Jo and I spent a recent weekend in a nearby state whose countryside is littered with cows, cheese stores and signs that welcome you to "Dairyland." (That's not a misspelling. "Fairyland" is a place of enchanted forests, rainbows and wishes that come true. "Dairyland" is a place of flooded pastures, washed-out roads and wishes that the rain would stop for just three stinking minutes.)
From a distance, the Dairyland countryside appears lush and green, but closer examination shows this to be overgrowth and mold. The state's name is an amalgam of the Indian words, "wis" ("it rains"), "con" ("all the"), and "sin" ("time").
Here in Illinois, highways are sensibly aligned with reference to compass points. Dairyland's roads, on the other hand, were laid out with the foresight you'd put into tossing plastic forks on a picnic table. Major thoroughfares wind along rivers, snake through dark hollows and circle back around hillsides. Using a roadmap to plan a journey is pointless; you might just as well try to identify patterns in a plate of spaghetti.
Considering that roads are constantly flooding and bridges washing out, you'd think the local radio stations would alert drivers to impending danger. Instead, when you scan through the car radio dial, you get the news from Lake Wobegon. The further north you travel along the Mississippi River, the more hours per day are devoted to broadcasting reruns of "A Prairie Home Companion." Personally, when raging rivers are spilling over their banks and emergency vehicles are screaming by on hairpin turns, I'm not interested in hearing about Pastor Ingkvist's latest visit to the Chatterbox Café.
The local residents display a hearty sense of humor. All the towns along Route 60 have erected "Detour" signs on their outskirts. These signs point back to where you just came from, to places you have no intention of going, or, sometimes, toward the nearest overflowing river. After being turned away from village after village, the weary traveler eventually suspects a joke, ignores the signs and drives right into one of these towns. That's where the real fun begins. All the communities in southern Dairyland have torn up their downtown streets and dug down to the underlying soil. The local residents crowd the sidewalks in the pouring rain to enjoy the sight of panicked tourists slamming too late on their brakes and hydroplaning halfway to Minnesota through brown oceans of mud.
Dairyland's claim to fame, cheese, is also a source of practical jokery. An amiable clerk in a grocery store sold us a pound of fresh cheese curds, explaining the processes of making, storing and eating this local delicacy. He left out only one detail: these spongelike little balls of rubber emit soft squeaks when you chew them, another Dairyland "gotcha." Jo and I drove off, happily snacking away and, within minutes, found ourselves worrying about a high-pitched sound the car was making. I spent the next hour stopping the car every two miles and standing in a foot of water while looking under the hood for the source of the noise.
All the natural wonders and local flim-flammery of Dairyland were visited upon us simultaneously on Sunday morning. Desperately lost while trying to locate State Street in Mad-i-son ("abandon-all-hope"), we drove in circles around the capitol building through a torrential downpour, windshield wipers clacking with the jarring regularity of semi-automatic weapon fire, detour signs shunting us through construction zones, down random streets named for presidents, Indian tribes and breeds of livestock. I, a longtime critic of Aledo's system of naming streets, threw up my arms and cried, "Where is Northeast 3rd Street when you really need it?"
I will not soon be revisiting our northern neighbor. As a Dairyland, "Wis-con-sin" cannot compete with the southwest corner of the Mercer Market, where there's a dry roof over your head, you can find your way around without a navigation satellite, you don't have to listen to Garrison Keillor and you can get decent cheese that doesn't scream back at you when you eat it.
From a distance, the Dairyland countryside appears lush and green, but closer examination shows this to be overgrowth and mold. The state's name is an amalgam of the Indian words, "wis" ("it rains"), "con" ("all the"), and "sin" ("time").
Here in Illinois, highways are sensibly aligned with reference to compass points. Dairyland's roads, on the other hand, were laid out with the foresight you'd put into tossing plastic forks on a picnic table. Major thoroughfares wind along rivers, snake through dark hollows and circle back around hillsides. Using a roadmap to plan a journey is pointless; you might just as well try to identify patterns in a plate of spaghetti.
Considering that roads are constantly flooding and bridges washing out, you'd think the local radio stations would alert drivers to impending danger. Instead, when you scan through the car radio dial, you get the news from Lake Wobegon. The further north you travel along the Mississippi River, the more hours per day are devoted to broadcasting reruns of "A Prairie Home Companion." Personally, when raging rivers are spilling over their banks and emergency vehicles are screaming by on hairpin turns, I'm not interested in hearing about Pastor Ingkvist's latest visit to the Chatterbox Café.
The local residents display a hearty sense of humor. All the towns along Route 60 have erected "Detour" signs on their outskirts. These signs point back to where you just came from, to places you have no intention of going, or, sometimes, toward the nearest overflowing river. After being turned away from village after village, the weary traveler eventually suspects a joke, ignores the signs and drives right into one of these towns. That's where the real fun begins. All the communities in southern Dairyland have torn up their downtown streets and dug down to the underlying soil. The local residents crowd the sidewalks in the pouring rain to enjoy the sight of panicked tourists slamming too late on their brakes and hydroplaning halfway to Minnesota through brown oceans of mud.
Dairyland's claim to fame, cheese, is also a source of practical jokery. An amiable clerk in a grocery store sold us a pound of fresh cheese curds, explaining the processes of making, storing and eating this local delicacy. He left out only one detail: these spongelike little balls of rubber emit soft squeaks when you chew them, another Dairyland "gotcha." Jo and I drove off, happily snacking away and, within minutes, found ourselves worrying about a high-pitched sound the car was making. I spent the next hour stopping the car every two miles and standing in a foot of water while looking under the hood for the source of the noise.
All the natural wonders and local flim-flammery of Dairyland were visited upon us simultaneously on Sunday morning. Desperately lost while trying to locate State Street in Mad-i-son ("abandon-all-hope"), we drove in circles around the capitol building through a torrential downpour, windshield wipers clacking with the jarring regularity of semi-automatic weapon fire, detour signs shunting us through construction zones, down random streets named for presidents, Indian tribes and breeds of livestock. I, a longtime critic of Aledo's system of naming streets, threw up my arms and cried, "Where is Northeast 3rd Street when you really need it?"
I will not soon be revisiting our northern neighbor. As a Dairyland, "Wis-con-sin" cannot compete with the southwest corner of the Mercer Market, where there's a dry roof over your head, you can find your way around without a navigation satellite, you don't have to listen to Garrison Keillor and you can get decent cheese that doesn't scream back at you when you eat it.
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