Susan Smith: North Woods ricing ‘not for the weak of heart’

Originally published Sept. 28, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

HAYWARD – For those of us who buy wild rice in the store, Chris Smith has nothing but pity.

Pity, and a few choice words.

“It’s hybrid crap,’’ she said. “It’s not even real wild rice. It’s wild rice crossed with brown rice, then treated to look wild.”

Wild rice, called Mahnoomin by the Ojibwe, and celebrated this month during the Wild Rice Moon, is another thing entirely.

“It’s a treat, and a good staple,’’ she said. A true grass, not a cereal crop, it grows in lakes across northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, both of which have regulated wild rice gathering seasons.

To get the real thing, you have to do what hundreds of Wisconsinites do every September -- take to the shallow waters of the Northern lakes and rivers.

The 2008 wild rice season is winding up, and it has been a decent one.

“It’s not a real top-notch year, but it’s better than last year, which was the fifth year of a five-year drought,’’ Smith said.

Smith and Paul Vallem run The Rice Shack on Highway 63 just north of Hayward, where the region’s ricers bring their prize to be parched and threshed.

Vallem and Smith grew up ricing, and inherited the Rice Shack business from their fathers, along with a love of this special season in the north.

“Most of the people we deal with grew up ricing and learned it from their parents,’’ she said. “It’s not just the Native Americans who go ricing, it’s anyone.”

Sam Thayer, who runs The Forager’s Harvest in Ogema, teaches beginners to rice, but he said it is not for everyone. “If people aren’t used to physical labor, it can be very hard for them,’’ he said.

Anyone can buy a ricing license from the state Department of Natural Resources for $8.25. Thayer estimates the DNR sells about 500 licenses a year, and the tribes issue another 300 to their members.

It takes a canoe and two people: one to stand and pole the canoe through the rice, and the other to sit in front with two sticks called knockers, and whack the ripe grains, which fall into the bottom of the canoe.

Ricing takes some skill – most beginners will wind up in the water – and some fortitude.

“This is not for the weak of heart,’’ Smith said. “If you don’t like bugs and spiders and worms, don’t pick rice.”

To remove the bugs, hulls and moisture that will spoil the rice, the Rice Shack crew first parches or dries the rice in a 50-gallon cement mixer that rotates over heat, then threshes it in a second machine. The Rice Shack charges $1.75 a pound for its services, and will trade for rice. But most people keep their hard-won treasure.

“You have to pick twice as much as you want, because you only get half the weight back after it’s threshed,’’ Smith said. For her, about 40 pounds will last until next year’s rice season.

PHOTO INFORMATION: Chris Smith (front) and Paul Vallem check wild rice after threshing. If they find more than one husk in a handful of rice, they continue threshing for another minute and check again./PHOTO by Dennis Harnden

Susan Smith: Pioneer Store remains the heart of Ellison

Originally published Sept. 14, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

ELLISON BAY -- Ah, we’re such tourists.

We go away for a year, or a decade, and we expect nothing about our favorite place should change.

I want the Wampum Shop in Mercer to still have the same rubber tomahawk my parents wouldn’t buy for me when I was a kid. (A decision that likely saved my brother’s scalp).

I expect whitefish livers on the menu at Greunke’s in Bayfield. (Even though I’d never order them.)

So it was with horror that I, and many other tourists, learned about the July 2006 destruction of the Pioneer Store in Ellison Bay. The store blew up in an early morning gas explosion. The blast knocked store owner Carol Newman out of her bed upstairs, and she had to escape by climbing out a window.

It seems a building project had cut an underground gas line, and gas leaked until it exploded in the middle of the night, killing two people staying in a nearby cabin.

It also cost a community a beloved landmark. The store had served the far Northern Door since 1900, as a post office and a store.

As local writer Myles Dannhausen Jr. wrote: “Many feared a part of Door County’s soul was lost forever . . . so entwined was it in Ellison Bay lore that many speculated the town would die without it, as if the town’s heart had been cut out.”

