Where Eagles Dare
Imagine standing on a wooden dock beside a coastal Alaska inlet. Around you are fishing boats tied up their moorings, gently bobbing on the sparkling water. The picturesque craft have just returned to harbor, their bounteous catches transferred from their holds to nearby processing plants and canneries. Salty breezes surround you, you fill your lungs with them, when suddenly, out of nowhere, WHOMP! The impact against your neck and head is like that of a two-by-four or a thick branch. Your legs sag, your vision swims. And then you spot it, a most unlikely nemesis, rising back into the sky from whence it came: a majestic bald eagle, our noble national bird.
When three attacks on unsuspecting humans by the avian emblems of our freedom occurred a few weeks ago on Kodiak Island near the harbor at Dog Bay, residents of the area were mystified. In Alaska, assaults by eagles and other raptors are not uncommon …
Summer in Saratoga DMB
Saratoga stays loyal to a bar band that wrote the shittiest part of the soundtrack of the 1990s
‘Crash Into You’ means that he puts his hand down your pants on the SPAC lawn
It’s not the Grateful Dead, but at least they jam
My hometown of Saratoga Springs has two main passions — horse racing and jam bands. These hobbies converge in the summer, when the town’s famous racetrack opens and Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the historic concert venue better known as SPAC, kicks off four months of shows. SPAC is a leafy, sprawling venue in the middle of a state park that has hosted performances by everyone from Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles to Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd. The mellow, bucolic atmosphere lends itself to a stable of regulars, with the most beloved returning act being the Dave Matthews Band, which has now performed in Saratoga 49 times.
Attending your first Dave Matthews Band concert is a rite of passage for upstate New York teenagers, myself included, characterized by the solemn rituals of determining with your friends whether you should attend “Fridave” or “Saturdave,” securing cheap lawn tickets and a chauffeur …
Wisconsin Supper Clubs
Childhood memories may be haunted but the relish tray abides
Pickled mushrooms and asparagus don’t mix well with alcohol; neither does ice cream
The first rule of Supper Club is that they don’t take reservations; the last rule is that no one eats alone
It’s been said that Wisconsin has more ghosts per square mile than any state in America, a claim I can’t substantiate but buy nevertheless. It seems like every town has its own ghost story: haunted hotels, haunted theaters, haunted steakhouses and saloons. Some have seen the apparition of a Christmas-tree delivery ship that sank into Lake Michigan off the shore near Manitowoc in November of 1912, or heard the disembodied sounds of the Kickapoo Polka Band, whose eerie music floats through the Vernon County woods. Others have seen the ghosts of gangsters who laid low in the Northwoods at spots like Manitowish Waters’ Little Bohemia Lodge, where to this day you can enjoy fried lake perch, potatoes, coleslaw, and rye bread in a place whose windows still have bullet holes from the FBI’s botched 1934 raid on the Dillinger Gang.
This was more or less what brought me heading north on Highway 51 towards the vast …
