Breaking my New Year's Resolution???

 

As I posted on January 1st, my resolution for 2025 was to do an outdoor hike of at least five miles every single day this year, no exceptions, no excuses.  It's been great motivation, and it had been a very positive experience on balance ... so far.

But what about injuries?  What about a catastrophic illness?  What if I'm kidnapped by Aliens?

Shit happens, right?  Just look at that photo of my left ankle.  It was May 6th.  The story is such a typical one.  It was not a hiking-related injury.  I was preparing stuff in the kitchen and dropped something really hard and heavy, and tried to intercept it--to break its fall--with my foot, soccer style.  Big, stupid mistake.  It clobbered that ankle, which is always sensitive because there's a bone chip in there from when I broke my ankle 37 years ago and the orthopedic surgeon told me he wasn't going to operate because the ankle was stable enough.

It hurt like hell.  It began to swell up, and soon the swelling had spread all the way up my lower leg to my knee.  I could barely walk.  The pain was biblical!

I would surely have to stay off the leg until the swelling went down, right? 

Well, I wasn't going to give up without trying.  I took some aspirin (I don't even keep Ibuprofen around) and headed out to at least try to walk a bit.

It was pure torture.  I limped along gamely for just a single mile, and it took an hour and a half.  But then the aspirin seemed to kick in, just enough that I was able to pick up my pace.  It was still as painful as a root canal, but I could see hope of getting in the five miles and living to tell about it - keeping the resolution alive for at least another day.

And I did it.  It was no fun at all, to say the least, but I'd had a day like that with a twisted ankle when I hiked the AT in 2012, and it all worked out for the best.  Back then, I had been almost back to normal the next day.

But that was a twisted ankle.  This was a blunt-force trauma injury.  What would it be like the next day?

May 7th: The swelling was down, back to just a very sensitive local area around the ankle.  I headed out to try to walk, and was shocked to find that walking did not aggravate the pain.  This was not systemic, not down in the guts of my foot where bones rub together.  I was able to get my five miles in at almost a normal pace.  And best of all, I was able to actually enjoy the experience!

Normal service resumed!  New Year's Resolution kept alive ... at least until the next big disaster strikes.

That January 1st post has grown long and unwieldy, so I'm retiring that one and picking up the coverage here.

Spring has sprung and it's one of the best times of the year to be out.  The bugs haven't proliferated yet, temperature hasn't gone into a tropical sizzle, the new greenery is all fresh and perky, and the birds are singing up a storm, and I'm loving my life in the woods again, and eager to share my joy, whether in words or in photos.  Photo Archive follows:

This is Western Maidenhair Fern, one of my favorite deep-woods plants, and very difficult for gardeners to grow.  It's called 'western' because its range is up and down the US west coast--including among the huge Redwoods and up into Alaska among the giant Sitka Spruces, growing all the way out into the Aleutian Islands.  But somehow there's a rogue colony of it in the mid-Atlantic, and it's actually reasonably common around here.  (There's another colony in Vermont).  I love the way ferns unfurl in spring, and the delicate, fractal-like geometry of their leaf pattern.  Walked past two small clusters of these on May 10th, not on any real trail--just a route I took through the woods around my retreat at the Cloister at Three Creeks.

Sketch Pad - The View from Outside the Box: Big breaking news in Cosmology

The "Creation of Reality" out of the Virtual Vacuum: a co-equal superposition of "nothing" and "something" spontaneously becomes "everything" thanks to what Physicists call Dark Energy. 

(Last update: 3 May 2025)

Inspired by the March 19, 2025, release of new results from DESI - the experiment that is studying millions of galaxies to understand how our universe evolved.  This outside-the-box analysis and commentary starts with an equation that Mathematicians will tell you isn't even right.  That's because it isn't math ... it's reality.

What if, at the time of the Big Bang, Dark Energy and Planck Energy had the same absolute value, and were the 'particle pair' that started it all?

That breakthrough idea comes from a thought experiment that follows from the cartoon above.  The resulting scientific hypothesis, which I call the Dilution Hypothesis, offers a seemingly compelling solution to three and possibly four of the most profound mysteries (unsolved problems) in physics.

First it presents a physical resolution to the 'worst prediction in all of physics' - the so-called Cosmological Constant Problem.

Second, it explains the 2022 Nobel Prize Winning observations proving that what Einstein called "Spooky action at a distance" is real - the essential non-locality of reality known as Bell's Theorem. 

Third, it resolves the 'Measurement Problem' in quantum physics, most famously described in the 'Schrödinger’s Cat' thought experiment in which it appears that an "observation" (the ill-defined action of making a measurement) is required to change the fuzzy probability of a quantum field state into a real physical state.

The last mystery that it addresses has been called the biggest problem with the currently accepted Standard Model of Particle Physics, and it's called the Hierarchy problem.  The discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 was the crowning jewel on the Standard Model.  Problem is that its mass is an unexplainably low number.  The Higgs' interaction with the Vacuum should give it ginormous mass.  The fact that it doesn't may be explained by the Dilution Hypothesis. 

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The latest news from the world of cosmology may be the biggest news since 1998.  It certainly is for me—an avid follower of all the news about the very biggest picture of our reality.  I had a front row seat on that big news of 1998, while working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.  It was the discovery that our universe is expanding at a rate that is accelerating.  Some mysterious force or influence seemed to be ripping our universe apart faster and faster.  That unknown force was given the name of Dark Energy.

It's hard to believe that was 27 years ago already.  The research earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, and the discoveries made back then have become mainstream science that almost everybody has heard by now, yet back then it was a totally unexpected shock result.  It led to the formulation of what has become known as the Standard Model of Cosmology. In a nutshell, the Standard Model's basic story is that all the stuff we know about and understand (stars, galaxies, planets, chairs, and Easter Bunnies and all the light and other forms of energy that make them tick) makes up less than 5% of the total stuff of the universe.  All the rest of it is pretty much a total mystery, divided into two bins.  26.5% is "Dark Matter"; and nobody knows what that actually is.  Despite massive searches, it hasn't been observed yet.  We only know (or suspect) that it is there because of its gravitational influence on the behavior and structure of galaxies, among other things.  Finally, the vast majority of the universe's material (about 68.6%) consists of that mysterious stuff called Dark Energy, which seems to be steadily, inexorably ripping the universe apart.

The standard model says that Dark Energy is a constant, unchanging in time and space.  The so-called Cosmological Constant was first proposed by Einstein himself back when he was developing the General Theory of Relativity well over a century ago.

Since 1998, work has been ongoing to understand Dark Energy and to quantify it more precisely.  Astrophysicists have developed some very clever ways to study the influence of Dark Energy and, in particular, the way it might have been influencing the universe at various times in the past.  That's where this week's big news comes in.  