Newman, a part of Door County life for more than half a century, and her husband Lester didn’t let that happen. The new store reopened about a year after the blast.

On the outside, it greatly resembles the dearly departed Pioneer Store. Inside, it’s too new to be the same. I miss the narrow aisles, the rolling floor boards and banana bunches hanging from the post near the wood stove.

Newman says what regular customers miss most is the old stool on the customer side of the counter. “Everyone sat on it,’’ she recalled, “the customers, the salesmen when they were making a call. I even would sit on it at night when I did the books.”

She’s still got the base of the stool; the seat, which blew across the street, disappeared during the clean up.

Everyone in town, it seems, helped decorate the new place. They’ve donated antique tins, dishes and appliances for shelves above the new counter.

It doesn’t look exactly the same, but it still has the same feeling. “It still has the charm of the old store because the customers are all happy and chatting with each other when they stand in line,’’ she said.

And there’s a secret behind that. Newman says, “It’s because we keep the air conditioning up high, so people are happy instead of irritable and hot.”

But I think it’s because we’re happy an old, beloved tradition – for tourists and townies alike – has survived against all odds.

PHOTO INFORMATION: On the outside, the Pioneer Store looks much like the original, destroyed by an explosion in 2006./PHOTO by Susan Lampert Smith

Susan Smith: Start school year right with trip to Appleton’s Jansport outlet

Originally published Sept. 7, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

APPLETON – Think you’re cool because your kid goes to the big UW?

Well, I’m a “Yale mom,” not to mention a Stanford booster.

And my collegiate pride cost far, far less than the tuition you’re paying.

Yes, it’s time for back to school, which means our annual pilgrimage to find slightly wacky collegiate wear at the Jansport Outlet Store, located on the company grounds a few miles west of the Fox River Mall in Appleton.

This is a real outlet store – a place with real deals on high quality merchandise – unlike those fake-o outlets that line the highway, offering just a few bucks off the full price. I discovered the store, at N850 County Road CB, when I went to the company’s Appleton office to write about a mountain climbing expedition for women with breast cancer.

At Jansport’s Appleton outlet, you’ll find thick collegiate sweat shirts, two for $15, as well as $1 bins of misprinted T-shirts. They don’t make the stuff in Appleton, but the appliqué and embroidery is done here. And the outlet is the place where they get rid of the ones that represent a bad day at the embroidery machine.

Our family tradition, part of our annual trips to Door County and Lambeau Field, is to find the strangest schools to support, as well as the best misspellings.

Yes, Jansport has Wisconsin wear and our beloved Bucky Badger on sale, but why wear what everyone else is wearing? Besides, the Victor Valley Rams need your support more than the Ohio State Buckeyes.

You can adopt the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University, the Lynchburg College Hornets and the Shippensburg University Ships.

My personal favorite weird mascot sweat from the Jansport store is the Wichita State Shocker, a crazed looking dude with dreadlocks made of shocks of wheat. The family used to fight over who got to wear that sweatshirt.

There is a weird side effect, however. When you wear your Kamehameha School zip-up, people will stop you on the street to talk about the greatness of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the school founder and last royal descendant of Kamehameha the Great. It does no good to explain that you’ve never been to Maui, and couldn’t get into the school, anyway, as you’re not native Hawaiian.

Likewise, my husband used to wear a Palomar College sweatshirt at his stand at the Dane County Farmers Market, and encountered a surprising number of people who wanted to reminisce about the good old days in San Marcos, Calif.

The misspellings can be fun. My son has a brown sweat shirt advertising the UCLA “B’s.”

But we’re still searching for our holy grail: A nice collegiate shirt that reads Hervard or Yael.

It gives us a reason to keep on digging.

PHOTO INFORMATION: Dustin Roosa of Mount Horeb models a UCLA “B” sweatshirt, a great find at the Appleton Jansport outlet.

Susan Smith: Madison’s derby Dolls more than just “hurt in a skirt”

Originally published Aug. 17, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

A funny thing happened in the four years since I’ve been to a roller derby bout.

