Poor People In Wisconsin Eat Filet Mignon

I left Chicago at noon on Sunday, heading towards Milwaukee. I crossed the Wisconsin-Illinois border and immediately noticed a kinder, gentler America. A billboard for the Apple Holler Restaurant and Farmer’s Market sat right across the state line. It was a restaurat/farmer’s market/mini golf course. It was the kind of place I want to raise my kids. (The state, not the mini golf course.) Farm after farm after silo passed by as I fell in love with yet another state - and I was only on the interstate!

At Milwaukee I branched west on a tiny road, but not before I was shocked at how big Milwaukee is! "Did I just teleport to Boston?" I wondered aloud. "Where the hell am I?" Coming north on the highway, it stretched east and west like a vertical shelf on the water, mostly brick. It was beautiful in the noon sunlight. I wanted to go downtown, to find out what inner city Milwaukee was all about, but I missed the exit, heading instead towards the Wisconsin State Fair. "I suppose I’ll go to the State Fair today!" I thought, but when I came upon it something said, "Don’t do it." Like it was a good way to lose a lot of money. I kept on west, hoping to make it as far west into Wisconsin as possible by the end of the night.

I stopped for gas at an exit that read, "Sullivan - Ixonia". The gas station itself was a general store, the only business between the two towns. It was called the Concord General Store, but what caught my eye even more than the plastic horse tied outside the door was the wooden archway in the back that said, "Fort Concord". It led into a thicket of bushes, beyond which a meadow was barely visible. After I got fuel, I took a walk down to the "Fort", finding the biggest petting zoo I’ve ever seen.... with the least amount of animals. I counted 4 rabbits, 4 small chickens, 3 goats, and 2 sheep. Bear in mind, it sounds like a lot, but this was spaced on about and acre and a half of land. Still, it was beautiful. Wildflowers grew in between the pens and out for miles into the meadow, deep purple, golden, white, and cornflower blue. I fell deeper in love with Wisconsin. Most of the animals wanted nothing to do with me since I had no food, but the bunnies raised their tiny mouths to the fence to nibble the clover I picked from the outlying meadow. I heard calls of "BAAAA!!!" as I walked back to my car. Inside, buying postcards and peeing (my two main daily activities), I noticed these signs:

"If You’re Smoking In This Bathroom, You’d Better Be On Fire!"
"Wisconsin Law And Common Decency Require You Wash Your Hands"
"Dog Bones For Sale" - and there were the biggest, bloodiest pelvic bone of something I’d ever seen.

I drove through Ixonia, then Sullivan, then Helenville. Green Bay Packers mailboxes, spray-painted garages, and porch swings lined the narrow streets. "The Pack is Back!" "Go, Pack, Go!" Each house had a red sign with numbers on it in the front yard; eventually I figured out they were the house numbers. Each new town I passed was more adorable. I got hungry and tired around 6 o’clock and ended up in Lynxville, just past Prairie du Chien. Ask any Wisconsin native what that town is called and they’ll call it Prairie du Shane, or Prairie du Shen. Some just call it Prairie. So did I.

I pulled into The Falling Rock Bar and Grille parking lot, right across the street from the boat launch, just to ask where there was a place to camp. Inside, there was a short, dark haired biker, a tall, bearded man in a ball cap, a pretty brunette lady, and an older, stately man. The bartender was another pretty brunette.

The inside of The Falling Rock was warm, inviting enough that I knew if I lived in Lynxville I’d be a permanent fixture, if not an employee. The walls and bar were made of cozy golden oak, with homespun fishing memorabilia all around. One sign said, "Hunters, Fisherman, and Other Liars Gather Here!", another read, "Business Hours Subject To Change During Fishing Season!" The bar doubled as a bait shop and fish cleaning shop. I was expecting everyone north and west of Chicago to be really nice and I was right. I plopped on a bar stool and was greeted by warm smiles.

Ordering a hot ham and cheese (hello, school lunch!) and a diet soda, I inquired about campgrounds. (The bartender doubled as the cook, and she makes a mean hot ham and cheese!) "Uh, yeah, there’s one nearby!" the bearded man laughed. "Right across the street for three dollars!"
"Are there showers?"
"No."
"Okaaaayy..... well, what time do you open so I can come in and brush my teeth?"

Someone asked where I was from. They all gasped. "Baltimore?! Wow, you’re a long ways out, aren’tcha?"
"Yeah." I explained why. "I hate that people in New York and LA are all convinced that people out here are uneducated and backwards."

