Under the Baobab Tree

I arrived at the manufacturing facility where my meetings were being held. Across the street was a industrial brewery. Next door was a Midas muffler suppler (not customer service place, the supplier). There were piles of black snow in the parking lots of these one story industrial buildings. The driver said, "are you sure this is the place?" Oh yes! This looks just right!

I walked in to the corrugated tin temporary-looking "office" building and walked into the coffee room where I saw three men. One nice big burly manly man and two scrawny men. I said, "ah, you must be my men?" They said they were. The manly man was the general manager of the manufacturing facility, scrawny man A was another lawyer, scrawny man B was a scientist. I asked the manly man, "Why is a Middleton a separate town from Madison and which was here first?" He did not know. I started looking for half-and-half for my coffee and he directed me to the non-dairy creamer. "How can you be in Wisconsin and serve me non-dairy creamer?" He said that was a good point and he hadn't thought of that before. He smiled like Santa Claus the whole time. He kind of looked like Santa Claus too, if Santa Claus were still in his mid-40s. I liked him very much.

Santa Claus looked out the window and saw someone coming across the parking lot. "This must be the fourth person you're waiting for? I'm guessing because he's in a suit and carrying a skinny suitcase which isn't normal around here." It was indeed our Fourth Man, another lawyer. He quickly removed his tie.

I kept chattering on about Middleton and what I had learned about Madison yesterday. I described my "Thank you, but I'm having butter" refrigerator magnet. I talked about the Dairy Queen in her milk-colored dress. I said Wisconsin earth is very black. He said, "yes! Our earth is very black. In fact, the next town to the West is called Black Earth, Wisconsin!" I said the place was practically swimming in agricultural products. I said I had consumed "locally sourced mustard" the night before at dinner, which was very good. "Ah! Mustard! Do you like mustard?" Santa Claus asked? Apparently there is a Mustard Museum in Middleton. I am SO disappointed that I didn't know that before because I would have gone there in an instant. I feel cheated.

We took our non-dairy creamer and went upstairs where we locked ourselves in a conference room for the next 8 hours. People came in to talk to us about a number of things mainly having to do with some Western Blot results. Our scientists taught us all about Western Blots and then we looked at a bunch of digital photos of Western Blots and we learned that they are washed in milk and then some sort of horse radish concoction and then they are laminated and pasted into a book. We looked at all the books. We learned everything there was to know about how to perform and read a Western Blot test.

We interviewed four separate people all about the blots. As one of us lawyers began to fade the other would pick it up and keep asking about blots. We asked about failed blots, successful blots, good blots, bad blots, missing blots, super-charged blots, wasted blots, and destroyed blots. At one point when I was leading the questioning -- the topic was proper methods for destroying failed blots -- I said something like, "so, you get a bad blot back and you toss it, destructamundo, and then you redo the sample, or the vial, or whatever you call it, right?" I turned to our scientists and said, to the side with a slight wave of my hand, "am I using the right terminology here?" meaning sample versus vial, of course. He looked at me and said, "destructamundo? sure."

We had lunch brought in and I ate four chocolate cookies the size of my head and one vegetarian sandwich (frowned upon in Wisconsin)

The room got hotter and hotter. Our "interviewees" got more and more technical. At this point we were talking about centrifuges and elutions and ELISA assays and prions. The room got hotter. Way hot. The receptionist came in and said my car was waiting to take me home. We finally stopped.

We walked across the hall to Santa Claus's office and said, "Okay, we're done." Done? he said? "Yes, we're all blotted out. Totally blotto." I guess he hears that all the time because he didn't laugh. He had an empty container of "mixed nuts" on his cabinet and I asked him if that was symbolic. He explained that people gave him empty "mixed nuts" containers all the time and while I was starting to giggle he said he kept bullets in them. Oh. Don't mess around with a manly Wisconsin man. He is a "competitive pistol shooter." I made some grammar jokes. "Are the pistols competitive? Or are YOU competitive?" Santa Claus told me he'd tell me all about it when I came back to visit the Middleton Mustard Museum. Our scientists laughed pretty hard at the competitive pistols and mixed nut containers.