It’s become a real sport.

Oh, yeah, the women – who fill roles as substitute teacher, mom, or IT tech in daylight – still sport funny stage names and the costumes. The summer travel league team, the Dairyland Dolls, dresses in their blue and white gingham dresses. Think Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, if you left her out in the rain until her dress shrunk to the approximate size of a teddy, the better to show off her panties – and her massive pair of quadriceps.

The Dairyland Dolls play up their bad farm girl image with a mascot in a Holstein costume, and a cheer that goes:

“Don’t gimme no pop, no pop
“Don’t gimme no tea, tea.
“Just gimme that milk, moo, moo, moo, moo
“Wisconsin milk, moo, moo, moo, moo.”

But once they hit the rink – their next home bout is Aug. 30 against the Burning River Girls from Cleveland – it’s clear the sport has come a long way.

In July, they made progress in the rankings, by narrowly beating the Charm City Roller – a Baltimore team dressed unwholesomely in black, at their home rink, Madison’s Fast Forward.

The team’s star jammer, a tiny girl in braids named Mouse, cut through the Baltimore bruisers like a mouse through Swiss cheese. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) As she came around the oval, scoring a point for every opposing member she passed, her arms churned (sorry again) like those of an Olympic speed skater. There were referees’ whistles and fouls, but none of the professional-wrestling style antics that marked the team’s birth five years ago.

“This is definitely the future of derby,’’ said Tammy Faye Undertakker, the dolls’ spokeswoman. “Anymore, teams that are just show and fake fighting aren’t respected.”

The Baltimore bout was serious business, as Baltimore came in ranked 13 nationally, and the local team 17th. The top 12 teams in the East will qualify for the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association’s Eastern Regionals, which will be held Oct. 10-12 at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison. The top four teams will advance to Portland, Oregon, for the national championships in November.

Derby in Dairyland has come a long way since the Dolls first season in 2004. The four Madison area teams that play locally -- the Vaudeville Vixens, the Reservoir Dolls, the Unholy Rollers and the Quad Squad – have been joined by the Appleton-area Fox Valley Foxs and the Milwaukee-based Brew City Bruisers.

And Crackerjack, a Doll who currently serves as president of the WFTDA, expects the sport to grow some more after the release next year of the Ellen Page (of “Juno” fame) and Drew Barrymore movie, “Whip it,’’ about a Texas girl who gives up beauty pageants for the track. Texas was the home of the roller derby revival early this century (it all but died out in the 1970s), so it’s appropriate the film is set there.

Standard rules and athletic training have made it more of a sport and less of a show.

“The hits are harder, but cleaner,’’ said Crackerjack, a Dolls founder. “Before, the rules weren’t clear, so it was street justice.”

And the girls, many of whom never played an organized sport before, are in better shape than ever.

Witness the “baby dolls,’’ a group of about 25 women hoping to make the local teams this fall. Their summer regimen consists of two or three days doing core strength work at the Monkey Bar gym, and three nights of training at the track.

“We play tag and learn how to properly fall,” said “Baby Doll” Robin Giles, who was limping around Fast Forward on a crutch, the result of wrenching her knee during a practice.

Still, for every bout, there’s an ambulance and a paramedic team on hand, giving truth to roller derby’s motto, “Hurt in a skirt.”

For schedules and info, see http://www.madrollindolls.com/

PHOTO INFORMATION: A Dairyland Doll named Mouse passes on the outside during a recent derby match in Madison vs. Baltimore’s Charm City Roller team./PHOTO by Neil Stechschulte

Susan Smith: Door County’s curvy Hwy. 42 designed for beauty, not speed

Originally published Aug. 3, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

NORTHPORT – In a state known for its paved and curvy rural roads, it might be dicey to pick one stretch as the curviest road in Wisconsin.

After all, motorcyclists and sports car hobbyists from all over the flatter parts of the Midwest flock to Wisconsin for its scenic rural drives.

