IF THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAS AN IMAGE OF ITSELF, IT IS SUREly a rural and agrarian one. Even our license plates proclaim us to be America’s Dairyland. In fact, Wisconsin also has a good share of manufacturing, but it’s rarely mentioned when discussing the “good life” of the state. We may be grateful to have industry in Wisconsin, but we don’t seem to talk about it much.

A Madison television station recently produced a program about the Wisconsin River, which cuts the state in half, running roughly north to south. As you might expect, it emphasized the Indian populations and the brutal treatment they received at the hands of white settlers. There were some quick vignettes of the great nineteenthcentury timber rafts that traveled the river to move the spoils of the virgin forests to the mills, but the program was strangely silent on the state of the river today. Instead it merely intercut a few views taken from a helicopter or shot along its banks. The river was shown as an Arcadian vision, with mist rising from the calm waters on a chilly fall morning or with sweeping vistas of a silver thread cutting through the lush green Midwestern landscape in summer.

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