Screen shot from a Lawrence Berkely Lab article published on the day of the announcement of the results of three years of DESI observations

The DESI experiment, which has been ongoing for about four years, released preliminary results a few years ago that brought to light the first suggestions that the Cosmological Constant may not actually be constant at all.  Dark Energy appeared to be weakening with time.  Last week's newly released analysis of much more data has strengthened this finding, and, although it doesn't reach the strict "5-sigma" threshold for a confirmed new discovery (which means that there is only a 0.00003% chance that it is not), it has opened up a 4.2-sigma gap between the Standard Model and some new model of Dark Energy that evolves over time—a model that would specifically say that Dark Energy is weakening as the universe expands.

Okay.  That's the gist of the news that has inspired this post.  Maybe Dark Energy was very much stronger in the early universe than it is today.  Maybe it even ties in (seamlessly?) with the rapid explosive growth of the universe right after the Big Bang that has been called 'Inflation'.  Maybe it is entangled with the Higgs Boson's Mass (gosh, maybe the Higgs Field and Dark Energy and Inflation are all closely related—perhaps unified in the early high-energy epochs of our universe). And maybe Dark Energy will all but disappear in the far distant future as our universe continues to expand and cool.

That representation of Dark Energy dwindling over time has always made more sense to me, and this post is here to discuss how and why.  It's an outside the box discussion, and I'm going to begin it at the farthest reaches of our comprehension of reality and work my way back in.

I'll start with nothing.  A blank piece of paper on a sketch pad.  Let the thought experiment begin.

That blank represents what we call 'the vacuum', and in it, I am now drawing a single dot.

The pencil I used to draw the dot is a special one—infinitely sharp—so that the dot itself has no dimensions.  It is an infinitesimal dot.

And here's where the cartoon at the top of this post comes in.  Our creator (or the unguided process that led to our universe's creation) began his work with that single dot expressed as an 'equation'

0 = 1/∞

As mentioned in the caption, Mathematicians will tell you that this is not a valid equation.  The valid way of expressing this relationship uses 'Limit' notation:  Zero is the limit of the quantity 1/n as n approaches infinity.  They're not wrong.  They're just suffering from a sort of self-inflicted 'myopia.' 

Also as mentioned in the caption, this expression is meant to be a depiction of reality, not of math.  The number zero represents nothing.  The lack of stuff and things.  The absence of every imaginable and unimaginable entity.  It is that blank sheet of paper on my sketch pad.

The number one represents 'something' or 'anything' in the sense that it is the opposite of nothing.  A presence of 'stuff' of any sort—the foil in the absurd question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that philosophers have wasted their time discussing for millennia.

The thought bubble by our wise creator in the image up top attempts to depict the absurdity of that question by posing the expression as the answer:  The two-sided 'equation' demonstrates the co-existence of nothing and something in superposition.  And the glue that binds them is that most mysterious Paradox known as "infinity"—unrestricted 'bigness'—a 'numerical' or virtual entity that nicely straddles the gulf between the "necessary" (abstraction—an 'absolute') and the "contingent" (actualization—anything that can be realized).  Because it resides in the denominator of the expression as written, we're dealing with the inverse of bigness—unrestricted smallness—the infinitesimal.

How to understand the infinitesimal?  Let's explore the dot that I drew on the sketch pad.  In order to see it, you have to zoom in, right?  Let's start with a million-x zoom lens.  Zoom in a million times magnification, and my dot is still infinitesimal.  Another million times?  Still the same.  No matter how many times you repeat the zooming-in process, the dot does not get any bigger in your new view.  And it never will.

What's the difference, then, between a dot you can never see and pure nothing?  If you say 'No practical difference - they're equal - and your expression is obviously valid' then you're on board with my meaning.

Yet there is unquestionably a difference between something and nothing, right?  It is as obvious as the difference between black and white.

In the abstract, idealized (myopic) realm of Mathematics, that is right.  An infinitesimal point in a parameter space is completely different from the lack of specification of such a point and of a 'space' in which it resides. Clearly, "Nothing" seems conceptually simpler.  Its counterpart opens a Pandora's Box filled with all sorts of enigmatic questions and contains all sorts of messy stuff (e.g., how to define an 'axiomatic' all-inclusive, unrestricted parameter space to begin the enquiry).  That's the black-and-white thinking that leads to the absurd question "why did something show up at all, when Nothing seems the preferred state of reality?" In the real world there is no practical, physical difference between the two. Nothing and something cannot be cleanly separated.  The science that we call 'physics' (study of the physical) offers many different ways of expressing the ambiguity that results in trying to resolve smaller and smaller things or trying to remove things from a 'box' until nothing is left.  The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a good start.  It says that the more accurately you try to zoom in on the location of the dot (to box it in), the more it is likely to be buzzing in and out of that box (uncontrollably tunneling through the walls of the box).  Specifying an absolutely perfect location will take you to a blur of random motion that will put the actual dot at that location only once in ... forever.  It is effectively NOT 'there'.  Physics has come to recognize a tiny length scale, called the Planck Scale, below which nothing can be resolved - nothing that small or smaller can have any physical significance, not even in principle.

I've probably belabored this point more than I should.  Let me just step back to say that many people who practice science and math suffer from an existential angst when told that their black-and-white conception of reality just doesn't work.  Their classic response has been succinctly expressed as "Shut up and calculate."  In philosophical space the same issue is confronted when trying to bridge the gulf between Necessary and Contingent.  How can a thing be both?  I've offered a primer on that above—the key is that entity known as Infinity.  It's bigger than you can imagine, but also fully realizable if you embrace the intrinsic blur it includes at the limits of conceptualization.  I was lucky enough to have figured that out while sitting in my High School library during a 'Study Hall' period when I was in the eighth grade.  (That was in 1962, even before the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation was discovered!  It's astounding to realize how far the science of Cosmology has progressed in my lifetime.)  I'll never forget that moment.  I was imagining holding the end of a string in my hand—a string that did not have another end.  You just have to get over your angst, people.  Something and nothing happily co-exist in superposition, and we'll continue to explore further the idea that for a necessary thing to be actualized, it has to be observed by some kind of interaction/entanglement with the contingent physical world (an 'observation,' in the broadest sense of the word, is required).

Now the fun begins.  As I said at the start, this is a thought experiment where that blank piece of paper represents the vacuum – a 'place' where there is supposed to be nothing—a completely unrestricted 'lawless' nothing – and the dot represents ... well, let's go all the way and then backtrack.  That dot is the universe.

You see, there is no rule that prevents my infinitesimal dot from having attributes.  Fundamental particles like the electron are point particles—they have no dimension—and yet they have charge, spin, and mass.  If we allow string theory into the picture, then the electron may have more than three dimensions as its operational 'realm'.  (This may be important later in this discussion.)

