The Last Roundup

Alfalfa plants thrive where nothing else but sagebrush lives

The Last Roundup

As we arrived in lush Seattle, where the streets are lined with peach and pear trees, the wild blackberries grow in every ditch with 2-inch diameter fruit, and everything is shockingly green after the long drive across the dry western prairies; the yards and town squares beautifully flower-spersed with plants that would have long ago been eaten by deer or bugs in Wisconsin; we are in the land where window screens and air conditioners are unknown.

Seattle certainly outdoes Cushing for number of attractions, however, I will miss this Saturday’s adult soapbox derby there down mainstreet. Seattle has better hills for it, but not the attitude!

We brought along a case of syrup, 10 pounds of Burnett Dairy cheese, and some homemade raspberry jelly as gifts from Wisconsin to our cousins who only remember Wisconsin through stories from their parents and grandparents (i.e. the year the rutabagas failed in Cumberland; the Cushing marsh mosquito plague of 1939; the dry years in the Great Depression drought when the Holsteins were so thin that it took two to make a shadow, etc.—funny how adversity stories persist longer than any others).

We managed to get out to Seattle without any car trouble at all with the 1991 Olds. It is just about ready to turn over 100,000 miles and came from Margo’s Aunt Lou as a final gift as she made her own final trip. The Olds sailed flawlessly through the hot Dakota prairies, climbed energetically into the Big Horns where Custer made his last stand, cruised through Montana roads where “prudent speeds” are the limit and intersections along the roads littered with flowered crosses representing deaths of folks who thought they could make it across before the next car cruising at 95 got there, and then zoomed up the Cascades without even shifting the V-6 down from overdrive and finally veered through the switchbacks coasting down to the end of the U.S. of A.

Gas price ranged from $3.57 to $3.99 with the average about $3.75. Here in Seattle, it is $3.85. Overall, the Olds made about 28 mpg with spurts of 30 on the plains with a tailwind. I changed the oil (synthetic for better mileage), aired the tires to 32, and put in a new air cleaner before hitting the road. The engine control module (computer) that I replaced seems to work perfectly. The GPS only led us astray half a dozen times as we wandered the back roads seeking adventure—only to end at closed gates private road signs; the GPS egging us on; Margo worrying about crazy westerners and their gun racks in the back window of their pickups, and the Rambler ready for adventure, duct tape at the ready to patch the oil pan.

We kept costs low by tenting and sandwiching our way through the West. Our 40 year old tent is still sound; the cots we bought last year comfortable and high enough so the rattlers sleep under them; and with the screened windows, we managed to see many falling stars from the ongoing meteor shower last week though the cloudless western skies.

The trip across country was consistent in one thing—everyplace from SD north has had a wet late spring and relatively wet summer so far with a two weeks delay in everything growing from apples to wheat. Most of the northern midlands have been hot and humid too. The Missouri River Valley flooded extensively due to the huge snowfall in the mountains melting and coming down the river, and water is still high in the rivers out here.

The woman stopping traffic on Hwy 12 for construction waits of ten minutes, told us about the nearby windmill farm, one of dozens we saw beginning just west of Rochester, MN. “Most of them aren’t running now, too much water going through the power dams out here from the big melt in the mountains. Water generated electricity is cheaper than wind. Did you know that inside each of the huge towers is a 374 step circular staircase to the top? Some people complain about the swishing sounds, but I think they are good for the future.”

I mentioned we were retired, and not in a rush so the highway construction delay didn’t bother us. “I should be retired too,” she replied, “our ranch went bankrupt a few years ago after the drought. Started in 2002 and lasted seven years out here. We raised riding bulls for the rodeo. The water ponds went down and the bulls died from the water. We didn’t know then, but the drought concentrated the salt and it killed our stock and we had to sell out. It is easy to get a job out here with all the oil work and such, but there is a lot of unemployment too. Too many of the younger folks don’t pass the drug tests and can’t get hired. Gets on their record and they can’t find a job.”

Generally speaking, the crops we saw looked good. Corn and beans dominated through Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. Winter wheat farther west is being harvested and looked good. Sunflowers were beautiful and healthy. Many fields had bare areas, drowned out due to the extra water. Although there is a drought to the south, the northern 1/3 of the country seems to have good crops.

We stopped in a small café midway through Montana. The parking lot was littered with battered pickup trucks so we knew it was a hangout for local ranchers. As we drank strong coffee and waited for ranch style eggs (everything thrown in with the eggs from restaurant leftovers for the past week) we listened to the conversation at the nearby extended old guys table.

“I miss the big roundups of the old days,” said a weather beaten lanky old fellow with well worn cowboy boots, cigarette yellowed teeth and a sweat stained Stetson. “Nowadays we just bring alfalfa bales to the cattle—don’t drive the cattle down from the high summer range anymore. The roundup era is over.”

As a farm kid, and someone who still dabbles in farming in Wisconsin, one of the biggest changes we see now over a few decades back, are the weed-free fields along the road. In a vast 1000 acre field in the plains you can wear your eyes out looking for a single weed. In farming, the Roundup era is upon us.

This comes from the “Roundup ready” plants, beginning in the late 90s, that have dominated the past decade of farming all over the world. Monsanto, a big chemical and seed company, spliced a gene into all sorts of farm plants that makes them impervious to their herbicide, Roundup, that normally kills everything it touches. Farmers have enthusiastically adopted this technology and no longer cultivate crops to get rid of weeds. To learn more about Roundup and farming I turned to the Internet.

Wikipedia is a “grassroots” encyclopedia of the world, thus a wonderful place to turn for information on crops. It is being built by people who have expertise and are willing to share it on the Internet. Each article is submitted and then undergoes ongoing and continuous review by readers and is updated as needed. If I wanted to submit a topic, for instance, the history of Cushing, WI, I could do it, and others could review and modify it after a discussion of the changes. What makes Wikipedia work is that experts from all fields of endeavor have taken it seriously and worked to make it useful.

I looked at Roundup. There is some discussion of problems with the chemical in our environment—not at all clear what harm it might do, but the main problem is the number of weeds which are no longer killed by it, the “super weeds.”

Evolution as seen by scientists, is an ongoing process where living things adapt better to their surroundings. Every time sex occurs, potential for a new and unique combination of genes arises from male and female species (plants and animals). The offspring are very very close to the parents, but yet different in some ways. In the billions of new and slightly different pigweed seeds formed each year, a few are enough different to no longer be killed by Roundup.

Sometimes the differences are not just from normal variation, but from a mutation (an accidental change in normal genes—like a cat with an extra toe). The change, if it is inherited by the next generation and favorable for survival (i.e. an ice age starting where cats with bigger feet can hunt better), will gradually spread as it gives the plant or animal an advantage.

Already, in the US, super weeds are found in 13 states, in 63 types of weeds and are rapidly spreading, forecasting the end of Roundup as a useful weed killer, the end of the Roundup era. (Note: the exact same process is happening with antibiotics and bacteria growing into super bugs predicting the end of the antibiotic era that began in the 1940s).

Monsanto, the inventor of Roundup and Roundup ready crops (the first being soybeans released in 1996 from the Middleton WI facility), is working on plants resistant to 2,4D, an old herbicide used since the 40s. It is the broad-leafed weed and brush killer you can buy in the store. 2,4D and 2,4,5T were the two chemicals mixed 50-50 to make Agent Orange, the defoliant used in Vietnam to clear Vietcong jungle hideouts; the chemical that also ruined the health of many of my friends who were sprayed with it while in Vietnam. Replacing Roundup by 2,4D will be controversial.

Although the farmer in me admires a vast weed-free field, and the homeowner in me admires a pure grass lawn, the scientist in me worries about what is going to happen when super weeds spread. Some kind of new plant needs to be found that solves some of the problems of current farming for the future, a plant not so dependent on artificial sprays and fertilizers and genetics to survive. It got me to thinking what kind of plant it should be.

The ideal plant for farmers would be something that is a perennial (you plant it once and it continues to grow each year—like the alfalfa plant). It would, like the alfalfa plant, fix its own nitrogen from the nitrogen in the air. It would, like the alfalfa plant which can have roots as deep as 50 feet, grow a tremendously deep root system to get moisture and food from far below the soil while breaking up the hardpan that occurs when farmers plow the top 8 inches of soil. It would be, like the alfalfa plant, adapted to drought, heat, resistant to harsh winters, spring back rapidly from repeated harvestings, resistant to disease and bugs, high in protein and work as a single food source for animals providing most of its needs, competitive with weeds, harvestable in different ways (i.e. greenchop, silage, dry hay and sprouts), produce more nitrogen than it needs, thus creating fertilizer for a future crop on the same field. An ideal plant, if it is ever found, would be a great thing for farmers!

