The View from Illiana

In the Kitchen

2010-07-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

A bounty of tomatoes, bulbs of red and green (tomatillos) crowd our counter tops, cover our table, even perch along a window sill.

Kitchen’s human population: two. Feline: one.

I’ve made multiple shopping runs for the occasion, to Wal-Mart twice and the liquor store once. Now numbered among our possessions: the Ball Blue Book of Canning, mason jars, and new utensils: can lifter, funnel, head-space measurer/bubble remover, and my favorite, magnetized lid wand.

We’ve never canned before and we hadn’t exactly intended to start, but as with all descents through underworlds—drugs, madness—one thing has led to another. T.’s been blanching and freezing greens since the start of the season, a benign project, without risk of botulism. Then one day he comes home with a recipe for putting cherry tomatoes in a jar with vinegar and herbs. Now we’re knee-deep in boiling, which is what canning is: boiling sauce, boiling lids and bands, boiling jars, and then boiling the lidded, banded, jarred sauce a little while longer. In this process a stove gets cooking (cooking: the application of heat to food) with water roiling, steam rising, utensils clicking, and tomatoes everywhere juicing and reducing and finally rising to float toward the top insides of jars. Plumpy, weirdly fetal mass.

It isn’t canning, at all, T. says. It’s jarring.

And it’s addicting. Winston, he instructs the cat, watch out.

Because even meat can be canned, or so says our new book. If, say, we had a squirrel we could can it, leaving in the bones or taking them out.

The only thing more odd about this mid-summer spate of preserving (more odd than our sudden, unplanned and yet energetic turn to it, more odd than its wacky labor plus cost to outcome ratio) is that we’re doing it just as we plan to leave Illiana.

We’re packing up and moving in three weeks.

Good-bye.

A Short Discussion of Seasons and Literary Shaping Devices

Early summer, like say May, is a bad time to visit Illiana. If you come here then, you’ll want to stay. I visited in May of last year, interview suit cleverly wadded in my carry-on. This year in May, same suit wadded in the same case, I waited at a train station in Effingham, town noted here previously as a crossroads of Illinois, with its Amtrak station and towering, lit-up-by-night cross surrounded by open parking lot, Mecca for long-distance, worshipful truck drivers. I was on my way to Chicago.

In the daytime in May in Illiana, there is nothing at all but the sounds of insects, weltering chorus. (This is only matched out at the farm by entire field of cows, munching.) Noiselessly, when your back is turned, tomato and green bean seedlings inch a little higher from their tidy rows, which dot every other backyard, and on the horizon in every direction—like this land so far from the ocean has actually been, all this time, a floating island launched out to sea—tractors pass, ghostly, shadowy as ships.

I grew up four hours north of Chicago, T. about four hours south, but for both of us, Chicago might as well have been located in New York City, and New York City on the moon. Skyway rather than ship, Amtrak rocketed us to the city, swirling slowly farm and farmland into soup.

Out at the farm the day before, I pulled up to the sight of three of the small grandchildren, fair-skinned redheads hiding from the sun in a copse of pine trees. Do you want to see our fort? You can come back here! The three-year-old yelled, his Owen Meany voice giant and husky, as if understanding the role of speaking for all of them, for his less voluble older siblings, to call chiefly for volume. Farm kids, they aren’t playing so much as working, still, actual tools in their tiny hands, knives, an axe.

We’re getting rid of all this poison ivy! He shouts, armful of the wilty green stuff aloft.

At the site of their new house, further down the lane, their parents and grandfather and T. drink water in the shade. They’ve worked this afternoon to erect a concrete wall. This house is being built to stand. It will overlook even the crumble of the grandparents’ two-story wooden farmhouse, which is next to an even older structure, their great-great grandparents’ place, now garage-like in modern home dimensions, but sturdy in its red brick.

The farm isn’t ours—not our family, not our place—but I’ve come to think, like some crazy hippie once told me about The Mountain in Taos, it has had some say in drawing us here, in permitting us here.

