"On Reddit, someone theorized that, during the preparation of hot chicken, 'the oil combines with the chili to make some kind of undigestible lava.'" 

– Paige Williams, from "The Spice Trade"

March 12, 2021

If you haven't had a chance to travel to Nashville recently to try the famous hot chicken profiled  in "The Spice Trade," that seems understandable seeing as cross-country culinary travel is not advisable. The hope is though, for those of us stranded in winter Wisconsin, that hot chicken finds you from some local menu still open for safe entry. I found it by pure happenstance only four nights ago and it's more than a little possible that a smudge of cayenne is still glowing like lava under a cuticle or two.  That's not to say that the number one entree listed at Cafe Benelux, located in the Historical Third Ward, Milwaukee – directly kitty corner from the Public Market – was a disappointment in any way, taste, or form, but that it is far easier to read about hot adventures than to go through them yourself. The visual of the arriving plate at Benelux was nearly identical to a variety of other pics you find for the dish – a glistening slathering of deeply bumpy ruby sauce that is, at first glance, noticeably gooyier than any standard bbq. The description above of 'lava' seems well justified. And yet the knowledge that this should pack plenty of heat seems tamed by the fact that there is brown sugar in there also... how bad can this be, sweet should salve anything. A little metal cup of cool pickles is set alongside for safety sake as well as nice green-centric bowl of house potato salad. A glass of ice water tends to sit up at the neck of the plate and if need be a Tandem Double at 7 percent ABV offers palate diversion. There are three legs. They are each the kind of tender we all wish for as the fork slides down the bone to unfurl the core meat. The skin and the hot sauce has become one and textures are simply fun. However, by leg two, there seems to be a heat-trap that has been set-up in your mouth wittingly. By bite two on leg two something has established in your mouth that can't be reversed, a kind of heat-in-motion momentum that is at once cravingly wonderful to the point of addiction but also something to be avoided, similar to running toward fire. "Would you like some of my chicken" I ask my daughter, now that I realize I have plenty to go around. Young, sharp, and prepared always for my own culinary mischief, she says, "sure, I would love to try just a touch," as she peels the chicken away from the sauce and eats the meat, yes, but the skin stays put on the dish. Although she did not get much by way of lava, there was enough there, set deep in the meat, for the 14 year old reaction. "What is in there, is that, like, sugar, oooh." I say, "I don't know, the menu doesn't say." Later, a slice of carrot cake comes out, caramel lined and coconut frostinged, a more pure sugar sans cayenne and all will be well again for her anyway. I, on the other hand, could at certain times of the following day still taste hot and sunny Nashville.

A Friend Beside Me

"...a friend beside me whom I do not see
without words making it come clear to me
the youth of heaven the ages of light"
– Merwin from "At Night Before Spring"










Owl Down

As important to know owl
that soft bunch of wind blown feather
who must have slipped the night before
perhaps the light of the road
was lower than that of the moon
I suspect a car or two passing above
and the silver sheen of old snow
had found it lying along dead oak
nothing more than new weight
a glove from a hand dropped
and as I pass watching another silver
curve of cloud above in blue
I sense before I arrive here the woods
know less than I do so still and numb
my bones of the same trunk
and of the same of half froze cones
that stand tilted submerged near owl
the eyes of an island of all living
opened as if a map to a hollow
near as bone and timber and lost
untold dreams of dark mice singing

Enter the Driftless

"The tempest being over, I waited till the floods of rain had run off the ground, then took leave of my friends, and departed. The air was now cool and salubrious, and riding seven or eight miles, through a pine forest, I came to Sapello bridge, to which the salt tide flows."
– from Bartram's Living Legacy









