal when I was a kid, it was popping up everywhere in restaurants. And when we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberries at Al Johnson’s sod-topped restaurant with goats on the roof, the butter dish held not only margarine, but foil-wrapped pats of butter from Minnesota. Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast3MNMIWI?authkey=Gv1sRgCOSojOKV1aXjCg&feat=directlink

Across the Northern Plains

We lost the mountains near Great Falls, entering the rolling hills of prairie land, passing through tiny towns like Big Sandy and Box Elder. Harvested wheat fields sported blond stubble and drying bundles of hay looked like giant cake jelly rolls in the fields.
This was land rich in western history whose glory days had passed. Markers recalled Indian battles, settler expeditions and ambitious river settlements. Now we passed abandoned barns and white frame houses, once rather grand. White metal crosses marked all-too-frequent sites of highway fatalities. We shuddered as we passed several groupings – four in a row, then a pyramid of seven. Tiny towns advertised businesses like Bear Paw Savings & Loan and Montana Lil’s Saloon, but the biggest urban enterprises were the grain elevators and hoppers, the skyscrapers of the prairie.
We paused for a soak in Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs, a timeworn complex just off the highway. A fat cat held court on the counter of the adjoining gift shop, which sold minnows, snacks and T-shirts proclaiming the area the “Mosquito Capital of Montana.” The enclosed hot springs were like most we’ve seen, steamy and smelling of sulfur, with a general air of decrepitude. The indoor Olympic-sized pool was spooky and dark, but we enjoyed a soak in the extra-hot soaking pool, under the baleful gaze of a bison painted on the wall.
The horizon stretches forever on Montana’s northern plains, where once-prosperous towns parallel the old Great Northern Railway tracks and bear European names like Malta, Glasgow and Havre, none of them resembling their distant namesakes.
Living time capsules, these towns combined ‘50s era neon signs and ornate 19th century stonework. We checked out the old drug store soda fountain in the railroad town of Stanley, and although it was way too early, enjoyed a “whirl-a-whip” custom-blended ice cream for breakfast.
We hit Highway 2 the first evening, the next morning setting out under leaden skies on one of America’s least-traveled highways. Steady winds blew down from nearby Canada; a gentle reminder that winter temperatures in these parts can hit 80 degrees below.
The mineral-rich grasses on these treeless plains once fed a vast sea of buffalo; now a token wild herd is fenced on the Nez Perce reservation. Outlaws like Butch Cassidy knew these plains and Chief Joseph surrendered to the duplicitous U.S. army here, effectively marking the end of the Great Plains Indian wars (and the Indians’ way of life).
The biggest crop in western North Dakota seems to be oil, and we camped for the night on a lake, the rosy glow of oil rig burnoff flames lighting the horizon of the nighttime sky. Heading east the next morning, we shared the road with a steady stream of trucks and equipment bearing names like Halliburton. A few gentle hills and clumps of forest appeared mid-state, along with fields of corn and sunflowers, their seed-heavy heads bending toward the earth.
Suddenly blinding rain and flashes of lightening drove us inside to a late lunch at a roadside café, where we sat in a vinyl booth at a Formica-topped table next to a trio of old-timers playing a friendly game of dice while they enjoyed cookies with mugs of coffee. Most customers, men and women, wore baseball caps. Terry had the walleye special for $8.95 and I had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans for $6.50. The food was delicious. A stone marker outside indicated the geographic center of the U.S. We’re a long way from California.
Tonight we’re in a gorgeous state campground on the Turtle River near the Minnesota border, the only visitors in a forest of towering hardwood trees.
Photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast2MTND?authkey=Gv1sRgCILphp6xtcXQHw&feat=directlink

Happy Heads East - Stop 1: Jackson Hole

We moved into Gros Ventre campsite #2 just after lunch, covering the 1046 miles from St. Helena in a day and a half. Scattered groups of pronghorn along the way were the only wildlife we saw; our much-loved bison were AWOL. We hoped they’d show up the next day or so in time to treat our St. Helena friends to a welcoming bison jam.
The owl fledglings had left the nest cavity in the cottonwood tree, spring budding wild rose bushes now bore the ripening red hips of fall and the campground was filled with large rigs running noisy generators. No wonder wildlife was scarce. We wouldn’t visit again over Labor Day weekend.
But the mountains remain immutable and awe-inspiring, the air clear as spring water and the clouds spectacular. We began our first two mornings with long bike rides, breathing hard as we made our way up the long hill from Moose to Windy Point and eventually Jenny Lake. An elk bull with a nervous harem threatened to charge us along this route last year, but we were too early for the rut this time and the meadows were empty except for late-blooming wildflowers of purple and saffron.
Friends Daphne and Chuck arrived with a shaker of icy martinis and excellent Napa Valley wines. We made campfire chicken and dumplings in Terry’s Dutch oven with tomato salad and farmers market corn on the cob, ending the evening at a ranger talk on wolves, where we compared the feel of coyote fur with that of a wolf.
Morning dawned with a pair of moose in the meadow. One of the bulls seemed to spot a small willow just off Happy’s stern and made his way steadily through the sage toward his intended breakfast until suddenly he was just feet away, looming above us. We spooked, he spooked, and while we ran for the door, he bounded across the road just as Daphne and Chuck drove up.
We didn’t get our bison jam, but had a close encounter with a herd enroute to a cookout breakfast on the Snake River where we whiled away the morning watching mergansers and kayakers make their way swiftly downriver as the sun ducked in and out of the clouds.
More campsite martinis, an excellent Penang curry in town and lots of laughs ended our brief rendezvous before we went home to head our separate ways the next morning; our friends off to Idaho and Terry and I north through Yellowstone.
After a morning walk to discover a beaver lodge near the campground, we headed north through Yellowstone, where wildlife did not disappoint. There were elk in the woods and elk lounging on the grounds at Mammoth Hot Springs; there were bison galore, including a meandering herd in the Hayden Valley which held up traffic for the better part of a mile, just because they could. We’re spending the night in Mammoth, one of our favorite spots in the park. After hot showers at the hotel and Wilcoxson’s graham cracker ice cream, we drifted off to sleep while a family of coyotes held a spirited discussion on a nearby hill.
Pictures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/HappyHeadsEast1?authkey=Gv1sRgCJzWjNz0roOJ-QE&feat=directlink