Blow Ye Winds, Blow

Apparently our trip up north was very well timed, since we made it home on dry roads with only a minor blip in traffic near Madison. There’s always traffic around Madison. It was an easy drive.

This would not have been the case had we tried it today. Likely would not be the case tomorrow either.

Most of Wisconsin is shut down right now, and when Wisconsin shuts down because of a winter storm you know it’s bad. When they close the bars then shit has definitely gotten real.

The state Department of Transportation has this nice service where if you go to their website you can see a map of travel conditions. The entire northern half of the state is outlined in black and listed as “Stay the hell off the roads you simpletons! Your 4-wheel-drive Compensator will not help you!  We’re not sending people to rescue you! Maybe Tuesday we’ll send out retrieval parties! Morons.” I’m sure if they thought they could get away with it there would be skull-and-crossbones graphics as well, and possibly little hand emojis flipping you off for even thinking about driving, but they’re doing what they can to get the message across.

The interstate highway that we took to drive home on Friday was shut down in both directions at 11am today. The traffic camera images all looked like closeups of sheep.

Down here in Wisconsin’s banana belt it has rained incessantly since about mid-morning and you have to appreciate the fact that you don’t have to shovel rain. The winds are fierce, the ground is saturated, and the main storm has started to sag southward so our potential overnight snowfall has been raised from one to four inches (2.5-10cm) to eight to twelve inches (20-30cm). This will be on top of all the rain, which will have frozen into sheets of ice at some inconvenient point in order to provide just THAT MUCH MORE EXCITEMENT for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not looking good for leaving the house is what I’m getting at here. All of the local school districts have already announced that they’re closed. As for Home Campus, we usually wait to make that call. Instructors can cancel their own classes without too much bother and staff can make the choice to stay home on their own, but to close the entire campus officially triggers a wave of bureaucracy that the people in charge try to avoid if at all possible. So we’ll see.

I don’t have any classes or student appointments tomorrow, but I do have to be part of two different candidate interviews for positions where we’re hiring and I’m not sure how much of that is actually going to happen. Perhaps there will be Zoom. I’m not the one making the decisions, so I’m sure I will be told at some point.

At the moment I’m just sitting in my little office, surrounded by books, listening to the rain lash against the windows. I got the grocery shopping done yesterday and none of today’s plans involved putting on shoes. There’s corned beef simmering on the stove, since Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day and nobody has time to simmer corned beef on a workday. It smells good.

So we will hunker down and be glad for our snug oasis in the middle of the storm.

A Wild Trip Up North

I actually like the Minnesota Wild. They’re a good team, they have a snazzy logo, and Minnesota feels like it should have a professional ice hockey team in a way that Florida and Texas really shouldn’t. Plus at this point in American history I confess I have a deep fondness for anything connected to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, as they have been at the forefront of resistance to the current tyranny and should be supported by all patriotic Americans for this. So I do like the Wild.

Just not as much as the Flyers.

A while ago Kim and I discovered that my hometown Philadelphia Flyers would be traveling to St. Paul for a game in March and we agreed that this would be a fun thing to go see. For me that probably would have been the end of it but Kim is a planner and actually makes things happen, and surprisingly quickly we had tickets and a hotel reservation.

And then we realized that by midwestern standards St. Paul is not all that far from the campus where I teach my remote class, so perhaps we could head there the following morning so I could teach it in person for the first time since I started doing this course in 2012. It would be nice to see the students, for one thing, and it would also be good to see all the people up there who make this class work – any remote class is a group effort, after all. Plus the Campus Director up there is a friend of ours and an old chemistry colleague of Kim’s from a previous institutional structure, so there was a lot to recommend this visit.

We therefore had Plans.

We drove up to St. Paul on Thursday – a relatively uneventful ride for the first part, though once we got past Eau Claire the snow closed in and the High Wind Warning became a genuine thing. It wasn’t much snow, to be honest – just enough that no windshield wiper setting was quite right – but the winds were fierce and remained so through much of the next day.

