Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Sundays used to be a time to relax with a good cup of hot cocoa. My grandfather would swing by our house for a cup of coffee. He would stay for a long time before going into work at the garage. Or I would climb into my dad's old red F-150 and we'd go partridge hunting down the back roads outside  town, prowling for startled birds. We would drive down those lonely old dirt roads for hours, searching for dinner, scouring in the musky air. Sundays have always held a peculiar fascination for me. Days of rest, maybe, but they can also be days of great excitement. Lately though, they're just more days to work. In front of a computer screen, I dole out the daily word count, wishing I could be up north or down south, any damn where but here. I'd rather be running through the woods, disc golfing, just walking down the street, and instead I'm here. I guess it's time to go. Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED5s1-Fe9FA Kris Kr...

One summer when I was a kid, perhaps 1990 or 1991, my great aunt enrolled me in nature classes in Cable, Wisconsin. They were held once a month and taught youngsters about wildflowers, animals, and respect for the earth. We would ride in her old tan Mercury Lynx into wilderness that seemed larger and more wooded than near my house; the area was hillier and covered with heavier, older trees. The woods seemed to hang over the narrow roads, some on hills that stretched into the distance. On either side of these roads, it seemed like one slight slip of the wheel would send the car plummeting into the ravine. The telephone poles were tall and felt straighter, pointing down into the crumbling earth. It was very green -- the trees were full of leaves and visible soil was clay red. Cable was about an hour northwest of my hometown in Bayfield County, and the start of the Birkebeiner cross country skiing race. We must have taken highway 13 north to 77 and gone west. I have never returned, bu...

Not to sound cliched, but there is something different about the North Woods during a frigid winter. Heavy snow nestles in clumps on the median, pine trees are heavy with white, and dark, large crows crowd telephone lines. Small towns and hamlets find protection from encircling balsams. Greyish snow is caked on signposts from the morning plows, pushing, salting, and sanding the world into a shape more suitable to people's whims. The drifting snow covers doorsteps, as the wind whips and whirls outside. The temperature is only -1, but it might drop into the -20's. Even in Illinois, this stops traffic, closes schools, changes the day to day. Here it isn't as common as it once was, but it still creates less of an event. Cars don't start, and there are always more accidents on the first days after a snowfall. Yet as winter settles in, even the deer and birds seem to disappear, except at feeders. Of course, those crows remain, ever watching, ever circling. The worl...

I drove up to northern Wisconsin yesterday through alternating rain and sun. Once I drove past Tomahawk the rain turned to slushy snow and sleet. Turning onto highway 8, traffic trailers, trucks loaded down with planks, and general messiness slowed me down. The trees up here are still struggling to leaf out and the brown, dirty grass attempts to push past random snow piles. In Illinois, the trees are in full bloom, yet the nights are cold and wet. I'm glad to be back in the North Woods, if just for a couple of days. The place is lovely even in its worse vernal dress. The birds are attempting to sing, hastening the full arrival of spring, then summer -- all before the darkening doom and gloom of the change back to fall in the northern woods. The seasons here change in a heartbeat. The earth and the people are always hopeful that the seasons might just last a bit longer. Luckily, they don't have to put up with stretches of 100 percent humidity for weeks at a time that ...