Scoop - the story of West's Dairy and Hayward, WI

“Scoop: Notes From a Small Ice Cream Shop” by Jeff Miller

What a joy ride – Jeff Miller and his partner Dean decide to leave their world spanning careers and move from London England.  Where would you put the lawyer and executive who have worked in Hong Kong and achieved great success in their careers?  Well Hayward Wisconsin of course – they do have the international Birkebeiner ski race there.

Jeff has a wit that makes every chapter fly and the humor is not sarcastic or mean, I laughed and laughed because it was so true.  These are the characters I meet in the small towns I have lived in.  They buy a dairy, West’s Dairy and ice cream shop and in addition to a building that is in desperate need of remodeling they have an old vehicle, old equipment and an old employee, Buck, who serves to dispense his own brand of wisdom while avoiding the dispensing of ice cream.

It is reminiscent of Bill Bryson’s writing and holds together from beginning to end.  They bring their London accents, their gay lifestyle, and a wonderful desire to adapt to both the dairy and the remodeling of  Lumberman’s Mansion B&B on Shue’s Pond. The reader is the recipient of a ride back in time to small town America where Santa’s Sleigh can be seen in the mouth of a giant Musky and the community celebrations are Americana at its best.

Meet the people, meet the author, and send me an ice cream cone – I am starting to crave a cone of  “Almost Sinful.”  Check out their website for a fun video  http://www.westshaywarddairy.com/

Visit Sunny Chernobyl – Andrew Blackwell

I can only call Andrew Blackwell an environmental voyeur.  He is not content to read about bad things – he has to see them.  He knows of Chernobyl, but he has to have his meter tell him he is being cooked by the nuclear energy that is still all around. 

Unlike most of us who travel to pristine areas to avoid the ugliness that is being foisted on the world, his vacations, if you can call them that, are in the tar sands.  He goes to these places knowing that are bad, but he does not go to preach.  He takes us along and lets us look over his shoulder; shake our heads and wonder – what next.

His writing is descriptive and vivid, “…rose the Syncrude upgrading plant, the flame-belching doppelganger of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom, built of steel towers and twisting pipes, crested with gas flares and plumes of stream.”  And his writing also conveys a dark, foreboding vision of the future that is filtered through these awful and apocalyptic.   Then as we move through the dark areas of polluted earth on this bizarre trip our Dante guide lets us listen to the nonsense that lets people accept their fate and the fate of their land – “I think that dirty oil thing comes from a lobbying group in Saudi.”

Resignation is obvious in a statement from a drunken worker   “Lemme Tell You something.  By the time I’m fifty, I know – I don’t guess, I know – I’m gonna have some kind of cancer.”  But he is not going to quit.  He is stuck in our make a living world where the cost of survival is the debt of education, acceptance of contributing to destructive acts, or the sacrifice of years of health. 

This is not a descent into Hell, rather it is a horizontal path that zigs and zags with destinations like the massive gathering of trash in the midst of the ocean – the vortex of human waste,   coal mines of China and the sewage of India.

But our guide has a strange affliction – he wants to see the rosy aspect of each corner of Hell.  He wants us to see happy people content in their apartments with electronic parts boiling in solder and emitting toxic fumes, he wants to see the soy farm intrusions in to the rain forest with much more innocence that some might feel. 

Perhaps this joyride into the horrors of pollution is really a reminder that each Hell hole is created to serve the demands of those of us who want to live in a clean and beautiful environment.  That behind Yellowstone and the other magnificent parks lays a consuming matrix of people and industry that is leaving a mark throughout the earth and each tendril of the pollution center reaches in to the center of humankind throughout the planet.  They are really not the worst or the most; they are just artifacts within hundreds of sores from the cancer of our consumption.

In a way the author’s enjoyable romp also downplays the serious situations.  After reading about the coal mining in China chapter I thought that this review in NYTimes was a more appropriate look at the serious situation. China’s Poisonous Waterways  By SHENG KEYIAPRIL 4, 2014

“BEIJING — Over the past few years, trips back to my home village, Huaihua Di, on the Lanxi River in Hunan Province, have been clouded by news of deaths — deaths of people I knew well. Some were still young, only in their 30s or 40s. When I returned to the village early last year, two people had just died, and a few others were dying.

“My father conducted an informal survey last year of deaths in our village, which has about 1,000 people, to learn why they died and the ages of the deceased. After visiting every household over the course of two weeks, he and two village elders came up with these numbers: Over 10 years, there were 86 cases of cancer. Of these, 65 resulted in death; the rest are terminally ill. Most of their cancers are of the digestive system. In addition, there were 261 cases of snail fever, a parasitic disease, that led to two deaths.

