Item From the Past: Schwarzwald Saturday Morning

August 6, 1983, Freiburg.

After Frühstück Rich & I hit the trail and soon made our way into the Black Forest, which is dark indeed. Tall pines and firs lord over the paths, cutting off the light below, especially in the small hollows. We didn't see many other walkers out on the winding trails, something of a surprise on a Saturday morning. We did see a number of strange, shell-less snails with orange skin on the trail. If they hadn't been so orange, we might have stepped on some of them.

At one point, the trail wound up to the crest of a hill. It was a rare bit of open space. One of the slopes took the shape of half a bowl, and all of its large trees had been removed -- except for a stand of ancient pines at the base of the hill. Dotting the rest of the hillside were much younger, much smaller pines. It was a Greek theater with an audience of young pines watching their elders perform a very, very slow play. Beyond the pine-theater, the rest of the vista was terrific. We could see Freiburg nestled in its valley and the array of Schwarzwald hills behind the town, far in the distance.

We arrived back in town, hungry, in early afternoon. It was a Long Saturday, so the Stadtmitte was full of people. We each ate an enormous salad and bought food for tomorrow at "Schwarzwald City," a tiny, glittering shopping center. We ambled around after that, full of greens. Remarkable how much a salad can fill you up. Spent some time watching street musicians preform and rail against U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. They claimed -- in German and English -- that the money they were collecting in a hat was "in protest" of that involvement. Uh-huh.

More Iconic San Antonio: A 750-Foot Icon, to be Exact

In the fall of 1968, I went with my family to the world's fair in San Antonio, known as HemisFair '68. I doubt that we would have traveled to see it, but we didn't have to go far to get there, since we'd moved to town in July of the same year. I remember a few things about attending HemisFair, such as my brother Jim getting lost in the crowd once; and my brother Jay buying an African-style wooden mask and some small iron-tipped arrows to go with it; and the exciting fact that the West German Pavilion was giving away one-pfennig coins as souvenirs.

Then there was the Tower. Officially, the Tower of the Americas, but few San Antonians during my time growing up there in the '70s called it anything but the Tower. It is as distinctive to the skyline of the city as the Arch is to St. Louis or the Space Needle to Seattle, and visible from countless vantage points far away, some even outside the city. More than 40 years later, it endures. Stand right under it and you see this.

If a city or town has a public observation tower, I'll find it and go to the top, provided it isn't outrageously expensive (that means you, Top of the Rock in Manhattan: $21 for adults, bah. Tower of the Americas: a tolerable $10.95). This tendency of mine might go back to 1968, when I went with my grandmother and brothers the top of the Tower during the world's fair: a thrilling ride for the seven-year-old that I once was.

I hope it was thrilling enough for the seven-year-old and the 12-year-old who went with me to the Tower after we visited the Alamo last week, getting there by way of the Riverwalk. They seemed to enjoy the rising view from the outside-facing elevator as it sped upward, and the miles and miles you can see on a clear day from both the inside and outside sections of the observation deck. To them, it might have been just a large, unknown city below, stretching out in all directions, but still impressive.

I recognized a lot of San Antonio's buildings from that perch, such the former downtown Joske's of Texas department store, home of the first retail escalators in Texas, and an early user of air conditioning. The structure would have been a complete city block in size but for the refusal of St. Joseph's, a Catholic church, to be demolished to make way for Joske's expansion. The church remains, surrounded on three sides by the former department store. "Former" because Dillard's, the successor flag to Joske's, closed up shop downtown a few years ago. (God forbid there be any local or regional variation of department store names, like Joske's or Marshall Field.)

Looking down from the observation deck on a summer afternoon, you see this, if you're facing east.

Not far from the shadow of the Tower is US 281/I-37, and beyond that -- the Tower shadow is nearly pointing at it, and note the rail line -- is the 1902-vintage Southern Pacific Railroad Station (Sunset Station), now a special-events facility. Early one morning in March 1990, I caught an Amtrak train there that took me to San Francisco, where I caught a flight to Japan.

