Initially, the archaeologists thought it was a relatively young canoe — an artifact of the 1800s or a Boy Scouts project from the 1950s. The revelation of its true age took their breath away: the vessel was 1,200 years old, built around 800 CE by early ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

News of the canoe’s discovery and recovery made waves that traveled the world, but the impact is felt most strongly at its source. For some, the vessel is a tangible reminder of a history frequently forgotten in the wake of watersports and watercolor Terrace sunsets. For others, it affirms a truth as old as the ancient lake herself, one that reflects on her glassy surface and rests in her cloudy depths.

“Madison is the water,” says Molli Pauliot x’94, MA’20, PhDx’23, a cultural anthropology student and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s Buffalo clan. It was the water that sustained this area’s earliest residents, and it’s the water that has drawn everyone since.

Water has memory — sometimes so vivid that it freezes a moment in the form of a dugout canoe. Lake Mendota is speaking. A great many people are eager to hear what she has to say.

“I think I found something”: The first glimpse of the canoe in Lake Mendota. Wisconsin Historical Society

A Whisper Underwater

June 11, 2021, was a perfect summer day in Madison: the weather was warm, and Mendota was beautiful. For Tamara Thomsen ’91, MS’93, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, these were prime conditions to do no work at all. Equipped with diver propulsion vehicles — underwater scooters — Thomsen and Mallory Dragt ’20 set out to a popular dive spot off the lake’s southwest shore.

“I have been to [this dive site] probably a hundred times, and thousands of divers have been there, too,” says Thomsen. “We were going to scooter around and chase fish, and then pick up trash.”

Halfway into their joyride, Dragt signaled to Thomsen that it was time to circle back to the boat. But Thomsen was focused on a log sticking out of the lake’s wall. In the rare clarity of Mendota’s June waters, the log resembled the dugout canoes she had spent recent years studying around the state. She counted the minutes it took to scooter back to the boat in hopes of finding the canoe again later that day, this time not as a recreational diver, but as an archaeologist.

Amy Rosebrough MA’96, PhD’10 was working from home when she got a call from Thomsen, her colleague at the historical society.

“I think I found something,” Thomsen said.

Rosebrough is a terrestrial archaeologist in the State Historic Preservation Office and an expert on the Indigenous peoples who lived in Wisconsin and surrounding areas during the Late Woodland period, which lasted from 500 CE through 1200 CE. A self-described “landlubbing archaeologist,” she wasn’t about to suit up and dive in with Thomsen, but on a day like this, she couldn’t refuse an opportunity to sit on the boat and offer her expertise.

Back in the water, Thomsen located the canoe again, recorded its coordinates, and investigated its condition. She fanned around the edges of the wood, expecting to find a fragment, only to discover the vessel almost entirely intact. She resurfaced to share photos with Rosebrough before returning to retrieve the “weird, colorful rocks” she reported finding nearby.

“We put them in a row and looked them over, and I thought, well, this is very, very strange because they’re not round, they’re not tumbled, and they’re not smooth like you would see if they were dropped by a glacier,” Rosebrough says. “But I couldn’t, at that point, figure out what on earth they were.”

Thomsen returned the rocks, measured the canoe, and reburied their discovery. That evening, Rosebrough realized that the rocks were net sinkers, tools thought to be used by Late Woodland fishermen. Intrigue quickly became excitement. What memories would Mendota reveal?

Resurfacing

The Wisconsin Historical Society was between state archaeologists in June 2021, so further inquiry into the canoe’s origins was put on hold until the arrival of Jim Skibo. Skibo was a professor of archaeology at Illinois State University for 27 years before coming to the historical society.

When he learned of a story resting at the bottom of Lake Mendota, he committed to telling it. Thomsen retrieved a hair-sized sample of the wood from the canoe to send out for radiocarbon dating.

“When Jim announced what it was, I almost fell on the floor,” Rosebrough says. “From that time period, we have things made out of stone. If the preservation’s really good, we’ve got a bone tool or two. We’ve got pottery, but even that is usually broken into tiny little pieces, so we were making history based on scraps and impressions and the occasional mound.”

But Mendota, a meticulous conservator, kept this piece of history safe: packed tightly into the lake bed, the wooden canoe evaded sunlight, invasive species, and centuries of other vessels and visitors.

“This is a chance to touch a piece of history that should, by all accounts, have turned into dust a couple of decades after it was abandoned,” Rosebrough says.