“The Lanxi is lined with factories, from mineral processing plants to cement and chemical manufacturers. For years, industrial and agricultural waste has been dumped into the water untreated. I have learned that the grim situation along our river is far from uncommon in China.

“The nation has more than 200 “cancer villages,” small towns like mine blanketed with factories where cancer rates have risen far above the national average. (Some researchers say there are more than 400 such villages.) Last year the Ministry of Environmental Protection acknowledged the problem of “cancer villages” for the first time, but this is of little comfort to my parents’ neighbors and millions like them around the country.

“More than 50 percent of China’s rivers have disappeared altogether, and few of the surviving waterways are not completely polluted. Some 280 million Chinese people drink unsafe water, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Nearly half of the country’s rivers and lakes carry water that is unfit even for human contact.

And China’s cancer mortality rate has soared, climbing 80 percent in the last 30 years. About 3.5 million people are diagnosed with cancer each year, 2.5 million of whom die. Rural residents are more likely than urban residents to die of stomach and intestinal cancers, presumably because of polluted water. State media reported on one government inquiry that found 110 million people across the country reside less than a mile from a hazardous industrial site.”

There is more, but the picture is clear.   He literally ends up in shit – that is, he finishes in the over populated country called India (which translates to river) and it is the country of rivers – religious rivers in fact.  But the growth of population has another graph – the growth of municipal waste – merde.  It is a country without the controls and systems to handle run away population (something the author does not mention directly) and consequently the shite does not hit the fan – it fills the rivers and Krishna’s sacred river is an open sewer. 

There is much to think about – but the real lesson is that behind the places of beauty we have protected are places of ugly that are the result of our human choices, greed, and indifference. 

Back of Beyond - C J Box

I have been a fan of C J Box since I stumbled on his novels at the wonderful book store in downtown Cheyenne, WY.  I have enjoyed his primary character - the game warden but I was beginning to tire of the character - especially as the issues seemed to more and more center around his own family, a trend I am seeing in lots of writers recently.  So it was fun to have this crusty character who comes from a trashy family, is an alcoholic who definitely does not have it under control, steps outside of the rules, and generally is a screw up with the tenacity of a pit bull.

The mystery begins with a fire and what seems like accidental death, but the victim was Hoyt's sponsor in AA and thus we have the inevitable personal angle.  And it turns out it is a murder and the murderer will be on a horse trip in Yellowstone's back country which sets up lots of new situations - most beyond belief, but still entertaining.

And of course Hoyt's son is on the trip so the personal angle drives him to new heights of independence.  But the writing is really good, the story is a gripping one and the pace is outstanding.  In many ways this is my favorite Box story, but I still hope all the characters can get out of the personal relationship and back to just solving crimes.

March books - a summary

The Lost Battles by Jonathon Jones was my last book of the month and the most difficult.  It was a tough read that demanded my attention beyond my person art and Italian history interest.  Written by an art historian this is an greatly researched look at the rivalry of DaVinci and Michaelangelo - the superstars of this art and historic era and the story of Florence.

Fascinating in a way is that the art project that is the central theme of the book is gone.  We cannot see it.   We can get splashes of it from other artists like the sample that accompanies this review, but we cannot see it.

So we find our way through various historical alleys with other artwork, other artists and the story of Florence as we try to piece together this great confrontation, but I found myself seeking web sources to show me what we were talking about.  To that end the book succeeded in sending me seeking, but on the other end, I found myself wading through knowledge that is valuable but beyond my care.

If you have the right interests the book should be great, if you have curiosity like I do, it is a good struggle.  To the general reader I do not recommend it.

My favorite books of the month were my last two postings - The Stages by Thom Satterlee and  Badluck Way by Bryce Andrew.

Bossypants by Tina Fey had times of laughter and some poignant humor, but if you are not a television person - my weakness in this - a lot of the book did not have much value.  However, before I just pan it, I have to say there are some excellent passages that have great humor and justify wading through the materials that lack enlightenment or inspiration to a reader like me.

Chester Alan Arthur by Zachery Karabell that confirms the unscientific conclusion that Arthur is not a president worth remembering.  Still, he was a president, so we should know something.

Waldenwest by August Derleth was in another review - a 1961 classic of Wisconsin writing that had an excellent start but suffers from a half century of time.  It is fun to see some of the people and the philisophical parts are excellent, but once again the end did not come soon enough.