The Saint Paul Hotel is a much nicer place than I’m used to staying. It’s one of those big old-fashioned places with lobbies that were designed to convey more than simply utilitarian processing, and as someone used to staying in hotels that have numbers in their name it was a bit of a shift, though a pleasant one. They also have valet parking, which meant we just pulled up, handed the keys to a dapper man in black tails and a top hat who did, in fact, work for the hotel (we checked), and then didn’t have to think about it again until the next morning. This worked out very well since the arena where the game would be played was just a three-block walk away.

It was raining when we walked over, which was actually kind of nice. Rain melts ICE, after all, and we were not confronted by any jackbooted government thugs while we were in St. Paul. They haven’t left the city, despite the news reports – they’ve just decided that publicly executing American citizens was bad PR so they’re not as overt as they were a couple of months ago. Still no justice for the dead, of course, but one lives in hope and fury.

We got to the arena fairly early, bought one of the souvenir programs (“Only $5! Benefits youth hockey!” – how could we say no to that?) and found dinner at the first big concession stand that we came to. The arena has a row of Standing Room Only spaces just behind of the last row in the first tier of seats and these come with a little counter that you can lean on and was also absolutely perfect for resting trays of Buffalo Chicken Fries and cups of house cider upon, and we enjoyed a tasty if nutritionally void dinner.

From there we wandered counterclockwise around the concourse until we got to our designated spots on the Standing Room Only section further up the ice. For those who actually watch hockey, we were about level with the face-off dots on the Wild’s end of the ice, across from the team benches. We were a bit worried about the very tall people in front of us who did not sit down during the entire extended warm-up skate, but they did once the game started and we had a great view of the game during regulation time. It turned out that they were most of the neighborhood where Alex Bump grew up and they were here to cheer for him in his first professional trip to St. Paul as a hockey player, even if he was playing for the Flyers. They dutifully wore Flyers gear with his number on it, despite confessing to be Wild fans in general, and you have to appreciate that kind of support. I chatted a bit with the guys standing next to us at our counter, one of whom was also a university instructor so we had that in common.

There were a lot of Flyers fans in attendance, to judge from the jerseys and sweatshirts, and everyone seemed happy to be there. I like going to sporting events where everyone is clued into the fact that it’s a game and you’re there to have a good time. Three cheers to the Wild fans for being good about that.

It turned out to be a very entertaining game, even from a neutral perspective. The Flyers went up 1-0 toward the end of the first period, found themselves down 2-1 after the second period, and then tied it on a short-handed goal in the third.

The game went to overtime, which the NHL now does as a 3-on-3 five-minute sudden death period, and everyone stood up at that point so we couldn’t see anything. Fortunately there were two seats open a couple of rows down by that point, so Kim and I went there and stood by them, so we did get to see the end of the game. When overtime didn’t solve anything they went to a shootout, which the Flyers won 1-0, and it was a good night for the orange and black.

Every single goal of the game was scored on our end of the ice.

We walked back to the hotel, collapsed into heaps on the various chairs, and spent a lovely time not doing much of anything at all before calling it a night.

The next morning we got up way too early, retrieved the minivan from the top-hatted man (who was either still there or had somehow returned before we woke up), and headed off toward Far Away Campus. We made it there with plenty of time to spare despite a) the High Wind Warning still being a thing, which is an experience in a tall vehicle on a high bridge, let me tell you, b) somehow managing to get behind every sightseer in northern Wisconsin, which in mid-March is not that many people so this was something of an achievement, and at least one turkey delivery truck, and c) stopping for breakfast at one of the several million Kwik-Trip gas stations that permeate Wisconsin like pubs in Britain. IYKYK.

