There are four viable routes between my mom’s house and mine. All of them include a stretch of Highway 41 in the eastern part of the state and 40 miles of Interstate 90 in the west. In between there are options, no single one any better than the others. Last week I made the drive from Green Bay to La Crosse. I’d planned to take Highway 10 off of Highway 41, but missed the exit. I took Highway 21 instead. That turned out to be a mistake.
All was going well until I hit a detour just east of Necedah. When I saw a sign that read “Detour 43 miles,” I pulled over to the side of the road and took out my Wisconsin Gazetteer. The Gazetteer is a compilation of detailed maps that supposedly show every backcountry road in the state. I assume each state has it own map series, and the Wisconsin version has 95 maps, each one covering a 25-mile x 35-mile section of the state. I usually use the maps to locate potential put-in and take-out spots for paddling. On this day I was looking for an alternate route to a 43-mile detour.
My first potential shortcut was 19th Street West. Calling the road a street makes it sound like it passes through a town. Nineteenth Street West does not. Its entirety is in the middle of a remote oak barrens. I took what I thought was going to save me 20+ miles, but the road ended after three miles. I looked back at the Gazetteer and saw that the mistake had been mine. I should have taken 9th Street West, not 19th. The map clearly showed 19th Street as a dead end.
I went back out to the designated detour, headed north, and then turned east onto 9th Street West, the road I should have taken in the first place. This time I got five miles. There I encountered a sign that read, “Caution: High Water.” Apparently in the flatlands of central Wisconsin, “high water” means that same thing as “underwater.” Just beyond the sign, a creek flowed over the road. I stopped the car and got out to see whether it was safe to drive through the water. There was another man on the opposite side of the creek doing exactly the same thing. He looked at the swiftly moving water, looked at me, and then shook his head. I nodded in agreement, and we both got back in our cars and drove away in the directions we’d come.
Before I got back to the designated detour, I came to the intersection of 9th Street West and 5th Avenue. Whoever named the roadways in the area must have had a sense of humor, as 9th Street is not much of a street, nor is 5th Avenue much of an avenue. Ninth is a shoulderless two-lane with a creek running over it, and 5th is a pair of tire ruts. Still I took the ruts, as the Gazetteer showed 5th Avenue going all of the way through. After a mile I came to a birch tree that had fallen across the road. Someone, probably someone with a banged up pickup truck, had come before me and shoved the tree just enough for a vehicle to pass by. I probably should have turned around right there (not that there was a place to turn around), but I continued on. The ruts became less defined, and I eventually came to a sign that read, “No motorized vehicles beyond this point.” If 5th Avenue does go all of the way through, it goes through for hikers and mountain bikers. Again I had to turn around.
I returned to the designated detour. The Gazetteer showed that I had two more shortcuts to try (4th Street West and 1st Street West), but I was done exploring. Had I just followed the detour signs in the first place, I would have already been back on Highway 21. Because I’d taken a series of useless side trips, I still had 30 miles of detour to go.
Last summer Manyu cleaned the inside of our car and threw out my dog-eared Gazetteer. She assumed that because we now have maps on our phones, paper maps were obsolete. I explained to her that the Gazetteer was for intentionally getting lost, not for finding the quickest route from one place to another. I dug my book of maps out of the recycling bin and put it back in the car. In my efforts to find a shortcut, I’d have been better off had I left it in the trash.
Recent Comments