The Red Man's Bones by Benita Eisler is the perfect companion to the new biography of Curtis.  The combination of Curtis and Catlin are responsible for the images and knowledge we possess of the American Indian.  It would be my third favorite book of the month of variety.

The Hammer, a Sports Illustrated collection is truly a collection of the Sports Illustrated stories that span Hank Aaron's career as my favorite baseball player.  It not only is a reminder of the man and the complicated path he took from Negro Leagues to Icon, but also of the horrible racial undertones of our nation.  The stories are excellent and the book was a pleasure to read.

The Serpent's Tooth by Craig Johnson is a continuation of the excellent Longmire mystery series set in the Bighorns and the Crow reservation and this book did not disappoint a fan. I enjoy the personalities and I know the setting.  It is a good modern western and the series continues to keep me going at the same time that I am losing interest in other on going series like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone where the character seems to be the reason the mystery was written.

Sherlock Holmes in America by Lellenberg, Greenberg, Stashower. deals with another of my old favorites - one who never seems to disappear from history or literature.  I am putting Doyle next to Shakespeare for the creation of a literature that goes beyond time and location to be a reference to all others that dabble in the same form of writing.  Why this has three editors is beyond me.  It is uneven, and often disappointing, but there are always those gems that make you glad that you took the time to read.

The Stages - thom satterlee

This novel was a good reminder of why you must invest in a book before deciding if you like it or not.  The difficulty of the topic made the first chapter difficult, by the second chapter I could not stop.  Once you gain the voice of the American translator who suffers from Aspergers it becomes a fascinating murder mystery in an exotic setting (at least for Americans).

This book is set in Copenhagen and the back story is the work of Storen Kierkegaard.  I love Copenhagen, but until this book I have not been motivated to learn about Denmark's most famous classic writer and philosopher.  Fortunately you are not required to understand his complex and multi-voice writing.

The person you follow through this story has to fight through the limitations of emotional expression and lack of ability to read the nuances of public discourse.  He is the American translator of Kierkegaard and is excellent at the job because it is what he can concentrate on and avoid confusing changes of schedule and routine.

However the director of the institute where he works, his first and only love, is murdered.  A manuscript is missing.  The translator was the last known person to be at the address before the murder and also finds another dead person along the way.

How does he sort this out, what does Kierkegaard say?  What is the strange clue that the murder victim left to him?  Can he sort out the clues, can he make things right after striking a policeman?  Can he find time for is Mozart deserts and hot dogs?

It is an adventure that spins through people and settings and arrives at a conclusion that may leave you clapping or unsatisfied.  Getting there is a wonderful literary journey.

Badluck Way by Bryce Andrews

What a pleasure - this is not a critical review - I loved the book and the pace.  Since I love the area, love wolves and wildness, understand the conflict of ranching and have a horse (my wife's) at home - the last of a wonderful line of horses this is a novel that had to appeal to me.  Perhaps I should say as an old Hopalong Cassidy fanatic I love the open range stories.

But this is a book that does not mindlessly enter in to any of the typical genres.  It is a western in that it is in the west and on a cattle ranch - but that is it.  It is not a wildlife and wilderness book even though the second main character is a wolf pack. It is a story of a man yearning for the basics of life - ranch hand, but carrying the environmental and modern attitudes that make blasting away every wolf a burden on his conscience.  It is a contrast in sympathy for the dying cattle who, of course, are being raised to be killed, and sympathy for the wolf, who are in fact breeding to kill.

It is not always pretty.  The answers are not always easy.  That is the tension of the true novel and it works.  I can feel the saddle, I looked into the dark forest ravine with the author, I anguished at the elk caught in the barbed wire, and I could sense how difficult it can be to cross lines and be with others who have such clear-cut opinions and actions when you are conflicted.

The writing in excellent and the conclusions are not simplified and glazed over.  Even on a ranch with conservation as a high priority the decisions can be sad and even brutal.  The writing is excellent and the desire to keep reading is strong.

February book notes

Another good reading month with some real gems.  Please note - I read books from all years - I am not partial to new releases.

My favorite was The Homesman, a book that is about to be a movie - I only hope the movie comes close to the quality of the writing.

This book depicts an aspect of American Life that I first encountered in Pioneer Women, a book that still haunts me.  Women brought west and following the dreams of their husbands, often just newly married.  They are brought to the prairie where wooden houses are replaced by sod structures and often just holes in the ground.