I gave my a client a ride to the airport in my car and the whole way we talked to the driver about the Middleton Mustard Museum. Turns out he was from Osh Kosh. "Gosh! Osh Kosh!" I said. No response. ?! I asked him if Osh Kosh was on a lake. He said yes, Lake Winnebago. I asked him if Lake Winnebago was named after the RV or vice versa. He said neither, it was named after the Indian tribe. I asked him how big it was. He did not know. He said, 'that's pretty lame, I should know." I asked him if he could see across it. Yes. "So then it's less than 7 miles wide." "How do you know that?" he said. "The horizon is seven miles away so if it were wider you couldn't see across it." I have no idea if this is really true but I heard it somewhere once and amazingly every time I pull out this fact about how far away the horizon is, I turn out to be right. My driver looked on his GPS and said, "wow, you're right, it's 6.3 miles wide." How long is it? I asked. "Gosh! I don't know that either!" He said. So I continued -- is it more than 7 miles long? yes. Is it long like an eggplant or long like a baguette? "It's not that long, it has bumps. Like a pear," he said. A Bartlett pear or a Japanese pear? Silence. "Would you say it is more of a gourd shape?" Yes! It's a gourd shape. "You really know your lakes," he said.

So that settles that.

And as luck would have it, the Madison-Middleton-airport-Madison round trip means that I have now circumnavigated Lake Mendota. My work here is done.

P.S. My Dad reports that today is the anniversary of James Madison's birthday -- 1751.

After the war, he went to Madison, Wisconsin, on the GI bill with his young wife. He rowed for the crew team on Lake Mendota, cruised around the lake shores and the beautiful deep green farm lands in some big boat of an American-made car, occasionally went to class, and worked as a short-order cook in a cafeteria for the huge numbers of veterans at the university on the GI bill. In January of his first year in Madison, his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy, my Dad. The family story is that someone offered Grandpa a good deal on the cost of the birth if he would let the medical school students watch. So, he would claim in his later years, around the family Thanksgiving table, that my Dad was born in a giant medical school theatre with droves of red-faced Wisconsin youths looking on. My grandmother didn't know anything about it until it was over. She never forgave him.

Sixty-five years later I find myself here in Madison to check out a manufacturing facility that makes thrombin out of ground bovine lungs.

Madison is a little town built on an isthmus between two big, beautiful lakes (Mendota and Menona). The isthmus bends a little bit to make a very flat "V" shape of land. The state capitol building is at the point of the V. To the east along the isthmus are big old houses, long straight avenues, a big Kraft Oscar Meyer plant, and the Dane County Regional Airport. To the west along the isthmus is State Street which goes downhill and dead ends at the University which continues up Bascom Hill, which is a pretty steep little knoll on top of which stands Bascom Hall. It is at the same elevation as the Capitol building. They are the two high points of town. State Street is a walking street, closed to traffic. When the snow is down, you can sled down the Capitol hill straight down State Street all the way to the bottom where you will run into people sledding down from the top of Bascom Hill in the opposite direction. I imagine that sort of thing has been going on since the town was built, right before the Civil War.

To the north of it all is Lake Mendota which at the moment is frozen solid all the way across. My cab driver said that people cut across the lake on skis in the winter but don't skate because the ice is too bumpy. There is ice fishing and ice sailing. To the south is Lake Menona about which I know nothing.

The people here sound like the Norwegian Lutherans on A Prairie Home Companion. The local men are big and jolly and have red cheeks and solid frames and Viking-type hair and wear red and black plaid shirts and work boots and Carharts and smoke foul smelling cigarettes. My cabbie was this archetypal Wisconsin Man. I know he was an Archetype because he kept popping up all over town. The same man. I swear. He was my cabbie. Then later I saw him working as the cashier in the University book store. Then after that he ran over to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, where he was a docent, and later still he was working his fourth job at the State Historical Museum.