I barely remember my 1968 visit to the Tower (except it was a thrill), but in 1978, I clearly remember taking a date up to the observation deck. On January 13, as it happened, because that was also the day that Hubert Humphrey died, and remarkably it was warm enough to spend time on the outside part of the deck. In the mid-80s I came again, with a out-of-state girlfriend who previously doubted that San Antonio was a city of any size; and in early 1993, I brought Yuriko. So besides seeing the three dimensions in front of me, I also sensed the arc of time as I made the ambit around the Tower's observation deck with my kids.

Item From the Past: Canadian Waters

In July 2006, after visiting Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks, in Banff National Park in Alberta, I bought a postcard that depicted the famed vista below (which is my own photo, not the postcard's image) and sent it to my old friend Ed, who's well acquainted with the Canadian Rockies. On the card I wrote only: "Oh My God!"

Next is an image of the Columbia Icefield, on the border of Banff NP and Jasper NP. This vantage looks like we might have taken ice axes in hand and adventured our way up the icefield to reach this point, but of course we didn't. There's a bus that goes on to the icefield, and specific places you can wander around it without much risk.

Some miles to the north in Jasper NP is Athabasca Falls. It isn't known for its height, which is about 80 feet. But it's got power. All of the Athabasca River rushes to the precipice and drops over. The river's in a hurry to reach the Arctic Ocean.

Item From the Past: Diamond in the Sky

It was a cool day in late June [1988]. There were no clouds or haze in the air and a smooth little wind was coming off Lake Michigan. A perfect day for climbing around the outside of a glass skyscraper about 40 floors above Michigan Avenue.

I haven’t taken up scaling the outsides of tall buildings for sport. But recently I did find myself atop the Associates Center [now the Smurfit-Stone Building, 150 N. Michigan Ave.], climbing around its glassy, diamond-shaped roof.

It started as a publicity gimmick for the building. The building’s management sent out an invitation to print journalists, TV crews and other ne’er-do-wells to the top of the building for lunch and a look at the “light changing process.”

That is, we were invited to see replacement of some of the white light bulbs on the roof with red and blue ones. The bulbs line the diamond shape of the roof, adding a glowing rhombus to the luminous texture of Chicago’s nighttime skyline. Red, white and blue are for the Fourth of July; at Christmas, the lights are green and red; and for Valentine’s, just red.

This is no small job. There are 252 bulbs up there, laid out over a surface of an eighth of a square mile, which just happens to be sloping at a 51-degree angle.

To reach the roof, you ride the freight elevator. At the 42nd floor, a staircase leads up to a space located under the top of the diamond-shaped glass roof. The place is a forest of pipes and machines with a floor covered by a layer of small rocks, bathed in sunlight from above. This is one of the mechanical hubs, maybe even the heart, of the building’s HVAC system.

So far, nothing too extraordinary, except maybe for the exquisite spider webs spanning a few long-undisturbed nooks among the machinery (it’s remarkable where living creatures can live). Anyway, from there a short climb up a metal ladder led to a small door that opened onto the roof.

Sound dangerous? From the ground, the roof of the Associates Center looks like a smooth, steep plane. It is, and of that were all, you’d tumble to earth like a pill bug rolling off a leaf.

But the roof also sports outdoor stairs running the length of it diamond-shaped rim, parallel to the rows of light bulbs. The stairs are recessed several feet so that it would take a good jump to get out onto the glass slope of the roof, if that were your intention. Here are also handrails that you (that is, I) grip tightly at first.

Once on the stairs, you first notice the building itself, angling down and down and down, and the other way, arching up into the sky. Then the view begins to sink in.

You’re looking southeast across the entire sweep of Grant Park, Chicago Harbor and the line of the lake curling south into Indiana. On a clear day, and this was a very clear day, you can see smokestacks in Michigan.

But it’s more than a nice vista. You get that at the Sears Tower or John Hancock, but there you’re behind glass. Here the vista is raw, unpackaged and not sold at $3.50 a pop.