On November 2, 2021, after months of careful planning and practicing, Thomsen, Skibo, maritime archaeologist Caitlin Zant, and a group made up of experienced volunteers and divers from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office executed a maneuver never before performed by the historical society when they excavated the canoe from the lake. The process took hours, during which a crowd amassed on the shore where Rosebrough was communicating with the team out on the water and fielding questions from curious onlookers and media outlets.

The canoe — the oldest intact vessel ever recovered from Wisconsin waters — emerged to applause, cheers, and tears before being carted away to the State Archive Preservation Facility. The recovery made headlines from CNN to the BBC. The canoe itself harbors many more stories to tell.

Ancestral Footprint

To appreciate the canoe’s stories, you have to know the people who made it. While Lake Mendota’s present-day shores may be the most populated they’ve ever been, the vast majority of her history has been spent in the company of the Ho-Chunk Nation, who have called these waters home since time immemorial.

“We’ve been in Madison as long as we’ve been Ho-Chunk, and the Ho-Chunk have been there since before it was Madison,” says Casey Brown x’04, public relations officer of the Ho-Chunk Nation and member of the Bear clan.

According to Brown, the tribe’s oral histories indicate that the Ho-Chunk first entered the world at the Red Banks (near present-day Green Bay). From there, they spread throughout the Midwest, from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan. Archaeologists refer to them as the Late Woodland people or the Effigy Moundbuilders after the animal- and spirit-shaped burial mounds with which they sculpted the landscape. To the modern Ho-Chunk Nation, they’re simply centuries-removed kin who established the tribe’s ancestral footprint in the Madison area: Teejop, or “Four Lakes,” a region whose beauty lies in its waters, and whose waters spring from stories. One Ho-Chunk account of the Four Lakes’ origins tells of Man’una, or “Earthmaker,” who was traveling through the region when he stopped to rest. He filled his kettle with spring water, caa (deer meat), and roots, and set it atop a fire to cook when he heard a sound in the woods. He left to investigate, thinking it might be his friend Bear. When he returned, the kettle was on its side and the water flowed into depressions in the earth, forming the Four Lakes.

Another Ho-Chunk story tells of a man who once fell so deeply in love with a water spirit that he turned into a fish to follow her, carving out the Four Lakes in a pursuit that culminated in the creation of the largest one, Wąąkšikhomįk, or “Where the Man Lies.” To this day, mounds that resemble water spirits can be located just off Mendota’s shores.

The presence of mounds in the area indicates a landscape that allowed for exploration and education, its residents’ basic needs having been readily met by their environment. These early Ho-Chunk were expert navigators, engineers, and astronomers, learning from the land and sky and innovating with the abundant resources.

The mounds themselves are teachers to this day, not only educating people about their builders, but also serving their original purpose by indicating directions and reflecting cosmic phenomena such as solstices.

“The entire Four Lakes area is essentially a university,” Brown says. “Even before the UW was there, the Ho-Chunk were using it as a teaching tool.”

And it continues to be. The Ho-Chunk Nation worked closely with the historical society throughout the canoe retrieval process, and they’ll continue to be involved in helping the canoe tell its story. After all, it’s their story, too.

Mendota’s Oldest Companions

As the leading expert on the ancestral Ho-Chunk who resided on Mendota’s shores during the Late Woodland period, Rosebrough knows more than most Western academics about their customs, technology, and ways of life. With the discovery of the canoe, she also has the most questions.

In the summer, the early, seminomadic Ho-Chunk lived in small villages along lakeshores and riverbanks and grew gardens of sunflowers, squash, goosefoot, and little barley. In the winter, they spread out to preserve resources and the environment. Hunting was integral to their sustenance; archaeologists have recovered arrow and spear points, skinning knives, and hide scrapers, along with remnants of bird and deer bone at many village sites. The importance of fishing was an educated guess.

“We’ve assumed that they were fishing and working on the lakes because the pottery is decorated with the impressions of fabric and cordage and, in some cases, nets,” Rosebrough says. Along with a small collection of harpoons and bits of fish bone at village sites, the canoe and its net sinkers are concrete evidence of fishing in these communities, which raises more questions. Were they fishing onshore or offshore? In deep water, where the big catches lurked? With nets alone, or are there hooks yet to be found?

Inquiries into fishing are just the start. According to Rosebrough, the historical society already has stone tools believed to be axes dating back nearly 10,000 years. By comparing the tools to the markings on the canoe, archaeologists can determine if these implements, once thought to be used for cutting down trees, were actually used for canoe-building.

Rosebrough is also interested in exploring the vessel’s capability for travel. Archaeological evidence suggests that early Ho-Chunk traded with the Cahokians, Indigenous peoples who lived just across the Mississippi River from present-day Saint Louis. The Cahokians were almost certainly traveling up the river to reach the northern tribes — could this canoe have traversed rough waters like the Mississippi or the Great Lakes to reach distant civilizations before meeting its end in Lake Mendota?

