Road Trip: A vacation is an improvisation

A vacation is an improvisation. The reservations are the chords, the proposed route is the "standard" melody. Around these two elements travelers spin an adventurous solo based on anticipation, research, whim, fatigue, unexpected mishaps, digressions and encounters, and the vagaries of the weather, among other things.

One of the fundamentals shaping our recent road trip was flighty in the extreme—the spring warbler migration, which we wanted to see in all its beauty and particularity.

We take such a trip every spring, combining elements new and old.

There's no way to predict precisely when these waves of small, colorful birds, most of which spend their winters in Central America, will be passing through, but some locations are a much better bet than others for witnessing this lovely event, should you happen to find yourself in the midst of it. Two of the best in these parts are Frontenac State Park and the nearby Lake City municipal park, which goes by the name of Hok-Si-La.

In either location, you can stroll along a bank of trees, this year conveniently free of heavy foliage due to the late spring, and see colorful little birds flitting here and there. Many of them belong to a small set of "common" warblers—palm warblers, myrtle warblers, redstarts, yellow warblers. Yet none of them are truly common, and the next one you spot might well be a less common species, so you'd better take a good close look. I won't drag out the phenomena or attempt to capture the thrill of each unusual sighting. Suffice it to say that by the time we were through with six days of intermittent investigation, we'd seen 22 warbler species, whether often or only once or twice: Northern waterthrush, redstart, common yellowthroat, ovenbird, northern parula, magnolia, Nashville, Tennessee, black-throated green, pine, bay-breasted, Cape May, palm, myrtle, black-and-white, golden-winged, blue-winged, yellow, chestnut-sided, orange-crowned, blackburnian, Wilson's, and Canada warblers.

There is a certain elation, hardly distinguished from pride, associated with a good warbler count. Opinions will differ as to how good a particular "list" might be, but it would be a mistake to imagine that some sort of competition is involved. It's far more a matter of reconnecting with feathered friends you haven't seen for a year or maybe two or three. You welcome their presence, one after another, as you spot them, and you marvel at their beauty. It's also reassuring to see that they haven't gone extinct; the very act of spotting them seems to play a part in insuring their continued survival. As a birding trip progresses, and the sightings mount, they become "old news" and you find yourself saying: "I haven't seen a blackpoll yet!" or "This river bottom environment would be just right for a prothonotary." 

A second fundamental of our trip was much more down to earth: a desire to get a better feel for two medium-sized towns—Winona, Minnesota, and Ashland, Wisconsin—both of which we'd visited often but had never spent much time in. Here the sightings were far less difficult. Some of the sites—a bakery, a museum, a historic building, a beach—had been sitting in the same place, plain to see, for decades. But we were also eager to feel the vibe of these municipalities, both of which had once been port cities of considerable stature.

A final element in the equation was the desire to see new country by drawing our route north across Wisconsin from Winona to Ashland a little further to the east. Spooner and Siren and Hayward are as familiar to us as Brainerd or Grand Rapids. Bloomer and Ladysmith and Loretta? Not so much.

Our final "push" would take us further east along the south shore of Lake Superior from Ashland to the Black River basin and on to the Presque Isle River on the fringe of the Porcupine Mountains.

And that's what we did. More or less.

But there were wrinkles in the plan almost immediately. We left home in mid-afternoon and arrived at Frontenac State Park with some deli food from a supermarket in Red Wing, nursing visions of the quaint campsite (#53) where we'd often camped before, with its grassy tent pad looking south across the fields and a picnic table lapping up the shade of two nearby trees. The trees were gone. The tent pad was gone. The DNR had cut down the trees, bulldozed the site, and covered it with chunks of gravel the size of marshmallows—though undoubtedly not nearly so comfortable to sleep on. We took a brief stroll around, and after a moment of discussion, Hilary called the campground reservation hotline and succeeded in getting us moved to a site thirty feet away (#57) that, if anything,  was even nicer than the one we had remembered so fondly.

From that point on, all was well. Baltimore orioles singing everywhere (but no orchard orioles!); a late afternoon stroll through the campground, and on to the picnic grounds half a mile away on the bluff above the river; a cold dinner of chips and hot sauce, pre-packaged cole slaw and potato salad, followed by a good night's sleep—as far as tent-sleeping goes—with coyotes howling nearby and the sound of trains in the distance passing up and down the river throughout the night. Ah, wilderness!

It was gray the next morning, and we could hear heavy rumbling to the south and west. The sky was unusually dark. A severe weather system was making its way through the Twin Cities, though we didn't even get a drizzle. We broke camp early, took an extended drive through the village of Old Frontenac—which would make a good set for a Civil War film—and then wandered through the woods at Hok-Si-La Park.  

At the north end of the campground we came upon a birder who had been camping there for three days, solo.

He had seen a lot of birds.

"They had the bird event here on Saturday and saw only five warblers," he said with ill-concealed glee. "The stormy weather was holding up the migration. But it started to move through yesterday, and I've seen more than twenty!"

Aside from a few rare warblers, the one thing that seemed to be missing was someone to share his delight with. We were it. And we made for a sympathetic audience, because we knew the birds and understood his enthusiasm. His mention of species we hadn't seen was encouraging ... but also discouraging. I was happy to hear they were coming through, but slightly anxious that we hadn't seen them yet. Well, we were just setting out. But when I pointed to a nearby branch and said, "There's a nice magnolia warbler," he replied, "I've seen SO MANY magnolias...." as if he found them disgusting and never wanted to see one again.

