When WC was in junior high school, best friend John Gottschalk had one of those old-style “Punch ‘n Gro” planters in the family kitchen window one winter. Punch ‘n Gro was basically a plastic tray filled with vermiculite and covered with a transparent plastic lid. They were pre-seeded. You punched holes in the top with…
It’s presumptuous, at the very least, for WC to write about Thailand after a mere 17 days visiting the ancient kingdom. What is now northeastern Thailand had a prospering bronze-making center while Idaho was still buried under the Wisconsonian Ice. The current monarchy traces its origins to the middle-Thirteenth Century and has a long, complex…
Mrs. WC came to Alaska “for a few years” in 1991 and ended up staying for 24 years. WC accepts responsibility for some few of those years. But what made her 24 years in Alaska truly remarkable was that she stayed in spite of her first day in the state. Mrs. WC first came to…
The Hiawatha was the Milwaukee Railroad’s luxury passenger train, which made the run from Chicago to Seattle. She made her last run in 1961, in the railroad’s third and last bankruptcy. The railroad’s assets were sold. The purchasers salvaged the steel rails, but some of the roadbed, including the stretch from Missoula, Montana to Coeur…
WC was lucky enough to visit Machu Picchu last night. While the place is afflicted with the same kind of industrial tourism that plagues Alaska, the place is astonishing enough that its worth being treated like cattle to see it. You can’t drive to Aguas Calientes, the tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu.…
Readers could say, with some justice, that WC needs to learn to focus. But this stuff is pretty amazing. Wednesday WC took a cultural tool of Lima, Peru. The trip included a visit to the Museo Arqueologico Rafael Larco Herrera – a private archaeological museum – in downtown Lima. The pre-Columbian Indians took pottery to…
WC went to law school at Northwestern University, in downtown Chicago. And loathed living in the megalopolis. So in Spring 1975, when WC’s buddy Doles offered to drop him off and pick him up in Great Smokies National Park when Doles drove home to North Carolina for spring break, WC jumped at the chance. Doles and…
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Alaska Highway during World War II with the easiest route possible. The result is an pretty boring drive. WC strongly prefers the Cassiar Highway, which breaks away south from the Alcan just before Watson Lake and runs 450 miles to the Yellowhead, Canada Highway 16, about 150 miles…
Wickersham's Conscience 