Last fall, early in the semester, I fell woefully behind with this blog though I did keep up on You Tube and on Facebook with all the events I usually highlight here. I will now begin the process of catching up, so you see a mixture of dates and events for the next few months.
For the past couple springs, I talked with students in Gina Bitner's EDUC 290 class about Picture Books and other matters. In late April, I returned to Dr. Gina Bitner's
class EDUC 290 class to hear her special guest, awarding-winning author Julia Cook. I am glad I went. The students in the class wrote and illustrated picture books. And the following Tuesday, I enjoyed a couple hours at Calvert Elementary school where the college students read with groups of youngsters the Picture Books that had all created.
As the photographs from Julia Cook's presentation of Peru State and those I took at Calvert Elementary suggests, imaginative things occur when enthusiastic learners come together. I look forward to a return trip to the Auburn elementary school in the spring of 2015.
This past spring's 25th Piano Extravaganza turned out to be Tom Ediger's last. The collected photographs will give you a good idea about how many people once again engaged in this annual event held in the Peru State Theater. As usual, the gathering featured many, many youngsters and an increasing number of PSC Alumni. This video features a group that includes Rich and Deb Clopton's talented son, Ellis:
If I recall correctly, this particular group contains some video of Dennis and Heidi Welsch's son and daughter:
In the final video of the last group, the pianists play "Stars and Stripes Forever," one of the numbers featured in the first of these events:
On early Saturday afternoon (2 January, 2015), we left for Prairie de Chien at the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers to begin a quick two-day road trip on which we visited a few Wisconsin attractions that included the World's Largest Six Pack in La Crosse and concluded with the Orange Moose in Black River Falls, a grip that frequently took us from pathos to bathos. I have thought about visiting the monument first dedicated in 1947 to the last Passenger Pigeon shot in Wisconsin since reading about the plaque in Also Leopold's writings (See his essay at the conclusion of this posting). The simple and sublime dedication to avarice and stupidity sits atop the bluffs overlooking two beautiful rivers, frozen just now and dotted with people ice fishing. The last Passenger Pigeon, in captivity, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo just over 100 years ago: the numbers went from the billions to zero in an alarmingly short time. The plaque is located in Wyalusing State Park, which also features
many American Indian mounds, sixty-four of them, I think. We enjoyed our visit to the park and left for our hotel room in Prairie de Chien as the sun began to set over the frozen rivers.
Chronicled in the collection of photographs that begins with Friday's visit to the memorial, Saturday's kitsch trek began in La Crosse, moved to Sparta, and concluded in Black River Falls. Our visit to La Crosse included four stops: The World's Largest six pack, Gambrinus, King of Beer, a large Baseball and Bat, and a statue as one enters the city that depicts Native American Indians playing, wait for it, Lacrosse. Give a look to the stories connected with all four of the stops, linked in the preceding paragraph. The narratives connected with the six pack and the King of Beer interested me, and I was disappointed that we could not take a tour or sample the product. The large baseball and bats sit outside the La Cross Loggers' baseball stadium, Copeland Park, situated near the Wisconsin River. I would enjoy watching a game there someday. As we left La Crosse on our way to two stops in Sparta, I made a U-Turn to take a look at the statue of the three lacrosse players. As I got out of the car to snap a few pictures, a pick-up pulled up to me and asked if I needed any help, for without thinking, I had turned on the flashing lights. Well, a pleasant way to leave a place, to be sure.
items you have probably seen at various theme parks. And walking through the mold yard describes something of a jaw-dropping experience.
I enjoyed watching the short video of the company's president, Jim Schauf, talk about his "bone field": filled with molds of all manner of items, from a beautiful pheasant to large-toothed sharks.
We both enjoyed our walk through the museum, which in addition to a bit of moon rock and tributes to Sparta native, Deke Slayton, one of the seven original astronauts, includes an fun collection of bikes, including one made for ice and another for mowing the lawn.
On our way to Black River Falls, our final stop for kitsch, we pulled off the highway to visit a site Linda discovered while we drove to see the Orange Moose, The Wegner Grotto near the small town of Cataract.
Paul and Matilda Wegner created the grotto filled with a variety of sculptures of cement--from a welcome arch to a church, from bird houses to a luxury liner--decorated primarily with broken glass and shells.
Our one-day voyage to strange attractions concluded in Black River Falls where we laughed ourselves rather silly--well, more than once on this odd outing--over the final three sculptures on the agenda.
Really, they speak for themselves!
I leave you for the moment with the Leaping Deer, the Giant Mouse with Cheese, and my favorite bit of fun, the Orange Moose, all located a few hundred yards of one another, a rich catch of kitsch to conclude the day's catalogue of smiles.
