Family Nature Journal
Option 7: Finding your Formation

"Three billion years was too long a time to contemplate with wisdom and perspective. All I could do was be aware of the beauty around me. I could look at the rose quartz in its vein and delight in its color and the perfection of its crystals. I could explore the surrounding hills and find it in all its infinite variations as I did not long ago at the site of an abandoned mine shaft of the Vermillion gold rush of almost a century ago."
 – Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point, "Rose Quartz"







Growing up for many years as a boy in the small, near alpine lake city of Coeur 'd Alene Idaho, there are a few natural images that I carry with me as though they were captured photographs and available in a back pocket: one is the mountainous pine needle floors of the forest, and the warm and earthy smells that rise up from the soft soil surrounding the trees, how they felt safe, secluded, and welcoming. Another is the grand lake itself, a true emerald wonder with seemingly infinite styles of rock promontories that jutted out at the shoreline and collected bobbing driftwood.  But it was the rocks themselves that lined the hiking trails of Canfield Mountain, an often attended city hiking trail system, that offered the child's imagination a sort naturally occurring playground – rocks formations that erupted out of the earth like wide flat sea ships that were safe and easy to climb.  To try to climb these ancient playgrounds took virtually all of the combined skill and imagination that a young person could muster.  Once you make it a part of the way up a particular rock climb, something begins to take over, an innate desire to 'summit' for the sake of not only accomplishing a feat that a shy young person might not ever attempt otherwise in other facets of life, but to gain a new view on things, maybe twenty feet higher up, at the top of the ship where the air is a little different, and the landscape along the veins of the rock, mysterious and magical. The mind, without thinking about it much, drifts off to not only years past, as it wonders what native or pioneer had seen and climbed this very rock, but forward, wondering if other would get such a chance in the future. In a nutshell, it is the very essential kind of experience that forms the narrative of natural images of mind. And unlike the other, electronic, side of experience, which tends to pass by as continual stream of non-creative acts, finding one's 'formation' is a binding act with the living world, a state and stage of the process of defining character and coming to understand a connection with the landscape.

We were reminded of this one more time on a few hour visit to Devil's Lake, Wisconsin. Descending here on an early October day in mid afternoon sunshine is a little bit like being transported back to childhood, or to a magical island, where the rocky quartzite shores rise up out of the robin's egg blue water, itself a deep curve that looks like the cauldron of a long dormant volcano. Along the west shore path, we passed a hundred people offering up to their own children the prospects of landscape memories. The tumble rock trails is exactly what it sounds like – a view up along enormous rockfalls of quartzite boulders, many of which are perfect little sea ships to climb, and warm up on if they

happen to face the sun.  Many of the boulders – much in the same way that Olson's memories of quart were a rose color – showed a faded green pattern and glow faintly against a crisp October sun. The trail moves past the entire shoreline then wraps up along the backside of the bluff so get another view of these rocks but from above this time.  Formations beyond anything that the imagination could create from scratch, often stand seemingly teetering out beyond which the tops of old pines and beyond that the blue of Devil's Lake.  By the time you reach back to the bottom at the shoreline beach at the visitor's center, something has just happened – you have just experienced millions of years of geologic history and placed your own foot trodden stamp on monuments of time itself.  As Olson says, there is too much here to ponder with pure wisdom or perspective. Instead it is a kind of absorption of something sustaining, a knowing of one's surroundings, and that positive emotion that comes along with it is only a stone's throw away at any moment.

Option 6: Find your favorite formation and promise to continue to return as often as possible.  Much of the drift less area of Wisconsin offers, at the least, limestone bluffs or the dropped rocks from ancient glaciation.  Everyone should have a place to go to be by rocks.  A temptation no doubt will come to turn these rock ventures into events, activities, experiments, yes, even writing assignments. Rocks, however, are literally 'awe' some and need nothing more than to be experienced.  We used to live at bottom of bluff and could easily take a trail up into ridges where the limestone was exposed.  One day we began to walk off trail and found, at the very edge of the ridge, one line limestone rock which had, over the eons, lost much of its base to wind erosion but the bulbous top was wide and easy to climb up and safe and flat at the top.  There was no need for anything else in this moment. A kind of kindred wisdom seeps up and takes hold, a quiet zone where history sits without a lesson or a plan.