For the fact we’re not completely flat, like much of Illinois, you can thank the glaciers that either missed areas – the hilly Coulee Country near La Crosse comes to mind – or shaped it into eccentric gum drop mounds and deep kettles, like those found in the Kettle Moraine of southeastern Wisconsin.

For the fact so many of our rural roads are paved, unlike the gravel rural roads of other states, you can thank our history as the Dairy State. Milk trucks had to get to farms 365 days a year.

So, yes, we have many curvy roads. But for my money, nothing beats the last couple of miles of Highway 42, as it winds out to the very tip of Door County.

Between Gill’s Rock and Northport, where the car ferry leaves for Washington Island, the highway zigs and zags between the beech and maple trees.

There are plenty of beautiful photos of this stretch, with the trees blazing orange and yellow in the fall, and with the black road coiling through the icy white woods in the winter.

I’ve driven it many times, but I don’t always appreciate its beauty as I’m rushing to catch the last ferry.

During a recent trip, I counted 15 curves in the one and half miles between Timberline Road and Porte de Mortes Drive. And why? It’s not like you’re snaking along the edge of a winding river or skirting the edge of bluffs.

Bill Prue, at the state Department of Transportation office in Green Bay, said he didn’t know the reason, but he has heard the theory it’s designed to slow down tourists so they don’t drive straight into Lake Michigan. “It does look nice,’’ Prue says. “Oftentimes when I’m up there, I’ll see people stopped on one of those knobs taking pictures.”

At the town of Liberty Grove, at the very tip of the county, town road commissioner Walter Kalms says his grandfather complained that “whoever laid out that road had something wrong with his head.”

But Kalms, and deputy clerk Janet Johnson, actually do know the reason: The road was designed by an artist, not an engineer.

Johnson says famed landscape architect Jens Jensen had a hand in laying out the end of Highway 42 to enhance its scenic beauty. Jensen, a Danish immigrant, designed parks in Chicago and Madison before coming to Door County in the 1930s to create, The Clearing, a school to train landscape architects.

Jensen, who had a near-mystical belief in the civilizing power of nature, would probably scoff at my hurry to get to the island so I could start relaxing.

Next time, I’ll appreciate the curves that were put there just so I’d slow down and see the beauty of Wisconsin.

PHOTO INFORMATION: Tourists often stop along the knobs on Highway 42, capturing photos of the road as it winds through the beech and maple trees./PHOTO by Neil Stechschulte

Susan Smith: Capitol Square restaurant serves an Old Fashioned good time

Originally published July 27, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

MADISON – Doug Griffin can’t recall his first brandy old fashioned.

“No. No, I guess I can’t,’’ he said. “I have enjoyed them very much over the years.”

He won’t forget the 100,000th. Not his personal 100 grand of brandy, mind you. No this was the 100,000th served by the namesake restaurant, The Old Fashioned, which opened in 2005 on the East Side of Madison’s Capitol Square,

Griffin and Kevin Kiley, his pal from their days at Green Bay’s Notre Dame High School, and half the town, it seemed, crammed into the noisy bar on a hot July night, urged on by $1.50 Korbel brandy old fashioneds.

General manger Jen De Bolt and her staff glistened with perspiration as they muddled sugar and bitters, splashed in the brandy and soda, and speared cherries and oranges like they were on an assembly line. As the brandy went down the hatch, the noise level in the bar soared, a natural consequence of mixing Cheeseheads with brandy.

The bar wound up serving 761 old fashioneds during the three-hour special and another 145 afterward. Not so unusual, really.

“We sell the most Korbel brandy of any restaurant in the state,’’ said De Bolt. So much that the president of Korbel paid the bar a personal visit back in January. (There were $1 old fashioneds that night to celebrate, but since there was a blizzard raging, they only sold about 300.)

The Old Fashioned restaurant is a tribute to all things Wisconsin. From the old Blatz beer signs on the wall to the Green Bay Packers souvenir bourbon decanters behind the bar, to the menu, where you’ll find the wares of Wisconsin’s small food companies.