I talked to the chief engineer of the building, who is in charge of the great light bulb switch. In the summer, he says, it isn’t too tough to change the bulbs. In takes him and an assistant a day. In winter, however, it’s a different story.

Then icy winds and nasty cold make the job miserable. Ice on the stairs makes it treacherous too – the engineer and his assistant sometimes use ropes to stabilize themselves, as if they were mountain climbing.

Even on a warm day, I was unnerved at the thought of trudging around on a tilted ice sheet 40 stories up. The Associates Center roof is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to work there.

Downtown Dells

I have a handy visitors map of the town of Wisconsin Dells, and it lists no fewer than 69 resort and motels -- not counting 18 waterfront places to stay and 17 campgrounds and three B&Bs -- 75 attractions, 27 retail establishments and 34 restaurants. These places, all eager to tunnel into your wallet, are all over the map (literally), but the majority gather along an irregular y-axis formed by the north-south US 12 and the downtown x-axis, an east-west street called Broadway. I know that it isn't a complete list, either. It doesn't include the Museum of Historic Torture Devices, for example, whose entrance I saw with my own amazed eyes.

Two years ago, we'd spend some time and some money along US 12 (see BTST August 21, 2007), but not downtown. So before leaving on Sunday, we parked in a municipal lot and wandered around downtown. It was crowded, but not as curb-to-wall crowded as, say, a street in Shanghai. Could this be the impact of the recession, or was it because Sunday afternoon is a little past peak pedestrian traffic?

I don't have any numbers on that. The Wisconsin Dells Visitors and Convention Bureau noted a few months ago that tourist spending in 2008 was up about 4 percent over 2007, totaling just over $1 billion last year. That despite the high price of gas last year, and the fact that nearby Lake Delton had drained away in early June (See BTST, June 11, 2008.) The lake has been refilled -- I saw signs welcoming it back -- and gas is cheaper this year, so who knows? The Dells may be a recession-resistant destination.

If I'd been given a free stack of money (and where do they give those out?) in the downtown Dells and told to spend it, I might have visited Ripley's Believe It or Not! or Wizard Quest or the Dells 4D Special FX Theatre or Meet the Beetles (live Beatles Tribute), all of which are right there on Broadway. As it was, we went into a few small stores on the street -- filler material between the major attractions -- and had ice cream at a Dairy Queen.

We also found and walked the entire length of the Dells RiverWalk. One of the rare free sites in Wisconsin Dells, it's a paved footpath on the bluff above the Wisconsin River. It's a pleasant little walk, and note that not very many of the thousands of people on Broadway, just a hundred yards or so away, bothered with it.

Pleasant, but because of tree foliage it mostly didn't offer views of the picturesque stretch of the Wisconsin River that was the mustard seed from which the tourist town grew. The one unobstructed view was of a dam on the river. I wouldn't be for cutting trees down to make a view, but as scenic walks go, this one would be better in winter. When it might be too cold.

Still, I managed to see a slice of the dells from above. Just enough to wonder what it would have looked like 100 years ago, or even 50.

Alpine Tundra

I don’t ride on cable cars that often, and there aren’t many fatal cable-car accidents, so it’s a fairly safe bet that I’ll eventually die from something a lot more ordinary than a snapped cable-car line, such as the Big Elephant stepping on my chest.

Still, when I’m riding a cable car I can’t help but wonder about the sturdiness of that single cable that holds everything up, including whatever’s left of my lifespan. I can’t call it fear, since I board cable cars without hesitation, just a heightened awareness of contingency. Especially when the car crosses over the wheels of a support tower and bumps and wobbles.

The Jasper Tramway cable-car service is the easy way up Whistler’s Mountain, a peak near Jasper Townsite. It’s a steep ride, rising more than 3,000 feet (just under 1,000 meters), but even so it doesn’t take you to the top of the mountain, only most of the way up, well above the tree line. It’s also a tight ride, since the cars are fairly small, and about 20 people at a time jam in. It helps to be tall if you want to see the view of the mountainside glide by, first the spiky treetops, then rock rubble above the treeline.