The dot that I drew could have negative pressure.  That would set in motion an exponential gravitational repulsion, expressed only within its confines, which can readily give rise to the entirety of our universe and much, much more.  Maybe that's too much for the layperson to swallow in one felled swoop.  Carl Sagan might say 'let the dot be blue and step back and marvel at our insignificance amid the vastness' (of the whole of the sketch pad).

The "pale blue dot" - a famous photo of distant Earth taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Neptune in 1990 as reprocessed for its 30th anniversary in 2020.  (Look for it in the middle of the streak of sunlight, which is an artifact of the camera lens.)

But maybe the dot is blue only from 9 to 10PM on Thursdays when Carl Sagan's show is live on your TV, and pink the rest of the time.  Whatever.  It could have as many attributes as needed to characterize it as indistinguishable from our ridiculously complicated universe.  Remember, it sits in a 'lawless' realm (the vacuum—the sketch pad) and so it is entirely free to acquire and experiment with (pick and choose, modify and refine) any sorts of laws that work for it.

And here's the thing.  That sketch pad doesn't have to have any of those attributes.  It only has to permit me to draw them in (to permit them to become manifest).  In our thought experiment, the sketch pad is the vacuum—a completely indifferent realm that isn't even arguably real; and calling it a source of 'possibility' is too vague and inadequate.  The vacuum is the closest there is to a 'Necessary' (starting point), but its 'being' is entirely Contingent on observation by some coherent (physical) entity that emerges within it.  Again, the Necessary and the Contingent must coexist.  Must.  The best term I've found to accurately characterize the philosophical and physical status of the vacuum is that it is Virtual—similar to a 'memory' but without need of a conscious mind, and without the element of time involved—"real but not actual, ideal but not abstract."  A Virtual object can be (and obviously is) the source of things that are 'actual' (allowing the emergence of existence itself).  This virtual-actual perspective can be credited to the French thinker Gilles Deleuze from the second half of the 20th century, and people who subscribe to his concepts are called Deleuzians.  (I'm not making this stuff up!)

Now the thought experiment is ready for the big reveal—the scientific hypothesis.  Our universe is a dot of no size on an independent vacuum substrate.  It has no size because the vacuum is devoid of time and space—those 'dimensions' are hypothesized to be attributes that were acquired (emerged and got selected) in the formation process out of which the universe originated.  Our way of interrogating the vacuum can only be via its interactions with our reference frame from within our universe, but from the outside-the-box, virtual 'perspective' of the vacuum, its interactions with the dot remain unchanged as our universe goes about its evolution.  When our universe was tiny, right at its inception (the Big Bang), the influence of the vacuum was concentrated, behaving more like the way we observe the influence of the vacuum on a closely examined electron that can suddenly interact with a virtual electron-positron pair and switch places with the virtual electron, making it suddenly the real electron, or the way quarks and gluons maintain the vast majority of the mass of protons and neutrons by a constant buzz of virtual motion—in other words the influence is HUGE.  It may be that at the earliest moments of 'creation', Dark Energy and Planck Energy were the same.  But as our universe expanded, the (aggregate) influence on whole-universe fields (on the universe as a 'particle') got diluted from our observational point of view.   Physicists have lamented the 'worst prediction in all of science' as the difference between the calculated vacuum energy (which is based on its influence on individual particles) and the 10-to-the-120th-power smaller value of the Cosmological Constant as it acts on our gargantuan present-day universe as a whole.  Maybe this thought experiment (the outside the box perspective) explains why.  Maybe it can even lead to a calculation of the true size of our universe—not the observable universe, but the whole ball-o-wax!

The hypothesized 'Dilution Effect' described in the thought experiment is meant to address the Cosmological Constant problem—that 'worst prediction in all of physics'.  It already has one very powerful observational line of support for it, and its perspective on the solution to the quantum physics 'Measurement Problem' and to the 'Hierarchy Problem' related to the Higgs Boson's mass offer further weight to the value of exploring it further.  

The support from existing known physics is that it perfectly explains the inherent non-locality of reality that Bell Tests have demonstrated.  Experiments proving the Bell Theorem won the Nobel Prize in 2022.  From the outside-the-box 'perspective' of the timeless, dimensionless, lawless (unrestricted - free of both attributes and restrictions) vacuum, all particles that emerged within that 'dot' on the sketch pad (anything from a given universe on down) are functionally in the same 'place'.  

The perspective on the 'Measurement Problem' starts by considering the process known as CSL—Continuous Spontaneous Localization.  The Measurement Problem has plagued physicists for a century.  Besides the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, another famous example is the 'double slit experiment' in which a beam of electrons that are sent through a pair of slits produces an interference pattern on a detector screen behind the slits that can only be explained if the electrons are behaving like waves and not particles.  Careful experiments that have been performed with single electrons have confirmed that the electron actually appears to effectively pass through both slits at the same time—a superposition of states.  And yet the electron then produces just a single dot on the detector screen. CSL explains such phenomena as a spontaneous collapse of the wave function due to the electrons becoming entangled with the quantum field of the detector screen, or even of the scientist that analyzes it.  The greatest feature of objective-collapse theories such as CSL is that they produce experimentally testable predictions that can distinguish them from the predictions that simple quantum mechanics makes.  The supposed worst problem with CSL is that it does not conserve energy.  The generalization of the process requires all particles in the combined entangled system to acquire a slight 'buzz' or 'hum' of Brownian Motion—basically heating up the whole system with no known source of that heat.  It might just be that this 'worst problem' is the key that unlocks the new physics described by the 'dilution effect.'  What if the source of the heat is a reduction in Dark Energy?  Think of the collapse of the quantum superposition of states into a single classical observed state as a phase change that happens when the system gets big enough that the effects of the vacuum on it become sufficiently diluted.  In this view, the quantum field actually contains 'hidden' or virtual dark energy, and the fruitful line of research would be to reformulate quantum mechanics to include that 'potential energy'.  There's a 2017 Physical Review Letters scientific paper that discusses this idea (behind an institutional paywall).  See also two popular summary articles about this paper here and here.

Okay.  The hypothesized 'Dilution Effect' is absent (or minimum) for individual fundamental particles on the tiniest scales, it begins to show up when systems have enough mass to begin to be seen in our macro-scale experience of the world, and when acting on our universe as a whole it is reduced by 10-to-the-120th power from the calculated quantum zero-point energy of the vacuum to the observed value of 'Lambda'—the Cosmological Constant or its time-varying counterpart.  Similarly, perhaps an ancient physicist weighing the Higgs Boson back in the early universe might have found it to have much greater mass than it does now because the Higgs Field was more concentrated. (Are there any clever observational methods to actually test this?)