Without neighbors, without libraries or any form of entertainment the women are kept in these prisons where they are to provide sex, meals, and mothering.  The result is that many women lose their mines in the isolation, desolation, and suffering.  They raise their children without a true vision of a better life and watch children die in childbirth and from diseases and accidents.  It is a life that is truly helpless and hopeless and the author is able to convey this and the even more devastating image of how society, as it exists on the plains, reacts to the insanity that is visited on these former wives and mothers.

In this epic an unmarried woman takes on the task of taking these women to Iowa where they might find care and this requires journeyed across the prairie, carrying for the women, and responding to Indians, weather, and emergencies.

She tries to enlist one of the men, one of the husbands, but they are anxious for the women to leave and to be rid of the burden.  With no success she engages an outsider, a claim jumper, who is hated, about to be hung and without any visible salvation.

The insane women are pariahs to their families and their community and even to strangers.  The group cannot even find comfort by the fire of a wagon train.  There, the men fear that their women might glimpse a future for themselves.

The unlikely duo presents some enjoyable moments of exchange - the pragmatist loner and the optimistic care giver.  Their relationship plays out as they cross this lonely landscape and I cannot give away how it develops - that must be encountered through reading.  But all of the change, the women in their care have endured an unspeakable set of circumstances without real promise of better days and in their continuing presence we are reminded of circumstances that are hard to envision today unless we think of life in some remote desert areas where time has a different meaning.   The character focus is on the man and woman leading the trip, the background is the women, and the primary character is the demanding land.

My second favorite for the month was The Longest Road.  This is a true Road Trip from the furthest point south Florida to the Northernmost point in Alaska.  What makes is so enjoyable is the fact that it documents the people they encounter along the way and the conversations that portray the human attitudes and emotions of everyday people.  No politicians, no stars, no rich - just the people they encounter at lunch counters, and gas stations, and other locations that are part of a road trip.

Since Kate and I have done this on the Mississippi River and around Lake Superior we can relate to what Philip Caputo writes.  A former newsman, he and his wife are now seniors with a world of experiences of their own, but these do not intrude on the stories they tell.

Of course the Airstream they live in is part of the story too.  Jump aboard and take a ride with them.

I love the Craig Johnson series about the western sheriff - Longmire and The Dark Horse will not disappoint fans.  For the first time Longmire must go under cover - not something he is really good at and as such he is alone and the great supporting characters have less of a role, but we see more of Longmire in this story of murder that starts out with the murder solved.

The trouble is, Longmire does not like the solution.  He does not believe the woman's confession, and neither does the sheriff of the district where the murder was committed.

Longmire's need to put things right, puts him in the sites of a lot of unsavory characters and introduces us to a connection with a horse that sits at the heart of the mystery.



In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes is an excellent memoir of a woman raised in the woods of Oregon and Idaho by a family that does whatever work is needed to survive.  It is about a woman who faces the fiery force of evangelical preachers and churches, and numerous events that she must come to grips with to find her own place and history.

Lost Duluth was a gem.  A record of old building that no longer exist (and ones you will wish still did).  But the real value is in the stories that surround these buildings.   The people who would build monuments, their stories are the story of Duluth.

Fitgers is a similar book to Lost Duluth, but it captures the brewing history of the city and the downfall to the economy that was generated by the Prohibition era.  Micro-brewing is now filling these niches, but not with the magnificent structures of the past.

The Story of Earth by Robert Hazon was an excellent book of Earth history that captures the complexity of geology and the beauty of the planet in terms that paint pictures and enlighten the read to complex ideas.  It is also a warning that what we are doing as a species is devastating to our own existence on this magnificent planet.

The Last Outlaws, by Thom Hatch is a historical search to know Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  As such it is good history, but I am still fascinated by the story and the telling of the history lacked the bold strokes of a story teller and therefore was not as enjoyable as I would have liked even though any historian of the west should read it.

Natchez, is a book I picked up in Natchez (surprise) and it was filled with stories of this southern town on the banks of the Mississippi.  It survives today as an interesting town, but at one time its location on the river and at the beginning of the first great Southern Road - the Natchez Trace - made it a pivot-able point in the history of the Mississippi River region.

The New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook written in 1967 has a good compliment of recipes, but its value is in the history of the famous restaurants of this gourmet paradise.

The Explainer by Slate Magazine was neither entertaining nor informing in my opinion.

January book notes

It is really hard to go back over a years worth of reading and give the January books the same attention that the most recent books get so here is a one month set of book notes.  January is a good reading book and I hope you have had some good reading, but still got some great outdoors time.