T. knows what I mean, he says. He works there every day. “Are you saying you want to stay?”

But I want to pursue interviews. I am a modern woman, ambitious.

“Oh, but then it will turn into romantic comedy,” I joke. “My blog. This story. You know. We meet our new town. It is so different than us! Love-hate relationship ensues. Love wins out.”

There are even going to be weddings this summer, weddings and interviews.

“Classic shape,” T. says. “Nothing wrong with that.”

In the Kitchen

It was the parents of the redheaded farm kids who gave T. the recipe for the cherry tomatoes in vinegar, and they are the ones who tell T. and me about canning tomatoes. It isn’t really necessary to process the canned sauce again in boiling water. Leave the hot jars with their hot contents on the counter and you’ll hear them pop, sign of a set seal.

It’s scandalous, but it’s what his mother did for decades. Plus these farm friends of ours are a horticulturist and an engineer, people who’ve already taught us about raw milk, hand-churned ice cream, homemade sauerkraut; after going away to college, working in cities, they’d returned to their hometown (they’d grown up neighbors) to build their own house from concrete, to home school their children, to grow everything they eat.

I also ask our in-town friend, the cashier at the liquor store, about canning tomatoes. She cites this same method of leaving the hot jars on the counter to pop on their own. Tomatoes are a “high acid” food. In the world of preserves, canning high-acid foods to canning low-acid foods is like scuba diving is to free diving.

Yet, for all this advice, I end up taking that of the Wal-Mart cashier’s—well, part of it. (I’ve begun asking everyone I see about canning.) She says the jars must be processed, given the second, thorough boil. It’s also what the Ball Blue Book of Canning says, among some other things about bacteria spores.

I always prefer things the hard way—if there’s a hard way that’s the way I’ll do it.

If I’m canning, I want to feel like I’m canning.

If I have one interview in Chicago, I’ll go to the second one too—even while I’m wondering if I could live in a city again, with a tiny apartment, a commute.

Even while T. says, hey, if you want to go to Chicago, go. Have a great life.

Go West, Young Woman

I’ve been thinking about the west again.

In moving here, we came east, of course—some 2,000 miles east. But we moved west mythologically, seeking open country, the unknown, a name and a place for ourselves.

It’s the story of America, from the Mayflower to land grabs to the gold rush. What to do, though, after all that west was gobbled up? Go to San Francisco to wear some flowers in your hair. To move west is to stake your own claim, if not to land then to identity, your identity as an individual, tribe and family free.

And so I’m on a train station platform in Effingham, Illinois, a city where truckers, passing through, can pay their respects at a giant cross—without having to climb down from their cab. Next to me, also waiting, is a family of women: a young, sixty-ish grandmother, two sisters in their thirties or forties, and the two daughters of one of the sisters, about eleven and seven, I guess, because they remind me of my sister and me at that age—the older one (like me) chubby and awkwardly pubescent, imitating the squeals and slang of a teenager as she discusses a problem with her footwear, her crocs, she keeps saying, as if only for the love of the word, yet she’s also carrying around a doll and a stuffed dragon. The younger one, still skinny, flings her long hair with a more natural femininity, already eyeing the older sister suspiciously. Is that who she’ll become? Will she have to?

The mother and her sister stand a ways apart in their shorts and tee-shirts smoking and talking—of all things—about the family plans for the Fourth of July. The one has already rented the cabin. They’ll have the golf cart again to get around the whole week. She’s purchased the streamers and flags to decorate it—last year it rained, but they wrapped the golf cart in saran wrap and were able to proceed like that.

It’s a mystery looking in at any family to try to understand how the members see themselves: if they can see how they grew in relation and opposition to one another. To what extent they define themselves as members or as individuals. One sister is blonde, the other dark haired, like the two girls. “I got tee-shirts for all the kids,” she says. Teal for the girls and blue for the boys, all with American flags.