The above paean to alfalfa came about as we drove into the far western dry prairies and continued to see alfalfa fields growing in land that otherwise, without irrigation, supported only sagebrush. Alfalfa plants, with their purple to gray blooms lined the road ditches and freckled vast dry prairie fields; a crop that thrives where little else survives.

May your own taproots be deep, your resistance strong, and your tolerance great. May you thrive in adverse conditions. I like to think of these columns as helpful bacteria doing a little bit to remove fertilizer from the air and spread it about your feet, some weeks deeper than others, as we all ramble into our own last roundup, ready or not.

Seattle or Bust

We headed on a motor trip to Seattle Monday via Hwy 14 through southern MN. Stopped near Balaton to put a geranium on Great Great Grandpa Olaus Hanson's grave at the Syllerud Church on Current Lake and ended up in Watertown SD to visit Cousin Ruby Hanson in the memory unit of a nursing home. She is 92 and having memory problems--short visit but she didn't know us.

Set up the tent in Pelican Lake Recreation area and pulled out the bedrolls at 3:00 am to watch the Perseid meteor shower--about one every 5 minutes in the clear night sky.

Heading north today to avoid the Black Hills and Sturgis -- motorcycle rally there this week. Probably take 212 up to 12 and cross SD today.

Gas price ranged from 3.57 to 3.79 in western MN and SD with most at 3.69. Our first tank got us 430 miles at 29 mpg. Not too bad for a 91 Olds Cutlass with a V-6 loaded full with camping gear and gifts!

We drove through Tyler MN on Hwy 14--big sign on the edge of town advertising their yearly aebleskiver dinner--celebrating their Danish Heritage. Three weekends ago, Margo and I spent a Saturday in Luck making Aebleskivers celebrating their Danish history!

Breakfast at McDonalds with two shrinkwraps each and senior coffees! $5.34 for a decent breakfast and good coffee!

Rambling down the River

Chuck and Tim, a couple of Bone Lake friends, have been asking to take a guided trip down a stretch of the St. Croix River since last year. Everything finally came together last week and we took a short run down from Hwy O to Sunrise, about eight miles. We used my old aluminum canoe, the last of the Grumman’s manufactured at Minong for the Links. I got it cheap after the wind picked it up and impaled it on the point of a pontoon boat. A little body work and some marine epoxy has made it riverworthy for 25 years. It is totally lacking in a keel—a wonderful river rapids canoe, but skitters like a leaf out on a windy lake.

Tim took the bow paddle and Chuck the stern as I filmed and narrated from cushions in the bilge. As the pilot, captain and guide and story teller, I didn’t have time to help. I did give plenty of canoeing instruction—you know my great great grandpa was a whaler back in Norway and I inherited the sea in my blood. They wanted the full historical account of the river, so I passed it along from my firsthand knowledge.

“The 1837 treaty with the Ojibway opened the area to logging and settlement. The first logging was by John Boyce in the winter of 1837-1838 just upriver from where we put in on the Snake. The Indians hadn’t heard about the treaty and hindered his efforts; then the rapids at St. Croix Falls broke up his log rafts and the old accounts says he left the area discouraged, not getting his logs downriver.”

“Well, Mom’s cousin, Mae Carnes, who lived here on the WI river bank, married Rex Boyce of Sunrise, MN just across the river from their ferry business. I don’t know if he was related to John Boyce—likely was as the name is pretty uncommon. Rex’s father, Silas, married Prudence Clover, one of the Clover’s from Sunrise and the Barrens. Her brother was one of the Sunrise boys who walked back home from the deep south after they were mustered out of the Civil War in 1865. I think they took most of a year for the walk—guess they thought it would be a chance to see the country! Probably a good way to get rid of post traumatic stress.”

“Down river a little farther, near where Wild Mountain is, my grandpa’s Uncle Clint Beebe farmed pretty close to the river. Grandpa lived just south of Nevers Dam on the Wisconsin river bank—where Duane Larson lives now. At that time you could use Nevers dam as a bridge so going to visit back and forth across the river was quick. You could cross at Nevers, Sunrise, Highway O (Rush City Ferry) and of course the toll bridge at Grantsburg or the free bridge at St. Croix Falls. Minnesota and Wisconsin folks weren’t so separated as they are now.”

“Nevers Dam was built at the head of about 6 miles of rapids to the south. Originally, there was a ferry across the river there. Charlie Nevers lived on the Wisconsin side. His wife was one of the missionary school educated Ojibwa women. They are buried over on Hwy 87 at the cemetery south of Eureka—Pleasant Hill. The loggers bought up all the river banks from St. Croix Falls way up river so they could flood it and run their logs down. John Robinson told me his grandpa owned to the bank near Wolf Creek. Had to sell when the loggers built Nevers and flooded the area.”

“Normally we would have put in at Hwy 70 by Grantsburg. Didn’t want to spend all day on the river, so we jumped in where the Rush City Ferry went across on Hwy O. I talked to LeRoy Hedberg last week. He said the Grantsburg bridge toll bridge was bought by the state in the early 1950s. He was the very first driver and vehicle to go across free. He was working for Shoholm in Grantsburg—made chicken egg crates and later snow fence. He had a load of egg crates—you know those wood kind that fold down flat, and happened to be there when they had the ceremony to open it as a free bridge. It was in the paper—his 15 minutes of fame! Reminds me—Don Davidson was one of the last trucks to go over the Osceola bridge before it dropped into the river I think. He hauled cattle to South St Paul.”

“Great Grandpa Carnes and two brothers homesteaded in West Sterling on the sand barrens near the river. They called it the barrens because it was mostly open and easy to farm. The little topsoil over the sand dunes soon wore out and blew the farmers farther east. Grandpa did a little farming, some logging and some preaching. His family took over the Sunrise Ferry and ran that until it closed. During the Prohibition and for some years after, there was a steady business hauling the moon-shiners big cars loaded with booze across the river at night as they made their runs to the Twin Cities.”

“Another Grandpa owned 260 acres of land just up from the river at the county line. A couple of creeks came out of springs further up along the shore—Davis and Lagoo creeks named after old settlers. Big springs boiling out of the bank one going north toward the river and one south. Grandpa sold it to some sportsmen in the 1940s, Milard and Shepard, I think, and they called it Lagoo Camp after the old creek and loggers. I think they sold most of it to the DNR last year, maybe except where the trout ponds are.”

“Dad and his brothers lived there and trapped the east bank just south of the county line during the Depression winters; along here where all the little creeks and springs tumble down into the river. There were few jobs in the winter and trapping gave them adventure, some money and something to do when they weren’t needed on the farm. ‘I can work all day long for a farmer and make a buck; I can catch a muskrat and get 50 cents, a skunk for a dollar, and be my own boss,’ said Dad.”

“Anyway, you see these two islands ahead in the River. They mark where Polk County starts. Dad told me that he and his brother Lloyd trapped on them back in the 30s up to 1940—last year was the big Armistice Day Storm. He said the islands were actually just big piles of logs and trees that had jammed on some rapids and gradually sand covered them over and these silver maples grew on the sand. He said they trapped down in holes between the old logs to catch beavers, mink, otter and muskrats. Clarence and Elias Blair trapped the land to the south of him.”

“They called the muskrats, ‘bank rats’ because instead of making a house of cattails, they made holes in the river bank. The fur buyers paid a premium for the St. Croix muskrats over regular pond ones. A little bigger or better fur I think it was. The beavers live in holes in the bank along the river too rather than brush houses.”

After Nevers washed out in 1954, Uncle Lloyd helped with the demolition of the old pine dam. He bought some of the old logs and sawed them to build his house up the River road. He said they were still sound. When Uncle Alvin was living on the river I the 1930s, he pulled out some of the waterlogged pine deadheads and dried them and sawed them for lumber too. Turned out to be good lumber. Lots of them were floating out there when we swam at Sunrise in the 60s.”

“Back in the late 1960s when Senator Gaylord Nelson and others were pushing the Wild River concept, the St. Croix was considered for inclusion. It was pretty much wild as most of the land immediately along the shore was owned by Northern States Power company—left over from when the loggers built Nevers Dam and had to buy up the shoreline above the dam so they could flood it. When the dam washed out in 1954, NSP held onto the land. Darn nice of them to give it to the government for a park!”

“Well, there were hearings in Sterling at the Town Hall to inform the local people about what was being planned and to get their opinion on whether it was a good idea or not. Dad was chairman of the Town during that time – or at least part of the time. After some meetings the general opinion was expressed by one of the local people who said ‘if Northern States sells it, the rich folks from the Twin Cities will buy it all up and put up no trespassing signs and all of us who have enjoyed fishing, hunting, swimming and boating will be shut out. If the Feds take it over, it will probably get more crowded, but we will still be able to enjoy it.’ Sterling went along with the idea and even traded some land the town owned closer to the river for some further away. At that time, the state still owned most of section 16 in east and west Sterling—the school sections. I think they traded some of that. The county traded land too.”

