Postcards from San Fran

The Presidio region at the northwest corner of San Fran is one of the more fascinating gems of the city. An area that might easily be overlooked by visitors to the city, it shows up in guidebooks as the most common green area for locals to hang out, enjoy the long stretch of beach which offers a close and clear view of Alcatraz to the east and the sparkling Golden Gate to the west.  Although originally cleared in

1776 by Spain as a fortress, it had changed hands to Mexico and eventually the U.S. Military in the mid 1800's, leaving behind the mammoth Fort Point, barracks, and hidden bunkers; but that had since

become the possession of the U.S. National Park Service.  It's little surprise then that a Disney Museum surfaced here in celebration of its near Disney World appeal – a mixing of historical buildings and panorama that looks similar to a hollywood studio set-up.  Miles of beautiful trails line both the old and new sections; walk up the hill through a well tended military cemetery; walk down along the flats past vast stretches of green fields; back toward the Golden Gate, through the fort, or upwards onto the bridge itself, traveled by both bike and foot.

Once out onto the bridge itself, all of the Presidio, Alcatraz, the cityscape behind and the rolling Californian hills on the other side are visible – the bridge becomes its own national park.

Postcards from San Fran

The Moma art museum of San Fran is dedicated to modern art.  You won't find here the classics of the ages, but mostly the hopeful classics of a new era.  Luckily, in between the Warhol's and the Pollack's

and the Warhol's there is still time for a wall of nature, a wonderfully towering flat structure planted in carved pods from the wall in which the greenery stations and grows up directly into the San fran

skyline.  As we were walking the seven floors of the Moma, I couldn't help but think about the Hyatt Regency, where we were staying, and the artful approach to the atrium, the largest in the world

and some of the art and architecture directly surrounding right outside of Drumm Street.

The same day, sunday, a few hours after Moma, we headed off to Stanford to find our summer institute dorm room and the possibility of a roommate.

We didn't find our roommate right away -- we were a few hours early to campus -- but the room, pretty much a dorm room, was at least on the basement level, cool, surrounded by pines and very quiet on Mayfield Street.

Stanford campus is enormous, its own city really -- and shows up as much on on maps -- dry, hot, beautiful, and probably one of the smarter overall areas of the earth.

Postcards from San Fran

It's a winding, narrow, rocky trip up Sir Francis Drake Rd. to get to Point Reyes but once there it has to be one of the most dramatic alluring landscapes on either American Coasts.  Located at the northern Pacific, bound by moisture coming in and a draught moving out from the interior, the landscape shifts from brown foothills to near rainforest sometimes within feet one another.  We took the Bear Valley trailhead out to the coast, over Meadow Divide toward Painted Rock near Point Resistance, a four and a half hour round trip walk from brown to green to blue.

The trail followed the path of a small mountain creek and where there was water and shade the ferns and lichen took over from more weather beaten meadow or rocky outcroppings.  Douglas fir rose up from the mountain sides and leaned in the direction of the hikers, forcing a look over the shoulder here and there to make sure there was no tipping.

We had planned to turn around half-way, at meadow divide, located at the apex of the trail but the allure of the panorama at the sea cliffs was overwhelming and despite just barely enough water and two sandwiches in a paper bag, we kept going...

... and there it sunk into the walking legs that there is no such thing as a free lunch or pristine view.

Eyeing along the coast north, past the major inlet at Drakes Beach, you could see Point Reyes lighthouse, a 45 minute drive from the Bear Valley trailhead and a trip to take next time.  We sat up on the sandy dune like mountain prairie and listened to the seacoast crash below on beaches that they highly recommend visiting only if you are willing to keep tabs on the tide schedule so as not to get trapped against the cliffs.  As we walked back we realized the great reward of returning back to the car and the promise of a watering hole at Point Reyes Station, a boutique mountain town five miles inland.

Postcards from San Fran

San Francisco is a city that is packed tight throughout its center but open, based on its geography, at the edges.  The San Franciscan spends most of her time dodging traffic getting to and fro work and play, but for leisure places like Land's End, pictured above, open to majestically dramatic cliffside views and tend to harbor substantial patches of beach below.  The Cliffhouse, overlooking Ocean Beach, is an old salt bath resort where the wealthy would soak along the coastline in enormous concrete baths.

Here it takes no more than the crashing of surf against the seaside rock formations for entertainment -- maybe seal or the fin of a dolphin slipping by at the lower end of the window looking outside.  The great coastline trail follows the cliffside north, up towards Land's End, one of the places where locals go to quickly deprogram from the rigors of the city.

This day – the only one like it on a short trip – was of the standard foggy coastline kind, where the island rocks seemed to fade in and out of sight and barges arrowed through the fog hardly without notice.  For all of its luxuries and domestic offerings, places like Land's End are quick reminders of the extremely coarse and sometimes treacherous landscape that the city actually lives on.

Compared to how many people walk these trails and flock to the cliffs, its fairly obvious that San Franciscans prefer the crowded center of their city.