The grandmother is different from her daughters—conspicuously so. If they didn’t call her Nana no one would know she was with them. She’s trim and tan, her hair short and sleek, her outfit with its lime green sweater a tick or two hipper, of a different fabric, with a different thread count. She doesn’t sit but roams the platform, as if interested in the signs, in staring down the track, tilting back her head for a breeze on her throat. She has no luggage save a Carnival Cruise tote bag. She joins her granddaughters on the bench, but sits up on the seat’s back, her feet on the seat. Her granddaughters immediately copy her. Later, after she’s left to wander dreamily again, she rushes back to admonish the girls to get off the one bench so an elderly black woman can sit.

Through all this her grown daughters eye her warily. They light new cigarettes, discuss a place called Holiday World. It’s all this eyeing that gives them away as family. Am I of you? What does your life have to do with mine?

Two more white-haired women join us, in pink tops and denim pedal-pushers and rolling one brown suitcase between them. Because it’s the Midwest, I assume they are sisters, but because I’ve lived out of the Midwest too I don’t assume it all the way. A father and a daughter join us. The train is the Saluki Express, running between Southern Illinois University and Chicago.

Then there are two college-aged guys blinking in the early morning light, a little sheepish and sleepy and shaky. One has low-slung jeans, expensive sneakers, and when he opens his mouth to tease the other about why doesn’t he just give him a ride to Chicago, he’ll pay him sixty bucks, I’m surprised it’s a British accent.

They are looking both ways down the track, jokingly debating about which way might be north, which way south.

T. and I had the same debate when he’d dropped me off at the station. That’s just what we need, he said, me to end up in New Orleans. Another direction, another possible decision.

On the train a college-aged girl sits next to me. She flips open her laptop and begins to watch a movie. After a while I watch over her shoulder. It’s a romantic comedy, with a wedding at the beginning and one at the end.

Wisconsin Wedding Season

My mother has long had an idea about how this would all turn out—our year in Illiana, the end of my blog.

It’ll be like that movie, she’s said.

What she means is the movie Sweet Home Alabama, and what she means is not that I’ll leave my rich, dreamy New York fiancé to return to the Southern country boy I’d already married (but now he’s going to be rich too!) but more generally that I will realize I’m the one who, in my decade of living away from the Midwest, has become a snob.

I understand that she has a point. When I’m at my parents’ house in Wisconsin, I marvel a little too wickedly at the accent. I tell a few too many stories about Illiana moments that have cracked me up, or annoyed me. (The scary barfly did with a glare reach to turn off the volume when T. and a visiting friend wanted to watch—of all things—a World Cup game.)

My mother lives in the same county where she grew up—though she left for about a decade when she was my age. Who knew my father would take a job back in her small hometown?

My sister has moved away too. For years while I lived in New Mexico and then Portland, she was in Wisconsin still. Now she’s moved to Kansas, and in less than a year she’s lost the accent. She and her fiancé will come home to Wisconsin to be married, and then go back to Kansas where their life is.

I’m at two bachelorette parties in one week in Wisconsin, my sister’s and a good friend’s from school (elementary, middle, high school). At my sister’s, girls drive in to Oshkosh from other, mostly Wisconsin, cities: Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton—though one flies in from Austin. They are not from cities originally but from small towns, like we are. Yet one asks me where I live, and when I give my rural coordinates she says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m sorry.” By this point, we’ve all had a lot of punch. I don’t take it the wrong way. If the frontier is no longer the west, then it is the city. The frontier is the girl on her own.

At the second bachelorette party, perhaps because the women are my peers and not my sister’s, it’s a little harder to ignore what suddenly seems a marked weirdness about my life, where I’m living. Our group is small but intimate. We’re drinking wine, cozy in our friend’s parents’ house, where the wedding will take place in three days, where right now a storm that has come in from over the bay is beating on the windows. On the couch, our arms wrapped around one another’s necks, one friend has come from Minneapolis, one Denver, and the bride from New Jersey (she works in the City, glimmering City of all cities). The fifth woman of our high school group will arrive tomorrow from Seattle, and the bride’s sister is up from Madison, her sister-in-law from Dallas.