1. Americans in Paris, Charles Glass is really outstanding history giving us insights into the very complex life in Paris when it was occupied by the Nazis.  First when the US was neutral and then when we were the enemy.  Paris is a complex city in any time, but never more so than in this period.
2. Old Man River by Paul Schneider.  This was an excellent book on the Mississippi River.  It blended old tried and true stories with personal observations and gave an excellent look at this complex geographic location called the Mississippi. 
3. The Trail to Seven Pines, Louis L'Amour.  One of four Hopalong Cassidy novels that L'Amour did.  It is well paced, captures my old hero, but with more edge and excitement and satisfied all my love of westerns.
4. Unfathomable City, Soluit and Snedeker.  Actually a combination of essays, each with a map of New Orleans looking at the layers of the old and eccentric city.  I loved the beginning half and the last chapter, but got lost in a series of essays that were too esoteric for my taste or it would have been number one on the list.  Very well written and the maps are a unique and effect support to most of the essays.
5. Dirt by David Montgomery is a look at the basic building block of all continents and life on earth.  It is the undervalued by lynchpin of our lives too, one we disregard too regularly.  We sacrificed topsoil down our rivers, substitute chemicals and artificial GMOs for the historic organic basis of life.
6. Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman follows the around the world race of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland.  It is a look at two women who do an amazing travel adventure.  The loser, as is the American tradition does not get the recognition she deserves, but in fact comes out the better in life itself.  It is a time when Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days set the standard, even though fictitious for world travel.  A very enjoyable read.
7. Madam by Cari Lynn and Kellie Martin is the story of Storyville in New Orleans.  It is a fictitious story in that the authors have to create a narrative that fits between the blank spots in the information that is available about this experiment in legalized, but controlled prostitution.  The characters are reall and the history that the novel exposes is fascinating.
8. Bull River by Robert Knott is a continuation of the Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch westerns of Robert Parker.  Good characters, the black and white west is crisscrossed by characters who are sure of their decisions, but constantly in the gray zone between good and bad.
9. Catch Me by Lisa Gardner is a very good police thriller.  It is about the thin line between police and vigilante, the dangers of on-line trolling for underage victims and gives good suspense with some real red flags for people to consider.
10. Cooperstown Confidential is the story of baseball Hall of Fame, but not the bio of those who get in, rather the politics of induction.  The choices that were made that should not have been made and the  very human aspect of HOF decisions. 
11. Red Planet Blues by Robert Sawyer was a genre buster for me.  I am not a SciFi fan, but this mix of Sci FI and detective was well done and well paced.  
12. The Persuader by Lee Childs is a Reacher Novel.  I read out of curiosity. It is first and last.  A testosterone novel.  No suspense - he is too good and he is the narrator so he has to make it.

Eighty Days - Matthew Goodman

This is the story of a race around the world by two women in 1890, Nellie Bly, reporter for the New York World comes from poverty in Pittsburgh and makes a name as an investigative reporter.  Elizabeth Bisland comes from the deep south, daughter of a plantation owner in Louisiana who suffers the displacement of the Civil War and the loss of family fortune, she goes to New Orleans to begin her writing career and ends up in New York working for Cosmopolitan Magazine.  

Bly is sent East to circle the globe and with less than 24 hours notice Bisland is sent West as a competitor of Bly.  We see the world through these two travelers and the contrast in how they see the world is fascinating.  It is a comparison between a woman who hates England and finds everything about America better than anything else in the world with her competitor embracing and falling in love with Japan and eventually moving to England.

Jules Verne is visited by Nellie Bly and it is his fictitious character's Around the World In Eighty Days race that inspires this race.  So even though they are racing each other, the women are in fact racing a fictitious person.  It does show how literature can inspire.

The story is also about the place of women and their struggle to survive.  The attitude that women belong in the home and not in the workplace was prevalent in their lifetime - it still lingers in ours - and yet when the fathers die, the daughters are often the sole support of the widowed mother and these women have to create a home and care for their families.

There is a wonderful passage in Hong Kong where Elizabeth Bisland reflects on the speed of communications now that there is the telegraph.  Today we would be upset to think we had to send Morse code and wait for a response.  This and the travel accommodations help us contrast time periods.

The trip around the world is the same year as the Massacre at Wounded Knee, it is a time of rampant racism, and terrible treatment of works who are trying to strike for living wages.  Yet in the midst of this the race consumes the American Public, makes a celebrity of one woman, and disregards the efforts of the loser.

The book follows the two women to the ends of their lives and it is a stark contrast as their personalities might have suggested from the beginning.  Who really wins, who really loses?  That is something the public decides and even today we have not learned to appreciate the efforts of those who try but do not come in first.