“When we used to come out swimming at the Sunrise ferry area after a hot day of haying, Floyd Harris was still pasturing the area—rented it from NSP. Everybody called it ‘Floyd’s big pasture.’ The place was open and like a mowed park when the cows kept it grazed and the brush and trees in check. We had the idea that the Wild River area might end up with the whole thing looking like a mowed park—didn’t have much idea of what wild meant, I guess. Anyway, it was disappointing at first; the beautiful open areas became brush as the pastures grew over; the beautifully mowed Nevers area turned to just brush. Few scenic river vistas from the road anymore and very limited car access. But it does look pretty nice from a river canoe. Just takes a while to get used to—the idea of wild. Even the Indians didn’t like it too wild, they helped keep the barrens open by burning it if nature didn’t do it often enough. They liked some prairie animals in the big woods.”

“Nevers Dam went in about 1889 or so and out in 1954. I remember it pretty well. To understand the need for it, just think of a flush toilet. To get the big logs through the rapids at St. Croix Falls, where they jammed, you backed up water and logs at Nevers and flushed them down. Exactly like a toilet!”

“One of Grandpa’s cousins, Violet Beebe—the family that lived over by Wild Mountain, married Rupert Fisk. I think Rupert’s dad, Chester, worked on both Nevers and the St. Croix Falls dams. Violet’s sister, Marie, married a Colby from Taylors Falls. That family, if I remember it right, was one of the first to build a house in that town. If you live in an area very long, you get connected to most of the other people around too.”

With the trip over in just a few hours, and some time to spare, I took Chuck and Tim for a tour of the Sterling Barrens. We drove up to the DNR’s Sterling Firetower on Fox ridge where I spent the summer of 1970 honing my philosophy of life during the long damp summer where we had no fires at all in our district that season. You got paid for looking for smoke out the window 100 feet above the top of the high ridge. I set a record for distance viewing, reporting the black smoke from Penta Wood Products smokestack 25 miles away at Siren. My philosophy of life came from Satchel Paige, the great black baseball pitcher; “Don’t look back, they might be gaining on you,” although while in the tower I changed it to “don’t look down…”

I took them to the Old Settlers Cemetery at the mouth of Cowan where it joins Trade River. George Williamson was mowing the cemetery getting it ready for Memorial Day. The little chapel looks great after having been burned and then rebuilt a couple years ago. The Sterling Homemakers are planting some flowers and shrubs out there this year. George has repaired some of the old pipe fence that had rusted out. It looks pretty inviting for eternal repose, although out there the abundance of bugs, mosquitoes, deer flies and ticks convinced people to be buried eight feet deep. George—I printed out a copy of the few old church records—just have to remember to give them to you to put in the church.

Wisconsin Public Teacher's Unions -- A personal history

Let’s Stick it to the Union

Down here in the Deep South, the news is full the turmoil all over the world as people rise up against rule by dictators and their families. You can hardly turn on the news without seeing pictures of huge crowds protesting in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya etc. People seem to have been successful in their protests in all the places except for Wisconsin, where the Fitzgerald, Koch and Walker families seem firmly entrenched. For idealogical reasons, they have taken a budget balance problem and turned it into an attack on public unions. As a former teacher and thus a public union member, I got bothered enough to try to explain, from my own experience, how public unions came about and why they are so important to their members. Get ready for a teaching moment!

Back in 1973, I became a school teacher. It was very hard to find a teaching job in those years with all the baby boomers coming into the market. I had a degree from River Falls in Physics and Math, and had spent another two years in grad school at UW Madison learning how to be a teacher and getting certified. Margo and I sent out 100s of applications to schools in the Midwest, and finally got an interview and then a job on Washington Island, WI., the smallest school district in the state of Wisconsin, out in Lake Michigan.

Washington Island was the most property rich school district in Wisconsin (dozens lakeshore mansions owned by absentee Chicago and Milwaukee millionaires), but the school district paid the lowest wages in the whole state; levying the lowest property tax rate in the whole state. “The rich people might not come here in the summer if we raise their taxes,” was the school board’s argument for continuing to use their two-room 100 year old schoolhouse with a few lean-tos tacked on.

There were only a half dozen teachers K-12, some of them part time. My salary was $7,000 for 9 months of teaching. I had 4.8% of my salary withheld for the Wisconsin Retirement fund and the school board contributed a matching 4.8% in my name. I had no other benefits including no health insurance. They offered the same salary for the next year. Costs of everything were about 30% higher on the island than the mainland—really impossible to live on the salary.

Rodger Meyer, my HS physics teacher from St. Croix Falls explains salary negotiations back in the 60’s. “When I started teaching we had to go before the school board individually to plead for a raise in wages, which were pathetic. Some farmer on the board would moan and groan and say, ‘You are asking for more than I’m making.’ Our teacher’s organization was run by the school superintendent and the school board (management). When I got involved in trying to form a teachers union without management, the school board wanted to fire me.”

Not being able to live on my Island salary and with Margo expecting, I searched around for other teaching jobs with health benefits and managed to find one on the mainland, at Goodman, WI, a lumbermill town on Highway 8 near the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My salary was $7800 and I had some health benefits. I stayed at Goodman for three years and in that time became a member of the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers, a branch of the American Federation of Teachers. The AFT was one of two teachers unions in Wisconsin; a very small one compared to the Wisconsin Education Association union.

I was chosen a member of the teachers bargaining team. We held meetings with the school board and administrator on a new contract every two years. Most of our negotiations were over pay, benefits and working conditions. We decided, at Goodman, with the agreement of the school board, that instead of a raise over one two-year contract, the district would pay both their 4.8% and our 4.8% pension contributions. As I remember that way gave some tax benefits. We paid all of our health insurance (in those days the whole cost was something like $50 per month). Next time we negotiated instead of a raise, the school would pay the health insurance, again for tax advantages. When I hear folks now complain that teachers get retirement and health benefits paid, you have to remember that was what both parties negotiated; these issues can be re-opened and changed at any contract renewal.

We did not have the right to strike. If we couldn’t come to an agreement with the school board, then there was nothing we could do. Teacher strikes were illegal in Wisconsin under the 1971 bargaining law that mandated good-faith bargaining on both sides of the table. However, there was nothing in the law that forced compliance for either party.
The old contract would just stay in effect.

It was very frustrating, because the school boards would tell us—there is no money or maybe there is $20,000 available more for the whole school next year and ask “How do you want to divide it?” and they meant that was what was available for new equipment, books, salaries, benefits etc. School boards believed this was bargaining in “good faith.” They could raise property taxes if they wanted to but that was done at the annual school meeting. The board could have explained the need for more money, but often chose to let the folks opposed to taxes of any kind dominate the meetings.

The 70s were a time of high inflation, and each year our buying power got less. A decent old mill house cost only $30,000 in Goodman, but the bank told us we couldn’t afford it based on their rule of a house should cost only 2 and one half times ones salary. Margo was home with our new baby and there were no jobs for her available anywhere nearby.

I liked teaching at Goodman. It was a smaller school, good teachers and decent (if old) facility. I just couldn’t afford to live on the wages. We teachers looked to our union to help us out by giving us a stronger voice at the bargaining table.

Gaylord Nelson pushed through a bill in Wisconsin that public workers including teachers had the right to organize and negotiate contracts for their labor back in 1959, but with no right to strike there was no way to force school districts or other governments to settle—they could just stall if they chose to, and many did.

From 1970-1977, there were 30 Wisconsin teacher strikes (and over 100 public employee strikes) that occurred including the infamous Hortonville strike of two years length where 84 teachers were fired. . These strikes were illegal, and often ended in strikers losing their jobs, but they continued. With the increasing number of strikes and labor problems with teachers and other public employees, many legislators were beginning to think about improving the process.

The big Wisconsin teachers union, WEA, joined with the AFT and started lobbying the state legislature for a bargaining process that gave teachers (and other public employees) a more even chance at negotiations. I was selected from my school to go to a meeting with our local Assembly representative and, with the WEA representative, talk to her about the problems and our proposed solution, binding arbitration.

“We have run into a real dead end in our ability to bargain with local school districts. They don’t have any reason to negotiate; if they do nothing they win. We are very frustrated with this, and you can see the result; strikes by teachers, even when they know it is illegal and they could be fired. We are to the point where it is strike or quit teaching and get better paying job.”