You can dine on natural casing hot dogs from Salmon’s Meat Market in Kewaunee, or on crusty hard rolls from Sheboygan’s Highway bakery. Appetizer choices range from smoked chubs from Charlie’s Smokehouse near the tip of Door County, to landjaeger sausage from New Glarus to cheese from the Fayette Creamery in Darlington. For color, add some Bea’s picked beets, and wash it down with the neon colored sodas from Seymour.

For co-owner Tami Lax, the menu is a way of preserving the foods she grew up eating in Green Bay. When she moved to Madison, she’d return from a visit home with a cooler packed with bacon, braunschweiger, and cheese. If she loved these things, she figured, so would others. And she’d be keeping the distinct flavors of Wisconsin alive.

“Some of these things are going extinct because our tastes are becoming more narrow,’’ she said. “You save them by eating them. We can keep Seymour Bottling in business by buying hundreds of cases of their sodas.”

And, thanks to dedicated customers such as Griffin, who says he “got here early and parked my keister on a stool” to wait for the special, they’re doing their part for brandy, too.

PHOTO INFORMATION: While people elsewhere might mix an old fashioned with whiskey, every good Wisconsinite knows it’s really made with brandy./PHOTO by Brent Nicastro

Susan Smith: Only in Madison -- Grad student is human mosquito magnet

Originally published July 20, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, people tend to tend to roll their eyes at the mere mention of Madison.

You’ll hear it is full of liberals and politicians and nothing like the rest of this solid Midwestern state. But in at least one way, Madison is classically Wisconsin: Its chain of lakes, marshes and woods have, this summer, produced a truly amazing crop of mosquitoes. One Madison surveillance trap sucked in 20,000 mosquitoes in a day.

But, yes, there’s a Madison twist here, too. Because on nice summer evenings, when the rest of humanity wisely flees indoors, swatting at the swarm, somewhere in Madison, Patrick Irwin is baring parts of his linebacker-sized body for science.

The UW-Madison graduate student knows, scientifically speaking, he’s a piece of meat. But he does have his limits.

“I told my adviser that I’ll be the bait, but I won’t shave my legs,’’ said Irwin, a doctoral candidate in Entomology. (His advisor, Entomology Professor Susan Paskewicz, a nationally known mosquito expert, is doing research in Uganda, where mosquito-borne diseases cause death and suffering to millions.)

Part of Irwin’s research involves “human landing studies.” This means during prime biting times, Irwin stations himself in a likely spot, such as a subdivision in the UW Arboretum near Lake Wingra, to count how many mosquitoes land on one lower leg in a 10-minute span.

His record? About 120 in 10 minutes. He sucks them up in a bug vacuum to be taken back to the lab, and counted by genus and species. Right now, he’s testing to see whether those carbon-dioxide-emitting bug traps, sold under names such as Mosquito Magnet, really work.

“We know that they catch a lot of mosquitoes, but what we’re interested in is whether (the traps) reduce biting pressure on humans,’’ he said. Maybe they just attract your neighbors’ mosquitoes or maybe they trap mosquitoes that don’t bite people.

The evidence is still coming in, but let’s put it this way: Irwin hasn’t spent any of his own money on the devices.

For his master’s degree in public health, Irwin surveyed Madison’s storm sewer system, swamps and drainage ditches to find the breeding places for the mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus. And, since he learned the vast majority of Madison’s mosquitoes breed in about a dozen or so “hot spots,” mostly in drainage ditches, he’s come up with a idea for killing mosquitoes without chemicals.

He recently got permission from the Department of Natural Resources to seed the drainage ditches with fathead minnows.

“They’re a native species,’’ Irwin explains, “And fathead minnows really love to eat mosquito larvae.”

If it works, it might be one fatheaded idea from Madison the rest of the state can embrace.

PHOTO INFORMATION: Patrick Irwin, a UW-Madison graduate student, settles into a spot at the UW Arboretum for “human landing studies” of this year’s amazing mosquito crop./PHOTO by Brent Nicastro