"We skirted the edge of the bluff into the Allison canyons and I noticed a freshly dug den in the hillside. A few yards farther, as I rounded the point of a hogback, a big fiery-red fox darted out of the cover of a fallen limb in the bottom of the draw and started up the opposite side." - Leopold, from Round River, "Red Fox Day"





30 September

Oktoberfest festivities are in the air, along the streets of the city of La Crosse, the traffic thick, as a hundred thousand might descend along the downtown streets for a bounding parade, thick drumbeats, raised glasses of beer, and here and there, pounding in the grounds at the far end of the route, a fine polka under big tents.  All this can mean only one thing for the outdoorsman: head in the opposite direction, light up for the limestone bluff and see what small dances and sweet songs we might flush out there.  La Crosse might be well known for three things: the bluffs, the Mighty Mississippi, and Oktoberfest.  All can be had in a mere one mile drive, if desired, for the eventual platform that you find at the top shelf those bluffs, looks out over the rest of the list, and you can just about make out the meandering parade that runs parallel to the main channel of the river below.  We found a trail head at the far south side of Hixon Forest, and made our way up a steep and recently heavily eroded trail, with divers and channels that run right through the center which one would imagine becomes their own version of river virtually every rain.  The valley that runs here holds some man made works, long flumes of dirt and rock and an occasional square corner of some cement block.  In the old days, when La Crosse had not yet wooded and was called by the Native Americans Prairie La Crosse, the quarry works used to connect top to bottom along some of these routes and you can find remnants here as well as directly below the famous Grandad's portion maybe a quarter a mile south.  Walnuts so abundant they look like a thousand miniature versions of lime green tennis balls.  We stop to examine one, rip off the husk which leaves our fingers yellow and slimy and smelling something like nothing else we have ever encountered.  We set one down on a rock and give it a few solid shots with another rock to reveal the pretty white segments of nut inside and consider that these would have been quite a harvest for subsistence in times past.  We continue up to the flat castles of sheer limestone cliffs at the top and marvel not only their structure, popping up in such random contours, but the unfortunate graffiti lit across each one as if revealing a competition we'd prefer to know less about.  Just below some of the cliffs wild and untended prairies, dry, drifting, and a beautiful snapshot of just what the landscape was a hundred and fifty years ago. Seen in contrast to the scene below, the La Crosse River Marsh, green and alluvial, cross hatched by trails and cattails, we breath in a strong sense of the city as a train makes its way through across its tracks along the edge.  Far off in the distance, a near mirror along the Minnesota side, bluffs the exact shape and height, revealing a similar pattern of emerald green and limestone pewter, and we wonder if there, too, there stands the avid hiker listening for the drums of the parade in the distance, while at their fingertips the soft whish of a September breeze across the field grass.

The Monarch Chronicles
An Allegory

"It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgrows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting–everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering 'whitewash' he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens." –Wind and Willows








The season had become late – she didn't have much time to think about this, not really. That air through which she jigged and jagged did not seem particularly the way she thought it was supposed to be, at least not since the leaves of the very milkweed she intuitively knew to be her delight and living quarters, was brittle to the touch now, large and eaten holes all over the place. Her brief life was not much in the way of planning, but more of an intense sense for doing some-thing, some-thing, all the time, to find that one-thing that would be ultimately soothing.  And oh the energy of these new found wings! If there was a sense of appreciation built into the body and mind of the Monarch butterfly, well, she most certainly had it, and latched for only seconds at a time at this particular milkweed that sat out in front of this particular home all alone, yet as useful as life itself.  As she bounded around the flow of the heat that came off the walls of the great yellow box of the house, there were the variety of smells that she detected and couldn't help herself to wonder why every single thing that she passed as she flitted about the green growth, how was not everything else flitting about in the same joy of aromas? This particular warm yellow box of a house had circled around a wooden wall that, at its very top ends offered what seemed a thousand smells, a thousand little samples. Over the past three sun cycles she had come to feel a sense of claim over this little area of the side river and cavorted around its edges as a sort of protective dance and begin to take pride in the way geranium and petunias sprung upward in their fountains of purple and pink, really little rides of color that had within them their own motion and feeling that nothing likely other than the Monarch could fully
understand, or so she thought. Her pride reached unusual heights at some hours, as the sun blaze hit her wings as if to lay comfort; a slight breeze cooled them back, and she fanned herself easily against the heat.  Food, shelter, warmth, water, what else could there be?