Postcards from San Fran

It's possible that the Hyatt Regency on the Embarcadero is the most difficult hotel in the western hemisphere to drive out of (it sits at the confluence of three city streets, the primary depot for the California St. trolley, and an underground entrance to the subway), but we wouldn't choose another for the world.  Directly across the street is the promenade, the bay and really one of the great gatherings of cafes and restaurants in the city.

Off the backside of the Market pavilion is the must-go Hog Island Oyster whose main shop is up on Tomales Bay, just a stone's throw away from where we would land in two days at Point Reyes Seashore and station.  The sweet water oysters could break your heart they are so fresh…even the traveling partner agrees.

As a complete contrast in pace from the Embarcadero, the Tea Garden on the opposite end of the city at the Golden Gate Park, is not for those cannot recognize a little spiritual peace.  As we got there the following morning, this part of the park was open to the public for free for an hour and a great majority glided through still rambling on about phone headaches and last night's disappointing TV shows, all the while forgetting that a rock garden is there to absorb, not punish.  Still, many pockets of quiet beauty can be found by walking away from the bustlers.

Long rows of carefully considered rocks, one imagines, is there to present stillness and order; underneath a band of sequoias it becomes a well-tended to portion of nature and quietly does all its talking with silence.

For the second visit to San Fran, it's a bit ironic that we would claim the Asian outpost one of our favorite destinations, creating a world, as it does, that is culled from the other side of the world, yet recognizing the immediate rocky mountainous wooded landscape of the coastline.

Postcards from San Fran

18 June


You find out early and often that walking all the various pockets of San Francisco is easier that driving or getting a ride.  At the Embarcadero, most of the city lays back behind you in all of its complexity – directly behind, the Financial district, which melts into China town (watch out for the Tenderloin east), Nob Hill, Union Square, North Beach to the west as that rolls smoothly into the Wharf and back onto the Embarcadero again.  We started our first search at the Wayfare Tavern in the Financial district under a mile away and got acclimated as soon as we cross Drumm street to the very hectic yet beautiful San Francisco streets.

The Wayfare is an interesting yet trendy throwback to time, a style that suits its owner Tyler Florence very well – watching his shows and reading his cookbooks, he serves traditional on the cutting edge, always with an eye on detail and flavor but hearty and unpretentious (my own favorite cook in America…Tyler is the one who has written "what can't bacon make better?").

Julia ordered a smoke salmon platter and I got the Sonoma style stuffed filet mignon.  Although these were both wonderful -- my own included in-season sautéed morels that stole the show – it was the pre-meal popovers that we both had to re-examine to make sure we understood what they were made out of.  Inside the popover was an airy and eggy texture similar to light scrambled eggs, warm and moist, a meal onto themselves.

The Wayfare might very well be the epitome of a culinary pub but for that reason we didn't stay lone, instead choosing to walk north beach back to the waterfront

where the local trawlers just barely bounce secured to the docks tethered in San Fran Bay.

"Where the city's ceaseless crowd moves on, the live-long day, Withdrawn, I join a group of children watching – I pause aside with them. By the curb, toward the edge of the flagging, A knife-grinder works at his wheel, sharpening a great knife;" Whitman, "Sparkles from the Wheel"








Cooperage

3.

For blocks the sweet and hot smell of the milled pines
under the sun, away from the shelter of the overhang
it dries and fills the air with the sweet smell for blocks
as the men who labor over their saws and splits for staves
rest under shade for a smoke and peak to the cool inside.

"The group, (an unmanned point set in a vast surrounding,) the attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets..." Whitman, "Sparkles from the Wheel"











Cooperage

2.


The scene and all its belongings, the railroad cars rolling
off the great wide white pine from the forests of St. Croix
sawed at great length by two men, swinging the handheld
blade with teeth as long as fingers, sharp as hunting blades,
the sun rushing down, breezeless, as the quarter logs
all long day drop to piles to be thinned to fresh staves.

"The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press'd blade, Diffusing, dropping, side-ways darting, in tiny showers of gold, Sparkles from the wheel." – Whitman, from "Sparkles from the Wheel"









Cooperage

1.
Where the city streets at Schenk's Corners were still mud and gravel,
where the old railroad tracks converged and passed
making their tinny song to sparks as the brakeman
squeezed his silver handle above his dusty cap,
the final railcar stopped and there beside the great
doorway open sideways strapped the giant log for barrels....

Following is the location link to Hess Family Blog, A Year on Monona. The entry below is the first for this blog and also found on new site.
http://ayearonmonona.blogspot.com




"After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship..."
–Whitman, from After the Sea-Ship















After the Rainstorm


After the rainstorm, out on the river, forever flowing,
after the rainstorm the brown river bay is rising
up and swallowing the rocky edges, falling, roiling,
as the fish float under then up to strike the swollen bugs,
there goes the boatman out from the safety of harbor
under the long sheets of slanted rainstorm falling,
as he slips his poncho hood over and seals his pole
under tarp, wet and hanging, as the engine gurgles and roils.
After the rainstorm, out on the river, forever flowing,
the Sandhill Crane stands as stoic as ever, waves rising
in among the pushing and pulling of the long grass flooding,
he moves forward into the sheeted wind the beak
and pecks down into the dull murky water a silver minnow.
After the rainstorm, out on the river, forever flowing,
the world is wet to its bottom as the boatman sings
out and lets out a puff of smoke under his hood smiling.