“We are proposing this: We negotiate until both the board and union are stopped at their last offer. The state appoints a neutral mediator to come in and try to move along further negotiations. If the mediator certifies that there is no hope for an agreement then we each make a written last best offer that is submitted to a panel of three persons for arbitration. One arbitrator comes from the union; one from the school board and one from a pool of independent, neutral state arbitrators. The arbitrators are only allowed to choose one plan exactly as it was submitted—no changes allowed, by a majority vote.”

“We think that forcing each group to submit its last best offer, knowing it will be take it or leave it by the arbitrators, will force each side to move closer together, and that in most cases, when this last offer is presented, one side or the other will take it right then.”

Well, that passed in 1977, with the vote of our representative (a Republican) and it worked pretty much the way we figured it would. Teachers or school boards, seeing each other’s real last offer often did take it. When the process went all the way to arbitration, it did help the lowest paid districts, because the arbitrators tended to look at the surrounding school districts for comparisons in making the decision. Strikes disappeared. Since 1978, there have been no public employee work disruptions in Wisconsin and for the most part, governments and workers have gotten along smoothly.

Well, I moved on to Amery Wisconsin in 1978 and taught in the High School there. A bigger school meant more money ($10,000). The first year was great. I liked the larger school, and the innovative spirit amongst the teachers and administrative staff. It was an excellent school district, and I lived close enough to Dad and Mom that I figured I could afford a house—of course it would be on their land and with wood from our forest and sawmill, but at least a chance to own a home of our own!

Well, my teaching career hit a snag in February 12, 1980, a Tuesday, at 1:30 pm. My afternoon Math 9 class had 35 students (way too many!). A normally quiet student, Don (not his real name) , a small, skinny, shaggy, shy boy started talking in the class, seemingly to no one, just talking loudly. His voice was slurred and I couldn’t understand anything he said. It was totally out of character for him.

“What’s wrong Don?” I asked. “Nothing, …,” with some more unintelligible stuff. “Do you want to go to the sick room and talk to the nurse?” He shook his head no, but got up and sort of lurched across the room and out the door. A student said “He and his friends were doing drugs at noon.” I followed him out the door into the hall. I asked “Are you on drugs?” He looked at me, as if he planned to say something, and then pulled back his right hand, made a fist and hit me squarely on the jaw. I was shocked; it was totally unexpected. It didn’t hurt, as he seemed to have little strength in his arm. “Don, whatever is wrong, you won’t fix it by hitting me. You go down to the office right now and tell the principal what happened.” This happened in sight of many of the students.

I talked to the principal after class. “I think he is on drugs. It is totally out of his character, and I didn’t provoke him at all.” The principal had sent him to the sick room. He called a meeting with the parents, both working full time, with the husband on the road most of the time as a salesman. A few days latter we met. The parents took the position, very insistently, that it must have been my fault, as their son just couldn’t have just hit a teacher. I told them of my suspicion he was on drugs. They got angry and accused me of making accusations without any proof. Don was given detention for two weeks (had to stay after school for an hour), and stayed in my class. I was upset after the verbal raking over from the parents and felt the principal had not stuck up for me. Why was I left feeling guilty for a kid punching me. There was no question that I had touched Don at all or provoked him, as several students who had seen it all told the principal in interviews as I was investigated.

That weekend, I searched the Twin Cities job ads in the newspapers. I updated my resume and wrote a glowing letter about my imagined and real experience in computers and shot off an application for a computer scientist job at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. I finished the school year, got the new job and left my career in teaching, shaking the dust off my feet on the way out. I look back and am actually grateful for Don’s punching me into a better job than teaching. My pay immediately doubled! Sadly, Don was in county court within a year and now 30 years later is still trying to get his life free from drugs and the problems they caused to him and his family.

Getting an education is how we poor farm kids made it into the lower part of the middle class. Many of us went into teaching, thinking it honorable profession; a respected way of making a modest living. We knew if we stuck by it for 35 years, we would get a modest pension. Luckily, our pension money went into an account that politicians couldn’t touch—so in Wisconsin our pension fund is totally funded. I even get a small amount each month from my 6 years of teaching—the money gaining interest over the 30 years it was invested in the account. The depression starting in 2008 dropped the amount I get from the investment, but, unlike in many states where pensions are badly underfunded, the independent retirement fund is sound.

I think it was wrong headed of Governor Walker and the Republicans to attempt to change the bargaining laws for public employees without first asking them to help solve the problem. Public employees are truly our neighbors, friends and relatives, not our enemy. Many of our local farmers and business owners depend on a public employee spouse for health insurance for them and their kids. Public employee unions should have been given a chance to help solve the problem. They are not our enemy! Wisconsin’s new political leaders seem to have two core principles: tax cuts for the wealthy and wage cuts for everyone else.

What few decent jobs that are still available to us will soon disappear if politicians continue to attack unions and workers. Remember, the only reason why workers have things like health care, pensions, 8-hour days, minium wages, workplace safety, unemployment insurance, and a say in their wages is because unions have fought the battles for everyone for the past 100 years. Without the things won for us by unions, we would all be fighting for a greeter’s job at Bigmart or flipping burgers nearby right up to the day we went to the poor house.

Grand Isle LA

We rambled to Grand Isle, LA state park, sort of the deepest south you can get into the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. Very windy and about 50 degrees meant walking the gulf beach was pretty cold. We were looking for BP oil spill evidence. The beach has been and is scraped regularly with a big loader that piles the debris (sea weed, drift wood, and misc) in small piles away from the beech. We found a few small pieces of tar -- about the size of a silver dollar or less--but not much evidence of what was a lot of oil 6 months ago.
Tourism is pretty much down yet after really bombing last summer. Local businesses are hoping things turn around this spring and summer.
It is an interesting area--all the buildings up on stilts; a big Exon oil refinery and helicopters coming and going from oil platforms in the gulf.
We are here for 3 days before heading back inland.

Shivering Oranges

Shivering Oranges

It turned cold down here and so instead of moving a little north into Mississippi last week, we went a little south to Bayou Segnette State Park on the SE edge of New Orleans (pronounced naw-lins) last week. The temperatures dropped to 33 overnight twice, and it rained and blew reminding us of an April shower. This was “break into normally scheduled programming” weather for the locals!

Heated shelters opened for homeless and those without heaters; winter cap and coat drives were on for the poor; a 15-car pileup closed a Baton Rouge icy bridge; schools were closed and road workers shutdown until temperatures rose above freezing the next afternoon. At our park on the edge of the Big Easy, several neighboring RV’ers stopped over to worry about us freezing in our popup trailer.

We have an electric space heater and use an electric blanket in the camper and can stay comfortable down to zero outside, so it was no problem. Our neighbors, mostly southerners, hunkered down in their big heated vehicles waiting it out. However, a sprinkling of us Canadianers and Midwesterners bantered about in short sleeves and baseball caps, “won’t see dis nice weather in Manitoba til May.” “Ja, you betcha, Ma’s in der gettin lathered up with SPF 30—she burns if it gets above freez’n.” “Ja, dose Canada da grees are bigger dan da US ones, much worser,” and so on.

Along the entrance road to the campgrounds, a new flood wall is taking the place of the old breeched one; stronger, prettier, and topped with 12 feet of concrete to let New Orleans, much of which is at or below sea level, get through the next big 100 year flood. With Katrina, the levees failed and nearly 80% of the city flooded. We drove through the northeast part of town where boarded up houses and flood damage mixes with repaired homes and businesses. Lots of empty buildings.

We put on our light winter jackets and tromped the French Quarter at 10 am Monday, wondering why hardly anything was open, the restaurants not cooking, and the streets empty except for the beer, liquor, wine and food trucks refilling the hundreds of bars and restaurants from the weekend crowds and garbage trucks hauling away the evidence.

We managed to get a beignet, a square donut without the hole, the specialty of Café du Monde along the waterfront. Canvas walls rolled down and flapping in the cold wind, the few customers inside gave themselves away with the familiar “eh’s” and “uff da’s” of the far north. Rugged Japanese tourist families roamed the empty parks, preying on strangers to take their pictures as they lined up in front just about anything.
We walked to Bourbon street, and through the even more colorful areas of town; all buttoned up waiting for a warm night. The stiff east wind rattled posters promising floozies, booze, and jazz inside the door, shaking them as if the scantily clad women were shivering. Margo clutched her purse in reaction to TV news warnings of packs of I-pad, I-phone and purse snatchers prowling the porticoed old streets.

We warmed up in museums; the old U.S. Mint and the Louisiana State Museum with exhibits remembering Katrina and the history of New Orleans. The Katrina display was new, with dozens of film clips running live reports gleaned from the Courics and Brokaws of disaster. Whipping palm trees, crashing waves, floating cars and houses backed by a deep rumbling soundtrack in darkened rooms with lights flashing like lightning. One theater screen was an askew house wall; behind framed windows of were TV screens showing hurricane footage as if we were looking right through the windows.