The biker next to me started listing a litany of the bugs I should be worried about. I was only half-listening, entranced by two huge jars set on the bar. One said Pickled Eggs, green orbs floating in pea-green brine. The other said Pickled Turkey Gizzards. It was nearly empty. "Oh, do people use those gizzards as bait?" I asked the pretty bartender.
She laughed. "No, they eat them!"
"DEAR GOD!! Ew!"
By this time the only person left was the stocky guy, seated right by the jars. "Oh, yeah! People love ‘em!" he said.
"I gotta get a shot of those," I said, jumping off my stool.

I got in between the guy and the jars, squeezing up to the bar. As I lined up the picture, he whispered in my ear, trying to freak me out even more. "There used to be a girl here that would take minnow shots. You put a minnow in a shot of whiskey and throw it back."
I turned to look at him. "That I could deal with. I like oyster shooters." Touche. "But I’ll be damned if I eat one of those!" I added, pointing at the long, ridged gizzards, green in some places and blood red in others.

I paid the three dollars for camping right there at the Falling Rock and then excused myself to go set up. The pretty brunette who wasn’t bartending had told me, "My brother and his family are down there. They won’t give you any trouble and they’ll look out for you, too." Sure enough, they were the only other group camped down on the little jetty on the north Mississippi River. Before leaving I told the bartender, "I’ll probably see you later tonight!" The camping spaces weren’t individual sites as they are in state and national parks, just a long lawn stretching one length of the jetty. Grab a space, that sort of thing. I pitched right near the other group just to know that I wouldn’t be alone. When I pulled up, my presence was dually noted four times over, especially by a young guy in a black t-shirt and baseball cap. He looked to be about 19.
Water was on both sides of the camp area. The kid grabbed his pole and pretended to fish right in front of me as I pitched the tent. He was your quintessential beer-drinkin’, Nascar-watchin’ guy, god bless him. "Need a hand?" he offered. His name, I learned, was Mike.
"No, thanks, I got it."

While I worked he told me about the area. "There’s bald eagles up on them bluffs. You can seem ‘em right about 5 o’clock. And there’s a sandbar out there on the main river if you wanna go swimming. Or I gotta extra pole if you wanna fish."
"Oh, I’d love to go fishing! But I don’t have a Wisconsin license. Thanks, though."
"Oh, man, that sucks. Well, you wanna go skip rocks?" How was I supposed to turn down an offer like that?

Down by the river, looking for a perfect stone, he asked, "So, you got a boyfriend?"
"Yup. Sure do." So I lied. Sue me.
"Oh. Well, how old are you?"
"Older than you."
"Age ain’t nothing but a number," he said. This continued for about, well, let’s see....um.... THE WHOLE DAMN NIGHT. The coup de grace, even better than when he asked if I wanted a massage on the dock, was when he offered to "crawl into bed with you, y’know, keep you company and shit." And shit, indeed. "No thank you, Mike." Still it was very sweet.

At one point I escaped back to The Falling Rock. Four young people, about my age were in but they left soon after I came in, leaving just the pretty bartender and I. It was getting dark by this time and the bar was so cozy, like a little, well-lit refuge from the deep night. The bartender cooked me up an order of fries and a diet soda. "How you like it over there?" she asked.
We talked about camping and the conversation turned back to my book. I had told her about it briefly in the afternoon. She was full of amazing stories, she was just the kind of person I have been wanting to find. I sat back and listened, trying not to miss one detail.

"I grew up in Chicago. I moved out here because I wanted to raise horses. I didn’t come here originally, I lived in Madison for a few years. It’s funny that you’re on your own, I did some modeling when I was young and flew all over the world. I was on a plane by myself to Europe when I was 19 and I wasn’t scared either. It’s fun! Anyway, like you said about people thinking everyone in the Midwest is uneducated, I’m a licensed vetrinary technician and I have a BA in Accounting." She pointed to the bar around her. "I do this because it’s fun. And I’ve done lots of other stuff, too. When I was modeling I got into photography, so I’ve been a photographer. I lived Amish for two years. I had–"

I cut her off. "Wait, what? You lived Amish?"
"Yeah, no electricity, no plumbing."
"Did you go through an Amish phase or something?"
She laughed. "Oh, no, no. I have a farmhouse and 14 acres of land that I purchased from an Amish family. They had ripped out the wiring and plumbing so I had to wait until I could afford that, too, to get it installed. But honestly, I didn’t mind it. I have my little woodstove and a two-acre garden. I grew almost everything. I had a milking cow. I made my own cheese and my own butter."