And one woman, a girlfriend of the bride’s brother, is flying in from Portland, and will arrive a little late.

Though it’s been years since high school, and we’ve all scattered, holiday gatherings back home, group trips to each other’s fun cities, and an email group have kept us in touch. (And, I always think, pop culture models must have contributed, at least given permission: Ya Ya Sisterhood, Sex in the City.) It’s a little weird given one factor of our congealing in high school was that all of us expected to leave, immediately, and with no two college choices the same.

There was camaraderie in that, especially at the end, a mutual respect but also a worked-out efficiency. We’d divided our territory. Our bond was one that—with Midwestern niceness intact—we could expect to disintegrate naturally, no hurt feelings. I don’t know if any of us planned to keep in touch forever, but that year we left for college, the Internet happened. We all got our first email addresses. Then it was so darn easy.

I also realize now, because I’m in the college business, that we had in common the luxury of leaving: parents who supported us and expected as much from us, that we would move away.

At the party, we are a retail buyer, teachers, a therapist, a dentist, a pilot. I don’t feel embarrassed to be living my small town Midwestern life, though I realize I would be if I had never left.

When the woman from Portland shows up, she has that easy, casual Portland look: the glasses, the fleece, the thick camping socks once she kicks off her shoes. I miss Portland intensely: the identity it offered, the identity I’d picked up there, for a time.

In the Kitchen

The other advice the woman at Wal-Mart had given me about canning, but which I had not taken as seriously, was not to can while on my period.

That was her grandmother’s wisdom. If she canned while on her period, the whole batch would spoil. Those days of the month, her grandmother would do all the washing—the jars, the lids—but she wouldn’t touch the produce, wouldn’t touch the stove.

It has to do with the Ph balance, she said. Reacting somehow with the tomatoes.

If I were a woman of that generation, I tell T., I’d also come up with a short but rigid list of chores I couldn’t do, at least on a few days of each month. I’d put mowing the lawn on there. And yes, standing all day in front of a hot stove.

What would you put on your list? I could ask T. But I know what we’d both say: moving.

I withdraw from the search in Chicago. We're going to stay here, we say, and begin to re-imagine it.

And then I’m offered a job in the north woods of Wisconsin. It’s a weird, crazy dream job: I’d get to teach creative writing. And T. is offered teaching too. We visit together. We drive around the town, through which a river flows, in which there is a farmer's market, an organic grocery store, breweries.

We still spend twenty-four hours agonizing, weighing, debating. Even a few days seems a ridiculous amount of time to make this kind of decision.

How can all this moving lead to a real way to live?

In the booth of a restaurant, this song will actually be playing on the radio: “Did you ever have to make up your mind? Did you ever have to finally decide?”

Okay, we say,but whatever we do this time had better last.

At least for a while.

Good bye

And so we find ourselves jarring tomatoes. It’s as logical as anything, probably. We’re preserving, laying in, packing up. We want to take these tomatoes with us, the ones we grew from seeds in Styrofoam cups.

We resign from our jobs. We start telling people goodbye, awkwardly. Leaving a place—leaving where other people live—seems always insulting. It goes with the Oregon license plates we’ve kept all this time.

Someone says, “It will be more expensive there you know.”

Someone else says, “We’re used to it, rising stars coming through here, on the move again.”

It’s a great Midwestern tradition: abandonment. They don’t know how prepared, how well-versed, we are.

That Little Girl Across the Way—She’s a Chemist!

Across the street from our house, a couple our age is moving out of their house. In all our months, we’ve never met them though we’ve seen them a few times out on their porch with wine, and once while I was walking I waved to him, jogging. We were several blocks away though, in a different neighborhood, and I don’t know if he recognized me as a neighbor from across the street.

I learn a few things about them from another neighbor: he’s a professor (wait—where? Not where I worked), and has been offered a job on the East coast. She’s a chemist at the oil refinery (I’ve been told about her before). Why they want to leave—with the big bucks she must be making—word on the street doesn’t know. What might be the problem is that they’re too smart to get along here, too educated. (I feel a little uncomfortable being told this: what do they say of us? And wait a minute, what do they not say of us?)