The 'Dilution Effect' has the correct sign and seems to have approximately the right magnitude in our present epoch.  Quantitatively it requires more detail fleshing out from these bones.  The DESI result shows that Dark Energy seems to be about 10% lower today than it was 4.5 billion years ago.  The present value of the Hubble Constant produces a 7% increase of the size (scale factor) of the universe in a billion years.   But theoretical physics contains a wealth of potential modifiers to the simple scaling to the size of the universe.  The set of Grand Unified Theories require two dozen or more Higgs Fields that are characterized by positive vacuum energy at zero field value and offset vacuum minima.  The unknown shapes of these curves could provide plateaus where high energy matter could reside in quasi-stability and contribute to a negative pressure inflation-like expansion.  The vacuum ought to have greater virtual effect on particles that operate in more space dimensions as offered by string theory.  In both of these high-energy 'far outside of observational experience' realms, there seem to be multiple solutions that share comparable validity; and any one specific (e.g. renormalized) solution could be characterized as the DNA of its resulting universe.  Further, the current working 'Cosmological Principle' that says that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic could be a local simplification.  Dark Energy (perhaps in conjunction with a selection of laws that fine-tune the speed of light—the rate of exchange of information) could have created this 'zone' for us as a sort of Cell Membrane to prevent regions with different laws from corrupting our space.   Here is where I want to confront the science community with an accusation of closed-mindedness and bias.  There does not have to be one unique path from the Big Bang to our current universe.  Multiple valid solutions are a good thing.  Is there only one unique solution (only one correct model) for creating a human being?  Or for generating the human species from a non-living chemical starting point?  What law declares that the universe we live in is in any way a unique solution to anything?

We do not even know if the original initiation of a universe from vacuum fluctuations is closely related to the characteristics of our universe (no more than the original single-celled "Last Universal Common Ancestor" of all life on Earth is closely related to me).  If there is any way that universes self-replicate, then ours is the offspring of the offspring ... of the offspring of any original.  If any precursor universes to ours harbored intelligence capable of and interested in simulating its origins, then our universe could be no more than an easily calculated 'toy universe'.  That would explain why it is so tantalizingly mathematically tractable, wouldn't it?  Interesting perspective: Could our universe be the virtual playground of the 'Gods'?  Maybe their real world is a dystopian mess, and our world is the idyllic place they come to escape their problems!  Post card from God:  "Looks like you're having a wonderful time.  Wish I was there."

But back to our own perspective:  Yes, this is a wonderful time to be alive.  Science is presenting us with some tantalizing new cosmological clues.  I see a vast array of avenues of inquiry and re-evaluation that can spring from the fertile soil of this new DESI result.  This is the stuff that burns hottest within me.  There is so much ground that is yet to be explored and so many keen young minds out there capable of expanding the boundaries of thought and understanding.  Let's get to it!

New Year's Resolution 2025 - Walk 10,000 steps every day

What's in a trail name?  On the Appalachian Trail, it is sort of a rite of passage to be bestowed your trail name by fellow hikers.  So far, I've not had that honor.  The only 'nickname' that I've ever been given (by two of my high school best friends a full 60 years ago) was based on this old hat that I used to wear as a counter-culture message in my hippie and pre-hippie rebellion days.  I'll let you guess what that name was (big hint in the image below).  Since then, I've always gone by trail names that I assigned myself:  'Seeks It' during my AT double thru-hike in 2012, 'Hiking Hermit' in more recent years, then briefly 'Mud' as a protest to a counter-intuitive Leave-No-Trace guideline, and most recently ORNG (Out Roaming Nature's Grandeur/Old Ranger Nearly Geriatric).  But I think I'll go back to the original and wear the hat for a while.  That hat is, believe it or not, a Templeform fedora made by Stylepark and bought by my Dad at Strawbridge and Clothier's original downtown Wilmington, DE store in the early to mid 1950's.  Yes, this was his go-to-church dress hat in the era before trucker caps (ball caps with non-baseball logos) became the new vogue.  Photo taken at the Cloister at Three Creeks on March 31st, 2025, with trees just barely beginning to bud out.

2025 is my 77th year on this planet.  I feel amazing and energetic and truly blessed to be still alive, let alone to be able to get out in nature and walk.   I'm astounded to see that nearly half of the men my age in the US have already kicked the bucket by this age (Social Security Actuarial Life Tables for 2024).  I'm beating the odds.  What did I do to deserve that???

Maybe part of the answer is the walking itself.  Honestly, I'd like to get up on a soapbox and preach the amazing benefits of walking and getting out in the peace and serenity of nature.  But all these things are pretty well known, and writers much more talented than me have expounded and pontificated and proselytized on these subjects at length.  I don't need to add to their wisdom.

My walks are the most important part and the best part of every day for me.  I'll even feel a sense of withdrawal and regret if I have to miss a day of hiking, and so when I got up this morning, it seemed natural to consider a New Year's resolution to help me avoid those few days when I just don't feel like going out because the weather is bad, or because I'm tangled up in some indoor sit-down project.  "Sitting is the new Smoking", right.  The chair is going to kill us all!

I already have good habits regarding the walking lifestyle.  When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things on my mind is "where do I want to hike today."  I like to vary my walks, both in the actual route, and also in the reason, theme, or goal of the day's outing.  Some days I'll walk to a store, buy what I can carry back home in my daypack, and save the planet a little by leaving my car parked at home.  Some days I'm looking for a particular feature of nature, such as which flowers are in bloom, how the seasons are changing the woods.

In general, I'm always looking for interesting things to photograph, usually something unusual, whether its natural or some sort of man-made oddity.  Sometimes, for example, I'll take photos of a plant that I don't know and then get on Google's 'search by image' feature to try to identify it when I get back home. 

I love sharing my photographs, so that becomes part of the motivation for creating this blog post.  It will serve to make me accountable for my resolution and to give me the excuse to do a 'show and tell' with one or a few photos from the day's hike.

And so, without further ado.  Here we go.  The resolution is basic and simple.  Here are the rules:

• Walk Ten Thousand Steps.  That's nominally five miles, and since I use a GPS and not a Pedometer, I'm measuring distance, not actually counting steps.  My goal is to hike at least five miles each day in 2025, and probably for the rest of my days - as long as I can haul my carcass out of bed in the morning and strap on a belt pack and get out the door.
• Always walk outdoors in a natural setting.  No tread mills.  No gyms.
• Rain or Shine.  No excuses, no exceptions.
• Take at least one photo of an interesting sight and feature it here on this blog post
• Do a little trail work along the way - pick up litter or cut back some brush (I always carry a hand pruning shear in my beltpack).

The creation of this post was my main motivation for the inaugural New Year's Day hike.  I intend to update this post every day, adding a new photo up top and describing the day's hike and distance covered.  The Chronological List of 2025 hikes begins below:

1. Jan 1:  Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD.  5.212 miles.
2. Jan 2:  Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
3. Jan 3:  Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
4. Jan 4:  Big Loop around Owen Brown Community.  "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
5. Jan 5:  Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple.  5.139 miles.
6. Jan 6:  Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
7. Jan 7:  Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn.  5.362 miles.
8. ... and on we go.  Because of very low view-counts on this post, I'm not updating this daily.  I'll report monthly, probably, and surely when I get to the magical 'virtual round-the-world hike' mark, at 25,000 miles.