The little local side trips of life can mean the difference between sulking boredom and an immediate spiritual lift. Watch how you nearly, sometimes, have to drag yourself up and into a coat, hat and gloves, pack the dog, and get in the car for even the shortest of drives during the dreary, post white winter months. We all know time itself stands a little stiller in February, March, April and at least the TV is still showing us sharp images of things. Indeed, I just last night finished a contemporary documentary movie following a mother and daughter who decided to walk and ski back country from Vancouver Canada to Skagway Alaskay over a series of several months. The footage was, of course, distinct, raw and exhilarating from right there at the couch. This morning is so bland and gray that I have already begun to devise my plan for yanking myself out into it, run the dog along Picnic Point, listen for incoming birds of any color, and watch water from afar. The domestic traveler has to do many many things to recreate in the smallest ways that which we watch on our screens. Who doesn't wrestle with the mismatch of abundance offered on screen versus the seeming dirth of a midwestern spring. Nonetheless, as I know, only twenty minutes out on trail, head phones off, even the gray world will come alive and a certain spirring of the spirit will invariably come.

Only two weeks ago I did some of this initial self-dragging. I was in Onalaska visiting; this is smaller city set right along the Mississippi and surrounded by the great chain of bluffs. It takes very little time to get onto one of these bluff sides and start your way up relatively mild climbs through nearly always accommodating forests, really some of the most hospitable countryside one could possibly imagine. There has always been a favorite rock that we liked to hike up to for years. Access can be fairly easy as a new conservancy allows for parking half way up a bluff at a cul de sac, a great route for a very quick nature dose. The trail immediately begins as an invitation; it is an old farm log road and winds through a remnant oak opening – those that would have virtually defined this entire area two hundred years ago; and in fact the LaCrosse area used to be called Prairie La Crosse, and if you had sidled up to the downtown shoreline hundreds of years ago, by most accounts, you would have not seen a tree for miles, all sand and prairie. Now to find prairie you have to find the little remaining pockets left, very few natural occurring without maintained tractor trimming or burning. As quickly as I can I turn on the old farmer persona and wonder what it might have been like to push cattle up this higher road for grazing or storage. These particular set of bluffs at Greens Coulee would have been empty except for a smattering of homesteads; they are now suburbs, lined at every amenable slot by large houses, but the rolling contours still visible, beautiful, and full of life above the building ground. A short walk takes you up to the always diverse ridge lines of these bluffs where a new semi-micro climate of growth often begins – the standard basswood, maple, elm forest transforms some to birch and scrub pines as well as juniper low lying along the ground. The crown jewel of the bluff works though is always the sandstone. Small cairns or quarries might appear, as it does just one lobe away from here at a primary quarry of old, which now looks like a cut out dome with park table and fire pit for the casual visitor.

My rock is a windswept head with neck. It's the only of its kind in the area the I know of. How it has maintained itself over all this time is hard to know, but it stands out as foreign to the landscape, not by coloration, but that it looks like its directly out of somewhere at Arches National Park, a fairly slender base that then forms to an eight by eight rock head. You can climb it with ease and sit on its titled but flat surface and watch the entirety of the valley. I give myself five minutes to sit and breath it in, watch my breath, remember the snapshot, and realize at that very moment that this could serve as its own footage of the drift less region, the scenes dramatic enough to capture anyone's attention. It took me approximately twenty minutes to get here. I have the bluff to myself. I see the roads below at the food of the neighborhoods. One or two people walking past the last red barn in the area. Cars to and fro.

Enter the Driftless

"Both agree that human mechanisms of perception, stunted as they are by screens of social training that close out all but the practical elements in the sensory barrage, give a very limited picture of existence, which certainly transcends mere physical evidence." – Mathiessen, from The Snow Leopard