Wisconsin’s First Shipwreck

Wisconsin is distinguished by its more than 800 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. The state flag, first adopted in 1863, features a sailor and an anchor, nods to Wisconsin’s early shipyards and nautical industries, the remnants of which lie at the bottom of lakes and rivers and occasionally wash ashore or startle anglers before revealing details of historic shipbuilding in the Midwest. But Wisconsin’s maritime history far predates its flag.

Thomsen is an expert in Wisconsin shipwrecks and spends a great deal of her time documenting and protecting these historic elements. With the canoe, she may have found the very first.

“When Euro-Americans are here and ships go down, we call them a shipwreck. When canoes go down and are found, we call them an artifact,” Skibo says. “But this was a shipwreck.”

Most Indigenous dugout canoes found in Wisconsin were recovered from shallow waters because it was common for early fishermen to cache their canoes offshore in the fall — to commit them to the water’s memory — and recover them in the spring. This canoe was found in 27 feet of water, far from the shores on which it would have been stowed.

The state of the canoe also points toward maritime mishap. Of the minimal damage the canoe has sustained, its oldest flaw may have also been its demise: a heel-sized hole in one end. Wood contains knots that stubbornly refuse to warp with the wood around them, causing them to become weak and fall out. While many recovered canoes show signs of patchwork and repairs, this one’s hole remains.

“Archeologists love touching individual moments: the fingerprint impressed into the pot, the footprint in the floor of a dirt-floored house,” Rosebrough says. “We have a moment here where somebody was either in that canoe or had stashed their net and gear in that canoe, and it went down.”

Like the side-wheel steamers Thomsen traces back to 19th- and 20th-century shipyards, the canoe offers insight into the building techniques of its makers. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory on the UW campus determined that the canoe is made of white oak, a hard and watertight wood native to southern Wisconsin and known to the Ho-Chunk, to whom it is sacred, as caašgegura. Dark soot inside the hull and markings from stone tools suggest the use of burning and scraping to create the vessel. According to Thomsen, wear on the bottom of the canoe can indicate which ends might have been the bow and the stern. Studying its construction can also help archaeologists track the progression of canoe-building through time and across tribes.

“This canoe would be great, like a pickup truck,” Skibo says. It may not have been built for speed or agility, but it could carry a couple of fishermen out to their nets and tote the cargo home — until it didn’t.

To test this theory, Skibo partnered with Lennon Rodgers, director of the UW Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab, to investigate the canoe’s structural integrity. Rodgers’s 3-D scans of the canoe have yielded detailed digital and physical models that will be used to test its flotation and satisfy Rosebrough’s curiosity about its maritime capabilities. They can also help determine whether a dislodged knot could truly be the culprit in its ruin.

The likelihood of shipwreck also raised the question of whether the canoe might indicate a burial, which would have stopped the excavation in its tracks. Wisconsin State Statute 157.70 prevents the disturbance of human remains of any kind and assigns immediate ownership of discovered burials or funerary objects to the respective tribes. Review of culturally specific burial practices and careful dredging of the area around the canoe ruled out this possibility. Still, the canoe’s location and condition create emotional ties that transcend centuries and generate wonder about the person whose vessel went under one day.

“Were they panicking? Were they upset? Were they looking at shore going, ‘Dang it, I didn’t want to get wet today’?” Rosebrough asks. “To reach back and start to think about one individual on one day — one moment of one day — we can empathize with them as another human being.”

The canoe rests in a custom-built vat in the State Archive Preservation Facility. Bryce Richter

People of the Mother Tongue

For some, these ties through time run deeper than the shared experience of a watercraft lost to the lake.

While the Ho-Chunk are the region’s longest-standing residents, their numbers have fluctuated over thousands of years after repeated attempts to eradicate them. According to Rosebrough, disease and intertribal wars instigated by the arrival of French fur traders in the 17th century decimated the Ho-Chunk population. The tribe’s oral histories indicate that, at one point, there were only 50 adult Ho-Chunk men. Later, federal policy displaced the Ho-Chunk from their ancestral lands and allowed for the destruction of mounds and other earthworks.

“When you’re colonizing people, you take over their most beautiful sites, their most sacred sites, and you put your site on top of it,” Pauliot says. “That’s why the capital’s in Madison.”

