Make Room for Wiccans

As it was Halloween, the witches were out last week around the Midwest. I mean the kind who call the holiday "Samhain" and spell magic with a K and take it all seriously.

Which, I'd argue, is a hearteningly old-fashioned American thing. This is a society with room for practically everybody because there is, literally, room for practically everybody.

There's room for witches. Those who style themselves as modern-day pagans sometimes speak of trepidation about what the neighbors might throw if they know, but the press was rife last week with seasonal stories on Wicca.

The News Tribune in Duluth, Minn., managed to chat up at least three, including a fellow who's on the faculty at a couple of local colleges, a woman who used to put on an annual public witches' ball, and another who teaches witchcraft classes. The teacher, Lorene Couture, said she's had about 350 students, including cops, doctors, and nuns.

"I'm a warrior witch," said Ms. Couture, though if respectable folk are flocking to learn her spin on magick, one wonders who she'd war against.

Even where the conflict was a little more acute, in central Illinois, it was mainly spiritual. Things in Rossville, Ill., came to a head a few weeks ago when about 150 people met at the closed high school to figure out what to do about the witch school that opened in town.

The school, which offers classes online, moved to a nearby town from Chicago, looking for cheaper rent, then switched to Rossville, citing a distinct chill from its neighbors. A lot of Rossvillians weren't too thrilled, either, the Chicago Tribune reported, though the local Methodist pastor and a professor at a Christian college in nearby Lincoln calmed the meeting.

The closest it came to actual trouble was when another pastor told the school's owner he'd pray for him.

Which, if you mean your prayer seriously, is probably a charitable thing. Since most Wiccans seem fairly free-form in their beliefs, one could imagine them taking it as goodwill and calling it a win.

It beats what you get elsewhere. Last week brought news that Saudi Arabia executed an Egyptian man on allegations of adultery and "sorcery." Some suspect books, a few "foul-smelling herbs," and a love triangle will get your head lopped off there. Amid the Illinois cornfields, without the paramour angle but with actual classes linking Kaballah and tarot reading, the worst you get nowadays is a cold stare at the Citgo and townsfolk wearing out their knees.

This, with some tragic deviations, is how it often has been. Some grieve the rise of the Internet as a disaggregating force in American society — a means to find and stick with the like-minded. We can all, the story goes, construct our little closed circles virtually. Last century's common culture gives way, supposedly, to a nation of enclaves.

Yeah, so? Drag yourself to enough roadside historical plaques around the nation's midsection and you realize this place was built of enclaves. It wasn't just the ambitious who flocked to the frontier. Where I grew up, one nearby byway was called Mormon Road. It ran to a ghost town that once was a Mormon settlement, Voree, Wis., full of people looking for fewer bad neighbors than they had in Nauvoo, Ill., where their founding prophet, Joseph Smith, was killed. Eventually, they moved on, just as others from Nauvoo headed for Utah. For a while, however, each of these places were remote enough for people looking to be left alone.

This still works. Wisconsin's got the nation's fourth largest population of the Amish, as land prices and crowding in Pennsylvania send them west. Fennimore, Wis., down the road from a three-mile-long line of giant power windmills, includes parking space for horses. For differing reasons, both the windmills and the Amish do better far away from cities. Much of the Midwest matches that description.

Duluth, for its part, seems like a fine place for witches. The old Lake Superior port town turned crunchy in the back-to-nature 1970s and has remained that way. It's surrounded by miles and miles of trees just waiting to be hugged. When I lived there, one of my colleagues had been drawn by the superior dog-sledding opportunities. In this city, you have to watch out for bears raiding your garbage cans. One year, pagans held a winter solstice bonfire out on a beach that stretches for miles along Lake Superior. Or they said they did. That far north on December 21, who's going to go out and check? Which is to say several things: For one, if Rossville doesn't work out for the witch school, there's a rocky, rusty port city 600 miles north where people already like nature in an almost druidic way. Fundamentally, one thing the Midwest still brings to this country is a plentitude of venues for those looking to try a new one.

Second, being remote can be good. There's nothing like a little added geography to solve social friction. Your neighbors will bother you less if you don't see them. Thanks to the Internet — the witch school is online, after all — and thanks to simple things like decent highways, the isolation is optional.

And from trekking Mormons to the kind of frontier refugees who populated the literary prairies of Willa Cather or Laura Ingalls Wilder, there have been few things more American than finding autonomy by opting for isolation.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.