Kim found a table just outside the classroom so she could get some work done and I wandered into the room and met Simon, the guy who sets up all the Zoom stuff for the class, and we got things ready. My students filtered in – according to Abbey, the Campus Director, they were happy that I was coming up to see them, and we had a good time together. It was a pretty full house for being the Friday before their spring break, and there was even a former student from last year who sat in for a while. We covered WWII, one of the gateway drugs of history and always a popular subject despite the casualty figures. And then I wandered around the trying to catch up to other folks who I’ve worked with, eventually finding Sue and Angela but missing Sonya and Troy. It was good to see them!

I also bought a campus sweatshirt so I can actually represent when I’m teaching. I have a lot of Home Campus gear, but this is my first for this campus.

After that we went to lunch with Abbey at a very good Mexican restaurant, where we hung out for a pleasingly long while and had good food in the process. One of my students showed up with his parents and it was nice to meet them.

All in all, a good day.

The drive back was uneventful as you always hope they will be, and eventually we came home and were confronted by a deeply annoyed cat who was, nevertheless, not too proud to sit on my lap for a while.

News and Updates

1. There are times when you just have to wonder what sins have been committed to create the timeline we’re in, though it has to be said that many of them are not secret, or at least not anymore. We in the US are governed by a criminal syndicate protecting a ring of child rapists that is actively trying to burn the planet down in order to avoid accountability, loot the place bare, and die with more toys than the rest of us. That much is pretty clear, as is the ceaseless braying of their minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves. But the vast majority of people in this world just want to get through their days with as little trouble and as much comfort as they can, preferably with something good to eat and a harmless way to amuse themselves for a while, and sometimes the gap between these two groups of people is just dizzying.

2. I think for today I am just going to focus on my little corner of the world, because you can’t live in the middle of the maelstrom 100% of the time without going mad. I’m sure I’ll get back to it soon. Fuck those bastards and everyone who supports them.

3. It’s the middle of the semester and everything is crashing down. Assignments are due, exams are scheduled, and students are nearly as bewildered and stressed as we are. I have far too many tasks to think about and not nearly enough focus to worry about them. It’s been a time.

4. Last week Kim and I went to the new Indian restaurant in town with our friend George and had an absolutely marvelous dinner. Every kind of restaurant has that one dish that you use to rate it, and for me with Indian restaurants it’s chicken biryani and it was really, really good. They’re a little slammed right now – I don’t think the owners anticipated the demand for Indian food here in Our Little Town, and to be honest neither did I – but definitely worth the wait. Plus we ran into several friends while we were there – Angelica stopped by our table, and we found Camrin and Jacob as well. A good time was definitely had.

5. Lauren came down to visit on Friday, mostly because she wanted to snag a suitcase for her upcoming trip to see Shai, and it was lovely to see her, as you would imagine. She invited Isabella and Lily as well and I made General Tso Chicken and we all sat at the table for a very long time just hanging out together. In a world full of troubles, it is a nice thing to have an evening full of good food and good company. And we had two in a row!

6. Oliver’s professor still hasn’t graded the project he turned in on January 9 and I kind of want to know how it turned out. I don’t know how professors do that. I get mad at myself if it takes me more than a week to grade an assignment.

7. I finally finished my second book of the year, a mark that I used to hit somewhere around January 10 over the past fifteen years or so, but these are not times conducive to doing much reading, at least not for me. It was a very good book, though, and I’ll post my review of it next January assuming we are all still here to post and read blogs. There have been times this week when I was genuinely not sure about that, given Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s illegal war of aggression in Iran – I find that teaching an entire course on the atomic bomb does give you a different perspective on international crises from most people – but who knows. Perhaps I’ll get to write that post after all. We’ll see.

8. Someone stole an hour of my life last night that I won’t get back until November. Daylight Savings Time is a conspiracy against all that is proper and just, and it needs to stop. Try explaining the concept to a cat.

9. I’m trying to find some projects to immerse myself in to keep the rest of the world at bay for a while, and the siren call of genealogy is getting louder. So far I’ve contented myself with trying to organize the stuff I already have in a way that I might actually be able to find specific things when I look for them, but I suspect that at some point I’ll go digging again. It’s an interesting hobby that harms nobody, with the possible exception of myself.