Perhaps the most recent and haunting attempt at eliminating Indigenous influence was the rise of residential schools. The Ho-Chunk language provided the foundation for many Siouan languages throughout the American Midwest and West; the tribe is known as the “People of the Loud Voice,” “People of the Sacred Voice,” or “People of the Mother Tongue.” After generations of cultural undoing in residential schools, the speakers of the “mother tongue” — those who taught language and its culturally preservative capabilities to others — are few.

Oral histories, the intangible and invaluable records of time from which the Ho-Chunk derive their sense of identity and connection with the past, do not die with the language, but they will suffer immensely from its absence.

“That’s why historic preservation is so important,” Brown says. “It is almost a form of protest, [us] just being alive.”

What is a canoe, then, to those who need no evidence of their own existence and who rely not on things, but on stories?

“It’s just another part of our culture,” says Bill Quackenbush, tribal historic preservation officer with the Ho-Chunk Nation and member of the Deer clan. “We don’t need to see items brought out of the water just to reassert that we are here.”

Bryce Richter

For the Ho-Chunk, history and culture are not lying at the bottom of Lake Mendota; they’re taking place on and around it. They keep their ways alive through the continuation of skills, values, and practices that have existed even longer than the canoe. This, Brown says, is how a nation survives.

One way they have done this is by building a canoe themselves. Prior to the discovery in Lake Mendota, Quackenbush gathered a group of Ho-Chunk youth to make their own dugout canoe out of a cottonwood tree. The team spent months burning, scraping, and sawing the log and, this past June, embarked on a weeklong journey through the Four Lakes region in their completed vessel, which included a stop along the Yahara River to visit the new canoe’s oldest known ancestor. Even as language is lost, water remembers.

“We’re going to show these kids what it means to be Ho-Chunk,” Brown says. “This is Ho-Chunk land. This is where you’re supposed to be. They have a 1,000-year-old canoe, but your people have been here, and they’re still going to be here.”

Reflecting on previous canoe-building experiences, Brown recalls that a vessel is imbued with the spirits of its creators. Submerged in busy waters, the ancient vessel found in Lake Mendota had every reason to disappear in the 1,000-plus years since it sank. It should have disintegrated into the lake bed, splintered apart, broken into bits under the churning of boat motors, or been eaten by zebra mussels — and yet. The People of the Mother Tongue had the first word, and they will certainly have the last.

Dehydrating History

Lake Mendota is not done speaking. Since the retrieval of the dugout canoe, two more have been located near the site of the first. These vessels were found in fragments and will remain in their final resting place, though radiocarbon-dating will reveal their respective ages.

The discovery of the additional canoes in such proximity challenges the theory of shipwreck: in addition to dating the new canoes, Skibo is currently working to determine the location of ancient shorelines — some of the research that has yet to be conducted on this most-studied lake. Perhaps these canoes weren’t sunk, but were simply forgotten.

Today, the original canoe is back in water, this time in a rubber-lined vat in the State Archive Preservation Facility on Madison’s east side, just down shore from its resting place of over a millennium. It’s one year into a three-year preservation process involving a purified-water bath, UV-lights, and, eventually, polyethylene glycol, or PEG.

When removed from the environment that kept it safe through thousands of years, the canoe was held together only by the water in its cells. By gradually adding PEG to the solution in which the canoe rests, the preservative will replace the water in its cells before it’s freeze-dried to remove any excess water the PEG didn’t reach.

It’s up to us to preserve its memory now. •

The steam whistle’s mournful sound announces the end of the day or the arrival of dangerous weather. Jeff Miller

As UW traditions go, this one really blows.

Anyone who has spent an evening on the Terrace will remember the loud, mournful sound of the steam whistle, announcing the end of the day or the arrival of dangerous weather. The whistle has been singing its sad song above the Terrace since 1987, though it’s actually decades older.

The whistle is attached to the Lake Safety Tower (or “sail tower”), a gift to the university from the Class of ’32. That tower is located on the northeast corner of Helen C. White Hall, so it’s not actually part of Memorial Union. Powered by steam from the university’s heating system, the whistle is operated by the UW Police Department’s Lake Rescue and Safety (LRAS) unit. On a day with calm weather, an automatic timer sounds Ol’ Steamy for seven to 10 seconds exactly an hour before the lifesaving station wraps up its workday, as a signal calling all those who have rented boats from Hoofers to return to shore.

“They need to be back 15 minutes before we close,” says Sean Geib ’97 of the UW’s Lifesaving Station.

When the National Weather Service sends a warning to say that severe weather is imminent — or when there’s lightning over Lake Mendota — a member of LRAS sounds the whistle manually in three short blasts. This is meant to give a more urgent signal to get off the water.