Family Nature Journal
Option 6: Allegory cont'd

"The mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in this throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms....It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring cleaning!' – Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows, "The River Bank"


And so begins one of the great examples of allegory in childrens' literature, Wind in the Willows, where the natural world around us – more typically seen as the passing green landscape, or as the menacing mole who digs those pesky tunnels underneath our daisy beds – comes to life poetically through story. It seems important to briefly point out, when beginning to talk about humans' connections to nature and the function of allegory, that in more advanced analysis of nature studies anyway, there tend to be sometimes valid counterclaims as to why not to anthropomorphize nature. One of them being that it might provide us with a false sense of connection or security to the condition of the animals and other creatures that we are describing. The other, more obviously, is that anthropomorphism is no doubt inaccurate – we really don't know what animals are thinking and can mostly only offer up educated guesses as motives in nature. But so much of outdoor learning has to do with taking into consideration age appropriateness.  In the beginning stages, when the mind is still forming, wonder, innocence, hands-on experience and creativity are high priority functions. If it takes a sense of wonder, born out of the books of allegory, to strike that critical interest in the woods, than I do believe this is another 'green deal' I am certainly willing to make. Parents know through their own experience that as some of that mystery and wonder matures, our analysis will no doubt become more appropriately complex and scientific.

And so to set up the creation of an ongoing story in the mind for young writer, it may take some writing choreography on the part of the parent, some guidance, and some pre-sensing.  The anthropomorphic allegory, of course, tends to take its motives and characteristics from people and placed onto the actions of creatures; the opposite can occur too, where the characteristics of creatures are placed upon the actions of people. Either way, the connection does many things for the sake of outdoor learning: it allows us to ponder for a while the lives of the natural world; it places us inside a sense of wonder and imagination in which the creative impulse -- of mind and matter -- we come to realize is a much more powerful activity than merely receiving pre-created impulses from the likes of screens; it allows us to consider our own humanness – what are our motives, our cares, our humor, our seriousness; and finally, in a wonderful stroke of imaginative connection, it links the creative mind to nature, a bond if you will, which cannot be broken, much in the same way a painting, once completed and framed and set on the wall, is a permanent fixture in the imagination and can be recalled forever. Dreams and the imagination made concrete through art are indeed 'green bonds.' The same holds true for the 'green hour' each day. At 20, the young person will look back and visually see that time.  It will stay with her for the rest of her life.

Option 5: make a goal to write an ongoing, chapter by chapter, allegory in your family journal blog.  As for set-up, we already mentioned handing off a simple book such as Wild Wisconsin, so that there is an easy way for the reader to take a liking to a particular animal, creature, or landscape.  There is no need to make this heavy research -- remember that this must seem free and easy for the young writer. School is school; this is something separate, and hopefully, eventually, much more self-driven and therefore becomes a bundle of suggestions and introductions.  Create a simple two-sided ledger list on a piece of paper and begin to describe what you know about your raccoon, or mole, or seagull, whatever.  Then, over on the other side, consider an interesting characteristic of human beings.  Some small snapshot of people living that could be compelling. The above example describes an easily identifiable self-thought of the mole griping about spring work! If you live in the city, maybe there is the common complaint of griping about morning traffic on the roads. Could this be transferred over to the ducks that cross the street toward the water. Why are there so many ducks that gather here in the morning? What are they trying to get to? Why do some take so long, etc., etc?

Now, to consider imaginatively entering into the 'life' of one of the ducks as protagonist.  What is her background? What are they doing here in the midwest...don't they migrate? Why are these holdovers? Is the river here warm and ice free during the winter time? Has the duck escaped recent injury? What makes this duck courageous, a leader, a follower?  It usually inside these moments of seeing motivation in the creature that we tend to find what it is that we want to say either about the human condition itself or something about ourselves, and the story can go description to expression. If the writer is going through a time that gym class is really getting her down at school, well, then, maybe all this flying around and waddling around the park is similar for our duck.  Writing the nature-based allegory has an endless number of potential connectors.