I interrupted again. "Did you churn it?"
"No, I have a hand-crank with lots of little paddles that I got at an auction. But my mom, in Chicago, she used to say, ‘If you could figure out how to make toilet paper, you’d never have to go to the store!’ She was pretty much right. But, seriously, I’ve done a lot. I used to own a bar called Jezebel’s in Madison. And because I was an account, I could do my own books. It was fun, but I like it out here. I moved here about twelve years ago. It was odd, too, because here I was, the new single woman in town and I was getting hit on left and right by all the single guys and half of the married ones. But I turned them all down, because they all had about 5 or 6 kids running around, and I want no part of that. Well, it’s not the kids so much but the mothers, the ex-wives, they’re the ones I don’t want to deal with. There’s a lot of child support issues, splitting stuff,"
I nodded. "Yeah, paying for college and all that can be hard."
"Well," she said, "most of the families around here don’t really plan on sending their kids to college."
"Oh," I said, looking down.

She continued. "But some of these guys were really offended, and it made living a normal life hard for awhile. But now I’ve pretty much moved on from all that. My husband and I just got married in March."
"Oh, congratulations!"
"Thanks! But I learned that I have to pick from the low end of the pool if I wanted to get a guy with no baggage. My husband’s 23."
"Wow. Do people ever give you hell about that? About the age difference thing?"
"Y’know, not really. Most of the women I know say, ‘You go, girl!’ I don’t know if his friends tease him about it or not. I don’t know if his mother’s thrilled but she’s nice to me so that’s all I care about. But no, we’re 19 years apart but I don’t even notice it. That woman Sandy, that was in here earlier? She’s 18 years older than her husband. It happens a lot more than you think."
"That’s really cool."

We got on the subject of food and money somehow, noticing the differences between the East Coast and the Midwest. "Yeah, I love sushi but it’s so hard to get out here," she said.
"Really?" I asked. "Even being this close to the Mississippi?"
"Well, it’s not like you could really make sushi out of walleye or blue gill. Not good sushi, anyway. Saltwater fish are much better."
"Yeah, I took that for granted on the East Coast, good sushi all the time. But y’know, meat was really expensive there, not like it is here in the Midwest."
"That’s because the cattle are all right here. The thing is, though, you get a steak from the store, you’re getting basically the second-choice cuts because the premium cuts are being shipped to Chicago and New York and LA, where people will pay big money for it. And poor people out here aren’t gonna pay $18 a pound for steak at the store when they probably have one or two cows at home that they just butcher themselves and stick it all in the freezer. Poor people in Wisconsin eat filet mignon. The big thing out here is to have shrimp or scallops. That’s a big deal."
I never thought of it like that. "Wow. And here I was on the East Coast, never tasting a steak until my 21st birthday, but we get shrimp at the store like it’s nothing.
"You never had steak?"
"We couldn’t afford it!" I told her. "Well, maybe we could have, but it wouldn’t have been practical. We would have had to give up something else, that sort of thing."
"Yep, that’s the way it is," she said.

She let me use her phone card to call my parents and then I paid my tab, giving her my email. "I’ll email you soon," she said. "If you get an email from Jezebel, that’s me."
I realized I actually didn’t know her name, after all these hours. "That’s really your name?"
"No, actually my name is Diane, but most people around here know me as Jezebel. It stuck after I bought that bar in Madison. It was called The Cellar and I was behind the bar one night, working, and I had on a little mini skirt and a top, right? So this woman, she leans over the bar and she says, ‘I know your type, you’re nothing but a home-wrecker, a Jezebel!’ And I said, ‘Lady, you don’t even want your husband, so why would I?’ That shut her up but the name stuck. I re-named the bar Jezebel’s and it became my nickname. My husband even has a tattoo on his shoulder that says, "Jezebel" in my handwriting."
"That’s awesome! Well, hopefully I’ll hear from you soon!"
I left her to finish cleaning, sad that I wouldn’t see her again.

When I walked across the street, back to the campground, I looked up and almost choked. The stars were so incredible. There were no clouds in the sky and no light except for the stars themselves. I saw Orion, the Dippers, the Seven Sisters. The coolest was being able to see the silky white streak of the Milky Way arching across the sky. As I walked, totally in danger of walking into a tree because my face was pointing upwards, I reminded myself, "It’s only going to get better from here."