The sail tower is not the steam whistle’s original location. It used to be on the Old Boat House, which stood where the Martin and Florence Below Alumni Center is today. And it wasn’t only used for lake safety. In the 1940s and 1950s, one of its chief functions was to announce curfew to the UW’s female students, ordering them to return to their residence halls. To them, presumably, the whistle’s note sounded even sadder.

Photo by Jeff Miller

We’ve been there before.

Visiting Madison to revive Badger memories, we order up the usual, frequenting the same places and reliving time-honored activities again and again.

That bowl of Berry Alvarez ice cream is calling our name at Babcock Hall. A plastic pitcher of beer awaits on the Union Terrace. The burgers, brats, and sticky-floored college bars that drew us away from textbooks, term papers, and 8:50 classes beckon.

Following that script is easy. Occasionally, though, it’s fun to venture beyond our comfort zone and build fresh traditions. So, we spent 36 hours traipsing to untested venues, sampling innovative tastes, and plowing ahead with untried activities.

Along the way, we met an Iron Chef champion, admired Frank Lloyd Wright’s rare Japanese art prints, soaked in a shimmering view of Madison’s lakes from a brand-new roost, put on our dancing shoes, checked out a Huey helicopter, and browsed 13 types of cheese curds.

An action-packed visit to Madison puts the capital city in a new light. Andy Manis

We scarfed a raft of cuisines, cruised museums, and got a little exercise.

Madison has enjoyed a rebirth as its people and tastes have morphed and diners’ expectations have kicked up. It’s become a foodie town, awash in creative restaurants.

“Dining has to offer an experience,” says Sara Granados ’10 at the Eno Vino Downtown Wine Bar and Bistro atop the AC Hotel. “Madison has a lot of restaurant options. Having good food and drinks isn’t enough. You need to have the whole package.”

Push away from the table, and you’ll find that Madison deserves high marks as a destination. National Geographic Traveler named Madison one of America’s top small cities, ranking it on such things as green spaces, coffee shops, breweries, and music venues.

We put those assessments to the test. At noon on a Wednesday, the Good Food cart on East Main Street on the Capitol Square is running with choreographed efficiency. Workers in the cramped cart crank out signature veggie dishes, some with lean meat, and all with a low-carb profile. The line lengthens as offices empty for the lunch hour.

The cart is the brainchild of Melanie Nelson ’08, a zoology major and runner who had trouble finding healthy eating options as an undergraduate. She saved money from her bartending job and sank it into the food cart in 2010. She now has two carts — on Capitol Square and Library Mall, open weekdays 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — plus a brick-and-mortar restaurant, the Good Food Café, on Cottage Grove Road on Madison’s east side.

Working originally out of a commercial kitchen in a converted garage, Nelson built a reputation for her tasty menu. “We were fast as hell, but there was always a line,” she says, noting that many of her customers are repeaters. “Attorneys would come down and I thought, ‘You guys are earning $150 an hour, and you spend 20 minutes waiting in our line?’ That says something to me.”

At $8.50, the pad Thai salad melds spiral-cut veggies with red cabbage, onions, peanuts, greens, cilantro, and a wedge of lime — plus a choice of grilled chicken or tofu — all drizzled with a spicy peanut dressing.

Around the corner is an often-overlooked gem — the Wednesday Dane County Farmers’ Market. With tables laden with beans, beets, and onions, Yeng Yang sells produce and carries on a family tradition at the corner of Wilson Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

His Hmong immigrant parents began growing vegetables in 1989 and have been selling at the market since 1992. “My parents did not want to accept welfare, so they began farming,” Yang says. “I grew up farming most of my life.”

The family operation grows vegetables in nearby Brooklyn, Wisconsin, and works both the Wednesday and Saturday markets.

“Wednesday is more of a buyers’ market,” says Yang, as he sells two bags of fingerling potatoes to a shopper. “We see the same people every week.”

The Saturday market rings Capitol Square and commands a sea of visitors, but the Wednesday affair is more laid back. A wild rainbow of produce is heaped on the tables: broccoli, cauliflower, herbs, poblano peppers, melons, spuds.

Dairy farmer Tom Murphy’s family sells 13 varieties of cheese curds, plus fresh-baked cookies and bars. Murphy Farms has also been at the market for a quarter-century.

“This market saved my family farm,” says Murphy, of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. “We’re in our sixth generation on the farm and people saved it by buying our products.” A 15-minute walk lands us at Madison Sourdough on Williamson Street. A popular breakfast and lunch spot, it has a bakery producing breads, rich French pastries, croissants, scones, macarons, and cheesecakes.