To begin chapter one, be sure to place a downloaded picture of your chosen creature at the top of the blog post. Find a great quote from a book your admire near the picture, use that as inspiration. Begin writing without worrying how the story will move. Remember, this is a blog, not a published book. It begins as words on screen, but then tends to stay as something only you read anyway, and can be changed at any time.  Write at least two paragraphs describing a scene and your protagonist.  Near the end, see if you can imagine what happens next. Save this next scene for tomorrow. Repeat process.

Family Nature Journal
Option 5: Writing Allegory

"Let's be realistic. Even if we're lucky enough to sing for bears in Alaska or to have bonded with nature when we were young, keeping that bond or establishing an evolved relationship with nature is no easy thing."

–Richard Louv, from "The Hybrid Mind, Enhancing Intelligence through the World Outdoors," The Nature Principle










As parents we want our project of re-naturing kids' lives to feel free and easy. If in the 'old days' kids were asked to just play outside for a while, head into the back yard and get on a swing or dig in the sand, or maybe take a short trip to the nearest creek to skip rocks, well, let's face it, it tends to be a bit more complicated than that today.  For better or for worse, until Louv's call above becomes a reality and nature becomes 'natural' again, parents, caregivers, sitters, guardians and educators have to become part-time choreographers of outdoor education.

In a way, this is truly the key component to the entire project because it stands up to common sense that kids are not always going to simply choose 'the nature option,' just in the same way they may not choose the 'oboe lesson option,' or the 'math homework' option. Our kids tend to become what it is that we present to them. For example I began cooking for myself as a very young boy. I was an only child raised by a single mother. The routine of planning my meals, cooking them, and cleaning up after me wasn't much of a choice.  At one point, I was given a kids' cookbook with great graphics and simple instructions. This was attractive, I remember, because I felt a little bit like a grown up moving through these short recipes and seemed to take some pride in self-guiding the process. But, of course, the situation was set-up: there was the need, and there was the book. The same really holds true for outdoor experience. If there is a committed "green hour" every day at home, then it becomes part of daily life. It begins to become a priority and becomes somewhat untouchable after awhile. Other activities revolve around it. How we set up that "green hour" is important.  Getting kids to write, we all know, takes some work.

In his great book Wild Wisconsin Notebook, James Buchholz gives a wonderful written sketch of Raccoons, Nature's Masked Bandits. "The raccoon's uncanny ability to break into our food storage areas and carry off the bounty is almost legendary in our state park and forest campgrounds...one of the more unusual raccoon raids I've encountered during my years working as a ranger in state parks occurred at Devil's Lake State Park several years ago. The original complaint we received from the camper was that someone broke into his tent and stole his silver money clip and eighty dollars in cash. Upon investigation, I found a large hole chewed through the back of his tent and a long trail of potato chips, hot-dogs, buns, and eggs leading into a nearby forest–a typical raccoon burglary trademark. After a friendly lecture to the camper about keeping his food in his car rather than his tent, I helped him pick up the long line of food and litter. About two hundred feet from the campsite, I noticed a shiny object among the broken eggshells. Yup, there it was, the silver money clip intact with the missing eighty dollars. Apparently, the little masked bandits had finally moved up to petty theft of cash."

This little story happened to remind me of our very own inner-city, at-home raccoon network that seems to have made a den underneath a portion of our backcourt yard cement tiles.  Just last week, making a quick check whether the doors were locked in our car, I walked outside of the courtyard gate and stopped for a moment to the very subtle sound of sniffing in the thin line of bushes near the sidewalk. A I walked to the back of the car, must have been a very friendly raccoon, slunk underneath the car like a slinky shadow then disappeared somewhere over onto the other side. Living across the street from a river and a long line of oaks, I've come to realize that we literally live 'with' raccoons, but that we just don't see them that much.

With a little prompting, a few stories, maybe a Wild Wisconsin Notebook, the story of the raccoon can become one that tells an imaginative story, whether there is any banditing going on or not.

