Week 39 - Nicolet NF, Wisconsin Rapids

Despite having done most of my packing the night before and being out of bed very early, I got into an enjoyable conversation with my hosts and didn't say goodbye and hit the road until after 9. The plan was to travel as far west as I could on Sunday, then take Monday to reach the middle of Wisconsin. I rode down to Kinross, and past the prisons and the Chippewa County International Airport (presumably with flights to Canada in better times), and worked my way southwest on farm roads. OsmAnd took me down yet another dead end called Dam Road, which was annoying, but it was a pretty place and I filed it away as a good area to camp in on future trips. Eventually I hit Route 2, which runs along the coast of Lake Michigan, and headed west alongside white sand beaches and blue water. The traffic was fast enough that I had to ride full throttle for long periods, and the wind was cold at that speed, but it also meant I was logging a lot of miles. I stopped for lunch and warmth at a friendly little diner in Naubinway, and then got back on the road. Once when I stopped for gas, there was another guy filling up a fully loaded Honda VFR1200F. We got to talking and he asked where I was headed. "Around the country," I said, to which he responded "Well, duh!" A refreshing change of pace from the usual "On that?!" Turns out he was nearly home from a 3000+ mile tour down to Colorado. He told me how leaning into the winds of South Dakota had made his tires wear unevenly, and his cellphone had been blown off into the ditch. While we were talking, another guy rode up on a fully loaded Honda. It was like a little convention! I got back on the road and blew past my original target of Cedar River, set the clock back as I crossed into Central Time, and ate dinner right across the Wisconsin border in Marinette.

From there I knew I could make it to Nicolet National Forest before dark. On the way I stopped for gas, checked my chain tension, and found that the chain adjustment nut on the right side had fallen off. This wasn't a case of not tightening things, because there's no way to make that nut any looser or tighter, it simply holds the chain in a certain position, and I guess the lock washer wasn't doing its job. Luckily I still had some spare M6 nuts on hand from the exhaust repair back in South Carolina; I put two on each side and jammed them together. Less convenient but more secure (at this point jam nuts and cotter pins are about the only locking systems I really trust). Well the chain had been running out of line for who knows how many miles; it wasn't in great shape and was making noise, but it was moving me along so I figured I'd take care of it later. I searched the map for places to camp and found a stub road that went off 64 toward the Oconto River. When I got there it looked like a river access that'd been blocked by fallen trees and abandoned, but it was flat and the remaining part was just long enough to hide me from the road. After I made camp I scouted around a little and found a rotting Forest Service signpost that had been knocked flat, with a yellow placard reading "No Camping Here", which I pretended not to have seen. Not that being hassled was very likely in a place so forgotten as to not even have any trash scattered around. I texted with a friend who was just coming out of a long period of struggle, and went to sleep happy, waking in the night to see a blurry moon behind the clouds and a single star.

I was up at dawn and headed south to Suring to get some breakfast at a small diner. They had a parking area for ATVs and Snowmobiles, which I thought was cool. Inside, the bar was filled with old men, and there was a large table with a group of middle-aged people chatting. I ordered potato pancakes and green tea (which I hadn't expected to find on the menu), and listened in. There was a lot more swearing than I'd expected to hear in the Midwest, so I guess my stereotypes are a bit out of date if they were ever right. One of the old guys wandered over from the bar and someone asked him, "How's that guy doing that was caught in that paper roller?" "Oh, they saved his arm so far, but he's had six or seven surgeries." Then the discussion moved back to small talk about the doings of the police force and the local parks reopening for the spring. While I was eating, I got a text from my friend DS, who I was heading down to stay with in Wisconsin Rapids. He told me about a park that I might like to see called Dells of the Eau Claire, so I recalculated my route to go there. It added about 30 miles to the trip, but recommendations from locals aren't to be discarded lightly so I decided to go.