A few shops were open, selling dried alligator heads, voodoo dolls, tee-shirts beads and tourist gimcracks. Margo had a hard time finding a tee-shirt tame enough to wear in Cushing. In all, it was rather disappointing to see the French Quarter so deserted. Cold weather is hard on iniquity.

Another cool rainy day, we drove south to the ocean in Placquemines (plack a min) Parish, a finger of land stretching far into the Gulf. Highway 23 parallels the west levee on the Mississippi extending 60 miles south of New Orleans. We were after evidence from the big spill.

Here and there were rows and fields of orange trees, some bare and some bearing. Only one fruit stand was open. “There are about 500 acres of orange trees in this area with about 100 trees per acre. There are many small owners, but my boss is the biggest with 100 acres or so and rents more. We raise tomatoes (they had some fresh picked ones for sale) and lots of cool weather crops now, broccoli, cabbage, lettuces, greens. We have yams, and other things on hand. We will be planting our 2011 gardens starting in a few weeks,” the short mid-thirties, bundled up woman tending the stand told us.

“The orange picking season started in late November and we will be picking fruit for about 6 more weeks as different varieties ripen. We raise Samatsu, Navel, Blood and a few other varieties of Oranges. My boss raises and sells thousands of orange trees each year to other states. There used to be more orange growers around, but it keeps dwindling. Each season is different; this year we have a good yield, and the price is pretty good. We have some lemon and grapefruit trees, but mostly oranges”

“We have to spray the trees for bugs and diseases that attack the tree itself. The fruit doesn’t get wormy like apples because of the thick rind. However, in the last few years a disease that makes brown ugly spots on the orange fruit has come in and we have to spray with copper, a fungicide, to keep it from spoiling the looks of the fruit.”

“Oranges can stand cold weather, it makes the fruit sweeter if we get some before harvest time. It can get down to about 18 degrees for up to 4 hours without damage to the tree and fruit, something that very rarely occurs here. The trees are pretty tough!”

Our intention, as we drove Hwy 23 south, was to follow it to the Gulf and see if we could find a souvenir BP tar ball to bring back for show and tell at the Men’s group. Another RV’er told us they had camped at Grand Isle, a state park a little west of where our road would lead, and all they found was a few tar balls along the beach—nothing else from the spill at all.

The whole road south of New Orleans followed the Mississippi west bank levee and the big shipping channel that lets ocean boats up river You couldn’t see the water over it from our road, but you could see huge ocean liners and tugs sticking above the ridge, only a few hundred yards away, as if they were in another lane of our highway. Occasionally we turned out drove to the top of the levy to see the rusty ships headed to and from the ports to New Orleans.

One roadside area was piled high with vast mounds of black crushed coal, the size of coarse road rock. Next was a series of high wheat elevators, the round concrete ones you might see along the Mississippi in the Twin Cities.

“Barges coming down the Mississippi, loaded with western coal sent by train to the Mississippi and loaded up north are unloaded here, piled and then reloaded on to big ships headed to other countries as is wheat and corn. Lots of it comes from Minnesota,” said the attendant at a gas station-casino nearby. Casinos here are often just a few slot machines in a room off a restaurant or gas station. If they really wanted to get my business, they would turn the gas pumps into slot machines; you pay for your gas and throw in an extra dollar to get a chance at getting it all back!

The last 25 miles of the road had some big flat drained fields, pasture to large herds of cattle. Although the grass was mostly brown, clover was bright green and the cows were out grazing. Occasionally there were forests of live oak or other green leaved plants, short and ocean wind blown along with marshes and a continual string of housing; mostly trailers and manufactured and messy, often up on stilts.

Oil production facilities lined the last 10 miles of the road. Vast security fenced lots filled with cars and helicopters support the offshore drilling/pumping platforms. Fenced crude oil tank farms; pipelines running helter skelter, and one huge huge Conoco-Phillips refinery, separated from the Mississippi by levees obscured the wetlands.

Five miles from the end of the road was the first hill we saw a limitless flat land of water and tidal marsh. A prominent hill far ahead turned out to be a “sanitary landfill,” truly oxymoronic. Windblown garbage littered the road, and atop the huge pile, trucks unloaded; bulldozers pushed and compacted and thousands of gulls dove in for food scraps before it all was covered with a layer of dirt.

The ugly scene set the pattern for the last few miles of the road into the Gulf. Narrow roads turned to gravel, one side the tidal ponds and hundreds of shore birds wading in abandoned pipes, hurricane strewed tin roofs, and other man made waste; the other side fenced lots filled with oil company tanks, pipes, equipment; much of it salt water rusted, ugly and abandoned and other lots still in use, security fenced and just plain ugly. It reminded us of a vast wrecking yard and dump that had been placed in some of the most pretty wetlands you can imagine.

Oil production here has been ongoing for 75 years with the bulk of the efforts starting in the 1950s and then as the easy-to-find oil in the shallow marshes ran out, pushing on out further and deeper into the ocean living the litter of old fields, tanks and equipment behind. Debris dumping appears to have been going on just as long!

“The junk is mostly just as bad as you go out into the Gulf waters,” a local man fishing along the road at the end told me, “but it doesn’t look so bad as it is underwater! Most of this land is still owned by the oil companies and although it looks abandoned, is still used at times; the pipelines from farther out come through here, pointing to ugly rusted huge pipes and junctions coming along the roads and the rusting tanks nearby. Maybe they will clean it up someday. It would make a wonderful wildlife refuge.”

“The main problem here with the spill was the local fishermen were told they couldn’t fish or collect seafood in the Gulf around here anymore. They just opened it up again last month. They couldn’t make a living, and of course the businesses who depended on them had trouble too. There was some oil cleanup around here—out farther from the shore, but that’s gone except for a few tar balls on some beaches. Can’t see anything left. Some folks are still bothered about eating the fish and shrimp and stuff they catch here, but most seem to think it is OK again. The oil dispersants (detergent like chemicals dumped to break up the oil) are more worrying for us than the oil itself,” said a fisherman holding his rod and reel fishing in a small tidal pool lined with debris and opposite a rusted old security fence surrounding an abandoned oil tank farm when I stopped to talk.

“About the only think left you can see from the spill are all the lawyer signs along the road trying to get us to hire them to get money from BP!” he laughed. “Lots of folks have applied for BP money to cover their losses. Twenty billion from BP has corrupted many honest folks and attracted lots of scum in a greedy feeding frenzy. That brings in the big sharks with law degrees. I think the money might hurt us more in the long term than the oil spill!”

We plan to ooze along to another Louisiana park for this our 5th week on the road. Right now we think that we will head back north at the beginning of March, but it all depends on Margo. Last week we parked over a fire ant hill, and after a few days they figured out there was fresh meat in her bunk and bit her up a lot before I got them under control. By tying her hands, I got her to stop scratching the raw skin and am spraying her down with benzocaine regularly until the stinging subsides. By the time you read this she should be fine, or in the hospital.

Black History

When we travel, I like to have a purpose, something I want to learn about. This trip south, on the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, I decided to try to find out if the Civil War did any good in solving the problems with slavery in the south. My rather weak recall of history is that although the slaves were freed, they were treated badly for the next 100 years, and only the Civil Rights laws and movements of the 1960s brought about real change, but things are fine now.

The first place we explored was Hammond, LA. This town has been in the news recently. Local Justice of the peace, Keith Bardwell, made the news in October 2009 for refusing to officiate at the wedding of an interracial couple. This town was the 1980s initial setting for the fictional town “Sparta” in the first season of “In the Heat of the Night.” In that TV show, black northern cop Virgil Tibbs (Howard Rollins) comes to work in a southern white town with police chief William Gillespie (Carrol O’Connor), exploring contemporary racism, modern policing, and other issues. I remember it as a good show.

Hammond is located in Tangipahoa Parish (Louisiana’s name for a county) east of Baton Rouge. It is mostly rural, crossed by freeways with a lot of urban mall sprawl. It has 70% white and 29% black people. Median income is about $30,000 with about 30% living under the poverty line. Total sales tax rate is 9%, split locally and state wide; property taxes on a $250,000 house were about $2,000; state income taxes are based on income level, 6% over $50,000. Louisiana is rated as a low tax state, but the ratings seem to represent a low income state where taxes are relatively high on lower income folks and relatively low on high income folks.

The week started with Martin Luther King Day, something taken seriously here where 30% of the folks are black. We chose to visit a local Black History museum. It was a very interesting, very professional and privately financed museum showing black folks history from their lives in Africa and the history of slavery from transport, sale, plantation life, Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights era ending with a display of current black leaders including President Obama.

