Grouse Hollow Journal for May 21, 2015 by Greg Koelker

Bud is in the camo jacket in the middle.  Paul is behind him in the tan jacket.

Bud Veale of Stoddard has often been a partner in crime in this space; he and I have hunted ducks and pheasants and on occasional surprised some fish since right after I started writing “Outdoors” for the Broadcaster in 1990. Over the years, we have developed a thing called “the report.” He'll call and let me know what's going on in the woods and on the water and any other gossip around Stoddard that he knows. I sometimes call with the report too. Anyway, last week Bud called me to get “the report” and share his story of his freedom honor flight on May 2. Bud is a Korean War vet. His initial words about the experience of the Freedom Honor Flight were, “Fabulous, terrific, very well done!” He was amazed that they managed to move a “bunch of older people” in such a big group so efficiently. “There were a few WWII guys who were all 90 or above,” said Bud.

Bud said that things in Washington, DC have changed. “I was there in 1957 and I drove right to the capital, parked, and walked right up to it the same as any other place.” He added, “Those days are all done. The area around much of the government buildings was blocked off and heavily guarded. We wouldn't have gotten anywhere but we had a police escort all day.” Bud said the city seems so much bigger, with so many more government buildings and so many more people. He remarked that he remembered Washington as a dirty city, but today it is, “Very, very clean and well kept, even for the number of people around that I could see out the bus windows.” In Washington, “We all wore a certain color shirt to stay with our group in the huge crowds.” He was impressed with the number of bicyclists who have a cycling lane in the middle of the streets. He said, “They can rent bikes there.”

The honorees started their tour at the WWII memorial. “There were bagpipers from Scotland marching. Everything was very military.” The group visited the Vietnam Memorial which he described as very large, just amazing how many names are on that thing. Another vet on the flight, Paul Benson of Stoddard, found a relative on the wall and got a stencil of the name. “We went to the Korean War Memorial. It was spread out just like we were trained in Korea: spread out so if the shooting starts they don't get all of you at once.” Other places they visited included the Disabled Veterans Memorial, the Naval Memorial, and the Air Force Memorial adjacent to Arlington Cemetery. He said it is on a hill overlooking Washington with three stainless steel pillars disappearing into the sky. “The Pentagon was down below it, and they told us how the 911 terrorists flew the plane into it,” said Bud. “We went into Arlington Cemetery and visited where war hero and movie star Audy Murphy was buried. We watched the changing of the guard. It was involved and really sharp. Those guys are really trained.” The guard also put out wreaths and played Taps. He added that, “Some of the cherry trees were still in blossom, and we could see where Kennedy was buried but we didn't get to the grave.” He said they also visited the memorial for the Marines which has a statue of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.

By then it was getting dark. Bud's nephew Rick Elsen, “pushed me all over in a wheelchair. Most of the vets were in wheel chairs, but Paul (Benson) managed to walk the entire time.” Other highlights of the day, included meeting former congressman and veteran Bob Dole in Washington, “Everybody got to speak with him.” When they landed at Reagan Airport there was a welcome from firemen who shot the water hoses in the air and all over the plane.

“The welcome back (at La Crosse) was unbelievable, certainly better that the welcome back I got the first time when we got home,” said Bud. He said the Stoddard Legion came, there was family, and the minister from my church. He said, “You get off and you walk down an aisle with people clapping and shaking your hand.”

“I'd recommend it to anybody, any veteran. I got to talk to some of the veterans who went through things like me. It really meant a lot to all of us. It is an impressive program,” he said and added, “They had it all set to take care of us tired old geezers. I couldn't put a price on it. It was worth it. It was a great experience. I am glad to have had a chance to do it. Just to get together with all of the other veterans.”

World War II and Korea veterans have priority status for Freedom Honor Flight. The next flight from La Crosse is scheduled for October. There remain some World War II veterans in our area who haven’t yet participated in an Honor Flight. The Freedom Honor group encourages them to apply. Freedom Honor Flight is not government funded. It relies solely on donations. If you would like to donate you can do so securely online at donatenow.networkforgood.org/1413009 or mail your check, made payable to Freedom Honor Flight, to Freedom Honor Flight, P.O. Box 505, La Crosse, Wisconsin, 54602-0505.

Until next time, get out - last week Ellen and her sisters did their annual preparations of flowers for the family grave sites. They also baked 18 pies for a fund raiser! She has been mushroom hunting more than me and finding more morels than me, but they are still coming up if you can see under all of the green. I also have a report of (@#$%!) gnats and mosquitoes on the rise. Thank you for your service, Bud and all vets. Enjoy the holiday weekend.

