My family moved to Black River Falls in 2020. My wife and I had spent most of our professional lives in Milwaukee and Madison — we both grew up in central Wisconsin, so we knew the state, but the Coulee Region was new to us. I fell in love with it almost immediately, and I'm still not sure I can fully explain why. That's the thing about this place: it's hard to describe but easy to feel once you're in it.
The people are genuine. That sounds like something you'd put on a tourism brochure, but I mean it in a more specific way. Black River Falls is small enough that you're actually connected to your neighbors — you see the same people at the baseball field, at the soccer board meeting, at the hardware store. But it's not so small that it's insular. The community here is remarkably diverse — in background, in profession, in socioeconomic status — and somehow that diversity doesn't divide people the way it seems to elsewhere. I've watched very successful business owners and blue-collar workers show up to coach youth sports together on a Tuesday night and not think anything of it. That's not nothing. That's actually kind of rare.
What I didn't expect, moving from a larger city, was how much civic life here operates on an assumption of good faith. People help because they help, not because they're performing helpfulness for an audience. I've been on enough boards and committees to know how often civic participation is really just networking with better talking points. That's not what I've found here. People show up because they care about the outcome, and they don't always agree, but the baseline assumption seems to be that everyone in the room wants roughly the same thing for this place. That shared stake changes the tone of every conversation.
La Crosse and Eau Claire are both close enough to scratch whatever itch the small town can't. We're not isolated. There are good restaurants and hospitals and airports within range. But you don't live in those cities. You live here, and here is a place with its own character — which is harder and harder to find.
Then there's the work. I became a prosecutor after leaving private practice, and I won't pretend that doing that work in the community where you also live and coach and worship is uncomplicated. You know people. You run into people. The cases have a weight to them that the anonymity of a larger place would soften. But I've come to believe that the weight is the point. It means something to do your work in a place that's actually yours. The families are real, the stakes are real, and you're answerable to the same community you serve. That accountability is uncomfortable sometimes. It's also what makes the work feel worth doing.
What keeps me coming back to the Coulee Region as a place I want to stay is harder to name than the people or the proximity to cities. It has something to do with the sense that the scale of the place lets you actually matter — that what you do in a board meeting or a courtroom or on a baseball field has a legible effect on people you know. Cities can make you feel like you're part of something large, which has its own appeal. Small towns can make you feel like you're part of something real. I think I needed real more than I needed large, and I didn't know that until I got here.