As our truck slowed for the exit off the Beltline, the first pangs of terror crept over me. There was no way I was going to survive this.
The truck was headed to Stoughton, population 12,000, and I was headed home for winter break. For three weeks. I had not stayed there for more than a weekend for almost three years, and if you have ever been to Stoughton, you would understand that this absence was not by chance.
Madison has a handful of cineplexes, a few comedy clubs and dozens of bars targeting college students. Stoughton has the bowling alley, taverns featuring daily meat raffles (where you buy a lottery ticket to win beef) and church bake sales. Madison has the Memorial Union for students to hang out after a long day; Stoughton has the parking lot at the Kwik Trip gas station. During the school year, Madison features four daily newspapers covering significant events; Stoughton has its weekly newspaper with such earth-shattering front-page headlines as “Century-old vase returns to its home.”
Ahh, Stoughton. Stranded there with a broken-down car, sleeping on the sofa, waking up at three in the morning as my younger sister comes home from dates with one of my former high-school basketball teammates, waking up again at 6:30 as my two younger brothers get ready for school, wondering if it will be prime rib or tenderloin at the meat raffle today … I was in a regular paradise on earth. But as much as I bash my birthplace and the hardship of spending three weeks there, I must admit that it was healthy for the perspective of someone in college.
It’s easy for college students to get caught up in their own academic worlds around finals time, heads swirling with complex scientific hypotheses, historical theories and ridiculously abstract questions like, “How does the impressionism of the novel affect its post-colonialism?” You might be able to come up with an answer while having a drink with a classmate at Madison; ask people that question in a Stoughton bar, and they’ll look at you like you’re Michael Jackson signing up for the Toughman competition.
And maybe that’s the way it ought to be. Any student can become lost in the world of academia and all its pretentiousness (especially at a school as egotistical as UW), and almost all students have sometimes taken themselves too seriously as they delve into philosophy, foreign cultures or calculus. All of these subjects are worthy of study; none is worthy of an obsession.
I’m as guilty as most in taking school too seriously. I tried to tell my parents about my British modernist lit class and my thesis about the increasingly blurred distinction between educators and police in high schools. I couldn’t finish. Listening to myself, I suddenly realized how ridiculous I sounded.
Does this stuff really matter? Outside of college campuses, does anyone really care whether E.M. Forster should be characterized as a modernist or an Edwardian? Of course not, and for the same reason that even the biggest names in the academic world are relative unknowns to the rest of the population: People have more concrete and personal concerns to occupy their time.
I cannot defend Stoughton as a place to have a good time. But to borrow a characterization from the acid-tripping guitarist from Stillwater in “Almost Famous,” it’s real. The people are real. It might not be the most exciting city to spend three weeks when you’re 22, but there is a lesson in the nightly congregations at the Kwik Trip parking lot:
None of us is on the planet all that long, and it’s tough to justify taking abstract academics so seriously when the most of the world just doesn’t care. After all, when it’s over, I don’t think anyone will remember fondly the hours spent stressing about college philosophy. But we might remember that juicy steak from the meat raffle victory.
Matt Lynch ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English and political science.
