Do you ramble?
The phrase “rambling zone” was coined a number of years ago by my brother Morris. It draws its origins from two converging influences. The first was a Youtube video starring Warwick Davis called “A Short Country Ramble.” Take a short break to watch it, it’s amusing and inspiring.
Now that you’ve seen it I don’t need to go over it in detail. While the video was intended as a spoof on the English tradition of country rambles, it inspired us to become ramblers ourselves. To Warwick Davis’ question “Do you ramble?”, we wanted to be able to respond with an enthusiastic “Yes!”
The other influence was a place on a ridgetop twenty minutes from our home, near the Human Powered Trails (HPTs). It is called the “Mathy Tract”. Other names for the place are “La Crosse Blufflands”, or more colloquially, “The Quarry”.
Quarrying in La Crosse
The bluffs in La Crosse have distinctive rocky faces, whose sandy color and sharp drop offs stand in contrast to the tree lined, rolling features of other Driftless Area bluffs. This is because they were quarried. In the 1800s, rampant city fires spurred mandates to build homes from stone instead of wood. Construction firms turned to the bluffs for their materials. Miners blasted the stone loose and loaded it into horse drawn carts. Then, it was placed into tramway cars which rolled down the bluffs on tracks.
Those days are long gone, but vestiges, namely rock walls and machinery, remain. The Mathy Quarry is now open to the public and free of human development. There are some rough trails here and there, but otherwise it is wide open grassland. Standing atop the Quarry, the sun beaming down, while looking into the untamed fields below gives one a feeling of utter liberty. It is a place to roam as you please and now it is our original rambling zone.
Free Range Croquet
Until recently I thought myself and my friends were the inventors of a new sport. We called it free range croquet. In this version of croquet the wickets are placed far apart on unusual features such as hills, creek banks, and flower beds. Often we mowed fairways to mimic a golf course. The games went on for hours and could be downright dirty.
I had hopes of debuting our sport to the world, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s already out there. Extreme croquet got its start in multiple American states in the 1920s. Clubs formed in the ‘70s-’90s, and new ones still occasionally crop up. A Boston University group has a promo video out there from 2010.
It turns out we were riding waves that were already created. Still, there is one thing we’ve done that I’m sure no one else has. We combined free range croquet with rambling at the Quarry, the original rambling zone.
The great game
Carl, Skeeter, and I drove up to the quarry one summer afternoon with croquet gear in tow. Until then we played free range croquet in our backyards. That day we took things up a level and played a giant game at the rambling zone.
It took an hour just to set up the course. Each wicket was several hundred yards apart. The course began near the parking lot and went through some short trails in the bushes before coming out into the wide open. Then, after several wickets in the grasslands it descended down the steep quarry wall, traversed the dusty bottoms, and climbed back up to the finish.
It was a classic croquet ramble. Drives were much more frequent than putts, so there was a short ramble between each shot. By the time we descended into the quarry our group had splintered. I was a wicket ahead of Carl, and Carl a wicket ahead of Skeeter. We each enjoyed the solitude of that first croquet ramble. Brown grasshoppers clicked and flew from grass stalk to grass stalk. The rolling ball kicked dust off the ground. Above us the quarry wall rose magnificently, and behind us was a view of the bluffs and their forests. It was rambling heaven.
The “Webster” definition of a rambling zone
Unfortunately our game ended early when we heard Carl shout out “A rattlesnake!” on his ascent back up the quarry. I ended up being the de facto winner. We closed out the afternoon with a short ramble back to the parking lot, proud of our pioneering efforts.
I have been back to the quarry many times for a ramble. Often it is in winter, when I return home for the holidays. Each outing is different. Old places are revisited and new places are found. Snow and mud are no deterrents, in fact, they add a north country flavor to the walk. Morris and I recently had a conversation where we tried to pin down a solid definition for a “rambling zone.” What we settled on is this.
A true rambling zone is where the feet, mind, and eyes are free to ramble.
