THE SHORT, LIGHT LATE-EVENING OF THE SOUL

I was looking through one of my old geography texts today. Mind you, I didn’t take any geography classes in college. I’m just a map-geek who shops the clearance racks at Half Price Books. But I digress. While I was looking through a section on North America, I noted that three major regions of this continent–the industrial core, the agricultural heartland, and the “marginal interior”–basically intersect in the general vicinity of my driveway.

And it’s true that I live in a no-man’s-land, no matter how you want to look at it. My little corner of the world (east-central Dodge County, WI) lies in the convergence of the Madison and Milwaukee media markets, and therefore doesn’t belong completely to either. The economy does and does not depend on farming, in the same way it does and does not depend on manufacturing. But you go a few miles in any direction and it all changes. Anywhere south and east of here is totally the Rust Belt. Go five miles west of me and you’re in the dairy belt. Go ten miles north and you’re in land that isn’t really suited for anything besides looking at.

But here–well, here, it’s hard to tell what this land is used for. There’s a few farms, but not many. Every town’s got a factory of some sort; shoot, the little thousand-person town our mail comes from has three of them. The only apt way to describe our little slice of Wisconsin is to say that it’s a transition zone between several transition zones.
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