I-94 Meditations Part II: Field Notes

A direct transcription of field notes taken on a Badger Bus ride (Madison to Milwaukee), March 14, 2006:

-Turkey Vulture (1st of season) a few miles east of Madison -- soaring high above field at the center of which appears to be a dead White-tailed Deer
-Morainal topography near Glacial Drumlin State Trail sign...about 10 miles east of Madison -->East of this, and S of I-94, landscape is more heavily wooded
-Creek [Koskonong Creek --> Lake Koskonong]
-Creek
-Wooded drumlins rising from fields and woodlots
-Exit 73: Marshall/Deerfield
-Groves of conifers S of I-94
-Still very wooded
-Lone Sandhill Crane in field
-Many of the roadside conifers, incl. those draping the near slopes of the drumlins, appear to be Cedars
-Cumulus shreds rafting across the sky
-Creek (west of Rest Area, Lake Mills) [-->Stony Brook Creek(?)]
-Creek [Rock Creek-->Crawfish River]
-Rest Area
-Aztalan Cycle Club
-Small cemetery
-Water standing in field
-Crawfish River...water in surrounding flat
-Cloud-field above mirrors army of drumlins below
-Creek [Unlabeled]
-Hwy N
-Rock River...about 1/2 again as wide as Crawfish R. ... Canada Geese in water --> roadside ditch, waterlogged, empties into Rock R. S of I-94
-Jefferson/Ft. Atkinson Exit
-Railroad tracks just west of Johnson Creek
-Drumlin topography visible from Johnson Creek stop
-Creek (flowing S) just east of Johnson Creek [Unlabeled]
-Landfill/swamp
-Creek [Johnson Creek-->Rock River]
-Hwy X
-[Unintelligible] Farms
-Abandoned farmhouse (big stump)
-Small lake (S of I-94)
-Lonesome tree (N)
-Hwy intersection
-Sullivan/Ixonia Exit
-Small gouged-out pond in farmfield (S) --> ducks
-Waukesha Co. sign --> creek
-Red-tailed Hawk descending through thick cover alongside creek (flowing parallel to I-94, S)
-Kettle Moraine S.F. (Southern unit) and Old World WI sign about 2 mi. west of Oconomowoc
-Lake (?) S of I-94
-Turkey Vulture
-Choppy open water fringing ice in first Ocon. lake S of I-94 [Lower Nemahbin Lake]
-Ascend ridge, then valley, then ascend (Hartland-Wales Exit sign, 84) toward "pass"
-N of I-94, ridge seems to confine lake
-Broad descent (we are 22 mi. west of Milwaukee)
-Town of Delafield Sports Commons
-Pewaukee Exit
-Creek
-Buck Rub Archery
-Waukesha exits
-Seems somewhat flatter here, east of Kettle Moraine ridges
-Waukesha/Pewaukee Exit - T
-Creek
-Skipper Bud's (S)
-Peterbilt Dealer (S)
-River (meandering) [Pewaukee R. flowing to Fox River]
-Habish, Habish, and Rottier (N)
-Floodplain of river has patches of standing water (near Steinhafel's)
--> river crosses I-94 [Fox River]
-New cinema being built (S)
-Prairieville Park (adventure golf) (S)
-Brookfield
-Windy outside
-Goerkes Corners (Brookfield water tower)
--> narrow wetland --> Canada Geese feeding
-Almost looks like kettle pond
-Creek [Poplar Creek --> Fox River]
-Creek
-River in parkland (S)...flooded Willows and other trees
-I-94 climbs and descends ridge near Elm Grove Rd --> ears pop
-Channelized river (near 21st St) [Honey Creek --> Menomonee River]
-Railroad tracks
-Railroad bridge near Mayfield Rd

Always Going Where There Is No Happiness To Be Found

Without knowing much about the production of compelling and convincing documents, but graced for a day with a red metal vehicle that would allow us to record impressions of a long swath of land from downtown to the far western shopping mall-- we set out to capture the narrow space between misery and possibility.


The nagging thought I have now in 2009 is that something might have changed since 2003. But let us think for a second about this: does the image above, with its flat, suffocating slab of sun-baked sidewalk, tell us that 2003 was a time of relative prosperity and stability? Was something lost between the new cracks that must microscropically radiate across these panels of pavement. What lingers is a desire to fill up the empty square.

We went to document, but still I feel our purpose was also to fill the blank realm with words. Which assumes, of course, a staying power of my own voice, a stinking fantasy that we are no longer likely to luxuriate in.

The small thought that follows is: would it have been possibly to pitch a tent there, build a campfire, and spend the night listening to the crickets, before returning to the proper center of the city with its friends and its coffee that kept us up so many nights until morning?