10. It was 70F (21C) today. This weekend it is going to snow. Welcome to March in Wisconsin.

Stories

One of the formative experiences of my life was watching some random news magazine television show back in the late 1980s.

I couldn’t tell you what the show was called, what network aired it, who hosted it, or even if it was actually aired in the 1980s. Maybe it was the early 90s. It was definitely pre-internet. It was a long time ago.

In this particular episode the host had gone out to the rural American west somewhere – one of those vast open landscapes where they don’t bother putting guardrails on the highways because what would you hit if you drove off the road? – to interview a reporter for a local newspaper. This is how long ago that was. There were still local newspapers.

The newspaper office was in a rundown little building on an empty street in town and it was piled with papers, typewriters, and the detritus of journalism before it went digital. There were probably half-empty cups of coffee sitting on desks as well. There would have to have been.

This local reporter had made a name for himself by writing human interest stories. Every week or month or however often the newspaper came out he had a story about somebody telling their tale, often just the most riveting thing you could ever read, and the host wanted to know how he found these people. Was there a trick to it?

The reporter just laughed. Everyone’s got a story, he said. You just have to ask them about it.

When the host seemed skeptical, the reporter walked over to one of the desks and picked up the local phone book. It was a fairly thin volume, as you’d expect from a place that looked like the whole population could fit into a minor league baseball stadium. This is another way you can tell how long ago this was, by the way. There were still paper phone books.

The reporter walked back to the host and told him to rip out a page at random, and when the host did that the reporter stuck it into the wall with a thumbtack and handed the host a dart. Throw it at the page, he said, and when the host did the reporter walked over to see whose name the dart had landed on.

They got into a car and drove out to that person’s home, a sun-bleached trailer on a dusty road under a sky that seemed to go on forever, and they knocked on the door. When someone answered, they introduced themselves as reporters and asked if they could talk for a while, just to see what their story was.

It was fascinating.

I don’t remember who lived in that trailer, or what they looked like, or even the story they told. But I do remember that it was the sort of story that you wouldn’t have imagined coming from someone living a quiet life on a dusty road under a sky that went on forever. Or maybe you would, if you knew someone like that.

And the lesson there, as the reporter had said, was that everyone’s got a story. You just have to ask them about it.

I write down a lot of stories here, because I have my own to tell. I am a historian, telling the stories of others for a living. I enjoy reading memoirs and blogs and the kind of social media posts that go on for multiple screens recounting some story or other – often trivial, sometimes outlandish, but never uninteresting. I love hearing other people tell their stories. I try to be a good listener when they do. Sometimes I succeed.

The world is not made of atoms and forces. It is made of stories, and if you ask people they will often tell you theirs.

On Finding Joy

In this darkening world it is no crime to hold onto what slivers of joy come our way.

It is easy to get lost in the headlines. The US has embarked on a war of aggression in violation of federal law, the US Constitution, the UN Charter, and the Olympic Truce. ICE thugs are still out there brutalizing people in the public streets, kidnapping and trafficking them to random nations. We are still governed by pedophiles, cosplayers, ghouls, and the suck-ups who defend them. AI slop is taking over and people are getting stupider in real time. Everything in the grocery store is smaller and costs more.

There is a very real sense that the people causing all of these headlines want you to get lost in them, though. They want you to despair. They want you to give in to fashionable nihilism and jaded dorm-lobby cynicism. It makes it easier for them when you do.

In such a world the act of finding joy is a subversive one.

There are good books to be read, strong black tea to drink, and conversations to be had with loved ones. The weather is slowly warming and soon we here in Baja Canada will be able to go outside without coats. There are cats. I will hold on to these things in defiance of an era that wants me to think of violence and cruelty and corruption.

It is entirely possible to grieve for the world and still take pleasure in what is in front of us.

There are many kinds of stories to be told, and each does not invalidate the others, no matter how it may seem when we are in the middle of them. I have no illusions about the current state of the world, but I will hold onto what joy comes my way as best I can.