If I wanted to rave about the view from Mt. Whistler, I could. I’d switch on the scenic-view adjective generator, and out would come fantastic, amazing, extraordinary, that sort of thing, but that doesn’t help readers visualize very well. Try this, then: Imagine standing on rocky soil rolling down and away from your feet (with some boulders thrown in), then imagine everything else you see is mountains, because it’s a fairly clear day. Some peaks are snow- and glacier-capped, others brown, others tree covered, yet others hazy in the distance, just mountain after mountain after mountain. I hadn’t seen anything like it since I took a funicular up the side of one of the mountains near Innsbruck.

The cable-car terminus, as I mentioned, wasn’t at the top. But rocky, dusty, seemingly barren trails lead from there to the top. We knew that Lilly and Ann wouldn’t want to make the climb. So Yuriko and I took turns going only part way up, a wise decision, because it probably would have taken each of us an hour to make the climb and come back, and it isn’t a good idea to leave your partner so long with children who have little to do.

I went up a few hundred more feet, taking necessary rests because I’m a fat man, and the sun was strong. Of course I continued to enjoy the mountain view. But more than that, I discovered the alpine tundra. The trail wasn’t barren at all.

Probably I saw alpine tundra in the Alps, on that same hike above Innsbruck. But I don’t remember, and I wouldn’t have known much about it anyway. I once imagined that tundra, either the Arctic or the alpine variety, was a sort of moss that covered everything. I still don’t know a lot about tundra, but I do know that it encompasses a wild variety of plants, a sort of forest in miniature.

And so it was on the side of Mt. Whistler. Once I started looking at the patches of tundra here and there along the trails, I started noticing all sorts of plant varieties, greenery as well as itty-bitty flowers, colorful but lost in the grays and browns of the mountain, unless you were paying attention.

Deep Time & Space-Alien Barbecue

After taking in the view of Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff NP (see July 20), I walked down the feature known as the Rockpile on its other side, away from the vista. The view from that side was nice enough, two forested mountain ranges right and left forming a broad valley, but it isn’t the kind of view that winds up on many postcards.

A sign part way down pointed out that during the most recent Ice Age, the entire valley was full of ice. An illustration of the mountains showed no valley, only ice up to near to peaks. It gave me pause, because however imperfectly, I could look out from there and imagine the valley full of ice. Where I stood was once thousands of feet under ice.

Geologically speaking, that glaciation wasn’t very long ago -- ending 10,000 years ago, maybe. But it made me think about Deep Time, a concept analogous in some ways to Deep Space, and one that’s fascinated me for years. The Rockies themselves inspired that kind of musing even better, since their age in the low 100s of millions of years represents some serious time, though I understand that they’re mostly a youthful range compared to the Appalachians.

Which made me speculate, again, that we’ve never been visited by intelligent creatures from other worlds, nor are we likely to be. It isn’t just a matter of the vastness of space, though that’s surely a barrier. Maybe more important, we’ve missed each other in the deepness of time.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure, and the idea of space aliens sure can be fun. Ask the proprietors of Space Aliens, a theme restaurant concept we first spotted in Bismarck, ND.

Space Aliens Grill & Bar, a sign said above a small billboard of a space-alien face. You know the sort, an anthropomorphic mug with two bug eyes, a nose and mouth, all bulbous and rounded and hairless. Under that was a smaller sign that said “Earthlings Welcome.” The signs pointed to a space-alien decorated restaurant building just off I-94. We’d already eaten lunch, and we had some driving to do that afternoon, but I liked the idea and made note of it.

Hey, if something as fatuous as the Rain Forest Café can be a hit, so can Space Aliens. We saw another advertised near Fargo, and when we got in to St. Cloud, Minn., that night at about 8:30, after checking into our motel we went looking for somewhere to eat and there it was: Space Aliens. Earthlings Welcome.