Dessert from Madison Sourdough Emily Hutchinson

A dense, rich pistachio Breton ($5) and a chocolate-almond croissant ($3.75) make up our midday snack, along with cups of steaming coffee. Executive chef and general manager Molly Maciejewski uses traditional French techniques.

“We source many of our products locally and mill much of our own flour,” she says. “It keeps more money in the local economy [and] supports farmers, and milling our own flour helps bakers, because it gives them more control.”

The bakery has a friendly energy. “It’s very neighborhood centered, with a family vibe, and we like that,” Maciejewski says.

With only wayward crumbs remaining, it’s back to downtown and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, which occupies the prow of the Overture Center on State Street.

The State Street gallery featured the metal sculptures of Jaume Plensa in a display titled Talking Continents. The suspended steel forms appeared to float in the gallery. Other galleries feature works in video, film, painting, prints, and fabric and are staffed by knowledgeable docents. In May, the museum welcomed Far Out: Art from the 1960s.

One can’t-miss feature is the museum’s store, which has a stunning array of goods from designers and studio artists — including jewelry, wood, leather, glass, and metal work as well as children’s gifts, art books, and cards. Soon, dinnertime arrives. Just off State Street, we find out whose cuisine reigns supreme.

Tory Miller began his restaurant career working in his grandparents’ Racine, Wisconsin, diner — the Park Inn — and today he owns four Madison fine-dining restaurants: Estrellón, Graze, L’Etoile, and Sujeo.

Award-winning chef Tory Miller Sam Egelhoff

His skills, honed at the French Culinary Institute in New York, have earned him the James Beard Award as the Best Chef: Midwest. Then, in January, his friends and fans gathered at Estrellón’s bar on West Johnson Street to watch him defeat rarely vanquished celebrity chef Bobby Flay on the Food Network’s Iron Chef Showdown.

“It’s very intense,” says Miller. “You’re pretty much competing against the ingredient. It’s wild to be on a show I grew up watching and take out somebody like Bobby Flay.”

We tried Estrellón, a Spanish restaurant with elegant, creative cuisine and a warm feel. “We wanted people to feel like you were coming into our house,” Miller says.

Paella at Estrellón Sam Egelhoff

The Spanish Experience Chef’s Dinner for Two ($90) includes a selection of tapas, a mixed-beet salad with smoked goat cheese and a subtle horseradish sauce, and a sweet treat of Basque cake with frozen custard and fruit compote. In between, there was a crusty bread with tomato; Tamworth ham pintxos; a tortilla with egg, potato, onion, and aoli; croquettes made with smooth Spanish manchego cheese; grilled octopus; and a paella made with bomba rice, chicken, shrimp, clams, mussels, and chorizo.

Miller locally sources ingredients. “Proximity to great food and agriculture is what keeps me here,” he says. “People rave about the Rhône River valley in Europe or Napa Valley, but to me, the Driftless Region is something untouchable for growing super-delicious food prolifically.”

Sated, we head off for a novel nightcap. For some at The Brink Lounge, Wednesday night is beer night. For others, it’s date night or a break from the routine. But for more than 30 souls — a mix of regulars, curious onlookers, and the experimental few — it’s time for some high-energy dancing.

The lounge is part of a trio of bars and entertainment venues in what was once a secondhand store. It’s also part of a neighborhood teeming with new residential, commercial, and entertainment developments at downtown Madison’s eastern gateway.

Every Wednesday at 9 p.m., The Brink features Jumptown Swing Dance, a group born as a UW–Madison student organization. Eventually, Jumptown became a community-based group that holds classes and events to teach people to swing dance — especially the Lindy Hop. With a DJ playing the swing rhythms of Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and a variety of more contemporary swing artists, people discard their inhibitions and dance.

“It’s people trying to have fun. You can have a party for two for three minutes,” says Sarah Zabinski, a Jumptown instructor and a 14-year member member of the group. “We’re all dorks, so silly things happen on the floor.”

On day two, the dawn finds us confident we can outsmart cholesterol science. That puts us at The Curve, a Madison diner just six blocks south of campus, next to Spike-O-Matic Tattoo, at the bend in Park Street.

The Curve is owned by Bill Antonie ’90, a Badger outside linebacker in the late 1980s. He’s still beefy, with an easy baritone laugh that erupts after summarizing what satisfies him most: “Everybody yaps and yaps and then, all of a sudden, they get their food and they shut the hell up.” Antonie started working in his parents’ Monona truck stop diner at age nine. “If I was working for the state or any other company, I’d be retired with a gold watch, but instead I’m sweeping the damn floor.”

