All Things Considered - Goodbye Wisconsin

Goodbye Wisconsin

I'd forgotten Wisconsin. And while most of the journey prior to it had been flattish and not very exciting, Wisconsin had Moments.

Somewhere along I-90/94 just after a petrol and coffee stop, I picked up a perfect decoy. Blonde, layered curls and straying wisps of hair that blew like flames in the draught from her a.c., young, small face, neat chin, probably pretty behind the shades, and driving a Mercury Cougar. I saw her pass as I started rolling away from the gas pumps. I took the tightly curved on-ramp way too fast and sailed wantonly out of the rest area onto the freeway, revelling in the Bonneville's sliding and shrieking tyreswith all of a repressed Englishman's passion for the appalling handling of American sedans , and as I joined the freeway, I noticed her slow down guiltily ahead of me. I cruised past her carefully, over the limit just enough to bring it down easily if I got a radar blip, and eased gently over to the right well after I'd passed her. Sure enough, having checked out I wasn't a cop, she toed the pedal on the right, overtook me, and I settled in a thousand yards behind an eighty mile plus per hour angel no male cop could resist - even a she-bear would pull her over out of jealousy. She lasted for a good long stretch of road, hammering all the way, ultimately splitting off the Interstate at Eau Claire.

People at home in England ask me about my travels over here, and I try to tell them the Zen of it; that sometimes it's Ohio or Kansas, flat and harried by zealous uniformed bandits, armed to the teeth and intent on busting you for doing speeds that anywhere else in the world are legal, buthere provide a useful means of local revenue; a place of chauvinist truckers on the CB and trash on commercial radio; of inedible road food, apple pies you can't taste for sugar, mechanically removed meat patties in Freeway joints that stink like abbatoirs and are populated by people with backsides that require two aircraft seats. And then I tell them that sometimes it's the glorious, wide, reddened space of Monument Valley, or it's vertigo in the Grand Canyon at a silent dawn, of how you can hear a bird sing five miles away there, or the drama of the Rockies, or lazy Hawaii, or beautiful Alaska in June, and wonderful galleries, pizza and good friends in New York, and that overall, it's a great commute whatever happens.

And sometimes America gives me a hell of a charge, and casually throws emotionally overwhelming scenic grandeur at me that makes me fall in love with the planet all over again. The broken light over Wisconsin provided one of those moments; a monumental chiaroscuro of blazing fire and sullen, lowering skies, and I was nose towards the more dramatic stuff. The sun was sinking behind huge broken clouds, flashing Jacob's Ladders around massively black cumuli, and bursting wildly through silver and gold gaps to highlight lush green rolling farmland, studded with trees in full leaf and fat, fecund meadows that would clearly supply an abundance of hay for the dairy herds that would winter indoors in the neat, clean Norwegian farm buildings.

The horizon cleared of cloud in time for a blazing red sunset that slipped behind a fold of land and then re-appeared as I crested a hill. No slick, one-off, west coast vanishing trick this, but encore aftertriumphant encore on a stage littered with emerald and silver tributes. And I slowed right down to watch.