I’m not one to sneer at serendipity, so we went. The décor was a little amateurish, with bulbous space aliens on the walls here and there, doing things like flying cartoon space ships, and looking like they might have been painted by the founders’ art student cousin to save money. More fun were the Weekly World News articles, all with space-alien subjects, framed and hanging on the walls. From the one in the men’s room, I learned that George W. Bush had had strong space alien support in his bid for re-election in 2004. (Gives new meaning to "resident alien.")

There were also collections of space alien bric-a-brac, most of it behind glass, and SF TV and movie tie-in junk, mostly from very famous confections like the original Star Trek, Lost in Space and E.T. Guess they couldn’t find anything from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Elsewhere there was a game room and bar, which also sported smatterings of space-alien doodads.

I’m happy to say that the food, which tended toward heavy meat and had goofball alien-sounding menu names, was really good. We had a selection of barbecued items: beef ribs, pulled pork, chicken, sausage. Not the very best I’ve ever had, but very tasty all the same, with fine sides. I asked the waitress about the chain, and she said there were four, the three I’d seen, plus one elsewhere in Minnesota. So maybe Space Aliens will expand nationwide. You heard about it here first. I can see the ads. SPACE ALIENS! COMING TO YOUR TOWN! “We come in peace. Maybe.”

The One Tower

“Tower Park Observation Tower,” says a red spot on my road atlas, specifically on the Peoria submap. It’s in a suburb to the north called Peoria Heights. When you cross over into that town, you notice that a lot of the area’s wealth is there, especially in the form of sizable houses. Nice, but I wanted to see the observation tower, to do some observing.

It’s something I like to do: find a high spot somewhere new, climb or be elevated to the top, and look around. Maybe that kind of enjoyment goes back to the days I rode to the top of the Tower of the Americas, the name given to the observation tower built for HemisFair -- the world’s fair in San Antonio in 1968. It’s a stark modernist tower in most ways, such as the unadorned concrete shaft, and the glassy top that owes something to the design of satellite.

Still, at 750 feet, it’s a distinctive part of the San Antonio skyline, a very aesthetic feature. I couldn’t imagine San Antonio without it. Better still, it offers a great view, both from the exterior elevator on the way up, and the top. I went up there with my mother and brothers, both at the fair and occasionally afterward; I took a date or two up there in high school; I took Yuriko there before we were married; and one of these days, I’ll take Lilly and Ann up for the view.

The tower in Peoria Heights is a lot closer to our home, however. But what were the odds that it would be open at about 11 on a Sunday morning? After waking up around 7 or so -- habit, and a hard one to break at that -- and sluggishly eating breakfast, fooling around some at the campground (more rocks needed to be thrown by small hands into the nearby lagoon of the Illinois River), and watching the childless couple at the next door campsite pack and leave, we got around to packing up. By the time we were on the road, the warm sun of the early morning had vanished under some clouds.

I knew roughly where the tower was from the map, figuring it would be visible as we closed in. It was. Peoria Heights doesn’t sport a lot of tall things. The mostly circular tower is dull red, painted steel, and reaches up about 200 feet. I asked the woman at the ticket booth about it, and she said it was formerly a water tower for a nearby Pabst Brewery, since closed. Now it’s a municipal water tower, with a three-tiered observation deck, which is supposedly unique among water towers. We paid the modest admission and took an exterior elevator, with mostly glass sides, to the lowest of the three decks.

How to describe a view? It didn’t qualify as magnificent. The Illinois River valley isn’t the Grand Canyon, after all. But it was pretty with the flush of spring, new greenery rolling all around and down to the river, where a couple of barges floated by. Peoria’s small downtown rose to the south, and facilities I took to be Caterpillar’s weren’t far away either. I would have meditated more on the view, but Ann was most interested in hiking up and down the metal staircases between the levels, and I followed her around. She doesn’t care a bit for views (I think), but she knows a good staircase when she sees one.