Ruminations

As I've come back to northern Wisconsin over the decades, patterns have gradually become clear. One is that my home county, Lincoln, and its neighboring counties to the east and west are kind of a dividing line. I first realized it when I was in grad school, driving from Carbondale, IL, the length of Illinois and at least half of Wisconsin. It was reinforced these last few days, coming into northern Wisconsin from the UP. 

The northern part of the county (including Rock Falls Township, where I grew up) is forested, uphill and down, potholes and ridges and cedar swamps. The farms are few and far between, tend to have small, scattered fields and are relatively small-scale. It's a little sad to drive around where there were productive, well-tended farms in the 1950s and now see fields gone fallow, buildings decrepit, falling down or gone. In lots of places, there appeared to be large numbers of little conifers scattered through deciduous woodlots. Maybe that's the natural evolution of this area ... to return to pine forest (and subdivisions).

The southern part of the county, and down into Marathon county, still has ridges and rocks and potholes and swamps, but the fields are big, the land tends to be more rolling and the scale of the farming operations is much larger ... one silo in the north, three or four in the south.

There's not much change in the social landscape in 50 years, either, at least not to this casual observer. In the crowded restaurant where we ate breakfast yesterday morning, the only people of color were the Hispanic busboy and the Hispanic cook. The menu offerings have changed a little ... burritos and taco salads are more common, and there are Oriental restaurants in evidence way more than in the 50s. TV