Eggs, wheat toast, and corned beef hash arrive on an oval platter, delivered by Kathy Tracy, a 26-year veteran waitress behind the U-shaped Formica counter where politicians, students, hospital workers, university administrators, and neighbors gather.

Antonie is a jack-of-all-trades, flipping eggs and bacon on the flat-top. He whips up his special-recipe corned beef hash every other Saturday (and every Badger football Saturday). To work off the $6 breakfast, it’s off to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum on the Capitol Square.

The free museum, operated by the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs, is compact but jammed with fascinating artifacts and exhibits.

World War I Beyond the Trenches marks the war’s centennial. It combines displays and artifacts such as trench periscopes, a German MG08 machine gun, and uniforms, and features compelling interviews with Wisconsin soldiers.

It also features exhibits on 20th-century military conflicts, including a World War II Jeep, artifacts from the battleship USS Wisconsin, and a Vietnam-era Huey helicopter. Peckish again, it’s time to seek and destroy some pizza.

This time, we turn to vibrant Monroe Street, with its wealth of shops and restaurants. Pizza Brutta is tucked behind a stone-arched façade and offers wood-fired Neapolitan pizza.

“Neapolitan pizza is simple,” says co-owner Derek Lee, a professional pizza maker, or “pizzaiolo,” certified by the Verace Pizza Napoletana, the association for authentic Neapolitan pizza. “There’s no sugar, no extra ingredients. It’s just crushed tomatoes, handmade fresh mozzarella, sea salt, olive oil, and our dough. It’s an exercise in restraint.”

The wood-fired oven at Pizza Brutta Andy Manis

Of course, there are other toppings, too. We chose the $12 salame funghi, featuring oregano, salami, cremini mushrooms, and saracene olives and delivered steaming after just 90 seconds in the 900-degree brick oven.

Lee’s co-owner, wife Darcy Lee ’96, says Pizza Brutta uses locally sourced organic products. “In Naples, they depend on a local food system. It was a way for us to marry business with helping the environment.” By now, exercise seems appropriate, so it’s off to a nearby BCycle rack to use the city’s convenient bikeshare program for a junket west of campus.

In 2017, renters rode 300,000 miles, burning off 11.9 million calories. With several dozen stations around Madison, you can rent one of the red bikes, outfitted with a basket and a lock. A $6 daily pass, which covers unlimited 30-minute rides, is required. Additional time goes for $3 for 30 minutes.

“Badgers and bikes are a great blend,” says Morgan Ramaker ’06, MBA’17, director of Madison BCycle. “It’s a way to cover more ground and see Madison without parking hassles.”

Headed west on the smooth-riding bikes, we begin a mini–Frank Lloyd Wright x1890 tour. First stop: the Eugene A. Gilmore House, known as the “airplane house.”

Wright built the house for Gilmore, a UW law professor, in 1908 on the highest point of University Heights. Its copper-roofed wings extend from a center pavilion with a triangular balcony — which gives the home the appearance of an airplane. It remains a private residence, unavailable for tours.

Ten minutes away is the First Unitarian Meeting House. A National Historic Landmark built in 1951, it’s a magnet for Wright devotees. Its design, with a soaring copper roof evoking a church steeple and a triangular auditorium, has influenced religious architecture since it was completed.

Touring Frank Lloyd Wright’s “airplane house” via BCycle Andy Manis

Our guide points out Wright’s signature plywood furniture and Hiroshige’s early-nineteenth-century prints — once part of Wright’s collection — in the loggia. Wright said the simplicity of Japanese art, which he sold early in his career to supplement his income, greatly influenced his work.

After the tour, there’s still time for nature. Just more than a mile away is Frautschi Point, part of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, a lesser-known area west of Picnic Point. There’s a parking lot off Lake Mendota Drive, and a short walk yields an elevated view of Lake Mendota, beneath a canopy of burr oaks, white oaks, and shagbark hickories.

A wooden staircase leads to the lake’s edge at Raymer’s Cove. The spot offers a view of the Middleton shore and of sandstone cliffs where Raymer’s Ravine meets the lake.

With the clock ticking on our rented bikes and our 36-hour adventure, we pedal to a new vantage point.

Eno Vino Downtown Wine Bar and Bistro combines urban attitude with panoramic altitude. It offers a 10th-floor penthouse view of the state Capitol, just a block away, and Lakes Mendota and Monona.

The eclectic menu features a globally fused array of cheese boards and dishes with small-plate influences ranging from Greek to Korean to Italian. Its floor-to-ceiling windows and a ninth-floor outdoor terrace provide a vivid atmosphere.

