The West and the Midwest...worlds apart

I was talking to my friend Stephanie yesterday and it got me thinking. She grew up around the mountains of Bavaria and now she's living in northern Germany with no mountains in sight. There's a different mentality up north she said. Things are wilder in the mountains. It's the same here in the States...

The road through the Santiam Pass in Oregon takes you briefly above the trees. There are peaks off to the left and to the right -- rocky behemoths wrenching their hulks skyward. The only signs along the road to narrate this majestic journey are several that simply say things like 'Three Fingered Jack' and point to the peak in question.

Here in Wisconsin there are many signs pointing out things. It feels like an attempt to create something interesting out of rolling hills.

Look! It's a hill... a really neat hill... um... and a German guy settled here a long time ago and built a farm... a really neat farm...

You don't get that so much out west.

And say you want to go camping with some friends. When I was in Oregon, that usually meant loading up a Jeep and driving into the Forest, stopping and then walking up a path. If there was no one around, that was where we camped. Here in Wisconsin it means hopping in a car, pulling into a campground, getting an assigned little square of ground and camping there twenty feet from the next group...

Here there is likely to be a sign every half a mile guiding the way to a genuine 100-year-old covered bridge. Out in Oregon someone might tell you how to find some 500-year-old Indian petraglyphs by shimmying along a ledge and around a boulder above the river 30 feet below.

There's nothing wrong with the Midwest really... there's just nothing here to knock your socks off. The spectacular is missing and it shows in the people here. In a way, we all reflect our environment a bit.

I'm not sure where I was going with all this; I guess it's just some things I was noticing...