January 2025 total: 171.224 miles.  

February 2025 total: 146.785 miles.  

March 2025 total:  173.620 miles.

April 14th, 2025 was the big day: I surpassed the 25,000-mile mark.  I've 'resolutely' kept to the resolution, having hiked at least 5 miles every day this year so far, and have no intention to stop now.

April 2025 total: 173.826 miles.  And on we go ... but ... 

***Because this post is getting long and unwieldy, and because of some breaking news regarding this ongoing quest, I'm migrating the coverage to a new blog post.  Check it out for the current progress.***

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I hope 2025 finds you, dear readers, healthy and full of joy, and getting the chance to get outdoors as often as possible and take a walk.  Cheers!

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PHOTO ARCHIVE

Plastic Trail!  January 1st.  The world is being drowned in plastic, but ... Really???  Plastic trail???  Yep.  This is the first all-plastic trail I've hiked.  Usually this is just a regular asphalt-paved bike and hiker trail, but the slabs of plastic were laid down over it for heavy equipment during a utility construction project.

Pond on a winter morning - January 2.  I'm showing this photo upside down because I think it looks better that way.  What do you think?

January 4, early on a frigid, windy Saturday morning. Wind chill in the teens.  Saying "Hi" and also, really, "Good-bye" to the church I used to attend fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD).  Back then, I felt very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open and inclusive-of-all UU "theology" has become more and more dogmatic--not in a spiritual way, but politically.  Sadly, they seem to have been sucked into the ever-increasing polarization problem in the US.  I made a few return visits recently but no longer feel comfortable there.

January 5th:  Frazil ice flowing with the current.  Early morning on the Middle Patuxent River beneath I-95.

January 7th: Lake Elkhorn, with two willow trees that really, REALLY like the water.

January 10: Canada Geese hunkering down in an aeration opening in the ice.  Sewell's Orchard Park Pond.

January 13:  Fun with symmetry: an old churchyard tulip poplar tree.

January 15 (at right).  The historic Pratt Truss Bridge built in 1902, now the signature feature of the Patuxent Branch Trail.  At left is my photo from November 28, 2011, the first time I hiked here.

January 17: The walk along Stoney Creek, heading up to the Cloister at Three Creeks.

Jan 19:  deep in the gloom of an impending storm, beside the ecological wasteland of a mown field, we enjoy the ever-hopeful catkins of a sweet birch awaiting spring while basking in a gorgeous Blue Ridge view.

Jan 21:  Bird on a tree-top twig.  Can you spot it?  The clouds are pointing to it.

Jan 22:  View from a hayfield of the peak called 'Three Ridges'.  The treetops there reach well above 4000 feet elevation, though the actual ground doesn't quite exceed that magic threshold. 

January 24:  Three Ridges framed by a badly invasive Paulownia Tree, native to China.

Jan 26:  Three pics for the price of one.  Rainbow Ice falls along the closed Blue Ridge Parkway.

Jan 27:  Ice covered "Stairstep falls".  The trail to get there was almost as treacherous.

February 3:  The first 'wild' flowers to bloom in spring are Skunk Cabbage.  Buds are opening today during a thaw.  The flowers are enclosed in that protective sheath to keep them warm, and the flowers themselves actually generate their own heat by a chemical process.  An extreme adaptation to beat the competition!

February 6:  the noisy abundance of a mountain stream - Stoney Creek at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is my new favorite viewpoint.  We had an inch of rain that had just ended; the roar of a hundred little 'water features' was a wealth of soothing joy!

February 18:  Icicles on a log at Flat Rock Creek in the grounds of the Cloister.  Winter is holding on.  Snow is in the forecast for tomorrow.

Feb. 21:  Ice mushrooms?  Puzzle this one out!

May 3rd:  First Rattler of the season.  An 11-segment rattle on this big guy.

Biography of my Grandpa Bill Wetzel: Gentle Man of Mystery

 

William Wetzel during his early years in America, ca. 1915

Georg Willi Julius “William” Wetzel immigrated from Germany to the United States at the age of 24 in 1910.  It had to be the biggest decision of his life, yet some of his reasons appear to be shrouded in mystery.  One of the motivations, I’m sure, was the political situation in Germany at the time and the threat of conscription into the Prussian Army.  When Grandpa was two years old, leadership of the German Empire fell into the unstable hands of 29-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm II.  Under his reckless and erratic rule, nationalism and aggressive imperialism were setting Germany on a course that isolated them from former allies and would inevitably lead to World War I.

Grandpa Bill’s connection to Wilhelm II is a strange and interesting one.  He was born under somewhat mysterious circumstances literally under the Kaiser’s nose—that is, one block from the grounds of Sanssouci Palace, the Kaiser’s seat of power in Potsdam.  More on this to come.

Explaining why Grandpa left Germany requires guesswork, because he didn’t talk much about his time in Germany.  In piecing together the facts that we do know about him, I believe the reasons were multiple.  The political situation was no doubt important, but Grandpa also had an unsettled, even mysterious upbringing, which very likely contributed to his decision.  I’ll cover what I know of his youth next.  A third reason for emigrating, and the reason he ended up in Wisconsin, is opportunity.  He had family, a great aunt who had come to Wisconsin with her husband and their seven children in 1881 and had settled in the farmland around Brandon and Waupun in Fond du Lac County.  The oldest of these children, Hermann Wegner, and Charles Guenther, the husband of the third child, Emma Wegner, acted as Grandpa’s sponsors.

Now let us try, as best we can, to penetrate the shroud of mystery surrounding grandpa’s early life.

THE MYSTERY YEARS

Georg Willi Julius Wetzel was born in his mother’s sub-let flat at Zimmerstrasse 7, Potsdam, at 2:45AM on 3 April 1886.  He is named for his great-grandfather Georg Samuel Wetzel and his grandfather Julius Friedrich Wetzel both master masons (bricklayers).  The given name Willi was the one he was known by.

Is there any chance that ‘Willi’ was a reference to Kaiser Wilhelm II?  Doubtful.  More likely, by far, it honors his grandmother Wilhelmine Goetsch Wetzel.  It's not an uncommon name.  But stay tuned.

Willi was given the surname of his unmarried mother, Anna Marie Wilhelmine Wetzel (Born 19 Mar 1864).  She was a young, pretty woman working in the shadow of two of the Kaiser’s Potsdam palaces as a maid servant and housekeeper.  She bears a striking resemblance to Princess Victoria, wife of Kaiser Friedrich III of Germany, daughter of Queen Victoria of England, and mother of a certain Wilhelm II.