Following is the location link to Hess Family Blog, A Year on Monona. The entry below is the first for this blog and also found on new site.


http://ayearonmonona.blogspot.com

A Year on Monona

"Life had changed, and the masons had changed it.  If we got up at 6:30 we could have breakfast in peace.  any later, and the sound effects from the kitchen made conversation impossible. One morning when the drills and hammers were in full swing, I could see my wife's lips move, but no words were reaching me. Eventually she passed me a note: Drink your coffee before it gets dirty." – Peter Mayle, from A Year in Provence










To write a family blog that would take its inspiration from an English couple who finally decided to take the great leap from London to Provence, first there must be someplace to land the blog, a home, in this case on Monona, to even begin.  Unlike the weather beaten couple from Peter Mayle's book, this time around anyway, we have been mostly able to avoid the sawdust in the coffee, and yet the sawdust is still there as the main bathroom in our new home in Madison is being completely gutted and new basement constructed....with us yet having moved in.  We picture great diligence on the part

of this Madison crew, tearing and hammering away as we think to ourselves back here in Onalaska that great strides are being made, just like the great and efficient strides made here back at home at our new condominium on the back bay of the Black River.  Unlike Mayle's classic, this blog entry can't be, by its very nature, a well-conceived story, but more of an attempt at offering impressions of a family that has chosen to make a leap into the contours of a dream of the somewhat unknown.  It is less about a moving away from anything and more about a moving toward a five-pointed opportunity, one for each person and one as a whole family.

New experiences, such as this one, as Carly is kindly welcomed to her fifth grade class for an orientation day at Edgewood school, will naturally blend with images of old.

Rock Dam pine needle gathering

Where we hope to also blend the great humor that is ought to be had by trying new skills against the

experience of those mastered.

If we are lucky along the way, the other, older participants of the Hess family – now both firmly planted in the great unknowable years otherwise known as teenhood – might stand still enough in front of dad's camera in order to capture and verify their existence, as Abby finds her new world on the campus of UW Madison, and Julia her studies under the open sky lights at Riverside Drive.  The reader can be sure the writer of the blog will most often be found looking out onto the sun-bedecked back courtyard pondering either the next meal or the next way to entertain fifth graders on the

volleyball court.  The mother will not be far away, lifting up, as is her way, the rest of us through her sheer might of good will, decency and care.

On the Yahara A-Z

H.

Hess Cooperage – Somewhere back here in the Schenk Corners neighborhood, no more than a few blocks from Riverside, at an arterial that is old of landscape and the streets and buildings many still

original, stood the old cooperage of Frank Hess and Sons from 1904-1966.  A bygone trade by hand anymore, it can only be realized, by biking by the storefront of One Barrel Brewery across the street – and I assume which took its historical name from the cooperage – imagining the work and craft shaping white pine in the steel frames day in and day out.  It takes a moment to leap back to a bygone time when the steel barrel did not exist and that any liquid that needed to be transported by the likes


of such a made barrel and that such an industry would be in great demand especially in Wisconsin, the brewing capital of the states.  You imagine that the cooper of old times on the great seas before plane and car and railroad would carry its own cooper to keep them repaired and in shape.  "The finished wooden barrels were heavy, and could dry out, leak or break.  Quite often a single stave might crack or break, requiring repair.  Hess, like many other cooperages, also spent much of their time repairing used and damaged barrels sent back to them by the breweries."  To construct, all sawing and planing for the staves that were crafted by power tools. As many as 35 men worked here at one time, to saw and craft...and to hold those steel hoops in place they had to retrieve cattails from the local waters surrounding in Madison. "You can't make a beer barrel without cattails.  We put a cattail leaf between every stave.  This helps to keep the barrel from leaking." We can picture the old time taverns emptying

those crafted barrels out their backdoors along the Atwood and Winnebago streets.  Down Williamson along the Yahara river and those barrels drying out and cracking after only that one use and would leak forever after.  During prohibition, as alcohol dried up, so to speak, the cooperage stayed on for the dairy industry. "Of six cooperages operating in Wisconsin at the time, Hess was the only one that managed to remain open during the "dry" years.  With an upswell in business after prohibition, so too came along the very demise of the industry that this family had followed for its living for a generation and in "November 1965, the Hess Cooperage factory produced the last white oak barells ever to be manufactured in the United States.  As more things than is easy to imagine the old barrel stands as a relic of technology that used to stand for a craft and trade but is not replaced by an unknowable process.  Many enclaves along the east of Madison have maintained the veneer of the old and the crafted, the beer is still important, but the men outside the back door of the old cooperage no longer stand under hot heat awaiting their truck of white pine for the carving to barrels.