I’ve never been to Wisconsin before.  Neither has anyone in my family.  As I think of it, it’s possible that no one in in my entire line has ever been to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin sounds like a boring place until you see it.  It has a strangeness to it, as though a wild magic once lived here, but has since gone on.  It’s a place that knows great black bears and rickety cropdusters and the lonely, lonely cold.

As I drive, I see silos and fields sandwiched between the green and blue America, stretching out, running along beside me and behind me, and I know I won’t remember it.

It’s disappointing to look at these poetic expanses, and know they will become a long green swath in my mind, bleeding into memories of Tennessee and Virginia and Kentucky.   In this tornado tour I’m on, there’s no time for stopping or unique moments.  My car has become the Window To America, and we never move, it and I, but sit still as the landscape rolls underneath us.

It made me wonder.  When you see enough variety, everything begins to look the same, in a way.  So would you rather see a thousand beautiful places in an instant, like postcards in a film reel,  or really know one beautiful place completely?

I don’t think I could stand to be in one place, too long.  So I will stick with the postcards for now.  But that’s also why I make such a fuss about losing them.  Hopefully, after all this nonsense, I won’t.