At left is Princess Victoria in 1867, the way her son Wilhelm II would most fondly remember her (he was 8 at the time) - this portrait is by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.  At right is William Wetzel's mother, Anna Marie Wilhelmine Wetzel in about 1883, near the time Grandpa Bill was conceived.

Yes?  No?  Maybe my imagination is running away with me.

In any case, Anna Marie Wetzel had lived at Zimmerstrasse 7 since at least April 1882, and very likely worked nearby, just blocks from the Kaiser's Palace.  Grandpa’s birth certificate does not list the father, which is likely to mean that his mother would not reveal the father’s identity.  That leads me to speculate, without justification other than circumstantial, that the father may have been an employer, and/or someone above her station.

Who was her employer?  There are no records.  Complete mystery.  I’ve had Y-DNA tests done on myself and on my father (Y-DNA is passed down only from father to his children).  No matches so far.

Some Aristocrat or member of Nobility *might* have been my Grandpa’s father.  We will probably never know.  And so, I dream up stories of a tryst between a pretty young serving girl and a distinguished guest in her employer’s house—none other than the impulsive and impetuous 26-year-old soon-to-be Kaiser himself.  There’s a best-selling novel in there just screaming to be written!  Why not?!

Birth record for William Wetzel, requested by his son Erwin in 1971.  I have a copy of the original certificate, record no. 355/1886 from Potsdam, but do not have permission to publish it.

But back to reality.  Unfortunately, the church records, and many other records in Potsdam were destroyed in World War II.  Zimmerstrasse 7 itself was leveled by carpet-bombing carried out by the 75^th Royal Air Force Squadron (all crewmen were from New Zealand!) during the “Night of Potsdam” on the evening of April 14-15, 1945.

I have had a professional genealogist in Germany search for records of what became of Bill’s mother and where Bill might have lived during his childhood, but they have come up with nothing.  Family oral information says only that Bill’s mother died.  We don’t know when, where, or how, and the genealogist could not find any marriage or death records or later records of any kind for his mother.

Anna Marie Wilhelmine Wetzel gave birth to my grandpa Bill and then just vanished!  Utterly and completely disappearing from the record.  Perhaps someday this ‘brick wall’, as genealogists call it, will be torn down, just as the Berlin Wall itself was.  We can only hope.

Bill himself never spoke about his childhood.  The first thing we know about him is that at age 15 he became an apprentice cabinet maker back in his mother’s hometown of Greifenberg, now in far NW Poland.  More on that in a moment.

One of the problems Grandpa surely faced as a child was the significant stigma that being illegitimate carried with it in those times.  He would have been looked down upon, scorned, perhaps even humiliated, by adults and child peers alike.  How this was manifest in his daily experience, and how it affected him, I cannot even begin to guess.  I imagine that the death or disappearance of his mother, presumably sometime during his early childhood only compounded the hardship.

We do have one fascinating glimpse into this time of Grandpa Bill’s life, written in his own hand on December 8, 1956.  I was 8 years old and had innocently sent him a letter asking him to describe what Christmas was like in Germany when he was a boy.  I think it was for a school project.  How could a grandpa refuse to reply to such a request?!?  The two-page letter he wrote in response begins:

“I am going to write you about Christmas in Germany 60 years ago when I was a boy 11 years old.”

And as of this writing (December 2024) the letter itself is 68 years old.  He was describing Christmas in Germany in 1897!  Below is the image of that first page—the only letter I ever got that was written by him (all correspondence was normally handled by Grandma Betty):

The letter goes on: “The Christmas season and the Christmas holidays were a very big occasion.  The Christmas season started Dec. 10.  Before that date there were no trees or toys on display.  But when that day came, the stores were decorated and full of toys from the floor to the ceiling.  Then the children would go in the evening from one store to the other and ask the Storekeeper for permission to look over all the toys.  And when you were very polite, he would let you in.  Then the children go through the store single file …”

Here I interrupt to offer my Dad’s interpretation, to which I concur.  Being herded through a store single file sounds like he was in a group situation—possibly an orphanage.  Unfortunately, all orphanage records from Potsdam were destroyed in the war, so this remains rank speculation.  He writes further, continuing to describe a group setting rather than a family setting:

“…  but there were signs all over (Alles besehen aber nicht enfassen) it means that you could look at all the toys but you should not touch them.”

I’ve moved to page 2 of the letter:

“When you had the stores all visited and seen all the toys, then all the Boys and Girls wrote a letter to Santa …”

(Again, this implicitly sounds like a group setting.  He then uses the term ‘parents’ in a generic sense that just doesn’t sound like a family situation, but an institutional one.)

“… but before they mailed the letter, the parents would look the letter over and crossed some of the toys off because we always ask for too many things, never thought that the other children wanted some too.  So finally when Christmas Eve came, everybody had to go to church at 6PM.  If you did not go, you would get nothing for Christmas.”

(If this doesn’t describe a tough and austere childhood in an orphanage, I’d be very surprised.)

“When we came home from church, the Christmas tree was lit and the present for every one was there.”

One present for each child?!

“That sure was a big event.  The tree had candles, and for ornaments we had stick candy, gilted nuts, cookies, and apples.  We always celebrated Christmas 3 days, and a good time was had by all.”

Bill’s grandmother, Wilhelmine Goetsch Wetzel had remained in Greifenberg, and was apparently far too poor to take him in.  She appears to have been widowed, possibly soon after the time Grandpa describes in the letter.  Family oral history describes life in a small, rented cottage where they could afford to own only one pig each year, which they would slaughter for the holiday season.  Here the veil of mystery begins to lift when, as already mentioned, Grandpa appears in Greifenberg at the age of 15 and began a three-year apprenticeship at the shop of master cabinetmaker Emil Greul in about September 1901.  He was living with his grandmother according to the oral histories.  My uncle Bill kept in touch with the descendants of Emil Greul at least through the end of the 20th century, but none of them could recall more detail about Grandpa Bill’s life.

Postcard showing Emil Greul’s furniture and coffin-making shop in about 1910.  Emil is the man on the doorstep.

Emil Greul and wife Toni in the mid 1920's

Based on the letters from Emil's family, I suspect that Emil was the closest to a father that Grandpa Bill ever had.   Bill made many toys for Emil and Toni's kids that they remembered fondly.

Grandpa graduated from his apprenticeship, becoming certified as a master carpenter on 1 September 1904:

Graduation certificate

I have Grandpa’s worksheets that show that within a year (by September 1905) he had moved to Berlin, possibly with his grandmother, and taken work at a shop there.  His last known address was at Fichterstrasse 7 in Steglitz bei Berlin (from a postcard mailed from Greifenberg in March 1910).  Although there is a Fichtestrasse 7 in Teltow, about halfway between Steglitz and Potsdam, Fichterstrasse as a street name in Steglitz is unknown according to my German genealogist.