And what a great decision that turned out to be! The new route took me northwest, at first through cornfields and dairy farms. The word that kept coming to mind was "wholesome", it was like I was riding into the graphics on a fancy carton of organic milk. The low morning light lit up tender sprouts of corn, planted in sinuous lines across the dark brown earth. The hedgerows converged on red barns and silos perched atop rolling grassy fields. Then I crossed into the Menominee Reservation, through some of the prettiest woods I'd ever seen, maple leaves fluttering fresh and green above, and the forest floor decorated with mossy rocks surrounded by ferns. Again, my navigation system led me to a dead end, although this time it couldn't have known because the road went through a swamp that had flooded it. I had to backtrack three miles, but again I didn't mind because it was such a pretty place. And the alternate route along an old logging track was even prettier. It didn't seem like many people passed this way; I rode over a fallen log and then stopped to clear it away for future drivers. When I got back to pavement, it was a section of 55 that twisted along beside the Wolf River with teasing glimpses of rushing water. Then it was back to miles of one-lane gravel roads through the forest, and I saw no vehicles except where people had parked their trucks to go fishing. Just after turning onto Pig Pen Road, I got caught in a deep rut and dropped Punkin, got back up, then did some water crossings and rode over the top of a fallen tree. This was real adventure riding! At several points along the trip, I thought to myself that even if the Dells sucked, it would have been worth it just for that ride. Perfect weather, lovely landscapes, no rush to be anywhere, and no worries in my mind... this right here was exactly why I was riding a slow little motorcycle.

And as a bonus, the Dells did not suck! It was a nice little park where the Eau Claire river winds through cuboid outcroppings of metamorphic rock, and has carved out potholes and a variety of other formations. I walked along the trail by the water, which went steeply up and down, sometimes showing a view up at the bluffs and sometimes down from on top of them. I ate my lunch high on a rock, watching the people and the river go by, and then got back on the road. I passed through Junction City of Hedwig fame and saw a couple in Western dress going down the street on horseback. After some more farm roads and county highways, I entered Wisconsin Rapids, passed the paper mill that had recently shut down (it made high-quality glossy paper for magazines, which is a declining market), and went through the downtown, then through the suburbs and back to county roads, and arrived at DS's place just after 3.

DS is a retired chiropractor and organic gardener who lives on 20 acres outside Wisconsin Rapids. I met him down in North Myrtle Beach, where he was spending the winter establishing a community garden and giving free chiropractic care to folks in the Meher Baba community. When I pulled up, he was sitting on his front porch and, having not seen Punkin back down south, he was surprised at how small it was. At least that cleared up the mystery of why it'd taken me all day to get there. We caught up for a little bit, then went over to meet his daughter ASA and son-in-law TA, who live about a mile away, and to look after some plants in the high tunnel on what remains of the farm that DS and TA used to run there. Then we stocked up on groceries, DS cooked me a delicious meal from his stockpile of homegrown produce, and we attended the weekly Zoom meeting that LS organizes from down in North Myrtle Beach. TM noted that I was "moving through the boxes" on the screen, and it's true, because the next major stop on my route plan will be in Montana with my friends SE and TB, who are also part of that group. While we were talking, thunder and hail swept through, beating against the skylights until we could barely hear the conversation. When I got up in the night, I was mystified by the white patches around my tent, but in the morning light they turned out to be little piles of pea-sized hailstones, still unmelted.

On Monday morning, we went to visit DS's old chiropractic office, which he designed and had built in the late 90s. Chiropractic care is quite the family business, DS's father was a chiropractor and so are two of his brothers and a niece. Also two of his daughters (ASA and MS) are chiropractors, and they took over his old practice when he retired. They'd just moved their office from the upper story of the building to the lower story, so the upper story could be rented out to a psychotherapy practice. Over the course of the week I learned a lot about the history and culture of chiropractic, and later got to watch ASA do an adjustment on DS, which was extremely quick and efficient despite her stopping to explain things to me. When we got back to the house, I worked from the backyard, which was lovely. A stray kitten, orange with a white belly, passed through the woods mewling with hunger, but he ran away when I tried to approach. I had been planning on heading to North Dakota the following weekend, but some work-related factors, and the consideration that I could use a restful weekend for once, made me decide to stay for two weeks instead. It didn't hurt that the weather was gorgeous, with highs in the 80s and lows in the 50s, and not at all humid (at least according to this southern boy). The mosquitoes hadn't even emerged yet, so I could spend most of my time outside on the shady grass. I did some cooking (and now that I've showed my hand at that I'll probably have to be the cook for the rest of my stay here :-). Not that it'll be much of a burden given the quality of ingredients on hand: ranks of home-canned tomatoes, pickles, and okra, freezers packed with homegrown produce, jars of seeds and nuts, and a good portion of a local grass-fed cow.