He told us that long-time park manager Joanne Klees, who lives on the property, was retiring and moving to Grand Marais to be closer to relatives. "I had a meeting in the Cities on Sunday night," he said. "I called Joanne to let her know I'd be returning to my campsite after midnight, so she wouldn't be surprised to see someone prowling the grounds that late with a flashlight."

Now that's dedication.

We moved on through the woods and back to the car. A half-hour later, heading up to Whitewater State Park on a gravel stretch of Highway 74, we turned a corner and came upon a construction crew blocking the road.

"Looks like we can't get through," I said to the worker who came over to turn us around.

"Not unless you drive real fast," he said. "We're replacing the culvert. Didn't you see the sign? Back at the turnoff, six feet high, with the flashing lights?"

"Oh, way back there?" I said. In fact, I'd missed it entirely.

The detour to the park was elaborate so we returned to Highway 61 and across to the Weaver Bottoms landing—a place we wouldn't normally stop. We were greeted at the overlook by the fuzzy, wayward songs of a flock of warbler vireos. We also heard a sora whinny, and I spotted a northern waterthrush down amid the grasses near shore. All in all, not a bad consolation prize.

But enough about birds.

WINONA

Until it closed in 1998, Winona's chief claim to fame among travelers may have been the Hot Fish House, a restaurant with a large parking lot conveniently located (as I recall) at the intersection of highways 61 and 43, far from the center of town but an easy stop, two hours from the Twin Cities, for a final meal or coffee-break during that long drive north from Dubuque, Prairie du Chien, or wherever. Back then, there seemed little point in going downtown, and no clear signage as to how to get there. Unless, that is, you were interested in Prairie School architecture. Downtown Winona is home to the finest of the banks designed by Purcell and Elmslie, (see below) and Hilary and I have ventured into town more than once to see it.

But Winona is also home to one of the most bizarre buildings in Minnesota, the Winona Savings Bank, which stands a few blocks away. It's an unhappy cross between a Greek temple and an Assyrian ziggurat, and it might almost be called a post-modern structure except that it predates the modern period. Mussolini would have liked it.

Not knowing quite where either structure was located, we would sometimes turn a corner hoping to see the one, only to come face to face with the other one. Eek!

Winona hosts an annual midsummer Beethoven festival and also an annual Shakespeare festival. (No one's sticking their neck out too far with those choices, though they'll never run out of good material, either.) But here we were, well before the summer arts season, contenting ourselves with the exhibits at the Marine Museum, which are also first-rate.

Viewing the exhibit offerings online before we set out, I 'd been attracted by the exhibit of German expressionist seascapes, which almost seemed like a contradiction in terms, but the paintings themselves proved otherwise. The show was small, but very good. The Hmong tapestries on display were familiar to me in style—you can get them at many farmers' markets, and we have a few on the walls at home—but many of these were much larger, and the interpretation was illuminating.

The extensive permanent collection of Hudson School landscapes was fine, as usual, but the smaller room of French Impressionist works seemed a bit depleted. I said something to the guard sitting in her Plexiglas booth in front of a keyboard.

"Well, it's been in the papers, so I guess I can tell you," she said. "They're selling off some of the paintings. The Seurat! I loved the Seurat!"

"So did I," I said.

"And Washington Crossing the Delaware," she added with a grimace that I found hard to interpret. "The estimated sale prince is $25 million." (I read in the papers a week later that it had sold for $45 million.)

She told us there were plans afoot to build a new concert hall somewhere downtown and move some of the artwork to an adjoining gallery. That sounded like a good idea to me. The Marine Museum is situated on the Mississippi riverbank in an industrial district north of town, not far from the Fascenal distribution warehouses. It's a great museum but it doesn't contribute much to the city's pedestrian energy.

"Well, life is change," I said. "You can volunteer at the concert hall downtown."

"Yes," she agreed. "I'm a grandmother now, and a mother-in-law. I've got to stay sharp!"

We had rented an AirBnB apartment downtown accessed from an alley. It sounded a little dicey, but so many buildings have been replaced by parking lots in downtown Winona that when we arrived, the locale seemed open and airy. The apartment itself was clean and modern, almost like a Room & Board showroom, and the only drawback seemed to be the French press coffee-maker, which we had forgotten how to use.

From our little apartment we walked north two blocks to a used book store where I bought CDs of music by Dowland, Bach, and Durufle for a dollar a piece and a copy of Virgil's Georgics, and chatted with the owner about the play he was directing at a theater on the other side of the highway in a log cabin tucked into the shadows of the bluffs. Then Hilary and I walked down to the waterfront levee, which was new and clean but deserted. A few blocks to the west took us past a small grassy park, situated between two brick buildings a hundred years old, where they were selling draught beer, and quite a few twenty-somethings were eating sandwiches and salads at a row of picnic tables.

"You don't have to buy the beer," the friendly woman behind the counter said. "You can just come and have a picnic."

I thanked her but told her we had other plans.

Which was true. Hilary was taking me out for a birthday dinner at a restaurant called Scratch - Nosh, a few blocks to the south.

"Do you have a reservation?" the woman at the front desk asked.

"No. I didn't think we'd need one," I replied. "It seemed pretty quiet in town. Now I see why. Everyone's in here."

It was, indeed, a lively place, and the meal was top-flight: a warm beet salad, crab cakes, a distinctive burger made of Italian sausage and locally harvested ramps. A glass or two of wine.

The air had been steamy all day, with the afternoon temperature rising above 80 degrees. Things had cooled off as we walked the block-and-a-half down the alley past the Purcell and Elmslie bank to our cozy apartment. The city was quiet, and we were pooped.