Yahara Winter Journal

"...All the walks here are wide, and the spaces ample and free – now flooded with liquid gold from the last two hours of powerful sunshine. The whole area at 5 o'clock, the days of my observations, must have contain'd from thirty thousand finely-dressed people, all in motion... – Whitman, from Specimen Days







January 24. – it will always start here, near the Rutledge Bridge which leans so firmly over the Yahara as it carries its buses and hundreds of cars, very early, and out the little bedroom window the joggers have already taken hold of still-icy road, adorned their yellow slick suits, glowing in the dark by the shining of car light. That is the fresh and invigorating way to begin the day...but oh how difficult it is! The cold seeps in the front doors, it finds its ways inside the cracks in the floor, frost flies off the eaves at the roofs and whips up in a wintry mix, no sun for days, but here they are, the runners the walkers the bikers to work, thin-wheeled, slow, deliberate over the shoveled sidewalks. Most of us come to live out on the road. Down East Washington toward the Capitol building, that domed white giant teacup up against the luck of the blue threshold that opens for a moment above makes the building a natural gravitational pull. I drive often down these roads and watch the traffic boil and complain at lights. I watch the young men walk out of EVS Coffeeshop, the smokers by lunch standing at the curb lights outside of the Baldwin Grille, no longer cold, already whiskey on their breath. Another man pulled over along the vestibule of the Avenue Bar talked to by cops. Buses whir past, baby strollers, wrapped up in blankets, so not a single breath can reach inside to where the miniature traveler sleeps so snug.  This is the city as it unfolds. Tomorrow the sunshine glaze will be out again and these same very scenes will lose their menace and monotony. Far reaching fields of golden sunshine will wash along the jagged shores of Mendota at James Madison Park. One skater, off in the distance, etching along the crumpled ice, as the last lake eagle soars overhead looking for fresh inlets. And there, from three hundred yards out, the white capitol, stolid, gleaming white, at the center like the very edge of a postcard.