I got to see a cheese-making operation with long stainless steel vats the size of a school bus, stirred by massive blades travelling back and forth on tracks, while people in white coats dumped 5-gallon buckets of salt into the curd. We also visited the Rudolph Grotto Gardens, one of the most magnificent pieces of folk art I've ever seen. It's a sort of shrine built between 1927 and 1982 by a succession of Catholic priests and one lay helper, inspired by the one at Lourdes in France. Most of it is made from the local reddish igneous rock, dry-stacked, mortared, or laid into concrete domes and arches, with accents done in tile work and opaque chunks of multicolored furnace glass. There's a tiny chapel made from notched logs, which would give the "smallest church in America" a run for its money in the size department, and is certainly prettier inside (following my general impression that Catholic churches tend to have better architecture than their Protestant counterparts). But the main attraction, for which a $3 ticket is required, was the "Wonder Cave", a tunnel that winds for half a mile below grade and up through an artificial hill, lined with dioramas illuminated by multicolored lamps and biblical quotes meticulously punched out in sheets of metal and lit from behind. Artificial stalactites hung from above in places. Some sections of the ceiling were painted, each rock blue with a white pinstripe around it or red with a yellow pinstripe, perhaps illustrating an ascent into heaven or a descent into hell; it was a simple but surprisingly potent effect. When the tunnel emerged on top of the mound, the path wound down through exuberant plantings, past benches for quiet contemplation and a colorful mosaic sundial. The path and everything else was laid out in an organic way, without any simple geometry that I could discern, and for me this really added to the charm of it. A lot of so-called "sacred geometry" leaves me cold (maybe it's too cerebral or generic), but this bore the strong imprint of the handful of individuals who designed and built it, and it warmed my heart to imagine the generations of aging men puttering over it for half a century. In other words it had a great deal of the Gothic nature in it. The scale of the 7.5 acre grounds alone is remarkable given how few people were responsible; over the years they collected thousands of tons of rock that farmers had pulled out of the ground to make room for the plow. Anyhow I would say it's very much worth the visit if you're in the area and like that sort of thing.

To sum up, Wisconsin is very beautiful, I'm eating well, sleeping well, and generally enjoying life a lot.

Things I Learned

• Restaurant stops are a great time to clean my visor, because napkins and water are always provided and I can lay on the soaked napkin for a long time to loosen up all those dried bug carcasses. There are a heck of a lot of bugs on the road up north in the spring!
• Post-pay gasoline is a thing up here, and it seems like every place I've stopped that doesn't have credit card readers lets you pump first and then pay, whereas I've literally never seen that on the east coast. I wonder if it's a sign of a more high-trust culture.
• I read a review of a restaurant that went something like: "the furniture is a bit run down, but I don't mind because it keeps away the yuppies and the FIBs." Apparently that acronym is local to these parts and stands for F**king Illinois Bastards.
• Where I'm staying is on the edge of Wisconsin's sand plains, which formed the bottom of a large glacial lake during the last ice age. So the soil is sandy and the landscape very reminiscent of a coastal plain, with many pine canopies and clean-looking, well-drained forest floors. There are a lot of potato fields in the area, but also some more surprising crops like cranberries and ginseng.

Wonderful Things

• Digging into a really good philosophical conversation or a simple but satisfying meal.
• Napping under a shade tree on a warm afternoon.
• Watching a deer and a wild rabbit feeding together on the far side of the field.