The hour stretch between Milwaukee and Kenosha held nothing of note. It was just more farmland—even Lake Michigan drew away and gave rise to all these grazing and crop fields. I nursed my camcorder. All around, darkened by the night, were dairy cattle stowed away in their fenced-in pastures and chickens in their coops. I supposed agriculture was one of the backbones of America, and not many places would escape that industry. In fact, most places didn't. The stretches of land between the cities—the negative space of our country—were simultaneously over- and under-developed. Over-developed in the sense that the bogs were gone. The farther south we traveled, we'd come to prairie land—which was gone now too. All of the beautiful sights, native plant life, natural terrain, had been wiped clean. Tabula rasa. Morphed into some plain place where it wasn't beautiful, just... utilized. The soil was tested and measured to figure out what crops to plant where and when. Back in the day, Mother Nature could sustain the plant life herself with her wise intuition. Now, we use logic and calculations and almanacs to exploit the earth for every mineral it's got for our neat little lines of vegetation. There were a few remaining vestiges of Mother Nature fighting to stay wild, and these places were scattered all about, but they were small. Hundreds of bandages to fix a crack in the dam.
These rural areas were under-developed in... appearance, more than anything. You look at these old country towns, settled however long ago, and you see a mirror of the past. There's history in the bars and mom-and-pop shops, and this history shows in the weathering and cracks in the windows, the large chips in the paint of nearly every house and barn you see, the bird's nest cradled in the 'C' of the next town's entry sign. You can see the history, because these towns have never evolved past those histories. You can still see the same blisters on the farmers of today's hands that you'd see on the hands of yesteryear's. You can probably trace the lineage of the cows back the same way you could a human's—generational, existent on this one speck of land.
My hometown was in the same vein. It was a fishing town, mainly, but even then the edge of the town was speckled with farm lots. I had lived there my whole life, and barely ever left. Maybe that's why I was such a harsh judge on negative space country. I lived it, and found it so unremarkable. No, unremarkable is not the right word—oppressive, perhaps? I don't mean in any political sense, more so a cultural sense. The people in these back roads towns dream. God, do I know they dream, because I dream and I am one of these people. I'd guess that most of them, at least when they were younger, dreamed bright futures for themselves. Of getting away, exactly how I am now. It's just that these counties are poor, and the people are even poorer, reaping less than what they've sowed in a quite literal sense. There's no real escape plan without money, which I am fortunate enough to receive. Maybe it is a little political. Most people settle into the country life. Even if they say they've accepted staying in their childhood town, I can sense an inner restlessness. They're ignoring, perhaps smothering, their own ambitions. They are giving into complacency, to continue tending to the family diner—generational, existent on this one speck of land.