Wisconsin Journal

Number 9

3 November 1997



Luke has become enamored of a card game called Magic, and found out

about a tournament that was introducing a new series of cards up

near Eau Claire in early October. We decided to be indulgent parents,

and headed up I-94 the Friday afternoon before the tournament.

Eau Claire is near the western edge of the state, on the way to

Minneapolis. We only had daylight for about half the drive up, but

we did see cranberry fields near Tomah, and lots of animals. Not

live animals, but animal statues in front of businesses, probably

made from fiberglass or concrete. On this trip I saw a pink elephant,

an orange moose, a giant mouse, an equally large rooster, and

several steers (with cheeseheads). Animal figures seem popular in

Wisconsin, with deer, cows and horses common sights in yards out

in the country side. Maybe they are more practical here than real

pets, which would just freeze, anyway.



Eau Claire and nearby Chippewa Falls were both lumber towns in the

heyday of Wisconsin logging. Both are along the Chippewa River, which

was a convenient means to bring the logs out of the great pine forests

that used to cover much of the state. The river also provided power

to mill the logs. One thing I am noticing in our travels around

Wisconsin is that you can generally tell by a quick drive around the

old downtown and residential area of a town whether it had industrial

(lumber milling, shipbuilding, railroad) or non-industrial (farming,

fishing) beginnings. The industrial towns were a lot richer, and that

is reflected in the scale and ornament on their old buildings, and

on the size and number of mansions. (The most striking example of

early wealth I've seen are the blocks and blocks of huge houses

lining Park Street leading south out of Neenah, a city on the shore

of Lake Winnebago with lots of paper plants.)



Kaye drove Luke out to his tournament early Saturday morning, and then

came back and collected Sarah and me. We started the day in Chippewa

Falls, looking through antique stores and touring the local brewery.

Antique stores and malls are common in the old downtowns of small

and medium cities we've visited, often occupying buildings that

were department stores before the shopping centers moved in on the

outskirts of town. Kaye is interested in antique stores because it

lets her see a lot of baskets, both Indian and other, and see what

the range of prices is. I like to look at the old kitchen utensils

and tools. Sarah is tolerant, showing some interest in old toys.



The Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co. is a short way north of downtown,

and is celebrating its 130th anniversary this year. Leinenkugel's

is a regional brewery with a single brew kettle that has fallen on

good times of late. The upsurge in micro and craft brewing seems to

have sparked interest in their beers, with the result that they are

now running the brewhouse 3 shifts a day, 7 days a week. So we actually

got to see a batch of beer being made, even though it was Saturday

afternoon. The bottle and keg lines were not running, but that wasn't

necessarily bad, as we got to be much closer to the equipment than

if it had been in operation. The brewhouse dates to the late 1800's,

and several earlier buildings are still standing, such as the stable

for the horses that used to pull the delivery wagons. I was kind of

surprised that a such a small brewery survived prohibition, but

apparently they got by making near beer and soda water.  Leinenkugel's

has around a dozen beers that they brew on a regular basis, with about

eight being shipped at any one time. Kaye and I sampled four of their

beers, and liked the Northwoods Lager and the Maple Brown Lager.

They also make Big Butt Doppleboch, but weren't serving it that day.

We did buy the glass, however. I've found that Leine's Red is often

the only interesting alternative at bars around here with mostly Bud and

Miller on tap.



After Leine's, we headed back to downtown Eau Claire to check out

the shops and find some lunch. Another way you can tell how prosperous

a town was in its early years is by checking out the antique stores--

whether the goods are mainly utilitarian or there's a lot of

finery and decorative items. Eau Claire stores had a good amount

of the latter. There was also a Indian arts store downtown, which

Kaye needed to visit both before and after lunch. She found a really

wonderful Cherokee basket to buy, which the owner seemed sad to part

with. The owner decided to console herself by taking the other

Cherokee basket she had home for her own collection. Lunch ended up

being a bit hard to find, as it was pushing 2, and some of the places

that were open on a Saturday had stopped serving.



Our plan for the rest of the afternoon was to visit the Chippewa Valley

Museum in Carson Park, which is a near-island formed by the confluence

of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers. Unfortunately, the homecoming

game for UW-Eau Claire was being played at a field in the park, and

the museum had decided to close for the day. Kaye was quite disappointed,

as it is supposed to have good exhibits on Indians of the area. Plan

B was to head out to a little town called Augusta east of Eau Claire

that was having a small harvest festival. People had made scarecrows

of all sizes and tied them to all the lampposts in town, which was

fun to see. The festival itself was mostly a couple of booths

selling produce and pies, plus bus rides past the Amish farms in the

area. We skipped the bus ride and headed back to the motel, as

Luke was supposed to call us to tell us how he was doing and when

he might be done.