Eno Vino Downtown Wine Bar and Bistro Sara Granados

After Eno Vino opened in 2017, social-media selfies helped drive success. “People started asking, ‘Where is that view? We’ve never seen it before,’ ” says general manager Jennifer Cameron. “It was a snowball effect.”

Eno Vino commands a big-city vibe and a glass wine case holding hundreds of bottles. After glasses of wine with small plates of goat cheese tortellini ($12) and lamb meatballs ($13), there was just enough time to crown our 36-hour expedition.

Just a 25-minute walk away, we settled into sunburst chairs on the Memorial Union Terrace with bowls of Berry Alvarez ice cream to catch a perfect sunset.

New adventures are great, but some habits die hard.

Chan PhDx’22, who is studying physics, would soon hop in a sloop for a three-hour lesson with Edward LeBlanc, a physician’s assistant with UW Health and a first-year instructor for the Hoofer Sailing Club. During the summer, Chan and his friends had decided to learn to sail, and they’d had an initial lesson that covered terminology and sailing basics about three weeks earlier.

As he began to prepare the boat for the water, Chan looked back at his instructor for guidance.

“Do what you want to do,” LeBlanc said. “And if it’s wrong, I’ll teach you something else.”

Despite the fact that Lake Mendota is completely frozen for about a fourth of the year, the student sailing club sells more than 300 memberships annually. Program manager David Elsmo estimates that the number of students involved at any given time is much higher than that, and the group boasts nearly as many community members. At around $250 for an annual student pass, it’s one of the country’s most cost- effective sailing programs.

Newcomers start out in the chart room inside Memorial Union, getting acquainted with terms such as tacking (bringing the forward part of the boat through the wind) and jibing (the opposite maneuver). From there, they move on to the techs — the familiar yellow boats lined up along the lakeshore — or the keel boats, which are larger.

Experienced sailors can make their way through the fleet to the E Scow, which LeBlanc says is likely the fastest sailboat on Lake Mendota. But for beginners, he says, it’s essential to learn on the slower, smaller boats — to feel the spray of the water and take control of the motions.

Even the most advanced students can make too tight a turn and flip the boat. But at Hoofers, there’s a saying for that.

“The worst thing you can do is take a swim,” LeBlanc explains. “And that’s not the end of anything.”

1. The Class of 1918 Marsh (shown above)

Not far from University Hospital, this swamp might look static, but it’s actually inching through a slow-motion restoration to its former marshy glory. The best way to enjoy it, short of pulling on a pair of waders, is to catch a looping trail at Parking Lot 130 near the entrance to Picnic Point, then walk to a weathered-wood overlook. Sit on the bench and ponder this panorama spiked by a forest of cattails, and tune in to a soundscape layered with the conk-la-ree! of epauletted red-winged blackbirds nesting along the edge.

2. Nancy Nicholas Hall

The third-floor terrace of the School of Human Ecology’s home on Linden Drive lets you sit on lacy wrought-iron chairs that are bathed in — you choose — dappled light beneath an arbor or full-bore sun, all graced with deep green ground cover. The wide- angle view sweeps across a swath of rooftops, including the terra-cotta tiles of Agriculture Hall next door. In the distance, you can even see a slice of Camp Randall Stadium.

3. The Memorial Union Terrace (early morning)

It doesn’t just matter where you go, but also when: The Union Terrace is crowded at brats-and-beer-and-music time, but the morning after is the flip side of the Terrace’s split personality. And it’s glorious. The water is like blue, exquisitely rippled glass, and the nautical woods of sailboats sway at anchor. A jogger glides by — pad-pad, pad-pad — accompanied by birdsong instead of bandsong. The iconic sunburst chairs are lined up in long rows, composing a rhapsody of yellow and green and orange backlit by the rising sun.

4. The School of Education Building

Make that a double order of third-floor terraces with a view, because the School of Ed on Bascom Hill has one, too. This view features Muir Woods, Lake Mendota, and an edge of Helen C. White Hall. The terrace offers up wooden furniture, sun umbrellas, two big sumacs, and ground cover dotted with yellow blossoms, plus the nearby Crossroads Café. The seamless integration belies a striking fact: the terrace is just an architectural kid, having opened in 2010, 109 years after the first students walked into the then-named Engineering Building.

5. Elizabeth Waters Residence Hall

Overlooking Lake Mendota, this dorm hides a rear courtyard complete with tables and chairs and birds and trees, suffused with a large measure of silence. You’re cocooned by the hall behind you and the woods, sky, and lake before you. On a sunny summer morning, there may even be a sense of Italian villa in the air. This, you decide as you sip a cup of coffee, is how a courtyard can turn tense into tranquil.