March 23

Sometimes you can follow along your handheld weather predictions so closely as to lay wasted a tomorrow's trip – as you see the symbol for clouds and rain, you might decide that is that and cancel before the day has even begun. I had already written yesterday off as another in a long line of cloudy and mercurial days; it is old winter now, only a couple of days ago from the official day of spring and as anyone who has lived in the heart of the upper drift less, weather here does not spoil you. That utterly lush growing ability of the midsummer breadbasket at this time of year is one long extended blanket of beige of fields of either corn cob or weighed down field grasses. The golden rod has still held its shape but it too blends in with the blandest of coloration. And so the surprise to wake to the luxury of vast sunshine borders on the truly religious. I, like others I presume, work relatively hard at maintaining the spiritual commitment to life-as-gift, but that most certainly comes easier when a fresh and thin snow has covered the surfaces of all things late night and now the sun turns it to a blaze. You wish, as always, that you could simply save this screen of life, hold it forever, and watch the eagles do their methodical dives down onto the edge of a sparkling patch of ice on the bay and call it up for whenever we need.

This has been a lonely and long old winter. The virus has indeed taken much of our recreation away from us. Not just the bars and restaurants and the retail outlets, but moreso, an attitude of the days a gifts. We endure them now at home; I regularly think of those who have not the outdoors to keep them company and have to say I wish every person in the drift less would take these hours on a sunday to dress up, take a hike up any one of these bluffs, and enjoy this blaze of the drift less. It doesn't take much. I sense that we have relegated this spirit of a love affair with creation to some very small venues and portions of our lives. If we were trending in the direction to adore creation, this earth, the nature that it is, and ourselves as part of it and in it, our news ways and media ways would be singing right now with the voices of the exalted participants of the world. I usually get to my trails here in the coulee region only to find the spare footprints before me. Yesterday I arrived at my quarry trail head and found three cars parked in the lot already! By the end, as I returned back to my car, the lot was full; the sound of children happily screaming in the back ground. They might not articulate it as such, but that walk they just took up this steep hill up through the ridge lines to either side, was of the spiritual; the scenes, perhaps not entirely accounted for and registered on any sheet or app, would carry the imagination through for days. Nothing out here is of one dimension; no pixels; no fingers across small and reduced screens. But here is the rub: you, and others, have to be willing to place the proper clothes on your back, set aside a few hours, park at an enjoyable spot, and then walk up that hill despite any vocal backlash. Now repeat and repeat and repeat and you will have yourself a spiritual practice, what our ancestors would have only partially taken for granted. To be outside would have been understood day to day; but that doesn't mean they would have taken for granted the gift of the growth alongside them.  Does anyone truly spend much of their time in such a domain of gratitude for our various live-in screens. You see, they have become nature of old; but their case, they do not grow, live, flap in the wind, snow or bless with sunshine.

The first steps are steep along this old quarry road. This would have been a steady stream of traffic in the old days – quarry equipment, bulldozers, conveyors and of course the heavy rock dump trucks. The road is considerably well built with its own curb along the edge side and built to last. You can't tell just how much they had to dig out of the side of the bluff to get the flat road, but this is truly a primary quarry within the region and no doubt helped build thousands of roads over the years. When you begin to see the results of years of digging away at the sandstone left and right, all around you, you have to take your own spiritual inventory for such things, such extraction. You look back down to your own car and you have to make a little argument with yourself: if you want to give up your car and not worry anymore about the nice smooth roads that you drive on, then it is time decry the quarries. Until then, it is still worth while to think of rock memories; any devastation of such an enormous resource will have some effect on the memory of stone. It is a perfect an example of the anthropocine as you can get, really, for what we are talking about is the human transformation of entire ecostructures and yes, this one could be seen from space. Ironically, what the digging and the transformation of the ecostructures have given in its place are some sheer sandstone cliffs rarely if ever seen on a standard bluff hike. Most ridges rise up at the top by only a small number of feet, but because much of the ridgeline in place has been dug up to its edge, it has left the bluff looking something more like mountain, and I want badly to do some climbing.