He ended up finishing kind of late, and it was about an hour drive

to where he was and back, so I took Sarah out to find dinner while

Kaye went to fetch him. There was an interesting looking restaurant

across the highway from the motel that we thought we'd try, but

there was a 45-minute wait for dinner. It turns out one of the local

high schools was having their fall formal dance that night, and

the restaurant was full of pairs and groups of party goers having

dinner before the dance. Sarah and I ate elsewhere, but Kaye and

Luke ended up at that restaurant later, when it was less crowed, but

still had a lot of the high school crowd. Kaye said most of the

boys looked uncomfortble wearing tuxes and suits, and a few looked

uncomfortable eating with knives and forks.



Sunday we headed back to Madison, with a detour through Warrens, which

is the center of Wisconsin's main cranberry region. Cranberries are

the #1 fruit crop in Wisconsin, which produces 40-50% of the nation's

cranberry crop. Cranberries grow wild in Wisconsin, and have been

farmed commercially for over 125 years. We stopped off at a place

called "Cranberry Expo Ltd.", which is a gift shop and museum run

by one of the families that farms cranberries in Warren. Our guide

was a fourth-generation cranberry farmer.



Having actually slogged around herding cranberries in a bog up on the

Washington Coast, it was interesting to see the differences in

"craniculture" between Wisconsin and the Northwest. We learned early on

that Wisconsin cranberries are not grown in bogs. The farms are actually

carved from marshland, which was covered by Lake Wisconsin during the

last ice age. Rather than being peaty, the soil is almost pure sand, which

means the fields need a fair amount of fertilizing and irrigation during

the summer. The cranberry fields are actually lower than the ponds

in the area, so water for irrigation and harvest is channelled in via

ditches, dikes and dams, whereas in Washington water was pumped into

the bogs. One challenge has been finding a good material to build

the little control dams out of, particularly the removable bulkheads

that govern the water level. The water is quite acidic, so steel only

lasts a couple years. Wood has been used until recently, but it has

the problem that beavers will chew through it if they don't like

the water level, and muskrats gnaw holes in it to get from one place

to another. Aluminum bulkheads seem to be doing a good job currently.

Harvesting seems about the same, with some amount of the berries

being harvested by dry pickers and the rest by flooding the fields

and flushing the berries off the vines with beaters.



The sandy soil gives up its heat fairly rapidly at night,

and the air temperatures near the ground can drop to freezing even on

the 4th of July. The fields have temperature sensors, and the farm families

stand shifts to watch for a freeze at night. If the temperture does

drop, they turn on sprinklers in the fields, and the freezing water

actually gives up enough heat to keep the vines it coats from freezing.

But you have to keep adding more water until the ice melts in the

morning. In the winter, they flood the fields, let about four inches

of ice form, and then drain out the rest of the water, leaving a slab

of ice as protection on the vines. This slab makes it easy to

add more sand to the fields by simply spreading it on the ice

before the spring thaws.



Cranberries are not a huge crop on a national scale, being grown only

in three parts of this country and in Chile, as far as I know. So,

it's not like Case or John Deere has a full line of cranberry equipment.

As the Wisconsin fields are different from those on the east and west

coasts, most of the farm machinery for cranberries has been developed

by farmers in the area. The museum is largely full of implements old and

new for planting, tending and harvesting the vines. At first, the

berries were picked individually by hand, which involved an enormous

amount of labor. Later came the hand picker, which is kind of like

a scoop with a long comb structure at the front. The first picking

machines had the same long combs in front, and modern dry-pickers

look not that different. For wet harvest, the beater machines look

kind of like miniature reapers with paddles instead of metal blades.

Weeds are a big problem, and we saw several devices that were intended

to get herbicide on the weeds but not the vines. One of the most effective

turns out to be a 20' length of PVC pipe with some holes drilled in

it and wrapped in carpet. It's carried along just above the vines and

wipes the herbicide onto the weeds. We also saw equipment for clipping

the vines, sorting the picked berries and jiggling the old wooden

crates they used to ship berries in. The crates had to be competely

full so the berries didn't bounce around and bruise in shipping.



Not every piece of equipment that someone has invented has been a success.

There was one harvester made out of a surplus army all-terrain vehicle.

The problem with it is that it could only hold about a half-row's

worth of berries. Vines all lie in one direction in the fields, and

are easily damaged if you drive against the grain. So you can't back up.

You can't go forward, since you'll crush the unpicked berries ahead.