Option 5: Pick an animal to read about, set out chosen reading, and make it part of the "green hour" to read. Pick a series of human like characteristics or tendencies to apply to that animal. See if you can tell a story with a meaningful ending (allegory). On an art postcard, draw the animal on the front side as best as you can. On the backside, write your story.  If it doesn't fit on one, write down to "to be continued," at the bottom and continue during the next "green hour." Send these postcards to a relative.  More on allegory next option.

Riverside Ovens Test Kitchen:
Polenta with Fontina
and Roasted Vegetables

"What can be said about vegetables as a form of gastronomical entertainment is best said simply, since once past the basic behavior, all such recipes depend on you and what you need.
Almost all vegetables are good, although there is some doubt still about parsnips (which I share). [I am no longer doubtful. I know. And rutabaga has joined the exclusive group]."
      – MFK Fisher, from "How to Be Content with Vegetable Love"









There is a recipe for chicken pot pie that I have made now for over a decade – it is a family favorite and, once mastered, has become a repository of creativity in the kitchen. At its base it is a vegetable stew that is then placed inside its doughy shell (several ways to make this as well, but the refrigerated pie crust rolls work just fine in a hurry). The vegetables in this meal have rotated over the years depending on the visual feedback of family members. The time that I tried diced beets didn't bring much of a positive response; the flavor, as we might all agree, brings a very exclusive, earthy fabric that is difficult to match. But we then remember, as are swirling the beets around in the pot, that there is the domination of the red color dye that turns everything that makes contact with the beet a goopy red. The earthy flavors leech onto the innocent carrot. The green bean, already a neutral creature, disappears in to the redness.  No more beets, thank you.  The parsnip, however, is always welcome in moderation to the pot pie. Like the beet, the parsnip is the earth itself, and we sense, when we get that good square bite, that we are plucking it right from the ground and it adds a sort of legitimacy of interest to the chicken pot pie gravy...and it is not red. I have known contentment with the parsnip and rutabega.

The polenta and roasted vegetables dish could use some similar differentiation in pickings.  As we scan the ingredient components on the back of the polenta package, we see virtual zeros right down the line until fiber, of which there is some.  This is part of the allure of polenta: its what you put on top that

counts.  The recipe itself calls for "anything your heart desires," but suggests eggplant, summer squash, red onions, zucchini, bell pepper, then to be topped with parmesan and fontina cheese. In other words, the polenta is there as a comforting stabilizer so have fun with your chosen concoction above.  I decided that besides eggplant, summer squash, zucchini (I considered parsnip, but skipped it in this application), I wanted to cover the porridge with something bright and warm. I remembered a simple recipe for roasted tomato sauce out of Alice Waters' little recipe book called My Pantry, and so placed three and a half pounds of vine tomatoes into a baking dish with olive oil, several small sweet

peppers and some diced basil, let it bake for 45 minutes then placed it all in a blender for chosen texture. This would be my comfort cover over the top of the vegetables, over the top of the polenta, a sort of garden stew.

Polenta takes three minutes to boil. Water is just fine, but I could easily see adding any number of friends to the polenta for richness, like a dash or two of buttermilk towards the end of the congealing stage, a vegetable stock for some of the water, fresh herbs and a pinch of spice. I reused the same

baking pan that I had cooked the tomatoes in for the diced vegetables; a layer of oil, onion and tomato peel remained on the bottom as a base fond and the eventual roasted vegetables carried the tinge of flavor with it to the end.  I found that polenta, if not eaten immediately in its porridge state, will harden and become less inviting. At its initial cooked state, though, it can be swirled and mixed with sauce in a similar way that mashed potatoes can with gravy. Here, the acid of the tomato sauce and saltiness of the parmesan was nicely tamed by the natural neutral flavors of eggplant and summer squash, and combined nicely with the very neutral flavor of the polenta.  Comfort food at its best.  Warm, rich, layered texture, easy digestion, a 'meatless monday' option without even thinking about it.

Riverside Ovens Test Kitchen
Restaurant of the Year

"It is a Sunday evening in mid-June. the cafes of Cavaillon are crammed. There isn't an inch to park your car. The noise is tremendous. In the most possible of the hotels – it goes by the name of Toppin – all the rooms are taken by seven o'clock. But the little Auburge La Provencale in the rue Chabran is quite quiet and you can enjoy a good little dinner..." Elizabeth David, "The Markets of France: Cavaillon."





