When I first arrived in Madison, I got lost looking for my apartment. I stopped into an auto repair shop just off the Capitol Square to ask for directions. It was a typical-looking place, with cars suspended on racks as drills whirled rivets into sheet metal. The mechanics were also blasting one of the loudest radios I ever heard — to classical music.
This, I thought, is going to be an interesting place.
It was August 1988. Tommy Thompson was governor, Ronald Reagan was president, and Madison was a sleepier, grittier town. My east-side neighborhood was pocketed with machine tool shops, paint factories and dairy processing plants, now nearly all gone. The Square felt like the humble commercial center of an overgrown small town, not the chic entertainment and dining destination it is today. Corn fields and dairy farms rolled west of the Beltline without interruption.
Like many Madison newcomers, I came to get a degree. I never intended to stay after graduation but, like many UW students, I did. Bonds develop with places just as they do with people and, like any long-term relationship, my connection to Madison has had its ups and downs. One significant “down” moment occurred the morning of May 7, 1989, when I discovered snow on the ground. Though I’m from St. Louis, I’ve still never fully adjusted to the long winters of the upper Midwest.
I also think the city has lost some of its famously quirky and fun-loving spirit. Just one example: The Onion was launched here at almost the exact time I arrived. Would that still be possible in today’s Madison?
These are quibbles, though, because my time in Madison has been overwhelmingly positive. Since depositing my thesis at Memorial Library in 1993, I ended up building a life here that has been personally and professionally satisfying, with more fun, friends and adventure than anyone could reasonably ask for. The “professional” part included helping launch a Madison-based business consulting on energy and regulatory issues, a venture that has lasted 15 years and led to work in much of the U.S. and over a dozen other countries. While it wasn’t exactly what I expected when I came here 27 years ago, life never is.
But all things must pass, and the reason for this brief trip down memory lane is my Madison experience will soon be coming to an end. In fact, by the time you read this, I’ll be in my new home in Austin, Texas. Why Austin? Suffice it to say that people sometimes get too settled in the grooves they’ve established, regardless of how comforting they may be. And there’s nothing more quintessentially American than “lighting out for the territory” when you need new challenges.
One of the more unexpected and, mostly, enjoyable things I ended up doing here was writing for Isthmus. It began with a curious invitation in autumn 2010 from then news editor Bill Lueders to write an opinion piece. Bill evidently liked what he saw (although many readers, then and now, begged to differ), and he made an even more surprising offer to become a regular contributing columnist. Over the last five years, it’s been a genuine pleasure to work with Bill and, after he left, editors Dean Robbins and Judith Davidoff. They have all unfailingly welcomed and encouraged my contributions, even though I’m sure they rarely if ever agreed with them.
That’s never been a problem for me, since expressing opinions comes naturally to consultants, and I’ve had my share of doing so in forums that are less hospitable than the Isthmus op-ed page. It’s been both challenging and fulfilling to provide a free-market, small-government perspective to a skeptical audience, especially during such a contentious and important time in Wisconsin’s history. My approach was always to appeal to reason and keep the nudity tasteful.
There’s also no other Madison paper I’d rather write for. I’ve always thought Isthmus was the best-written paper in town. It also captures the day-to-day rhythms of life here better than any other publication. Culture, food, family and neighborhood all matter more to our actual lived experience than politics, and rightly so. That’s one of the reasons I’m such an ardent small-government guy: We’d all be much happier if politics occupied less of our time, money and attention, and each person was left to cultivate his own garden.
In preparing for the move, I couldn’t help but notice that there are a lot of songs about leaving. None, however, is better than the great Townes Van Zandt classic, “To Live Is to Fly.” As Townes sang, “where you been is good and gone/all you keep is the getting there.” The Madison I discovered back in 1988 is long gone, but I’ll be keeping a trunkload of memories from the time I spent here. And since “to live is to fly,” after 27 good years “it’s time to go again/ and think of all the poetry and the pickin’ down the line.”
So, as they say in Texas, happy trails.