Madison is beautiful. So is Wisconsin. I spent four hours walking all around the University and the museums and learned the following:

• Madison is named after James Madison. Duh.
• Wisconsin used to be called New France. Duh.
• The soil here is black black black. Literally. Black. Not like the red clay or brown earth we have in Maryland.
• The cows are black and white. Never brown. Ever.
• John Muir went to the University here and this is apparently where he first fell in love with trees, etc. There is a memorial to him on a promontory over the lake on top of Bascom Hill.
• I have seen only white people since I arrived. Although a card in my room tells me that "Mohammed" is my "maid."
• The first use of the big field that is now the football field at Camp Randall was to recruit soldiers for the Civil War. Later it was a prison for Confederate soldiers. Later it was a drilling ground for WWI soldiers. In my grandfather's time it was used for ROTC. Now it is The Home of the Badgers.
• There's an entire book devoted to the Rock Shards of Central Wisconsin. It's a field guide to Indian spear heads and the like.
• The University seems devoted to water. There's a big ornate Victorian red brick building right by the water with big white brick letters on it that say Science Hall. Between that and the lake are two separate "water laboratories" and all the chairs at the student union along the lake were donated by a "water scientist" of some renown (don't remember his name). The airport has a big satellite photo of the little Madison isthmus surrounded by the lakes that happen at that moment to be suffering from a massive algae bloom that shows up as fluorescent green on the picture.
• There are lots of excellent second hand bookstores on State Street. I went into two. I saw all sorts of fabulous books and I almost bought a bunch until I remembered I already had all those same books at home.
• Students dress abominably and look too young to be allowed out without supervision. They are pupae. Without all their fingers and toes yet.
• I almost bought a book in the State Historical Museum that tells you how to distill almost anything from almost any kind of vegetable.
• I did buy a refrigerator magnet that says, "Thank you, but I'm having butter."
• The men in Madison, even the non-locals, are more manly than the men in DC. They have muscles and jaws and shoulders and they are weathered and alert and they speak in complete sentences.
• Madison was voted the Best Place to Live in America in 2003.

Madison seems very very safe. It is a beautiful little town nestled in the middle (literally) of two big beautiful lakes that are surrounded by county after county of lush, rich, dark green, fertile, productive, farm land. These beautiful green counties are themselves in between two much bigger beautiful lakes (Michigan and Superior) in almost the exact middle of North America, between two very big beautiful oceans (Atlantic and Pacific). Evil from abroad would have to come a very long way to get here. And why would it? To mess around with black and white cows on very black earth? To sabotage the satellite photo of the green algae bloom? To try to convert the butter people to margarine?

It must have been a strange thing for Grandpa to come here after flying bombing raids out of Northern Africa. So quiet and still and bucolic. A town buried between two hills that are between two green lakes, under a green tree canopy under a big empty sky. It's like the Shire in Middle Earth. In the late 1940s, it was a village with some university people on the top of one hill and some politicians on the top of the other hill and students and farmers and GIs goofing off and messing around on the lake in between the two, eating wholesome Wisconsin cheese and fruits and grains and swimming in the clear lakes and walking in the beautiful deep green mossy woods and bobbing for apples and everything else. You can imagine them dancing to big band music on summer evenings, and watching movies in the Orpheum Movie Theatre on State Street, and shopping at the Woolworth's and the Sears and the Kresge's Dry Goods that were also on State Street. The Wisconsin Dairy Queen parade went down State Street every year, with the Most Beautiful Girl in Wisconsin crowned the Dairy Queen and dressed up in a beautiful, shimmering, milk-colored gown. All the many churches are on State Street, too. In fact, there really wouldn't be much reason to leave State Street (I haven't yet).

Maybe that's why Grandpa came here.