So with this harvester, you had to harvest half a row, dump the load

of berries where you were, harvest the second half of the row, put

it in the truck, then go back to the other side of the field and drive

through again to the get the first load you dumped in the field. It

was only used one season.



The last thing we learned on our tour is that all the machinery that

actually goes into the fields uses food-grade vegetable oil for

lubrication, since any leaked oil can easily spread over several fields

when they are flooded. The reason we don't use vegetable oil in our

cars is that it solidifies in cold weather and you have to change

it about every two weeks. For cranberry farmers, that's okay, since

they only run the equipment in the summer, and harvest only lasts

about two weeks each year.



A few odds and ends, then I'll turn the rest of this report over to Kaye.



The Rolling Stones played at the football stadium the day after

we got back from the trip. I was out of town on travel, but

Kaye took Sarah down to sit outside the stadium and listen.



I finally got back to the zoo while the buildings were opened,

this time with Luke. It was kind of a muggy afternoon, and many

of the animals were just sacked out taking naps. Got to see some

more cranes.



There's an IGA near our house that turns out to be an Asian grocery.

Stopped there to get milk, and ended up with tamarind soda as well.



Some vendors at the farmers' market where Kaye shops specialize in

heritage varieties of apples. They only have a couple of trees of

each, but we have been able to try several varieties we had never

seen before. One of our favorites is "Honey Pound," so called, I guess,

for its sweetness and size.



Wisconsin lexicon:



- Questions are often bracketed with "So" and "or no", as in "So,

will you be having dessert, or no?"



- What I would call a traffic light, Kaye has heard referred to as a

"stop'n'go" light: "Just go down here three blocks and turn left

at the stop'n'go light." I hope I never end up at just a "stop" light--

I might be there all day.



Other Packerware:



- Packer snowglobes.  Probably more suitable for a Wisconsin team than,

say, the Miami Dolphins.



- Brett Favre cheese. In the shape of a football player, dipped in green

and yellow wax, with a number 4.



- Packer pasta, in the shape of footballs and the Green Bay logo.



- Packer corn chips, in green and yellow.



Just before we headed up to Eau Claire, Kaye came home one afternoon

with a Fram Credit mug, a flyswatter, 4 squishy plastic cows, a squishy

globe and a pair of gloves--freebies, all.  I'll let her finish up this

message with a report on where she'd been:



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So here's the first thing to know about the World Dairy Expo: Don't wear

sandals. And here's the second: Don't be alarmed if a seedy-looking

salesman asks if you'd like to enter a contest for some of his semen.



The World Dairy Expo is held each October at the Expo Center in Madison,

and people attend from all over the world It is a huge event, taking over

the entire complex and all the out buildings. Even the parking lot had

a steady stream of cows passing through (and passing steady streams) on

their way down to the lake, where a special cow photographer was doing

formal portraits as if they were so many bovine brides.



Farmers from all over the country bring their best Holsteins and Brown

Swiss to camp out for the weekend.  They scrub them with Dash detergent

and power washers until they glisten. Visitors from Brazil and Japan

and Australia and Wales wade through the pens in awe.  Modern American

dairy farming is apparently the envy of the world.



In a large coliseum in the Expo center, a group of young people moved

in formation, walzing with their cows to the live accompaniment of

an ice-skating rink-type organ.  The cows would take a step or so forward

and then stop, while judges would make comments about various parts of

their anatomy.  A large group of fans in business suits, overalls

and religious dress sat mesmerized by the dances with cows.



At booths around the outside hall of the coliseum, vendors sold

cow-tagging equipment, scrotum tape (couldn't figure that one out),

udder wipes (you put them in a little dispenser that you hang from

your waist), teat dips, and cures for various cow ailments, such as

"dry cow". (Are those the ones that make powdered milk?)



My favorite was the guy who asked me if I had calves. (Yes, right above

the cow poop on my sandals.)  He was giving away samples of his

antibiotic-laced liquid calf feed.



Another huge exhibit hall had your cow heavy equipment, such as inflatable

cow beds, rotating milking palaces, manure extruders (grinds it and pumps

it out of your barn at a steady pace), frozen semen and embryos, cow

magnets (to collect barbed wire and other metal debris in a cow's

stomach), and cures for various icky hoof diseases.



Of course there was food: fried cheese curds, whipped-cream buns, Almond

Joy ice cream, and all the usual hamburgers and carnival fare.  And

crafts: cow magnets (for your refrigerator, not your cow's stomach),

cow sweatshirts, and various cow ornaments to clutter the place up.



So even though I don't have calves, I now have a whole new appreciation

of the world of dairy farming and manure management and cow magnets

and modern animal husbandry through artificial insemination.  No bull.

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Bye from Dave and Kaye