More on cowbells
And cows
And cow towns
We just got back from a trip to Wisconsin (fresh off the covid hotspot list, thanks Big Chief Lori!)
Wisconsin may very well decide the presidential election
And everyone there seems to know it
There are signs EVERYWHERE
Like, in just about every yard
Here at home, we obviously don’t see a lot of Trump signs
Though I’m sure they’re prevalent in Mount Greenwood and Edison Park, among the cops and firefighters
And no one is overly excited by Joe-mentum
But in Badger country?
What do they call it, voter intensity?
Shit’s on ten
And the splits are very close, and very real
A common sight in Richland Center, back to back: 
Where we were, the Pine River and Kickapoo River valleys in the “Driftless Area” that was missed by the glaciers, are inscribed with rolling hills and big sandstone outcrops
There are sharp, sinewy valleys and even what some locals call the “Ocooch mountains”
A topography you don’t see in most of the surrounding Midwest, flattened by repeated advancing and retreating glaciation
This is a rural area of dairy farms and small towns
And like 95% white
But slow down with your Sunday Times think pieces
Trump did flip Richland County and neighboring Sauk County
Margins were tight
Richland was 49-44
Sauk was edge-of-razor thin
47.2% to 46.9%
These are tiny counties
The difference in Sauk was literally 100 votes!
For comparison, Obama carried both handily, even in 2012 (57-41 in Richland, 59-40 in Sauk)
There is a long history of activism in the area
The Richland Center Woman’s Club was founded in 1882
A middle class group of moms used to meet secretly in an old building downtown to plan support for suffrage, without the knowledge of their husbands and local leaders
They called it a woman’s club so they could disguise their political activity as social recreation
One of the founding members was Laura Briggs James, mom of Ada
Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton came through town to visit with them
There’s more to the history of Wisconsin progressivism than Fighting Bob, Milwaukee industrial unions, and Sewer Socialism
The socialists were some of the first to embrace women’s suffrage
And that fight often overlapped with movements for pacifism, labor, and temperance
Wiscy politics in particular make for strange bedfellows
Today, you’ll found plenty of this:
And this:
But the leave-me-alone libertarianism also coexists with a strong push for conservation
And the rural areas are far from monolith
There are significant Amish populations in the region
We went biking on the “400 Trail”
A gorgeous ride between La Valle and Wonewoc that skirts the Baraboo River
The 400, so-called cuz it runs on an abandoned Chicago – Northwestern rail line that traversed the 400 miles between Chicago and St Paul in 400 minutes, continues on to Elroy, where it links up with its elder and more famous sibling, the Elroy-Sparta Trail — IINM the very first rails-to-trails project in the country
La Valle is one of several tiny towns with names betraying some French history
(Incredibly, Muscoda, even though it’s pronounced not Mus-COE-da but Mus-cuh-day, like everyone’s favorite cheap wine to drink with oysters and fish, comes not from French but rather a corruption of the Ojibwe word for prairie)
Muscoda’s grocery is where that corona sweatshirt was for sale
Anyway, as we returned to sleepy La Valle in the late afternoon, an Amish family crossed the trail in their horse-drawn buggy
It reminded me of the cover of Bjarne Rostvold’s famously rare “Jazz Journey” album from 1962
Believe it or not, Denmark was home to some of the world’s finest hard bop in the 60s
Like the legendary Jazz Quintet 60, also produced by Rostvold and featuring many of the same personnel
Like Allan Botschinsky on trumpet, Bent Axen on piano, and Neils-Henning Orsted Pederson on bass, in his recording debut)
I brought up wrong takes a few doses back
(El Capitan, please brace yourself, you’ll love the minor blues but be shocked by the heresy)
Another one of my scandalously bad takes is preferring Rostvold’s version of Mister PC from Jazz Journey to Coltrane’s original
Trane wrote it for P.C. – Paul Chambers
Nothing against Tommy Flanagan; apparently his solo on Giant Steps is considered iconic, and it’s surely far more complex
I’m just obsessed with the simple swing (and vamping!) of Axen’s solo
Hell I’m even partial to the head on Botschinksy’s trumpet over the god himself (*ducks*)
Even though my obsession with Clifford Jordan’s tenor on Glass Bead Games has come up repeatedly, the dark truth is that I almost always prefer brass to sax
Reason number 4080 that the jazzheads would not be caught dead in my presence
Ok getting very late here
More on Axen, Pederson, Danish jazz, and Danish radio coming in the next installment
And hopefully get back around to Wisconsin at some point
