On the Relationship between Population and Hipness, Among Other Things

Wabasha, MN--So we really and truly have no idea how big or hip or together these towns are going to be until we explore them.

Logic Puzzle: Red Wing, Lake City, and Wabasha are towns along US Hwy 61 (“out on Highway 61” as Dylan sings, and the name “Wabasha” occurs in another, slightly crappier song of his, though there it describes a street rather than a city). By population, Red Wing is the largest with ~15000, then Lake City w/ 6000, with Wabasha in a solid last at 2600. In the DeLorme Gazetteer, they all look approximately the same size, with Red Wing appearing maybe just a little smaller than the others (though this might be an optical illusion created by the river--not the Mrs.--that splits it in two). In the Midwest, I'm finding, the distribution of cafes and libraries and bike shops and other indicators of my version of cool/hip is not even per capita. For every cafe in Red Wing, there are 5000 people; in Lake City, 3000 (but a full 6000 if you count only the cool one, and as the sole arbiter of “cool” on this blog I'll be using that standard; subjectivity be damned, I'll be prescriptive); in Wabasha, 1300, which is a much more reasonable number of potential patrons per cafe. To make a thoroughly useless comparison (Damariscotta-Newcastle is a different pop., not to mention economic climate, in the summer months), D-N, serving a year-round population of <4000, style="font-style: italic;">particularly non-academic conservatives, who are by far the most irritating in this respect because they don't possess the rhetorical skills necessary to argue the points in the same intellectual plane in which they--the points, not the conservatives--originated), tend to overreact and not think enough; and to find a median between these stridencies is very trying indeed; and that the most frequently-overlooked disciplines--e.g., I think, musicology--tend to attract those who don't find either extreme too attractive; and that too frequently these factions have a way of isolating and alienating and exiling (ha!) students and even faculty who could otherwise be really productive; and that this last point must be why academic research in the arts and humanities so frequently seems practically dead-in-the-water despite the fact that there's so much interesting stuff in the world that remains inadequately examined and explained; and, lastly (Ed.: I hope), that those academics who are able to resist the poles (not the Poles, obvs) are so frequently the ones that rightfully attract the most quiet respect (e.g. Shuck)).

So the point is that I have a lot of strong positive feelings toward Wabasha, not least because it hasn't turned its back on the River at all, which is a tendency I find gratingly ungrateful, if rational given the Mississippi's well-documented propensity for overwhelming its banks pretty much regardless of human intervention, and as a resident of a river town which very clearly hasn't turned its back on the geographical feature that gave it cause to begin, I feel a gravitation toward towns that do the same.