The earliest known photo of Bill comes from this period, sometime between 1905 and 1910.  The portrait, processed (background removed), cleaned up, and colorized, appears below:

William Wetzel ca. 1905-1910

On July 20th, 1910, Bill applied for and received a passport in Berlin.  He quit his job by 23 July (last work stamp), left Berlin, and boarded the S.S. Bremen in the port of Bremen, bound for New York on August 6th.  This was a massive steamship that carried 2000 to 2300 passengers, probably packed together like sardines.

The S.S. Bremen in 1905

His arrival notes at Ellis Island on August 16th list his grandmother as living in Potsdam at what looks like ‘Lenne Strasse’.  He was to meet Charles Guenther, husband of his Grandmother’s sister’s daughter, in Waupun, Wisconsin.

AUTO MAKER TO THE STARS

How much time grandpa spent in Waupun is unknown.  He began buying tools (I have several hand-written itemized receipts that were in the same folder with his passport) and soon found work at the Kissel Motor Car Company in Hartford, Wisconsin, which is 40 miles SE of Waupun, and about halfway to Milwaukee.

Kissel Motor Car Company was founded in 1906 and began production in 1907.  From then until it went bankrupt in the depression in 1930, the company made 35,000 “KisselKars”.  Its cars were high-end sports and luxury vehicles.  One of their speedsters was owned by aviatress Amelia Earhart.  Wikipedia lists other stars who owned KisselKars:  Bebe Daniels, Jack Dempsey, Ralph DePalma, Eddie Duchin, Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Gladys George, Ruby Keeler, William S. Hart, Al Jolson, Mabel Normand, Mary Pickford, and Rudy Vallee.

The vehicle frames were crafted from wood, and among the company’s products were multi-seat passenger transport busses.  The reason I mention this is because an auto enthusiast book on the Kissel Company, published on 1 Jan 1990 and written by Val V. Quandt, includes a photo of Bill and eleven other Kissel employees standing atop the frame of one such bus, demonstrating its sturdy construction:

From “The Classic Kissel Automobile” by Val. V. Quandt, Kissel Graph Press, 1990, page 61.

It is in Hartford that Grandpa Bill came to know Bertha Anna Augusta “Betty” Uber.  Betty was three years older than Bill and probably felt as though she was headed for life as an old maid.  She was the last of the children still living with her parents in the 1910 Census.  She was approaching age 30, working at W.B. Place Tannery in Hartford making gloves at the time Bill appeared.  Her parents had immigrated to the US from Germany as children in 1854, actually arriving just two weeks apart (August 4th and 17th respectively) and apparently traveling to Wisconsin together, with their parents buying adjacent farms in Washington County, just east of Hartford.

No stories of how Bill and Betty met have been passed down, at least none that I’ve heard.  The next thing we know for sure is that they got married.  The date was a traditional fall date, after the harvest was in, though neither of them were involved with farming:

Bill and Betty’s Wedding Certificate, 16 October 1917, provided by St. John’s Lutheran Church, 228 W. State St., Hartford, Wisconsin, where they were almost surely married, the service probably conducted by Rev. E.A. Kuhn, who signed the certificate.

Based on the certificate, it was probably a German Language ceremony.  The German immigrant community was slow to adopt English, and church bulletins and brochures produced by St. John's were all in German up until the time of World War I.  They probably spoke German at home in Betty’s household when she was growing up, and she and Bill probably communicated more in German than in English.

Witnesses to the wedding were Bill’s good friend and fellow German immigrant Charles Kaslo and his wife Ellen, who was Betty’s younger sister.  Charles and Ellen had been married just one week before!

Bill was 31 years old.  Betty was 34.  Was there a honeymoon?  I have no evidence of one.  Here’s their wonderful wedding photo, enhanced and colorized:

Wedding photo, William Wetzel and Bertha Uber, 16 Oct 1917

At the time of the wedding, World War I was, without doubt, the hottest topic of the day.  The US had entered the war on April 6th, 1917.  Bill was required to register as an enemy alien; and by marrying an enemy alien immigrant, so was Betty!

Here’s what the U.S. National Archives web site has to say about it:

“With the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on residents in the United States, citizen and immigrant alike, to loyally uphold all laws and to support all measures adopted in order to protect the nation and secure peace. For individuals termed “alien enemies” – all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of Germany and its allies (including American-born women who married German men) – showing loyalty required a number of additional parameters and processes.

“Wilson’s declaration of war included twelve regulations that restricted the conduct of alien enemies in the United States. Broadly, the regulations barred owning firearms, established a permitting process to reside/work in areas deemed as restricted zones or to depart the United States, and laid out policies regarding threats and attacks against the United States, along with condemning all aid to the enemy. 

“Significantly, Regulation 12 stated that “an alien enemy whom there may be reasonable cause to believe to be aiding or about to aid the enemy . . . or violates any regulation promulgated by the President . . . will be subject to summary arrest . . . and to confinement in such penitentiary, prison, jail, or military camp.” The War Department established war prison barracks at Fort Oglethorpe, GA; Fort McPherson, GA; and Fort Douglas, UT.”

1918 Enemy Alien Registration cards for Bill and Betty Wetzel.

STARTING A FAMILY – THE ROARING ‘20’S

The newlyweds promptly went about having children.  Their first, William Herbert Wetzel, was born on 20 Sep 1918.  Less than two months later, the war ended.  

It wasn’t until a year later, on October 20th, 1919 that Bill earned his certificate of Naturalization and became a US Citizen.  Interestingly, according to German Law, that makes their son William Herbert, and all his descendants, eligible for a German Passport and a fast track to German Citizenship, if they so desire.

This was also the time of the terrible “Spanish Flu” pandemic.  By April 1920, that had run its course, and a decade of economic prosperity ensued.  It was a great time to be alive.

Two more sons followed.  Erwin in January 1920 and Roland (my father) in April 1923.  Below are a couple of early family photos.  The first was taken in about 1922 before Roland was born:

William Wetzel with sons William and Erwin, 1922.

Family photo of Bill and Betty with all three children taken in 1924

The decade of the ‘20’s was a time of unprecedented progress and economic development, possibly the greatest such decade in human history.  With ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in August 1920, women had secured the right to vote.  The electrical grid burgeoned as the telephone and electric appliances proliferated.  Aviation became a routine business.  Radio and moving pictures became popular forms of entertainment.  One of the major hallmarks of the decade was the rapid spread of ownership of the automobile among the middle classes.  The number of registered automobiles was doubling every three years; and accompanying this came the rapid development of a national highway system.

I was surprised to learn that Wisconsin was the first state to number its highways.  That was in 1918.  The US highway numbering system was adopted in 1926, with famous Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, California being one of the originals, and possibly the most famous.