We were led on the tour of the former blacks-only school by a teacher who had taught there named Adelle. She was 82 years old, strikingly handsome, with long black and white hair parted in the middle, flowing widely on each side. She spoke in very educated English; a school teacher’s precise enunciation, fluent, yet with passion. I started by saying “My great great grandfather gave his health to free slaves and his oldest son his life. One hundred and fifty years later, we are here to find out whether it was worth the effort.”

Adelle tells the rest. “After the war, there was a time that black folks did well—as long as northerners were in control, the Reconstruction. We had the vote, elected blacks to all levels of government and things were headed in the right direction. By 20 years after the war, the Federal government soldiers pulled out and local white folks took over again and proceeded to strip us of all of our rights. We lost our right to vote, lost our integrated public schools, and over the next 20 years, the whites took control of everything and made rules, down here they are called Jim Crow laws. They enforced everything with violence; the Ku Klux Klan rode around burning, shooting and terrorizing any black folks who spoke out.”

“They separated kids into separate schools. White folks paid taxes that went to white schools; black folks paid taxes for black schools. Blacks were poor and so our schools were poor. Black schools when I went to school in the 1930s ran only a few months a year, because we had to work in the fields with our parents to make money. “

“If a black man complained, he got lynched. There were hundreds of lynchings of black people down here. The whites ran around with sheets over their heads, the Kluxers (Ku Klux Klan) burning, shooting and scaring black folks who complained.”

“We had a few black colleges. I went to one for two years to get a teaching degree. Then, in 1952, I got a job teaching in a black elementary school. We got the old desks, books, and supplies from the white schools when they got new things. My salary, $51 per month, was half of the white teachers on the other side of town.”

“We did a good job with the children who did come to school, but many didn’t stay in school. Even with an education, black people couldn’t get a decent job down here—just in the black school or black hospital. Women worked as house servants; men as field hands and day laborers on plantations. You complain, you got fired.”

“We couldn’t stay in the white hotels, couldn’t eat in the white restaurants, had to sit in the back of the bus, couldn’t vote without getting in trouble. I got married and my husband didn’t dare look at a white man or woman straight on without worrying about getting arrested or a visit by the Kluxers. We sent our two daughters north for an education and they both work in good jobs, lawyer and business, but not around here. Still not possible down here for most black folks.”

“This building was the Mooney School, the local black school until 1968 when the school district was told by the court it had to integrate black and white. They had claimed that they had separate but equal schools, but they were not equal, not even close. They shut the school down here, because whites wouldn’t send their children to such a poorly built school. “

“Do you know that the local district is still under court orders because instead of really integrating, they have continued to play games with boundaries of districts that keep schools either white or black. Last March the court found they were still out of compliance and ordered more changes.”

“After the black school, this building, closed in 1968, few black teachers got jobs in the new supposedly integrated schools. I did, and what I remember most was the big boost in my salary! The schools really have never been integrated here; white folks with money moved their kids to private schools or new neighborhoods where new schools were again white. When the black schools closed, it was really hard for a black teacher or coach to get a job in the new schools—still is even with a court order that 1/3 must be black, never got near that. “

“You see this picture. ( She showed us posters of the 20 -30 black folks marching up main street in 1966.) Dr. King started us on non-violent marches to try to get our rights. That’s me. She pointed out a tall strong looking young woman marching in the front of a street following mounted police with angry looking white people lining the streets. I marched in those times. We got attacked many times by the whites along the side, throwing stones at us and sometimes punches. The white police pretended to try to protect us, but they were on the other side too. We registered to vote, and then politicians had to worry about our vote too!”

“It is certainly better now. There still is racism; white folks down here don’t give up their prejudices and privileges easily. But it is not out in the open like it used to be. They don’t lynch us anymore, we can vote now without being attacked. “

“I was so excited when Mr. Obama got elected president. I had always taught my students that if they worked hard, they could become president of the US, but inside none of us really believed it. We were trying to give the children a good education, and we did, in our black schools, but there just wasn’t opportunity for decent jobs down here“

“When Mr Obama got elected, I just knew I had to go to Washington DC to see it. I was 80, but I told my daughter I had to go! She tried to talk me out of it; but she hasn’t seen what it was like to be black in the south like I have—to be treated second class so much of your life that it just becomes part of you. I just had to go and be part of the biggest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life. She realized I was going to go what ever she said, so she took off work and we got to be in the huge crowd at the Capitol for inauguration day. We stood all day long in the huge crowd, so excited we didn’t even have to go to the bathroom. We milled around the area and managed to see President Obama as he got out of his car. It was so wonderful to see a black man president of the US. If I had died right then, it would have been worth all of the trouble and bother of 80 years of being black in the south to see this happen!”

“It is hard for me to see President Obama criticized. I think underneath a lot is really racism. It isn’t gone from here. It is much better, but, my how hard it has been to be black here for 82 years. I hope my grandchildren don’t have to see how people can have raw open hate for people just because of skin color. I think that is why some people are so vicious in attacking President Obama.“

“Religion has been a consolation for me. Whites wouldn’t let us worship in the same churches, so we have our own. I never could understand why, when we were all Christians, that white people thought making slaves out of us was right. Sometimes I think religious folks can be the worst when it comes to treating others decently.“

After the tour, Adelle and three other retired teachers who had taught in the segregated visited with us. I told them, “Up north, we don’t have discrimination in our churches.” Adelle said “It must be nice where women can be ministers or priests; gays are welcome and your preachers don’t rail against scientists and Muslims.”

Raising Cane

It’s hard not to feel a little guilty having enjoyed mostly sunny mild weather through January down here in Southern Louisiana, while getting emails from up north telling about 32 below and snow. If we were there, we would be burning fuel trying to keep warm, adding to the increasing cost of energy and dumping carbon dioxide into the air. Helping the environment by sacrificing the comforts of home for strange places and tropical climates does give us a warm feeling of doing our part over those of you who just ordered another tanker load of fuel for February.

We had one pleasant 3-inch rain overnight, the rain drops falling on the canvas over our bed in the pop-up camper soothing our slumbers and drowning out the roar of frogs, gators and owls. The temperatures have ranged from a few days in the 40s to a sweltering 75 last Friday that brought some mosquitoes to life. Made us nostalgic for Wisconsin and Minnesota. There are individual orange and grapefruit trees in yards here and there and a few orange groves—the oranges appear to be ripening, but none for sale yet. Almost 100% of the fields in the 30 miles around the area we have explored are in sugar cane.

Lake Fausse Pointe State Park is on the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin, just west of the levee that channels the Atchafalaya river into a 20 mile wide, 150 mile long swamp. At the north end is a big set of gates that controls the Mississippi, allowing the US Corp of Engineers to run water down the current Mississippi channel, or divert some to the old Mississippi channel, now called the Atchafalaya River. Without the diversion project, the Mississippi would have already changed its main channel to the Atchafalaya years ago.

The area is honeycombed with old and new oil wells, the area underlain with natural gas and oil that has been pumped since the 1930s. In the 1950s to 1970s, huge dredges created cross channels to allow access to new well drilling. This has changed some of the freshwater marshes into saltwater, as the ocean has flowed into the deep channels. We are far enough away from the oil spill (to the south east of us) that the only effect are the claims for BP oil money being distributed to those who can prove financial losses from the spill. The locals in that area have gone pretty much hog wild making claims—some fraudulent, some wildly exaggerated, and some legitimate. There is 20 billion to be distributed of BP money, and every crook from Texas to Florida has managed to put in some kind of claim to confuse the legitimate ones. The folks down here take after their politicians; corrupt as you can possibly be.

The Mississippi has been channelized most of the way south from Iowa and thus runs through faster. Before this, the silt coming downriver deposited at the mouth of the river, creating the huge swamps and marshes that are here. Now it rushes through and dumps the silt out over the continental shelf, into deep water and so the land along the southern Louisiana coast is gradually disappearing rather than building up—29 square miles per year according to the U.S. Geological Survey. One Wisconsin township is 36 square miles, so almost one township is disappearing each year. This has been going on for 50 years or more. It would be a good idea for some of the farmers up there in Wisconsin and Minnesota to revert to their high erosion, clear field plowing to bring back the days when tons of topsoil ran down the streams and rivers into the Mississippi, or Louisiana may just disappear altogether.

Where we are camping is about 50% under water. Built up roads and natural ridges are surrounded by standing water and bayous (Indian name for streams) and cypress swamps. The whole of the area is ranges from about 3 feet above sea level to sea level. It seems to me that if everyone in WI and MN melted the ice cubes in their refrigerator and ran them down the drain, we would surely be under water here. Most of the buildings are up on 8 foot stilts anticipating the spring floods that come most years.

