Friday afternoon, driving west out of Milwaukee, I felt this odd pull. A reluctance to leave. Ironically, after 10 months of living in Riverwest, I was loathe to leave it for 5 days. As I've begun to tiptoe into that world, I find myself almost enchanted by it. Willing and eager to participate. But as with Hampshire college, I was terribly skeptical of the culture of Riverwest. The way it seems to pride itself on counter-culture and anti-consumerism, and yet, most of these kids come from money, and could almost only create this culture as kids from money. The money and the leisure to accept or reject education, drugs, bicycles, cars, organic food, gardening.

While we were in the Dells, we went to a restaurant that left much to be desired. It took over 30 minutes to get there, and after about 10 minutes in the car, the music had gotten stale, and conversationg had drawn to a sleepy lull, and all that was left was the scenery.


Wisconsin scenery amazes me, I think. In The Broken Cord, Michael Dorris aptly describes much of the midwest as possessing a "luxury of far vistas," and I thought about this on the winding, almost-lost drive. It could be that Wisconsin's landscape looks unique because it is familiar to me, or it could be unique. Low hills and black earth and deep forests, this stupid place has captured my love. New England was claustrophobic, and the South unfamiliar. And yet, places like Illinois sometimes make me want to weep with boredom, a feeling similar to the claustrophobia; trapped in the oppenness like trapped within valleys. Too much horizon versus none.

And yet, here is where I've grown up, accostomed to that luxury of space, to that wealth of skyline.

This restaurant that we went to felt like a definition for small-town America. The fancy banquet hall, replete with wood panelled walls, stone fireplace, and a perfectly shaped cowboy hat on the hearth. Local artists' paintings of pastures and flowers, old goats with leathery skin and neatly-belted jeans, and that smell. What is that smell? Cheapy prepared food, home-cookin, a strange stink that reminds me of dinners with grandma; at once familiar and suffocating. All I can think to describe it is "cans." Everything from a box or a can or a plastic bottle.

And yet, in spite of the prime rib special, soaked in salty "au jus," in spite of the orangey cheese spread from the salad bar that I just had to try, it didn't make me despise small-town Wisconsin as it once would have. This place just is. And, as a matter of fact, it's probably a disappearing lifestyle. (Besides the wedding reception in the other room, the only other customers were very old with tremors in their hands.)

Maybe I had to get out of Milwaukee to realize that I'd begun to like it (some of it,) and I still want to travel the states in an effort to better appreciate it. But here I am, very awake at midnight in Wisconsin Dells, writing about, I guess, patriotism. (ick?)