Bill and Betty Wetzel were keeping up with the times.  In the summer of 1928, the family loaded into an old Buick Brougham and headed west with another couple who I do not know the identity of.  For at least part of way, they followed US 66, which was still mostly a dirt road.  They visited Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park (I have a Grand Canyon postcard sent by Betty to her parents from Yellowstone). They passed through Petrified Forest National Monument (they brought back a piece) visited saguaro cactus country, probably around Tucson, Arizona, and reached the Pacific Ocean at the famous Santa Monica pier at the western terminus of US 66:

Grandma Betty and the three boys on the beach at Santa Monica Pier, California, summer 1928.

Betty and the three boys with the other couple, relatives or family friends, somewhere in southern Arizona in summer 1928.

Ice Cream Break!  From the 1928 road trip.  One of their stops appears to have been Cedar Rapids, Iowa, assuming that’s where they picked up the banner.  I can’t read the other one, possibly Wisconsin Dells.

THE DEPRESSION AND BEYOND

It wasn’t long before the infamous Black Tuesday stock market crash of 29 October 1929.  Times got tough quickly for Bill and Betty.  Kissel Motor Car Company went out of business, but based on the address information my Dad wrote down, it appears Bill left Kissel before the depression hit.  Perhaps he had been laid off, perhaps he had found other work, but soon after that 1928 trip out west, the family moved to Fifth St. at Capitol Drive in Milwaukee, just west of the suburb of Shorewood.  Bill may have found work by then with the Shorewood School System as a cabinet maker.  That is where he worked until he retired.  But this first period in the Shorewood area did not last.  In the summer of 1930, it would appear that Bill was out of work.  Bill and Betty went into a partnership with Alfred Eimermann and Betty’s niece Hilda Hahn Eimermann to buy a farm in Metomen Township, Fond du Lac County, near Brandon, Wisconsin, possibly with some influence or help from the Wegner family who had been Bill’s sponsors back in 1910.

Bill and Betty had no practical experience farming, and this experiment did not last.  Betty’s father, Oswald Uber had just died, and in the summer of 1931 they moved back to Hartford and into the house that Oswald had built back in 1915 at 242 Forest St. (number now changed to 535) where his widow Bertha Butzow Uber still lived.  On the other hand, the Eimermanns made that Brandon farm their lifetime home, farming until Alfred retired.  Bill and Betty stayed in Hartford with Betty’s mother until September 1938 then moved with Grandma Bertha to Shorewood where Bertha passed away a year later.

Bill was then employed by the Shorewood school system for sure, making cabinets for the classrooms, and he stayed with that job until he retired.  They first lived in a duplex on Newton Avenue, then in August 1941 they bought a house at 4479 North Morris Blvd., two doors down from Dutch and Ivis Auler, whose daughter Muriel eventually became my mom.

I do not know the date when Bill retired.  He would have been age 65 in 1951.  I do not know if he was paid a pension from the city of Shorewood, but my guess is that he was.  They lived comfortably enough in that house for many long years.  And that is how I remember them:

Bill and Betty Wetzel beside their Shorewood, Wisconsin house in July 1964, the way I remember them from our summer vacation visits each year.

We had moved to the east coast in 1951, so most of my memories of Grandpa Bill come from our nearly annual summer visits, one to two weeks in length.  On some of those years we would travel on to northern Wisconsin to a favorite vacation spot on Hunter Lake in Vilas County near Conover, Wisconsin.  There, in 1954, we had a family reunion where every one of Bill and Betty’s grandchildren assembled in one photo.  I don’t think that ever happened again.

August 1954, Hunter Lake, northern Wisconsin. Bill and Betty with the ‘herd of cats’—all eight of their grandchildren.

Bill and Betty with their three boys, Erwin left, Roland center, Bill right, also from the Hunter Lake family reunion in August 1954.

Bill and Betty have been gone for more than fifty years as of this writing, but fond memories linger on, and this biography is an attempt to preserve some of them.

As I remember Grandpa Bill, he was a soft-spoken unassuming man, just as gentle as they come.  He always had a cigar in his mouth, usually just a stub, usually unlit.  But the smell of cigar smoke inevitably takes me right back to that cramped wood shop he had in the basement of their Shorewood home, where he crafted countless items that will be his physical legacy for generations to come.  As a baby, I slept in a crib he had made for my older cousin Jeff.  Since I was the next to be born, it was passed to my Mom and Dad and somehow it stayed with them.  Both my children and now my new grandchild have all been regular denizens of that sturdy old crib.

Baby crib built by Grandpa Bill in 1946, still in use December 2024.

When my Mom and Dad built their dream house in the country in SE Pennsylvania in the mid 1950’s, Dad asked Grandpa Bill to come east and custom build and install the kitchen cabinets.  He was here with us working on that project for a couple months.

Kitchen cabinetry at 500 Church Hill Road, Landenberg, PA, custom-built and installed by Bill Wetzel in 1957 with Formica counter tops and vintage stove and eye-level oven.  Photo from August 2004 with my mom in the background.

The works that show Bill’s greatest woodworking skills are his inlay work and lathe work.  He made an exquisite chess set from American Holly and Philippine Mahogany:

Natural wood chess set turned by Grandpa Bill, unknown date, photo from 2024.

One of my most prized possessions is a coffee table with matching serving tray featuring hand-inlaid baskets of flowers.

Superb inlay work and expensive wood.  Curly maple, quilted maple, and serving tray handles made of Birds Eye maple.

Detail of the above, focused on the Birds-eye maple handle.  Dates of construction unknown, probably 1940's.

Bill made dozens of gavels, many for the Freemasons, of which he was a member, sock darning eggs and variants, and many faux-book jewelry boxes with amazing inlay work:

Assortment of Grandpa Bill's heirloom smaller pieces.

None of the pieces I’ve seen were signed or carry any identifying mark of the craftsman.  In fact, of all the many heirloom pieces we have, there is only one that Bill actually signed—a mantle clock made from oak, inlaid in decorative wood, copper or brass, and mother-of-pearl.

Oak mantle clock, made in 1918 by William Wetzel

His signature and date on an interior side panel

I even found a tiny little photo of Bill and Betty with that clock—the original was a 35mm contact print, meaning it was only 35 mm wide (an inch and a third).

Hard to make a good copy of such a tiny original!  Enhanced and colorized.

I could show more and more of his amazing woodwork projects.  But it’s time to wrap up this story.

Because of his consummate old-school skill (literally), Bill Wetzel’s legacy is not going to quickly fade.  Given the disadvantaged start he surely had, he had every reason to become a failure and to fade into oblivion.  Many in similar circumstances have done so.  But failure was not part of Georg Willi Julius Wetzel’s makeup.  And oh, how thankful I am for that, and for you, dear Grandpa Bill.