Alma, WI

Last summer, I rode a bicycle from Chicago, IL to Devil's Lake, ND. Since I've never written about the adventure, and since it was a long December as far as temperatures went, I thought January might be a good time to talk about summer 2008. January is Bike Month at the Drawing Board.

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I grew up along the St. Joseph River.* As far as rivers go, it's okay. It's a little dirty, and a little gross, and it's little. But as a kid, the St. Joseph River became my context for rivers. The river meanders for a little more than 200 miles and is about 400 feet at it's widest, but at the access near my house I could have easily thrown a baseball to the other side.

* Yep. I was a real Huck Finn.

Then in August, we rolled out of La Crosse and spent the rest of the day riding a bicycle within spitting distance* of the Mississippi River. At the first moment we saw the river, we were near Lake Onalaska. There, the river is 4 miles across. The bank on the other side was a golf course away and the horizon consisted of distant, blurry browns and greens. With limited perspecitive, it could look like a lake. It was big in the way Wrigley Field dwarfed my Little League, forever expanding my definition of the word river.

* An actual measurement.

The river was close and cool, leaving our bodies comfortable despite an off-shore forecast well into the 90s. It also provided a near-impossible visual distraction. Miles could disappear almost unnoticed while the river distracted our minds from our legs.

Ten-thousand towns must have sprung up following the industrialization of the Mississippi, which to 19th Century financiers seemed only like a God-given shipping lane.  Towns proliferated every ten miles or so, hoping to capitalize on the travelling money that seemed a certainty. Maybe at one point, each of these towns were thriving, but that didn't appear to be the case anymore. The barges became grander and dirtier and far more occasional. A few of the towns got lucky and became summer communities for the wealthy. Others, like Minneapolis became hubs of culture and economy. The rest became the kind of river towns that seem like they're stuck fifty years behind the rest of the world.

Places like Buffalo City feature four different places that'll fix your lawnmower for you and none that'll sell you groceries. Then there's a town like Fountain City, established in 1839 so that ferry boats could take on extra firewood. Now it resides beautifully along the Mississippi, full of charm, but seemingly without purpose.

The roads along the river were thankfully flat and meandered around bends as randomly as the body of water it skirted. Each new curve yielded a new vista, a new surprise, and usually a new iteration of a carbon copied river town. But the last curve brought something vastly different altogether.

Alma, Wisconsin is home to less than a thousand people. In about two hours, we met a tenth of them, each one more charming than the person before. Originally a Swiss settlement, little has changed in the 150 years that have aged the community. The original village is a historical landmark, and it appeared that each of the buildings was home to some kind of bohemian endeavor. We sampled artisan ice creams in a replica topiary garden, tasted espresso from a handmade European press, and purchased African art from a fair trade dealer. It was that kind of explorable town because it was captivating beyond time and small enough to be known entirely.

Our rocket pace had seemed foolish earlier in the afternoon, but now we were almost two hours ahead of the pack and so we took in every charm we could discover. Still, our destination was an hour away, and the days were becoming exponentially shorter. It was time to move on.