Postcards from Milwaukee, WI

Art and Tofu on the Fresh Coast.

This is my first post in a section I’m thinking of as Wanderlife with Notebook, so let me explain. I love to travel. I grew up traveling. I read travel writing and I daydream about travel. The writer Elke Heidenreich wrote, and I paraphrase because she writes in German, I travel to be somewhere else.

I’ve had the great good fortune to have been all over the world. For me, part of the pleasure of travel is the mindset: I slow down both to wander and to write. My observations and insights have filled many, many notebooks!

But I’m a mom with a full-time job, and besides, exotic travel is a luxury that can look an awful lot like checking off boxes or scratching self-made itches. The whole endeavor can stink of overconsumption and indulgence.

“It takes a rabid lack of imagination to think we have to go to Machu Pichu to find something new to appreciate,” Alain de Botton wrote in an essay (excepted on Oldster) about honing an “open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity” so that we are not rushed or remorseful about not getting to do and see it all. I would love to get to explore Peru one day myself, but I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment. Pay attention and there are substantially interesting things going on everywhere.

Still, I do love to set my eyes on fresh sights.

During the summer of 2023, I spent many weekends ‘traveling’ for my daughter’s soccer games, so this first edition of Wanderlife with Notebooks highlights a few places we visited during the hours around the games, the explorations that happened when I wasn’t sitting on the sidelines in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1. Doctors Park, Lake Michigan Shoreline

Greetings from the Fresh Coast! No filter here, that really is a Great Lake. I have been getting ‘better’ about swimming in cold water, relishing it even, and the gentle waves were alluring, but we just took a little stroll along this suburban park’s shoreline. The rocks are the star here: rounded and soft-looking, they inspire an urge to pick them up, to find a special one to rub between thumb and forefinger. It is a little like Schoolhouse Beach on Washington Island, a treasure in the middle of this same lake. At Schoolhouse Beach it is against the law to collect the limestone rocks polished over thousands of years by glaciers, but you will be tempted.

2. The “witch’s house”

A friend of ours (another soccer parent) grew up in Milwaukee and took us to see the place he and his friends found spooky as kids. They thought the house was haunted. The house was actually occupied by Mary Noel, an artist who filled her yard with fifty-nine concrete sculptures and decorated every surface of the cottage. After Nohl’s death in 2001, the Kohler Foundation, out of Sheboygan, WI, took on stewardship of her life’s work. Apparently she adorned and sculpted the inside, too, and painted her furniture and walls using carpet swatches as brushes. In 2005, the Mary Nohl home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and it was named a Milwaukee County Landmark in 2006. Yard signs on the lawns of nearby homes declared their hope that Nohl’s home would not become a museum, but personally I’d love to get past that chain link fence…

3. Bremen Town Musicians, Lynden Sculpture Garden

Google maps told me there was a “sculpture garden” on Brown Deer Road, which is a major highway on the north side of Milwaukee. We stopped to find a gorgeous park with an impressive collection of more than 50 monumental (read HUGE) sculptures spread across 40 acres of manicured woodland. The property was formerly a ‘country home’ for a wealthy family who collected art. The current generation of descendants opened it up as a public sculpture garden recently enough that it still seems like kind of a secret. As we were walking back to the parking lot, I noticed the Bremen Town Musicians! I’ve seen it before, in fact, in Bremen, Germany! There are two copies of Gerhardt Marcks’ bronze stack of characters from a story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and one of them is in Wisconsin. If you don’t know or remember the tale, you can read about how the animals ended up in a stack here.

4. Burnt Ginger Tofu at The Vanguard

Milwaukee is a city of steeples and corner taverns. Most people hear Milwaukee and probably think of beer - even the baseball team is called the Brewers - for good reason. Three rivers - the Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic - provided water essential to the brewing process. The winters were cold enough to make ice, which was essential for conditioning the lagers in storage cellars that the brewers dug into those river bluffs. These original settlers were overwhelmingly German, Polish, Italian, Irish, and English. So to go with the beer, there was plenty of sausage. If you make it to Milwaukee, I recommend paying homage to this history at The Vanguard. There is house-made sausage, but also one of the best tofu dishes ever, in my opinion. Because The Vanguard is run by a bunch of true hipsters, Milwaukee-style, including my dear friend Chris (pictured above). He makes sure there is always good music playing and Kung Fu movies on the TVs but, he swears, it’s just a corner bar in a city of taverns and steeples.

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When is the last time you wandered upon something or someplace that totally lit you up?

Tell me in the comments. I look forward to sharing inspirations!

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