Winter 2024

Winter arrived for a couple of days this January and we skated one day on local pond ice

My Uncle Donny passed away and I drove my parents over to Geneseo, NY for the funeral. I have 30 first cousins on the Ehmann side and I enjoyed catching up with some of them. 

Harriet Tubman's home in Auburn, NY was made a Park site during the Obama administration, and we stopped there for a pit stop on the way home

Caroline's Science Olympiad season kicked off with a tournament hosted at MIT. This meet is famous as the hardest of the season and brought in 72 teams from around the country, including 8 of the top 10 teams from last year's National competition. Caroline competes with a partner in the Ecology, Forensics, and Forestry events. She scored #1 in Ecology and #1 in Forestry

Each event is scored individually, with the top team earning 1 point and so forth down to #72. Top 6 teams in each event receive medals, as color-coded above. The lowest sum of all event scores determines overall winner. This year Lexington finished #10, and one place above their Massachusetts rivals. 

Next was a tournament at Columbia in NYC. I drove down there and after the 6AM drop-off I made the most of my wintry Saturday in Manhattan. At dawn I jogged the length of Riverside Park and back. Here and everywhere else in Manhattan, the parks were in excellent condition.

Next I took the subway down to Wall Street and visited Trinity Church to see Alexander and Eliza Hamilton's graves

African Burial Grounds NM was established after a 17th-century cemetery was discovered during excavation for a federal office building in the 1990s. After much negotiation, the park site was established on a corner of the precious downtown property.

The Stonewall Inn, site of a 1969 uprising for LGBTQ+ rights, is in Greenwich Village and commemorated by this park. 

Further uptown is Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace, or rather a reconstruction of the townhouse where he was born.

Among the artifacts are the pocket items that saved his life from an assassination attempt in 1912. On the way to deliver a speech, he was shot in the chest, but the bullet was slowed by his speech manuscript and eyeglass case. The bullet still entered his body and as this was his Bull Moose phase, he continued on to give the speech while bleeding, and finally sought medical attention afterwards.

and this is the cartoon that inspired the creation of Teddy bears

Continuing walking north for another 102 blocks I reached Grant's tomb, the largest and most austere mausoleum in North America. One of my friends is a history buff who has walked all the way (in installments) from Boston to NYC on the Post Road. He extols the virtues of walking and after a full day on my feet I can appreciate it, too, in contrast to my usual, more high-throughput, motor-powered tourism.

Back at Columbia, Caroline and her partners had crammed for their events

and she remained the Queen of Forestry

Caroline's secret weapon is the Forestry binder, a self-compiled reference material of the trees of North America

The team finished #2 out of 49

At Brown University's event, Lexington finished #3 out of 50, yet behind both of the teams from their rival

The final event before the state championships was at U Mass, where LHS finished #1

Erin ran indoor track for LHS in the distance events of 1-mile and 2-mile

Their team finished 4-1 in the league and Erin qualified to run varsity in the postseason

At the league championship, the top 8 finishers in each event score for their team. Erin ran a personal best 12:23 to finish #8, earning a crucial 1 point that contributed to their 87-87 tie for overall 1st place

Next was the Division 1 all-state meet, where Erin ran in the 2nd and slower of the two heats. Usually she is chasing someone but this time she ran her own race as the leader

Her PR of 12:19 was good enough for #13 overall and the #2 freshwoman

Tessie prepared a poster about women of the American Revolution

Tessie's Valentine acrostic 

In January Heather suffered a painful gallstone attack that led her to the ER, where they found stones in the gall bladder and blockages in her bile ducts. Her recommended treatment was removal by surgery and until then she was on a no fat diet.

This red-tailed hawk has no such restrictions and she brought down a bunny right outside our kitchen window. I love that winter camouflage on her plumage

By the next day, she had completely cleaned the carcass

Kansas-Nebraska acts

Bison and sunflowers, symbols of Kansas and the great American prairie

Last year Katy, Tessie, and I toured the Midwest over MLK day weekend and we decided to try it again, this time starting in KCMO and heading out into Kansas and Nebraska

As the trip approached, the intense cold in the forecast dissuaded Katy, whose livelihood depends on non-frostbitten hands. But Heather, who was in San Francisco, joined the party

While killing time in the airport waiting for Heather's flight we noticed an older Black man escorted by a 4-person armed security detail. I didn't recognize him, and I'll tell you he is not a politician or entertainer, but has probably been followed by security his entire life. Can you guess who it was? 

MLK III!

Our trip to Harry Truman's house was thwarted by the weather

and the cat cafe that I promised Tessie we'd visit had no openings, so we substituted a trip to Petco

At Jack Stack's Barbecue, the burnt ends were really good. Little did Heather know that this was the last big heavy plate of food that she would consume for some time.

 Tessie can draw almost any animal

I only recognized a couple of names on our hotel's wall of famous guests. Dante Hall, Alex Gordon, Tim McGraw, Sarah Palin, Anderson Paak, Caleb Smith, The 1975, Brian McRae, Robert Costa.

After dinner it only seemed fitting to watch Frozen

Next morning it was only -5 out

so cold that my tears froze on my glasses

I do like the sunflowers on Kansas state road signs

In Topeka is the elementary school that was one of 5 schools bundled together in 1954 for the landmark Supreme Court case challenging segregated schools.

Part of the site recreates a 1950s schoolroom 

including a creepy orange-eyed doll

Further into the countryside, this site and the Homestead NPS site were the inspirations for our winter trip

Before white settlers arrived, the Great Plains were covered in grassland comprised mainly of 4 species: big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, and switch grass. They were so tall that a child's head couldn't see above the sea of stalks.

On this diagram of grass root depths, at the far left there is Kentucky bluegrass, popular for American lawns, and measuring a pathetic depth of about 3 inches. Compare that to the depths of the prairie grasses at 8, 10, even 14 feet, and you get a sense of the challenge facing homesteaders trying to bust the sod for cultivation. You also may newly appreciate the hidden strength implied by the phrase "grass-roots movement".

We walked out to the prairie to see the bison

It was -1 with a stiff wind and OMG it felt like someone was stabbing my face

but the bison, those majestic native prairie dwellers, were out there foraging away. Having previously seen bison only in the summer, it was a treat to observe them in their element in the coldest weather I've ever experienced.

I don't think I've ever spent a night in Manhattan, but sooner or later it was bound to happen. By overnighting here in Manhattan KS, aka The Little Apple, I slept in my 49th state in my 49th year. Only the Last Frontier remains.

This morning we were just happy our car started. At this temp footsteps make loud crackling sounds on the snow.

Heading north, at least we saw some Kansas sunflowers

and a very historic traffic feature

I said this before, but Nebraska, your state sign looks like a beer can, and if you need inspiration just check out

the Nebraska Trader Joe's bag

It was a desolate drive into Nebraska. I re-read Willa Cather's "O Pioneers!" on the plane out here and she describes the Nebraska winter in a few passages: 

Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring... The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever. 

And yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one's heart; and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again.

At Homestead NHP you can tour a reconstruction of the first homestead granted in 1863 under the Homestead Act. Under its terms, anyone over 21, including women, Blacks, and immigrants in the process of becoming citizens, received claim to 160 acres of land. If they could live on it for 5 years and demonstrate its improvement, they received the land deed.

The last homestead claim was proved out in 1988 in Alaska (that's the farmer's tractor back there)

In Omaha we crossed a gigantic railyard for all the east-west freight trains. At least here they have less concern for the rampant freight train theft in warmer US cities.