People see golden fields when they hear me say home. Cabins on Lake Superior. Rolling hills dotted with cows, the smell of them blowing through the windows of cars just passing through. Immense, frozen lakes. Warm, ignorant rurality.
And none of this is wrong. But it’s not all right, either.
Eau Claire, Wisconsin is an extremely proud little city. We’re proud of our breweries, our art scene, our rivers, our industrial heritage. We’re proud of our “Midwest Nice” and the quaintness that comes with it. We’re proud of our imposing fiberglass statue of Babe the Blue Ox. We’re proud to be a liberal island in a sea of rural red. And this pride makes us do funny things. It makes us seek to distinguish ourselves from the farms that are a five-minute drive from any point in the city. It makes us build chic and completely unaffordable apartment complexes in our downtown. It makes us invest millions of dollars into renovating our theatres while unhoused people die on benches outside. Even the landscape, on the northern edge of the driftless zone, a place the glaciers didn’t touch, screams in its sharp valleys and craggy rivers a separation from the gentle hills of the rest of the state.
Every one of Eau Claire’s 70,000 residents has felt this need for differentiation, this dangerous proximity; being one red-checked flannel away from becoming a corn farmer- that dreaded fate. In its housing policies, colorful branding, and old factories-turned-galleries, Eau Claire swims fast and hard away from the image of the sad man whiling away his hours on a dusty tractor. We’re urban. We’re different.
Maybe it’s this desperation to be something, anything, other than a laborer of the land, that brought me to Cornell. It’s definitely why I feel a twinge of annoyance when people assume I grew up milking cows when I say I’m from Wisconsin. But in my time here, learning about cities and their place in a greater ecology, I’m coming to realize Eau Claire’s desperation to differentiate itself from the rural landscape is a hindrance, not an asset. Each year we push our boundaries further, filling in the fields with Targets and Chic-fil-As, and each year our carbon footprint, our air quality, and our sense of place take a tiny blow. The city and the country are interdependent. Seeing them as separate only perpetuates the idea that humans are somehow outside of nature, not creatures doing what we evolved to do just like every other living thing. It encourages us to see the land as something to build on, not as something to live in harmony with. And it separates us from the critically important work of farming, keeping us uninformed about where our food comes from and unappreciative of how it got to us.
I love Eau Claire. I love Main Street at night full of lights in the trees. I love seeing local musicians in the park every week. I love swimming in the vast, clear lakes. I love the self-important hipster coffee shops and the old industrial facades. And I love that our city is part of the landscape that surrounds us. Rolling hills of grazing cattle, deep forests, and golden corn gently give way to rough river valleys. Dilapidated farmhouses and dirt roads weave into the modern single-family homes and specialty shops. Trucks of sweet corn, strawberries, and watermelon sit on street corners and seduce city dwellers each summer. I love talking to the farmers and the Amish families who sell them. I love the long drives in the summer, watching acres and acres of corn fly past, the warm scent of fertilizer and corn dust rising off the soft hills. No matter how much Eau Claire tries to urbanize, we will always have roots and connections to the rural landscape. We are interconnected. And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
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