This area is almost exclusively in sugar cane fields—large, flat corrugated fields, some having been in sugar cane since it was first introduced here in 1751. We toured a museum at Jeanrette that was devoted to the sugar cane industry—they advertise the town as “Sugar City.” As a farm kids and maple sugar people ourselves, Margo and I were fascinated by the sugar cane growing and processing going on in the area.

Sugar cane fields are laid out in ridged rows about 18 inches high and 6 feet apart. The water table is high and with frequent rains, the ridges allow the plants to be up out of the water. Water drains down the troughs and into larger drains and out of the fields without drowning the cane. Farmers have special disks, pull graders, and cultivators to make and handle the ridges. These ridges and drains are called the “bank system.”

Wikipedia says: “Sugarcane cultivation requires a tropical or temperate climate, with a minimum of 24 in of annual moisture. It is one of the most efficient photosynthesizers in the plant kingdom. It is able to convert up to 1 percent of incident solar energy into biomass. In prime growing regions, sugarcane can produce 20 lb of biomass for each square meter exposed to the sun.”

“Although sugarcanes produce seeds, modern stem cutting has become the most common reproduction method. Billets (chunks of stem that look like bamboo with at least one junction where a sprout will form) harvested from a mechanical harvester are planted by a machine which opens and recloses the ground. Once planted, a stand can be harvested several times; after each harvest, the cane sends up new stalks, called ratoons. Successive harvests give decreasing yields, eventually justifying replanting. Two to ten harvests may be possible between plantings.”

In Louisiana, one-third of the land is fallow, waiting to be planted, and the rest in sugarcane. Every 11 months a harvest is made in the fall. Cane here is harvested 3 times over three years off the same root before a total replanting. One third is replanted each year. It seems, that like alfalfa, it gradually produces less each year. Planting is in the fall when the tops of the sugar cane stalks are available to be spread in the ditches between the ridges; then the old ridges are disked over the stalks and make a new set of ridges. Cultivation is not done after the first season.

Monsanto and other cane seed producers are tinkering with the genes in the cane plant and expect to have a “Roundup-Ready/Bt” plant available by 2015. Growers are debating whether consumers will balk at genetically modified sugar products. Sugar beet farmers in NW MN are already into a legal debate over the use of “Roundup-Ready” beets there. Sugar cane is sprayed for pests and fertilized quite heavily.

Slaves were brought to this part of Louisiana primarily to work on sugar plantations. It is a year around effort with harvesting lasting from about September to December. In the old days, everything was done by hand with the aid of mules. Nowadays, it is highly mechanized with expensive harvesters that cut the stalk, clean away the leaves and any dirt, cut it into billets and have it ready for processing at large central sugar plants, often farmer’s co-operatives. Much of the cane sugar here ends up as Domino brand.

Farmers traditionally have burned the cane fields in the fall to get rid of the leaves and smaller stalks parts and just leave the juicy canes. It is a real controversy here because of the nuisance to the neighbors and our higher rates of respiratory problems. A letter to the editor in the local newspaper last October describes it: “Giant smoke plumes all around the horizon; black ashes falling like snow. I knew that the burning had begun because I awoke with my sinuses full. Sure enough, when I left for work, I could see the angry plumes. Nothing like the familiar view of insecticide-laden haze all around!”
“Oh and it’s good for the economy, too. The hospitals, pulmonologists and respiratory therapists will all benefit from an increased load of lung patients (asthmatics, COPDers, sinusitis patients) flooding through their doors. “

Bigger farmers who can afford a $150,000 harvester don’t burn anymore, but smaller ones can’t afford it and still burn. The harvester cuts the stalks into billets, which are delivered at the factory where they are washed, ground, crushed and pressed to give up the sweet cane juice. Then many steps of filtering and boiling and crystallizing are done to end up first with raw sugar, sort of a brown looking sugar, then more of the same to end up with pure white sugar. Molasses and bagasse (pronounced as two words-bag gas) are the byproducts. Bagasse is the fiber left and is burned to fuel the boilers. Molasses is sold for mixing in animal feed and for the grocery. Inside the sugar warehouses, huge trucks and loader tractors handle the sugar—looking like the activity in a gravel pit. Eventually it is bagged and shipped to retailers. Some local cooks insist that cane sugar is better for cooking with than beet sugar.

I was hard pressed to find out the actual profit for a sugar cane farmer in Louisiana, but it appears that on a very good year, when the yield is good, the harvest season is not too wet, the sugar content is high, a profit of up to $300 per acre can be had; other years are break-even only or losses that are somewhat covered by insurance programs. In a radius of about 40 miles from the park, we saw only sugar cane fields. Rice has moved further west and north. There appears to be no crop rotation in this area.

Sugar was very profitable in the 100 years before the civil war. Labor was from slaves and huge land holdings made some planters immensely rich. They built large mansions, known here as ante-bellum plantation homes. There are still many around to tour.

We toured “Shadows on the Teche” in nearby New Iberia. Most of these plantation homes are the same—huge columns supporting porches at the front and back; storage and servant quarters on the 3rd floor, family living quarters on the second, and office, dining, kitchen, parlor and library on the main floor. The ceilings are 12 foot or so the heat will stay at the top of the room. Each room has a fireplace for heating, the only built in item. The rooms are furnished with hardwood wardrobes, sideboards, beds, tables, fine woodwork, expensive curtains, paintings of the ancestors, expensive china and porcelain objects and statuary in the gardens.

Each house was originally surrounded by outbuildings including a separate cooking building, a smokehouse, servants quarters, and housing for the animals. The tour guides are always very careful to use the word “servant” when they mean “slave.” The local tour guides almost completely ignore that the whole plantation culture and life of leisure portrayed was on the back of black slaves. In touring a dozen or more of these homes over many years, I have never seen a black person as a tour guide. Tourist from the north ask questions about slavery, and the tour guides generally say something like “most masters were good to their slaves and treated them as part of the family. When the Union soldiers came through they destroyed the culture.”

In almost every slave owner’s plantation (Shadows on the Teche owner had about 300 slaves), many of the slave children were “mullattoes,” product of the white male owners having children with the slave women. White wives looked the other way and continued to insist that the southern plantation culture was above that of the money-grubbing businessmen of the north, the Yankees.

When the war came, this area was a battleground and had a lot of destruction. After the war, the former slave owners had to convert to a hired labor role. Blacks who had hoped to become land owners and farmers in their own right, were for the most part pushed into plantation jobs that barely paid enough to live on. The white folks did what they could to keep black people uneducated, without the rights of a citizen (voting, holding office, fair trials…). They succeeded for 100 years and only since the 1960s have things begun to change for the better down here.

The area is backwards in terms of education, housing, salaries etc. Just about any measure comparing states puts Louisiana and its southern neighbors of Mississippi and Alabama at the bottom. “People down here kept black folks down for a few hundred years. You can’t prosper as a state doing that,” said Leon, a native Louisianan and retired school teacher who was RVing near us. “That and our history of mostly corrupt politicians at every level, make us more like a third world country. There is a third factor too, we are a very religious people – about 1/3 Catholic and most of the rest fundamentalists. Our church leaders teach us that our reward will be in heaven. I think this gives us an excuse for not improving our own condition here.”

Probably the most striking thing you see down here on the back roads are the water filled ditches filled with floating litter; the Styrofoam, aluminum, plastic and paper wastes that you see folks chucking out the windows. Towns and cities have made great efforts to clean their litter, but my how ugly the rural areas next to them are. Beer, Mountain Dew and McDonalds seem to predominate, but if it comes in a package of any kind, you will see it in the ditches of Louisiana. Margo thought we might volunteer to pick up some garbage along a stretch of waterfilled ditches. “Well, be careful of the poisonous snakes and the gators,” warned Leon, dampening her enthusiasm significantly.

Margo gets job cutting Palm Sunday Fronds

It has been staying about 30s overnight and 40-55 daytimes for the past week, cool, but sunny and pretty nice!

Buick Balks

Traveling Tribulations

We are down in Louisiana, with nice weather, and even some green grass on the ground with camellias in bloom. The trip was reasonably easy with the worst driving conditions on the Monday (Jan 10) right after a snowstorm swept through Missouri, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana, on Sunday.

We pulled into a rest stop, which was not plowed, not shoveled and a real mess a full day after the snowstorm. I asked the cleaning man “Why aren’t there any snow plows out today clearing the roads?”
“Govn’r Baba (Haley Barbour) is a devout Christian man. He b’lievs God dumped it on us, so God’s gotta get rid of it!”

