"The next morning, I return to Viroqua for a stroll through the town’s vaunted bookstore, Driftless Books, housed in another massive tobacco warehouse."
"The walls are covered floor to ceiling in secondhand books. Framed custom portraits hang from the rafters. A moose head. A rusting sousaphone... 'So yeah, one thing led to another, and a guy gave me this building,' says owner Eddy Nix, a community fixture in Viroqua. He is wearing a loose sweater and patched denim, and he wraps used books in donated paper bags as I pepper him with questions about the store. 'Literally just gave it to you?' I ask. 'He was like some guerrilla philanthropist,' he says. They met when Nix was running the first iteration of his shop in nearby Viola. A stranger walked in one day looking for Richard Brautigan’s 'Trout Fishing in America.' Nix sold him a copy, along with a preorder for 'Wake Up,' Jack Kerouac’s posthumously published biography of the Buddha. And that was that — until a year later, when Nix grew obsessed with this empty old warehouse in Viroqua and finally contacted the owner, who asked whether the Kerouac book had arrived yet. 'It was the same dude!' he says. 'And then like five months later, after forcing me to read the complete commentaries of Gurdjieff and all this metaphysical hoodoo, he gives me the building, like out of the blue.'"
Oh, no! The Washington Post has discovered Wisconsin!
I'm reading "In southwestern Wisconsin, the bucolic Driftless Area is an overlooked gem."
My favorite comment over there is from Owen Caterwall:
But there are so many Americans busting out of the lockdown looking for places in America to explore by care. They are wary of airplanes and they know that too many other people are going to the most well-known places. Open the newspaper and you see the "overlooked gem" that's right outside your door, and see how you feel.Please, please don't come here. Don't bring your crappy coffee shops, your whiney tourists, your behemoth vehicles, your brassy loud voices, your unsolicited opinions, and your bored witless kids. People live here. It's not quaint, or cute, or charming, or fey. It's where we live and conduct our lives. It's not a museum or gawkers' paradise. Go to Disneyland. You'll have more fun.
By the way, the "Driftless Area" is a geological term. Here in Madison, we're living in the terrain left by the glaciation of the last Ice Age. That's why we have our lakes. But go just a bit West and you're in the area the glacier did not drift into and flatten. There are — I'm quoting Wikipedia — "steep, forested ridges, deeply carved river valleys, and karst geology characterized by spring-fed waterfalls and cold-water trout streams."
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