It would be something else, right, to discover some old print-out depicting the Doppler track of a tornado across southern Wisconsin from, say, 1990? It could be included in a time-capsule shoebox with a faded Polaroid -- a true relic -- of a ribbon-cutting ceremony at some Brookfield Circuit City, I'd imagine. Also, naturally, the distribution of Mound-builder effigies (Thunderbird, Bear, Turtle, etc.) and perhaps lines tracing presumed trading routes between Aztalan and Cahokia. Don't forget that the Crawfish River runs under I-94 (see field notes, below). Don't forget that, starting around the turn of this century, young Gray Wolves began following the Rock River southward from established packs in the Central Forest and died on the Interstate near Johnson Creek -- which is where the Rock crosses that great new barrier.
Using GIS software, using Photoshop -- hell, using transparencies, you could overlay a hundred of these schematics and create a bewildering, chaotic, frightening geography, attaching the relevant photographs, documents, and graffiti transcriptions to the appropriate points. Red dots for the Blockbusters, green dots for the Thunderbird mounds, yellow dots for traditional Great Blue Heron rookeries, purple stipples for the tracks of 500 representative funnel-clouds, neon-green hashes for the routes of Homecoming parades in all encompassed towns, proportional circles depicting respective annual earnings at each 7-Eleven and total monthly sales of Willie Nelson Super Hits CDs at each Wal-Mart. Let's say for the period 1984-1999.
I'm not going to do this; one of you can do it and display the results here, exclusively. Be sure to include a scale bar, compass arrow, hexagram, Che Guevara stencil image, and other necessary cartographic references.
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