En route to Cincinnati. Still winter! Actually , the next four days in Cincinnati, Nashville and Memphis are going to be in the 40s. Hopefully no snow.

Tomorrow we leave for our cross country trip from upstate New York to southern California. Looking forward to saying goodbye to winter for a bit. We planned 10 stops: Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Austin, Big Bend National Park, El Paso, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and San Diego. Excited to share our trip with you!

We have arrived home safely after our 3,500 mile trip. We had a really great trip, but I have to say there is nothing like leaving to make us really appreciate home. I realize that we see more wildlife here than we did on our trip.  Something I have taken for granted. We also had a great sleep in our own bed the first night home, something most of us experience. I must say it is much quieter here than in most campgrounds!

There is no place like home, but Ithaca is truly an exceptional place. It was chosen as prettiest place in New York by Architectural Digest magazine. Living in such a special place makes it really nice to come home. We should explore this area with the same enthusiasm as when we travel.  Signing off until the next adventure!

We visited the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison. While we are not impressed with the politics currently going on in the building with Governor Scott Walker at the helm, the building itself is awe-inspiring.

Being in the building has made us reflect on the curious political history of Wisconsin, one of extremes. It has swung wildly from leftist to far right politics several times in its history.

The state started off with very left-leaning politics. In 1854, six years after Wisconsin was granted statehood, what was to become the national Republican Party was formed in Wisconsin by anti-slavery activists. The new party was formed to fight for the rights of African Americans and abolish slavery. The newly formed Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln won. Republicans dominated congress, forcing “radical reconstruction” policies for the south after the civil war and passing the 13h, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution granting full human rights to everyone. Sadly, that tremendous progress was very short lived. It is sad to reflect on what this party stands for today in the era of Trump.

At the turn of the 20th century, Wisconsin was a model for democratic leadership. The progressive movement, which took root here, fought corporate power, political machines and political corruption. They advocated for average working people and championed women’s suffrage.

Then, in the late 1947, Joseph McCarthy was elected U.S Senator from Wisconsin. He was the face of the oppressive anti-communist campaign that resulted in many progressive politicians, movie stars, artists and others to be defamed and lose their reputations and jobs. McCarthy was a demagogue who sowed fear through reckless, unsubstantiated accusations on his political opponents. He was eventually censured by the Senate and died a lonely death as an alcoholic.

In 1958, the Appleton John Birch Society carried on McCarthy’s paranoid anti-communist witch hunt. In their pamphlet, The Politician, written in 1963, they claimed that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist tool.

Meanwhile, Milwaukee, just 100 miles south of Appleton, had a strong socialist labor union tradition brought by German immigrants. Milwaukee elected socialist mayors for 50 years. Socialist Frank Zeidler served as mayor from 1948-60, and oversaw the construction of the County Stadium, library and park expansions, and the creation of a public television station. 

Recent history as seen another swing to the right. The current Governor Scott Walker, was elected in 2010, and almost immediately unveiled a fiscally conservative budget catering to the interests of his wealthiest backers and removing many of the collective bargaining rights so dear to Frank Zeidler’s socialists. Walker’s budget prompted hundreds of thousands of protesters to descend on the Capitol where they occupied the rotunda and marched in circles around the building, chanting “This is what democracy looks like”. More than 900,000 signatures were collected against Walker, and the governor faced a recall election in 2012, which he survived.

In spite of, or perhaps because of the right wing politics at the state and national level, there is a movement afoot in Wisconsin for local control of the economy in the form of cooperatives. In both Madison and Milwaukee, there has been an increase in all kinds of cooperatively run businesses offering an economic alternative to traditional capitalism.

It makes sense for us all to pay attention to what happens in Wisconsin. Is it a harbinger of what is to come nationally?

We camped at Mirror Lake State Park near Baraboo where it was cold (31 degrees) and raining again.

Sebby met us for a hike around Devil’s Lake in Baraboo. It was so nice to see him again!

The purple and green quartzite bluffs around the lake are over 1 billion years old!

One thing we have discovered on this trip is that we are fair weather campers! Too old for camping in this weather! We are looking forward to a warm dry airbnb in Madison tonight!

We are staying for two nights at an airbnb in the town of Showana, Wisconsin about 40 miles northwest of Green Bay. It feels nice to warm up and dry out after our camping adventure in the North woods. The next town, Keshena, is tribal headquarters and ancestral homeland for the 8,500 members of the Menominee Tribe. We stopped at the Menominee Culture and Logging Camp Museum on the reservation. The museum is home to artifacts the Menominee have repatriated through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It was interesting to learn about their culture, agricultural and forestry practices from the Menominee perspective. We have much to learn from them because they have been practicing sustainable agriculture for thousands of years.

We were invited to the Community Harvest Feast on the reservation on Saturday. We were told they will serve buffalo burgers, squash soup grown from seeds that have been passed down for 800 years and other traditional dishes. Unfortunately, we will miss it because we are moving on to Mirror Lake State Park nearer to Madison.

We toured the College of the Menominee Nation (CMN). According to their website, “CMN degree programs, research, and student activities are committed to addressing contemporary problems through modern science and methodologies that are informed by ancient knowledge.” I wonder if Cornell University American Indian Studies curricula (and other degree programs) are also informed by ancient indigenous knowledge?

Looking forward to Sebby joining us at the campground tomorrow!

We took a short trip to Sault Ste. Marie on the Canadian Border. As you can see on the map, the four locks here open up strategic shipping routes between three great lakes bringing iron ore and grains east to Detroit and Cleveland. The St. Mary river has rapids here, making the river impassible to large ships prior to the locks. Chippewa Indians, the first settlers of the area, fished the rapids, and are still the primary commercial fisherman of the area. We watched a large ship pass through the locks. Quite impressive!

One of the unintended consequences of increased access to shipping is the introduction of unwanted aquatic species. Cornell researchers recently identified a new invasive in western Lake Erie that they have never seen this far North. The origins and possible effects of this organism remains a mystery.