Spring to Come

"The first fact on January third
is the fact of winter,
more than dead banks, lost wars,
violence erupting here and there."  – Holm, from "Winter Facts"










Against the orders of a new world,
we set out on a short trip,
out onto the periphery of city,
where bald cornfields lay decrepit;
no TV screen was going to duplicate
what we see as our midwestern
ancestors still move through those scenes,
rough clothes, dour lips, hats,
cold days and minds in the wet.
We keep going through the years.
Let us go way back to geology.
Does anyone else's mind work like this?
Time is the new exploration
if your imagination has not yet halted.
Ridgeline of sandstone carry off
in every direction outside of Barre.
Forests, leafless, stick out like stubble
off the dreary cheeks of hillsides.
We have music inside the car,
so we are safe, hold back the boredom,
"who do you think would make a good farmer?
what do people do all day in the country?"
Rise up through the near dead fauna.
Blessings of green scattered
here in there under old invasives.
I pose the question whether all this would
look more fun from three thousand feet.
I point out a circling eagle.
Have you ever seen how the steely
sharpness of the eye wondering nothing?

No, This Can't
be the Place

"No, this can't be the place, but it must be
the road that leads there, always beginning
when morning is slow and hazy, suffering to
get somewhere..."  – Angell, from "The River Has No Hair to Hold Onto"











It's always true that your day could
start with a long drive past the grocery lot
you want to see if every last stall is full
and can see by the packages of toilet paper
walking out this won't be your day

because it is right there, always at the crosshairs
of your go to anchor store
and the highways a thousand feet away
that the woods sit somehow empty,
bombarded by spring detritus, that temptation

reigns, that somewhere out on that long trail
that cuts through the marsh, past the refinery
that mills the stone from the bluffs,
there is one bicyclist brave enough to live,
and right now feels the cold wind tickle her eyelids.

Yesterday I admit. I had my moment.
A ghost of self, the real you, something
that knows something of the ancients,
drove straight past the auto doors of grocery
and found itself at the edge of bluff.

I snuck out of this car. Houses moaned nearby.
They live inside said dream of escape.
How dare the bluebird sing, duck and weave,
my little blue frisbee, beautiful as a word,
alive, honing its color off a drab pallette

that it all came alive; kids' eyes along the moss.
Thank you green blanket, thank wind
creeping the shifting of the misplaced cedars,
thank you darkish knoll where time reads.
Thank you to this wind-swept rock I climb

at the top of the ridge where the eagle flies
and knows it as a planted fractal in the mind.
You get your toilet paper and stock it in the hutch.
Someone inside me leapt out cried dry.
Always suffering to get somewhere else.

Utopia Rock

"When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you."
– Merton, from March 11








March 15

Days come where, despite any downtrodden spring weather, the mind the soul the body will tell you, similar to seeking vitamins or water, that it is time be out on some trail where you will find rocks and sky and even leafless underbrush. There are the same series of trails here in the back coulees that I have walked for twenty some years. The area is all old farm and therefore lined by native trails that cut up along hillsides until they reach the ridgelines which overlook, in this part of the area anyway, the great and vast Mississippi watershed. Time moves on. Hikes do indeed look similar. Yesterday I parked at a small cul de sac which both invited walkers but warned off the parking of the car and dogs; I dare say that I played minor infractor, parked, took the dog up a wide old cattle trail through a nice dense forest up to my own favorite rock that I of in the coulee area. I might give it a name, but that can't matter. It has held us many times, much like a palm rising up from the mossy ridgeline, like a spiral with a giant head. You can just reach one jut out of a step at its side, position yourself, then leap up and you are standing ten feet up on the face of it looking out over neighborhood, river, bluffs to the backside. Is this enough for utopia? I sense there is only one left. The concerns of city has nearly taken our mental wherewithal. We pass such trailheads as these and hundreds of others as if ancient relics. Forget our imagination of those who lived right here and used these trails daily for pasture, some crops, and firewood. You sense that we have passed a spot where we recognize ourselves. Is that safe to say? That is all I want. I want to recognize the species. God, nature, eastern thought, it all has to have somethings in common: a mind interested in deeper engagement than the things we call modern and mechanical life. Merton, upon the life of brotherhood, still seeks it himself; I think it may be time for religious life.