Belvedere Mansion

Not those curtains

I’m starting to lose track of the number of historic houses I have toured–Deere-Wiman, Mathias Ham, Dowling, Villa Louis, Davenport House, Grant House(s)–each outstanding in some way, even if subtle. Nothing is subtle about the Belvedere Mansion in Galena, Illinois, however. Built in 1857 by a future ambassador to Belgium, Russell Jones, the Italianate house was his home for barely four years. When he moved away from Galena, he took his possessions and stripped the house to the rafters. Neglected for twenty years at one stretch, it was resurrected in the 1960s as a high end restaurant. The current owners have called Belvedere home, literally, for over 35 years, yet every year they open it to the public for daily tours from May to October. I could be wrong, but I think they have a fascination with fame. The house is furnished with an exquisite collection of antiques they have purchased over the years, many of them at auction, only not the kind of auction I am likely to attend anytime soon. Antiques in the house include chairs from the movie Marie Antoinette, furniture once owned by Liberace, and green curtains from the movie Gone with the Wind (no, not the curtains that became a dress). Certainly worth the $10 and 30 minutes it takes to go through the house.

The monastery on a mound

Just a few miles north of Galena is an unlikely place of interest to passers-by: Sinsinawa Mound, the Motherhouse for Dominican Sisters in the United States. Founded by a remarkable frontier missionary, Father Samuel Mazzuchelli (“Mathew Kelly” to the Irish miners in his ministry), the Dominican Sisters are devoted to teaching and preaching, with a special emphasis on social justice. By pure chance, their Motherhouse sits in rural southwest Wisconsin atop a mound that dwarfs any silo in the region. The center has a large, modern chapel that is, like many structures built during the 1960s, nothing special from the outside. Inside, however, the stained glass windows illuminate the space with splashes of color. The lobby walls serve as art gallery, currently displaying the works of an artist whose work explores the intersection of femininity and religion. The Sisters host spiritual retreats for persons of any denomination, and encourage visitors to explore a labyrinth and meditate. I find the mixture of spiritual practices both surprising and encouraging, but I just can’t help but wonder if the Pope would approve of such things.

Today’s Bad Decision: Pretending to be a mountaineer. Sometimes a little luck is your best friend. Late in the day on Saturday, I take a narrow gravel road to Turkey River Mounds State Preserve. I had read that the Preserve had an outstanding view of ancient burial mounds. The directions read “park at the end of the road and walk back along the road until you see an ‘unmarked trail’.” I’m not really sure what an “unmarked trail” is, but I look for it anyway. About a hundred feet from my parked Prius, I see an area of grass that is beaten down. Just behind the grass there is an opening in the brush. Hmm, maybe this is the “unmarked trail”, I think to myself, so naturally, I enter. I follow what appears to be a trail for several dozen feet uphill before any obvious path disappears. Undeterred, I keep slogging ahead, uphill, through spider webs, pushing aside thorny things that keep getting in my way. (This is something of a recurring theme lately.) Because I am at one end of a tall bluff, it makes sense to me to work my way around to the other side as I continue to climb higher. Even though my footing becomes more precarious as the soil loosens and is increasingly littered with stones, I feel a strangely delusional sense of confidence that the view I seek is just around the corner and a bit higher.

A bluff too high?

So onward I go until I am face-to-face with a twenty foot vertical rock wall and nowhere to go but up or back the way I came. Even though I have camera equipment slung over my shoulder and no rock climbing tools, I decide to climb up to the ledge. The view must be at the top of that ledge. I tentatively reach up and start climbing. Moments of sanity flash through my brain – “Hmm, there could be rattlesnakes in these cervices” and “Falling would hurt” and “I wonder how long it will take the Chiefs to fire Herm Edwards?” I startle myself by reaching the top with relative ease and take a moment to bask in the glory. Once I start to check out the surroundings, I realize that the view is not here and the walkable zone atop this ledge does not extend very far. Also, I have only ascended part of the bluff and need to climb another fifty vertical feet to reach THE top. Not gonna do that, no way. Feeling surprisingly lucid, I decide to call it quits and head back to where I started. Maybe I can find another “unmarked trail” further down the road. It dawns on me that I will have to climb back down the bluff face I just ascended to continue my quest. This feels more intimidating for some reason, I guess because a misstep feels more likely. Whatever. I make it down with relative ease. Yea me!

Up, up, and away

Feeling smug after the ill-advised climb up twenty vertical feet of craggy limestone bluff and back down, I start to descend the rest of the hill and immediately lose my footing in the scree at its base. In a flash, my feet fly out from under me, my arm scrapes across the trunk of a tree just as my head bangs into it, and all I can think is that my full body weight is about to crash down on my new camera. A slight leveling of the hillside is the only thing that stops me from a fifty foot tumble down the hill and through the brush to a location only buzzards would find me. Reality returns in full force. My car is parked at the end of a gravel road, two miles from the highway and is hidden behind a bluff. I have no cell phone service. No one knows I am here. I imagine myself knocked unconscious, lying at the base of the hill, a broken bone or two; I don’t think anyone would have seen me for a while. Thankfully, I am a little banged up. I think I’ve learned my lesson. Next time I will park my car in a more visible location.

Geez, these bad decision entries are getting too damn long…

 

My campsite

Postscript. I camped my first night on this trip. Big deal, I can hear you say. For me, it kinda was. It has been many years since I spent a night in a tent, much less a night in a tent by myself. I thought it was pretty cool, especially since my campsite sat on a ridge 500 feet above the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers at Wyalusing State Park. After my headlamp died just five minutes into trying to read, I decided that reading was not in the cards, so I spent an hour watching the sun set, listening to Blue Alert by Anjani. Sweet.

© Dean Klinkenberg, 2007