We spent this morning driving through northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin, on a college trip with Marcus. I have always been a flyover guy when it came to this part of the country, so I’m a stranger to this landscape. It’s beautiful, in a sorted sort of way. Meted squares of coffee-colored soil, combed into straight rows of bright sleeping corn stubble. All the rocks ploughed out long ago and stacked into piles at the corners. Straight lines of alders, poplars, and bright yellow birches along the fencerows. An occasional ancient spreading tree, standing alone. White houses, red barns, and silver silos. Weeds growing only where weeds may grow. Straight ditchlines. Streambanks allowed to meander, perhaps only because they were here first. Ponds and lakes, ringed by cattails and hunting blinds. Clumps of trees gathered at brief hills and narrow creek hollows, little patches of disorder that soon remember themselves and lapse back to prairie. Dairy cattle. A lone shepherding dog. Geese. Hawks. Cranes.
The people, too, seem well-sorted. Farming and railroad towns. A matronly waitress in a sensible short haircut serves fried cheese curds to a rounded 60-year-old man clenching in his teeth an unlit cigar. A nearby TV plays top-ten home fistfighting videos. Just two blocks away is a college where the students stage a “Really Really Free Market” in their dorm, as an “alternative to capitalism.” Recent campus graffiti, its wording judged to be racist and thus too inflammatory to print in the college newspaper, provokes this front page rejoinder: “Response to the blatant disregard for persons as illustrated by the hate crimes will be met in the best way [we] know how: with genuine, gritty, public, open and meaningful conversation about how to remind those around the campus and community that actions like this will not be tolerated.” Back at our hotel this morning, an elderly man with bright blue eyes, suspenders and an oxygen tank eyes me silently in the lobby. “College trip,” I hear him remark to his companion after we’ve walked past. “Wanna know how I know?” Yeah, I’ve got a fair guess as to how you know.
Still, my surface impressions are too easy. Whenever I visit my cousins in West Texas, the land looks flat and empty from the state highway. But when you’re in it, on foot, walking along the low caliche cliffs or under the pecan trees by the river, there are armadillos, rattlesnakes, wild turkeys, prehistoric gar that gaze at you from the green water. Here, I can only imagine the wild private places I couldn’t see from today’s highway, the crazy volcanic hearts living inside those white houses and red barns, the terrifying wondrous thoughts leaking onto keyboards inside those brick dorms. Marcus is hoping for a little wildness, after all. In the 21st century, that’s an increasingly rare thing to find, and perhaps the upper Midwest is an odd place to look. But landscapes and reputations can deceive, and I notice he’s getting to be a fair hunter.