I-94 Meditations: Part I

A short but necessary post: Probably one sort of meditation for this kind of work is to board the Badger Bus once every few years, at least, and make sure to ride it both ways; and ensure at least one of your journeys occurs in the evening, when the Sun is bleeding over the glacial country and the billboards can be lit crimson, the woodlots made black standing bones, the cornfields husky, Milwaukee's monuments especially regal, Madison's ragged storage-unit, strip-mall outskirts especially frontier-ish, etc. etc.

As we know, you will see all the iPods, all the DVD-processing laptops, all the cell phones, building a bulwark against the strangeness out the window (McDonald's and moraine, Sandhill Crane and truck stop). Who can blame their operators? Many are college students, too young now to imagine the front cusp of their present world. When it was emerging with frightful speed but great clumsiness, when broken CDs and unspooled cassette tapes were still not only possible but expected.

The real endangered species along that Badger Bus track are the ghost outbuildings, some fearfully close to Interstate-94. Ah -- now this will become a two-part post, for I remember notes I recorded once on just such a bus-ride (an unconscious meditation), logging the physical landmarks of the journey, partly because they were superficially unremarkable, most of them. Now those notes will find their true home.

Two Maps Stapled Together

The thing I kept saying was that Berlin as a jagged cavity for muddy boots and combustible minds, that was something that ended around the year 2000, and what we get now is a place to sit and test drinking chocolates, meet gentle and lazy people, and spend our money gradually until we have to leave. The thing I kept thinking was that the few cracked, unrenovated plaster facades must still house a couple of them, a couple of those ones that we had read about in foreign language textbooks, and that the old dreadlocked punk had told me about once at a bar in Kreuzberg (the Rote Rose, which I now find out is beloved and famous). "You don't know what happened here, you cannot know what happened here." Except he was no older than forty, which means he was not referring, probably, to the demanded upheavals of the nineteen eighties (if he was talking, I mean, about something that he knew about but I, being just above twenty, did not). He must have been referring to the less dark love-in of the nineties, the time when turntables and maps of a united world circulated on the fronts of magazines that are no longer in print today. Well, if I wasn't there, I wasn't there: if there was a time when bare brick gave a backdrop for throbbing backs and triumphant screams, I did miss out on it. My entry point was mockable: in 2003, I checked into a West Berlin hostel where a DVD of the recent failed blockbuster "Pearl Harbor" was playing, and I ate that same breakfast rich in sugar and pectin that we all know so well, those of us who decided that we would expand our minds in part of the world because, so the story went, that was the birthplace of mind-expansion. And I didn't realize that I was too young to afford sit-down cuisine, I went into places and paid cash and ran the bank account empty in a matter of weeks. Because I had expected, I suppose, that a door would open eventually, strangers in tattered clothes would recognize me with a oh it's you we've been expecting for so long and the loudspeakers inside would scream a haze of past and future, and I would be welcomed into the innards of a catacombs where I would grow a beard and would never sleep on anything but the bare floor. But in truth, friends back at home had gotten closer to my clouded dreams than any of my costly vacations ever did.
But that 2003 vintage of disappointment and inadequacy is an artifact worth remembering, worth putting behind glass, a significant crystallization of the Bush years, something so many of us would forget to leave at home these days. And the sky has come down a lot since then, the majority of us are forced to rummage the budget stores at least some of the time, glaring at men in suits, all of us have telephone numbers and e-mail addresses and bank accounts, and those who do not will be unable to read this blog posting.

A Tall Order

Each step I took seemed to make me bolder, more formidable; and then I squandered it all trying to think of something fine to say.
-Elle d'Chemme


A maiden post--and a modest one, at that--to fan the flames:

To those of our generation, what is the aesthetic effect of sitting in a strangely-attractive martini bar in Boise, Idaho--surrounded, naturally, by the tawny and sere Snake River Plain, with its subterranean channels, Sagebrush, lone telephone-wire raptors, irrigation gods; also the battlements of the Boise Mountains, their promise of black ravine and hard rock--alright, but still...there in the martini bar, in the city's bustling downtown streets, Rocky Mountain hipsters and lovebirds around, your own love there on the plush sofa, too, with a plate of yam fries and a pair of cocktails; what, goddamn it, is the effect of having, somehow, Jurassic Park suddenly boldly intrude on the above-bar television, so incongruous amidst the harsh glamor of the establishment (not to mention the city grid outside, then the physiographic province surrounding and enfolding)?

The year 1993 abruptly immortalized onscreen, and memories of Tyrannosaurus cut-outs in Blockbuster lobbies, big summer yards, grade-school recess shenanigans, etc. Beautifully, and justly, the bartender made no move to switch channels. Perhaps he, too, felt odd about the whole affair, and didn't want to tamper with something more powerful than himself.

This is not nostalgia, per say. Strictly social philosophy, urban planning, ecological elegy, cultural history. All science, of course. As always. As ever.