Grouse Hollow Journal for May 14, 2015 by Greg Koelker

Whitney dives into the underbrush after a morel.

It takes a good eye to see these.

Mark and Whitney check out some of the morels they found.

Some fabulous fungi and our morel hunting mutt, Scout.

Gregg and Pearl Sikora with thie 6 pounds of morels found on Mother's Day.

If you fill it, they will come. We found that out again last week, when on a hunch, Ellen decided to fill the hummingbird feeders. We hadn't seen any hummers yet, but within hours of hanging out the red and yellow nectar jars, we had action. So far there have only been two little green buzzers there, but this morning (Sunday) I saw my first ruby throated hummer. I also saw a bluebird on the feeder.

We have had some morel action this last week. I found a pound or so while I was turkey hunting last Wednesday and Ellen found maybe twice that many on two trips. She fried up a small pan of the fabulous fungi while I grilled marinated venison chops with asparagus for supper one evening.

We were over at the Flying Horse Stables on Saturday afternoon for lunch with the Swensons and our mountain kids, Mark and Whitney who were here for a few days to celebrate Mother's Day and the 34^th anniversary of my 29^th birthday. Whitney's mom, Dawn put out a bowl of the best chicken salad I think I have ever had, and El fried up some morels in a pan that had earlier been used for breakfast sausage. She added some minced garlic, butter, and oliver oil. They also had a birthday party for me that evening too. We had a cocktail hour and then Whitney's dad, Randy, grilled pork tenderloins; Dawn put out her special baked beans, and there was more of her great chicken salad. We also had Mama Koelker's famous birthday cookie (in my honor of course) and her famous rhubarb crisp along with some glorious guacamole too. Mark and his brother-in-law Zach built a bonfire with lots of friends attending. It don't git no better!

On Mother's Day El went to church and I started writing this. I stopped to get the paper and let Scout out. I realized that I also had to clean out some rain gutters before it rained again, so I did that. Then I put a pan of bacon on the grill. I made El my special egg McGreg with cheddar cheese, a nuked egg, and bacon inside a whole wheat bagel. El and Scout went to get some lilacs up on the hill. Later, Mark came over and he and I went looking for my girls. We met her and Scout on the ridge road, El said to us, “Guess what I saw walking on the Grouse Hollow path.” I guessed a turkey (as this is still my turkey season) but she said, “No, a ruffed grouse!” She also dug a a handful of morels from her jacket pocket. She had marked some mushroom trees, so she and Scout took Mark for a mushroom hunt.

The turkeys have toyed with me all fourth season. Gobbling but not coming in to my calls. Still, the hunts have been fun. The woods are exploding into color, mostly shades of green, but there are yellow shooting stars, wild lavender lilacs, curled red leaves on the trunks of some small trees, even some oak leaves are reddish right now; there are blue bells, red and gold columbine, many small white flowers and more. We'll be picking goose berries this week too I think. The song birds are a chorus of wrens and finches and blackbirds and doves and robins with crows and blue jays adding to the cacophony. So far I haven't found any ticks on me. I have one more season to try for a turkey dinner.

Until next time, get out. Life is good, but I am angry. I grew up loving trains. I loved seeing smoke belching locomotives and the sleek Empire Builder and the variety of freight cars. I had two granddads, a number of uncles, and lots of friends who worked and/or still work on the railroad; I had Lionel electric trains all over our basement; I read train books occasionally and enjoy the occasional Agatha Christie mystery on a train; I have lived near a railroad my entire life, and I still find some comfort in the rumble of a train at night, but the BNSF on my “list” now. I think it is going too far with its new policy of enforcing no trespassing on their tracks. Apparently, somewhere around the middle of the last decade, a change was quietly made to railroad trespass laws making it a crime to cross the tracks except at designated crossings. It had been okay to just cross them before that. No big deal you say? Well, I beg to differ. Hundreds of miles of the Mississippi River and thousands of acres of public land will no longer be accessible to the public if this craziness continues. Ice fishermen, waterfowl hunters, trappers, summer fishermen, bird watchers, morel hunters, and such will not be able to access these public wild places that they have always had access to. Places like Shady Maple, areas of Lake Onalaska, Ronkoski Slough, and De Soto Bay will be harder if not impossible to access. BNSF has even hired a cop to oversee enforcement. Say what? When did they become a governmental entity that can write tickets? I realize that some 65 deaths have occurred along the Wisconsin tracks in the last decade - 12 along the Mississippi River from Buffalo to Crawford County. An article in the La Crosse Tribune said those were classified as, “running or walking, a quarter were lying on the track, and the other quarter were driving.” Not one of the railroad dead had a fishing pole or a shotgun or a bag of traps. For outdoors types, this has not been a safety issue. BNSF is important and powerful but they still have to be a good citizen; I fear they are not right now. I hear that representative Lee Nerison says he is looking into it. I also contacted Ron Kind, Tammy Baldwin, Ron Johnson, Jen Schilling, and Warren Buffet (who owns BNSF I hear and you may get a message through to him at this email: berkshire@berkshirehathaway.com) asking them to do something about this. I urge you to do that as well.

