By Regan Penaluna
In 2004, I spent many hours walking the dirt paths of the Driftless Area, an undulating region in the Midwest left untouched by glaciers from Earth’s ice ages. In some parts the cracked earth exhales a cool air generated by underground ice. It’s a reminder of history easy to forget — until the frigid air wends its way through subterranean rock and wraps around a wanderer’s ankles.
I’d recently moved over 1,000 miles away from my East Coast university, returning to Iowa, my home state, where my then-partner was teaching. I had just finished my coursework and exams, and I was moving on to my dissertation. When I’d started my program years before, I’d imagined spending my final years as a graduate student at a world-class library, sharing ideas and coffee with brilliant colleagues, working at the peak of my knowledge and confidence at some epicenter of higher education. Yet here I was instead, borrowing books from distant libraries, and roaming limestone bluffs with a rescue dog from Baraboo, Wisconsin. Technically I was searching for a dissertation topic. But privately I roamed those hills searching for something more — a reason to stay in philosophy.