We stopped at a gas station ($3.09) to fill up and get a gallon of washer fluid. The price had been jacked from $2.99 to $9.95. I complained and the clerk said “well, it’s still selling.” I bought a 2 liter bottle of diet 7-UP, added 10 squirts of soap from the bathroom, shook it up at a cost of $1.89

We had some car troubles along the way. I intentionally drive older vehicles because they cost less overall most of the time. When I do have to pay for a car repair I think “it’s just one car payment,” remembering when I bought new cars and paid for them every month for many years, never getting out of debt before buying the next one. I find most older cars get by on two payments per year from age 5 to 10.

We are driving Margo’s 1995 Buick Roadmaster with a 5.7L V-8 that we save for pulling our small popup trailer camper. It has been a three payment per year car since we bought it six years go. Generally, I don’t mind a few car problems along the way on a trip as it keeps things interesting and at times exciting on what could otherwise be just a long boring drive. However the Buick threatens to go beyond just interesting, to worrisome.

These Roadmasters (called Road Monsters by many) are big; have huge engines that could easily pull a semi-tanker trailer fully loaded with gasoline (actually not a bad idea considering the amount of fuel they use). The towing package includes air leveling shocks to keep the rear end at the right level whatever the load. Their biggest downfall is the vast amount of complex automatic and power features.

Margo always had the idea that camping in retirement meant hauling a 40 foot trailer with two bedrooms, kitchen, dining, living and exercise rooms with multiple slide out compartments; bringing the full comforts of home on the road, versus me planning to get a slightly bigger tent to replace our 1973 canvas model.

She passed her dream to her Uncle Ray, a used car dealer who only sold Buick Roadmasters and my constraint of $5,000. He picked out a white 1995 Roadmaster with 95,000 miles on it; in beautifully new looking condition and sold it to her for $5,000—a “favorite niece” discount for a car that probably cost $30,000 new. I think the maroon real leather seats were the clincher for Margo.

It has been a challenging car. The first problem was that if you left it sit for a week, the battery died. I put in a new battery—no different, just took longer to die. I couldn’t find what was wrong and eventually took it to my local repairman who also had a long search. “I finally had my young mechanic crawl in the trunk while I shut the lid and sure enough, the trunk light stayed on!” he said, charging me for three hours labor at $75 per hour plus a replacement switch.

As we planned to hoard the miles on this car just for pulling the camper, it sat in the garage for months at a time before being run. Three months later, the battery was dead again. I took it back to the same repairman. He couldn’t find anything—nothing drawing current other than some really tiny amounts for the clock. “Leave it with me and we will keep an eye on it.”

Two weeks later he called. “The car has a towing package with air leveling shocks in the back. The air compressor that pumps up the shocks to keep it level, comes on every day and runs for a while. There is probably a very slow leak somewhere in the system. I couldn’t find it. Replacing the air shock system would be about $2000, so I just rewired the pump to only work when the key is on. When it sits for a while and you turn on the key, it will immediately pump up again, but not while it is off. Should work OK until the air shocks spring a leak big enough I can find.” Only $200 and all labor this time.

The next trip south, the rear end pumped up and stayed up, whether you turned the key off or not. The Buick dealer in Natchez, Mississippi found a short in the pump wiring. “Should’ve been easy, but somebody re-wired the pump and took me couple of extra hours to figure out what was going on. He let the wires hang and they rubbed against something and wore off the insulation” he said as he handed me a $196 bill for labor and parts (tape and wire).

After that we went on several more trips and it pulled the camper fine; ran fine and smoothly, and only needed a new dual pipe/muffler exhaust system ($500), a new alternator ($200) and the air conditioning quit (estimate $500 for repairs). We skipped the air conditioning repair as most of our trailer trips were in cool weather anyway. Eventually we had to replace the AC pump with an idler pulley as the clutch was getting ready to grab and tear the drive belt (which by the way we replaced too) along with another tensioning idler pulley (another $80 each).
I had been mildly grumbling about the car; the mileage was about 16 pulling the camper versus about 25 with the Olds 88, and we were paying lots for repairs. When we had to replace two of the tires we found that they were a size that had to be special ordered at $150 each. Margo got tired of my grumbling, and said—lets trade it in during a trip returning from Colorado one winter after having visited Scott at Keystone Ski Lodge.
On the way back, out on the prairie, a coyote streaked across the road in front of us and we banged into it hard at 75 mph. The coyote was killed, and the front bumper and fender had $2500 damage—just cosmetic stuff, but with my $1000 deductible collision, was hard to justify fixing—so I said no, lets just drive it until it quits. That was two years ago. This year I had some new brake lines put in. The heater no longer gets above warm, the air shocks are permanently deflated, but it does run and pull the trailer pretty good anyway. Of course, $60 per tank fill twice in a 12 hour day of driving does seem pretty steep. Margo has vowed never to buy a car on her own in the future, so I guess that is worth quite a bit!
The first real annoyance on this trip down was the leak in the heater core that I fixed with stop leak and then the heater quit heating. I think the heater core got plugged with the leak gunk, as one heater hose is very hot and the other not so hot, indicating the fluid isn’t circulating. That is why, when I left off the story last week, I had just put cardboard in front of the whole radiator hoping to heat the whole thing up so hot, it would remove the clog in the heater core, and get Margo out of hypothermia—all her shivering and whining made it hard for me to concentrate on driving. I couldn’t resist saying “well, I think it was you who picked this car…” which did heat her up a little.
With the cardboard in, we pulled out on the freeway and took it up to 70 and cruised along watching the temperature gauge go above the normal 200, to 205, then 210, and 220 and the heater warm a little. Suddenly there was the smell of antifreeze and a cloud of smoke coming from under the hood. I pulled over as far as I could get along the freeway and shut off the engine and popped the hood.
The radiator was gurgling; the engine steaming with wet antifreeze, all spraying out of a tiny pinhole in the upper heater hose. “It’s not serious,” I told Margo, “I will just let it cool a little and then wrap duct tape on the hole.” I popped the trunk and took out my toolbox (I carry enough tools to pretty much overhaul the engine if needed), but couldn’t find the duct tape anywhere. “Margo, would you look for the duct tape, please.” I asked warmly.
With a towel, I opened the radiator reservoir slowly letting off the rest of the pressure and steam then wiped the hose dry and cleaned it with windshield washer fluid and let it dry while Margo was still rummaging through the camper drawers and trunk for duct tape. Finally she said ”we must not have packed it.” That was a real shock, for along with wire, duct tape is probably the handiest temporary car repair you can get.
I noticed a copy of my new book, “St Croix River Road Ramblings” (only $22 to Russ Hanson, 15937 Co 27 Blvd, Pine Island, MN 55963 – Scott will fill your order) in the back seat. I print the books, then staple the pages together and cover the staples and back with high quality colored duct tape for elegance and to keep the staples from wounding the reader. Maybe I could peel the tape off and use it on the heater hose. Carefully, I pulled off the 11.5 inches of tape. It was still good and sticky. I wrapped it tightly around the heater hose leak three times and then took a few feet of wire and carefully wrapped that around the tape so it looked like the stents we used to keep open an artery at Mayo. I removed the cardboards, topped off the antifreeze and headed on down the road into Illinois.
We motelled overnight and in the morning the Buick wouldn’t start, just clicking sounds when I turned the key—signs of a dead battery. I always carry a 12 volt lawn mower battery with me camping. It lets me have some electricity even if the campsite doesn’t so I don’t have to run down the car battery. I took it out and jumped the Buick and it started! “The camper lights don’t work,” said Margo as I did my morning tire and light check. Looking under the camper hitch, I noticed that with the air shocks not working, the hitch was running lower and dragging the wires. Sure enough, two were worn completely off and must have drained the battery sitting on the icy pavement. I cut them, bared the ends and reconnected and then took the duct tape from my copy of the $20 “Second Book of Stories of the Trade River Valley” and taped them together and tightly to the hitch and we were on our way.
Louisiana was sunny, greener, and pleasant. We chose Tickfaw state park near Baton Rouge, LA. Our first disappointment was that LA has dropped the 50% camping discount for senior citizens as of last June. It now is $16 per night instead of our budgeted $8—adding $240 per month above our budget.
We hit a huge pothole near the park on the second day looking around. The Buick got what my hard of hearing Grandpa fondly called a “purr” (he didn’t like a muffler as he couldn’t hear the purr to know the engine was running). Looking underneath I could see one of the muffler’s had broke loose at the front connection. You can see how we fixed it in the photograph accompanying this story.
If you need one of the new books mentioned above to carry in your car for emergencies, send a check to Russ Hanson, 15937 Co 27 Blvd, Pine Island, MN 55963 where son Scott will fill your order. I would recommend at least two if your car is over 5 years old! Scott promises to send us the money here in LA so we will have enough to keep the Road Master comfortable.