Grouse Hollow Journal for May 7, 2015

Grouse Hollow Journal for May 7, 2015 by Greg Koelker

On Saturday Ellen and I spent a couple of hours on the future. That is as oft happens, we started with the past and dug old cement and rocks and old railroad tie chunks out of the very old cement water tank in the center of our garden. That old cement water tank held a galvanized stock tank for many years before and after we moved here to the farm. The garden now was the barnyard for Clement's Guernsey heifers and/or black angus cattle, then. We often talk about when the heifers would come in to drink. Now, anyone who knows heifers knows they are not nature's sharpest tools in the shed, and to prove it the future milk makers would wait out in the pasture and woods up on the hills until they were almost dying of thirst before they came stampeding down into the barnyard to drink, making a cloud of dust a volcano would be proud of , and crowding around the tank like a last call at an event with free beer. Often in the melee that ensued, cows would end up in the 300 gallon tank or tangled up in the barbed wire that enclosed the yard. One day, El and I were in the kitchen fixing lunch - I believe I had grilled some chicken and El had made a salad and crisp for dessert, uh, well no matter - when the Guernseys charged in to drink. I happened to look their way and noticed what looked like a cow leg sticking straight up in the air. You see, there was a three foot opening in the cement tank beyond the metal tank and somehow this 600-pound heifer had gotten knocked in there cattywampus and was caught upside down. Anyone who knows cows knows this can be fatal for four legged critters. Anyway, Ellen called Clementses to tell them while I saddled up King, our older quarter horse. By the time Emmett and Ken got there, I was in the barnyard with the horse and strapping a lariat around the cow's head and then to the saddle on King. King lunged a couple times and that cow popped out of its trap. I remember Emmett saying something like, “Well look at that. Who would have thought that horse could pull that cow like that?” Anyway, the heifer survived, and Ken filled the tank hole with some chunks of railroad ties, no doubt the ones we were digging out of the tank with the John Deere on Saturday. As to the future part, after getting rid of the rocks, cement, and rotting wood, we filled the entire tank with fresh dirt and dug up and transplanted some red raspberries. Now to the future: picture red raspberry pie, crisp, jamb, sauce, jelly, ala-mode, on cheese cakes, in cakes, raspberry lemonade, on corn flakes, just straight from the cane, and best of all, in Mama Koelker's fantastic Three-berry Jelly. It doesn't get better than red raspberries.

Anyway, we have spinach, radishes, lettuce, and asparagus up in the garden now. Rumor has it that some kids found some morels on Friday near De Soto, and on Saturday night I heard that people in Grant County were finding a few, so they can't be far behind here, especially, if the wet weather and heat we are promised pans out. Picture steak with fried morels or fried morels in scrambled eggs or on pizza or with just about anything. It don't get much better.

Our neighbor's the Sikoras, annual trout and turkey weekend was half a success as far as I know. There were no turkeys killed, but several limits of trout were hooked and fried up. Oh yeah, imagine grilled trout with lemon, butter, and raspberry chipotle. It don't . . . well you get the idea.

Until next time, get out - this last week I stopped by Steve's Meats in Genoa for some of my favorite breakfast pork sausage and some hamburger. Steve shared the story of a turkey hunt with me. While he didn't kill a bird in the first season, he took his son-in-law John Nickley and his pre-school grandchildren Grady and Reed out for a hunt in the second season. They were able to call in a tom that was a bit shy but it still put on quite a show for the children, gobbling and strutting just out of range. It finally wandered off - they could see its head on the horizon - gobbling and following five other birds. Steve said the love struck lothario eventually came back and John was able to take the bird. I am going to predict that Grady and Reed are hooked on gobblers from now on. Very cool. Enjoy.