Bit and I spent a couple hours on Ferry Bluff for the first time since we moved into the neighborhood seven years ago.
Bit and I last climbed to the top of Ferry Bluff on November 20th, 2016. We were in the area for Thanksgiving and it was one of the things we did to break up the mild chaos of a holiday spent away from home (we still lived in Duluth at the time.)
That visit turned out to be significant in the flow of our lives in a roundabout way. A Piper Cub flew downriver a few hundred feet over our heads while we were on top of the bluff. Having flown a checkout flight to rent airplanes from Morey Airport earlier that same day, I decided I’d follow the river myself to see what all of this looks like from above. I did that a few days later. It was pretty.
I had always looked upon the Madison area as a city surrounded by corn fields; a combination of two things that do not appeal much to me. When I flew that plane down the Wisconsin River, however, I found something a little different than what I had expected. There were corn fields, yes, sometimes as far as the eye could see, but contour farming had given each its own visually appealing identity. There was the river and the bluffs and the rock formations that pop up in random spots all the way to the Mississippi River. There were a bunch of things that had never really registered with me before.
Where the Wisconsin ends at its confluence with the Mississippi, I landed on runway 32 at Prairie du Chien Municipal Airport. It is still one of my favorite runways in the area for the approach through the bluffs of Wyalusing State Park and down to the valley between the rivers. It is a beautiful place to land.
I don’t think it hit me during that trip, but at some point during the subsequent year, I decided I could live in that place. I have family there. There are places to go and things to see. When I need to feel connected to my earlier life, all the way back to childhood in the Twin Cities, I can fly west and lay eyes on the Mississippi in less than an hour.
That was that. In November of 2017 we sold our house and moved to Prairie du Sac. A month after that Emmy was born. A new phase of family, environment, and life began.
Seven years later, here we are at the place where one of the first dominoes fell.
So far, so good!