It is Sunday and what we found out by the menu, still brunch time as we seated outside in a gated sidewalk terrace along Church Street.  This little square area of downtown Evanston is quite hectic, parking also crowded, as it was in Cavaillon for David, and so the better to be on foot we have found in this area of town to pick and choose from what has begun to feel like twenty dining destinations all worth the while if for no better reason than to see the future of fine dining right here in the upper midwest.  That is precisely what you get at Farmhouse, a two-story masterpiece of food, decor, concept and service that stands out as a sort of culmination of all things trendy in the farm to table

revolution, including a tasteful nod to downplaying its very own self importance. In the end, a restauranteur wants a foodie to leave their place with a gravitational pull left in the back of the mind to return, for the food, for the space, for the service, not for the sake of fashion. Farmhouse achieves all of the undertones of successful fashion because underneath it all is a concept that makes sense: source all of your fresh food from a single farm and use them to create recipes that don't leap away from midwest fare but re-engage it, with an understated elegance.  For all of us who have thought of this very idea in restaurants previously – what happens if we take simple midwest cooking and turn it gourmet – well, we have finally found it and the executive chef, from small town Ohio, likely doesn't have to work hard at producing meals in this category. It is part of his upbringing.

A wonderful example was the brunch menu full of new takes on fairly popular midwest cuisine. I ordered the biscuits and gravy, with the hitch that the gravy be made from homemade, locally sourced short ribs, the dish covered by nearly poached local eggs, making a heaping portion of one of the

more savory, rich breakfast plates that I have ever had. A brief glance at the finished plate and one wouldn't necessarily hold it out as anything of a masterpiece, but once you get started you begin to taste the care of the biscuits themselves, the delicate cooking technique that leaves them still moist, flaky, and able to pull inside the white gravy above.  The dripping of the egg yolks over it all is almost too much and you are fairly convinced that you are eating dessert before the meal, but then look around the other tables at other plates and see that they are sharing the same experience.

On this visit the gravitational pull to return to the Farmhouse last somewhere around five hours.  A mere half a mile away from my hotel, the question becomes why not return here for a late dinner, check out the rotated menu and see how the farm looks by dim candles next to small vases full of pressed wildflowers?  The beer selection was the interesting beginning by two taps from the B Nektar Meadery, which produces wonderful honey based fermented and filtered ales, really a perfect sort of beverage to go along with the farmhouse concept. I ordered the duck confit, a dish of old world grains, Whiskey cherries, frisee, spicy duck and spicy backwoods mustard.  As so many of us duck lovers have come to find out over the years, duck is a very difficult and fickle piece of wild meat to cook well.  More than likely any technique of fast cooking is going to leave the duck dry, dense and, frankly (and unfortunately) wasted.  One of the reasons that I have skipped ordering duck at a variety

of past restaurants is that I just hate to see this beautiful wild bird wasted by a cooking process that doesn't work.  The confit process is by its very nature a purposefully patient technique, brining as early as a day before and then slow cooking.  By doing this, and by adding the right fats and juices (cherries here), the cook is likely able to manage the texture moment by moment, which is proper care, unlike with, say, a chicken thigh that can be handled quickly and can recuperate from a poor start on the frying pan.  The end dish was a real work of craftsmanship, where flavor and texture synchronize – the skin is crisp and seasoned, the meat flakes and is still moist. The surrounding flavors complement and add don't detract.  This, alongside a bee mead, was the best farm meal that I have ever had.  The success of the meal is experienced in circles of ambiance, from the nature of the dish and decor of the table, to the side rooms made by brand and classic farm art, to the open seating concept that allows farm goers to socialize.  Although all the outer details are well cared for, it is still the small hot plate of confit that will bring you back.

Last year's Restaurant of the Year Award went to the Driftless Glen out of Baraboo.  There, as at the Farmhouse, there is a thoughtfulness in dining creation that seems to transcend out of current fashion and to create the very epitome of it, as though examples of the ideal at all levels.  It will be very interesting to see next year's winner.