Under the Baobab Tree

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.