Geometrics Really Just Isn't A Word, No Matter What Anyone Says; And This Isn't Covered In The Post But Stanley Fish Is Still An Idiot

De Soto, WI--A couple miles north of De Soto, anyway, at Black Hawk Park, looking out into Battle Slough and across it at Battle Island (there's a definite theme here). There's no cafe in De Soto (I had hoped that it would continue the pattern of there being no real correlation between size (in terms of both geography and population) and economic/hipness-possessing prosperity, but even on a non-correlative graph there exist outliers. Anyway. We spent the night in luxurious comfort at the home of Nick Lichter, who wrote this book that we've been referring to pretty frequently and who lives in La Crosse with his wife Margaret and kids, and I slept in a bed for only the second time in a month and a half. Today Eve kayaks from Brownsville, MN, where I finished yesterday, 18 miles to Black Hawk Park and a few miles north of here will cross the state line from Minnesota into Iowa, which means that (A) we've entered our third state and (B) Minnesota, which had started to feel like a perpetual companion and looming comfort over on the right shore, is no longer there, replaced by Iowa, a state about which my feelings are shall we say somewhat mixed (even though there's no real geographic/geologic distinction between Winona and Dubuque and the state line is a more-or-less arbitrary distinction based on the reasonable if arcane and artificial (i.e. prescriptive rather than descriptive, no?) system of latitude/longitude which also formed the U.S./Canada border and the Mason-Dixon line, and though I'm perfectly aware that this part of Iowa bears no resemblance to the industrial-corn-farm Iowa of the central and western part of the state, it's always seemed to me on the map to be adequately evoked by its shape, a square-that-they-made-not-quite-a-square-cause-hey-it's-gotta-have-something-to-distinguish-it-by). And it remains to be seen if we will experience the same transformations of Wisconsin and Iowa through which we experienced Minnesota, from the wild North Country to the Iron Range to the (especially) lakey region to the bluffs of the Southeast, and my guess is that we won't.

I'd continue these fascinating thoughts but it's hot today, probably not much over 80 but the kind of heat that makes you want to just lie down and turn off your brain. But maybe I'm just dehydrated or something. But either way I should stop.