Aldo Leopold's beautiful essay something of the serious, follows the preceding image of the Orange Moose,
In 1947, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology erected a monument
to the Passenger Pigeon at the confluence of the Wisconsin and
Mississippi Rivers in southwestern Wisconsin, in Wyalusing State Park.
The following essay, penned by Aldo Leopold on the occasion of the dedication of the monument, is widely regarded as the most poignant ever written about extinction. Read
the keynote delivered by Stanley A. Temple on the occasion of the
rededication of the Passenger Pigeon Monument on May 17, 2014. We meet here to commemorate the death of a species. This monument
symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again
the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring
across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods
and prairies of Wisconsin. Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still
live that, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few
decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only
the hills will know.
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are
effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights.
Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover,
nor clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. They
know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and
weather; they live forever by not living at all.
* * * *
Our grandfathers, who saw the glory of the fluttering hosts, were
less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by
which they bettered our lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons.
Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we
have gained by the exchange. It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the
origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding
caravan of generations: that man is only a fellow-voyager with other
creatures in the Odyssey of evolution, and that his captaincy of the
adventuring ship conveys the power, but not necessarily the right, to
discard at will among the crew. We should, in the century since Darwin,
have achieved a sense of community with living things, and of wonder
over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under
the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of
steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his
prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all.
But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been
ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather
than in Mr. Vandevar Bush’s bombs, or Mr. DuPont’s nylons, lies
objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.
* * * *
We who erect this monument are performing a dangerous act. Because
our sorrow is genuine, we are tempted to believe that we had no part in
the demise of the pigeon. The truth is that our grandfathers, who did
the actual killing, were our agents. They were our agents in the sense
that they shared the conviction, which we have only now begun to doubt,
that it is more important to multiply people and comforts than to
cherish the beauty of the land in which they live. What we are doing
here today is publicly to confess a doubt whether this is true.
This, then, is a monument to a bird we have lost, and to a doubt we
have gained. Perched like a duck hawk on this cliff, it will scan this
wide valley, watching through the days and years. For many a March it
will watch the geese go by, telling the river about clearer, colder,
lonelier waters on the tundra. For many an April it will see the redbuds
come and go, and for many a May the flush of oak-blooms on a thousand
hills. Questing woodducks will search these basswoods for hollow limbs;
golden prothonotaries will shake the golden pollen from the
river-willows. Egrets will pose on these sloughs in Augusts, plovers
will whistle from September skies, hickory nuts will plop into October
leaves, and hail will rattle in November woods. But no pigeons will
pass, for there are no pigeons, save only this flightless one, graven in
bronze on this rock. Tourists will read this inscription, but their
thoughts, like the bronze pigeon, will have no wings.
* * * *
We are told by economic moralists that to mourn the pigeon is mere
nostalgia; that if the pigeoners had not done away with him, the
farmers would ultimately have been obliged, in self-defense, to do so.
Perhaps this is true, but perhaps it is also true that we did away with
an idea, as well as a bird. It is one of the ironies of science that it
discovers, ex post facto, a philosophical significance in what it has
previously tossed into the dust-bin. The pigeon was no mere bird, he was a biological storm. He was the
lightning that played between two biotic poles of intolerable intensity:
the fat of the land and his own zest for living. Yearly the feathered
tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden
fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a travelling blast of
life. Like any other chain-reaction, the pigeon could survive no
diminution of his own furious intensity. Once the pigeoners had
subtracted from his numbers, and once the settlers had chopped gaps in
the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter
or even a wisp of smoke. Today the laden oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the
feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must now perform slowly
and silently the biological task which once drew thunder from the
firmament. The wonder is not that the pigeon passed out, but that he
ever survived through all the millennia of pre-Babbitian time.
* * * *
The pigeon lived by his desire for clustered grape and bursting
beechnut, and by his contempt of miles and seasons. Things that
Wisconsin did not offer him today he sought and found tomorrow in
Michigan, or Labrador, or Tennessee; to find them required only the free
sky, and the will to ply his wings. But there are fruits in this land unknown to pigeons, and as yet to
most men. Perhaps we too can live by our desires to find them, and by a
contempt for miles and seasons, a love of free sky, and a will to ply
our wings. – Aldo Leopold
For the past couple springs, I talked with students in Gina Bitner's EDUC 290 class about Picture Books and other matters.
class EDUC 290 class to hear her special guest, awarding-winning author Julia Cook. I am glad I went. The students in the class wrote and illustrated picture books. 
And the following Tuesday, I enjoyed a couple hours at Calvert Elementary school where the college students read with groups of youngsters the Picture Books that had all created. 
As the photographs from Julia Cook's presentation of Peru State and those I took at Calvert Elementary suggests, imaginative things occur when enthusiastic learners come together.
