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The sun setting over a Wisconsin farm.

EARLY IN THE MORNING there is only the sound of the wind in the trees. Soon the birds will sing. You may hear the horn of a passing train, just loud enough to wake you.

I am at my parents’ cabin in Buffalo City, Wisconsin, a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River on the southern edge of Lake Pepin. Their cabin sits in the middle of town about 5 blocks from the river and about a mile from the Burlington Northern train tracks. As the day progresses, the quiet, tranquil morning is replaced by the sound of lawn mowers and outboard motors, kids playing and dogs barking across streets and backyards. The sounds are somehow less irritating here than in the city; they feel, instead, as if they’re part of the normal flow of everyday life.

Farther north on the river, the highway bends between the steep bluffs and the wide river below. Eagles circle overhead. This year’s wet summer means everything is even more green than usual. Groups of decked out bikers pass by on either side of the two lane highway. I am reminded of Neil Young’s classic album, Harvest Moon.

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair
Flyin’ in the wind
She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with
The very air she breathes
The air she breathes.

To the Moon and Back

On clear nights in the country the stars seem much closer in the sky — somehow bigger, brighter. From the too-dark inside of your car you look out and the moon looms large overhead, illuminating the river. Maybe you think of the Apollo missions and think to yourself that that was one Michael Jordan-sized leap. In Chris Jones’ Out of Orbit he makes the point that people in pursuit of space are from open places, but he doesn’t mention maybe the greatest pursuant of all, Carl Sagan. Who grew up in Brooklyn. But the point is well taken: space seems both closer and more intensely vast out here. You can see how young men and women might fall in love.

The small towns along the river — old river and railroad towns from the 19th century — are quiet except for when a train goes through and rattles and shakes and makes a horn sound that earplugs don’t stand a chance against. The quiet has been replaced by something else. Something foreign. An hourly wake up call. You still here? Good.

But mostly there is just the quiet. The towns, far enough away from the Twin Cities, missed the big freeway-enabled big-box store developments of the late 20th century so they seem almost untouched by modernity. There are plenty of boutique shops, cafés, antique stores, and now even wineries to cater to the weekend crowd. It’s a lot like the Pacific Coast highway, without the hordes of people. Mostly, though, they’re just wonderfully old river towns — Alma’s downtown district is on the National Register of Historic Places — squeezed between the river on one side and the bluffs on the other.

If you’re lucky in life, there are moments in every day or week where you’re reminded — like the astronauts of Expedition Six when they finally landed in Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz space capsule after having been circling the Earth for 161 days — that we’re, all of us, actually living in paradise. Right now.

I think I have more of those moments here than anywhere else I’ve been to in the world.