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.
I try to add details, but feel on the verge of tears at the precise beauty of this post. All I can do is note the spectre of the wooly mammoth I would sometimes project into the yellow sky as my head leaned against the pane of glass facing south.
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