Hello Tommy:

I’m writing about the plan to “improve” state route 131. There is growing opposition to widening/straightening this gem of a road which may well be the most scenic highway in this beautiful state of ours.  For me the decisions involved go far beyond one highway.  This controversy becomes a defining test of how we make our way into the future.  The word progress too often means change that meets a one-dimensional purpose.
 
There is another kind of progress, the progress we make in saving things of beauty, places that speak to the heart and tell us we must live in harmony with the land.

This complex situation involves differing values.  I want to emphasize how important I feel it is for the more intangible side to be heard and understood.  I am reminded of an interview a New Orleans taxi driver several presidential elections ago.  He said he had voted Democratic all his life but not any more “because sometimes you have to forget principle and do the right thing.”

Let’s find a way to do the right thing on this issue.  Let’s make sure that the word progress does not always mean widening, straightening, bulldozing and clearing in ways that seem like an attempt to prove our human superiority over the land, which Aldo Leopold told us is not something we own but a community to which we
belong.

You know this land and you know the economic problems we live with.  The future here requires a broader vision than a highway that will carry trucks at a higher speed.  Speed in this case is anti-progress.  What this area has to sell to a broader public is peace and beauty - a tempo that relaxes us, saves us from the tensions of everyday living.  In the long run, those values have more economic value than the so-called progress of a widened, straightened road.  State 131 is not just a highway.  It is a journey into the intangible, speaking to needs in us that are not served by the economics of bread alone.

Now I would to issue an invitation. (Perhaps I mean a challenge.)  Before you approve changes to 131, please ride your Harley along its curves and dips and the wonderful unspoiled beauty it reveals to those who dare to go where 55 and 60 miles an hour are not only inappropriate, but a denial.

Growing up as we did, you  in a small town, I on a farm, I suspect we heard some similar summer night voices.  Echoing in my mind now is my father’s voice saying, “Before you leap always look to see if there’s a better way.”  And there was an old man at Seneca, saying about some proposal “Just remember, it’s one more thing being changed that ain’t ever going to be changed back.”

I confess to being confused these days about what the word conservative means in the political arena, but here, close to the land, those summer night voices still tell me what living conservatively is all about.

Happy Harleying!

Ben Logan
Seldom Seen Ridge
Gays Mills WI 54631