The final nail in the coffin, the final marker of this couple who is leaving, is that he—the husband—wants to get rid of his new grill. It won’t fit in the moving van or something (my source cannot fathom the reason; the grill works perfectly well). So he plans to leave it on the edge of the driveway, only absent its tank, with a sign that says free. But what he fails to understand—and this pains my source—is that people here will just think there’s something wrong with it then. No one will pick up something that says free. And that grill will sit there until it rusts, totally wasted.

I think of another neighbor’s yard, with the two riding lawn mowers for sale for $200 and $150. There’s a market psychology here that I never understood. (Probably, there is much here I have failed to understand.) It’s the same neighbor who lit off more fireworks than anyone at the Fourth of July, a bevy of children in tents in the yard, a volleyball net that recalled to me a low-slung clothesline of my childhood neighborhood, one we all knew to avoid in the dark, running in night games, running after fireflies. This same neighbor is also one whom T. once watched get so angry at his child that he pushed him down into a kiddie pool.

I can’t believe we never met them, I say to T., meaning the neighbors who are leaving.

Yet T. declares he will not meet them now. He wants a perfect streak.

After a few days of watching them pack, we see the van. Soon after they’re gone.

Love and the Art of Lawn Care

2010-06-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

I despise mowing the lawn. In fact, take all aspects of yard maintenance, from picking up sticks to shoveling snow, and you can hack it all to pieces with a giant weed whacker for all I care. Chase with a leaf blower each last remain all the way to kingdom come. But where does this antipathy come from? A dorm room and apartment dweller, I’ve engaged in relatively little lawn care. T., of course, is an avid gardener, and only trusts me with spade and hoe as much as he trusts me to remember to take the bread out of the bread maker after it beeps. This even though I’ve spent whole Saturday mornings pulling up by hand each pokey green piece he’s identified for me as weed, and mispronouncing humus like hummus at the Rural King. This even though, to support him, I’ve changed my Facebook interests to include gardening, like putting the cart before the horse, faith before the leap.

Growing up, I lived in a house with a woman who loved yard work so much that she only relinquished it upon occasion, and then only if she could have more fun concocting ruses of the Tom Sawyer variety. Neighborhood kids would come from blocks away to pick our fallen crab apples and throw them into the buckets my mother had simply set out and magic-marker labeled “5 points” and, further away, “10 points.” She’d also sacrifice her fun for my edification, handing over the task of riding dizzying, increasingly smaller co-centric circles around the family backyard in the name of my “practicing my shifting skills.” Why couldn’t we have wood chips? Concrete? What could the neighbors really do to us if we didn’t keep neat and trim our own little patch of Earth, maintain its chemical-green? I hadn’t yet read any David Foster Wallace, but on my own I could have made a case for the alignment of Midwestern lawn care and fascism.

When after college I left for New Mexico, it was the steadily thinning and browning grass along the way that buoyed me. I’d invited my mother along to divide the drive (yes, in my now well-mastered stick shift car). In fact I asked her to make the hardest part of the drive, which I knew, but didn’t tell her I knew, would be pulling out of the driveway. Fifteen hundred miles later, it was August in Oklahoma and all that dying foliage had completed its metamorphosis, had become ditch weed, scrub, scraggle. At the moment we crossed the state line—desert sunset brewing—the thinnest, palest rainbow hung splayed as exactly as a movie marquee over the sign Welcome to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, but I couldn’t be bothered to gape, so taken was I with my new lunar landscape, its unapologetic fruitlessness.

Surely this signaled a new possibility for world order. Certainly it heralded a new view that would be afforded to me, new resident in such a landscape. Later I learned that all those miles of empty middle were seen as great for missile testing.

And a decade later, a few states and a few moves later, I live with a man and a cat and a yard, smack-dab in that Midwestern country that so inspired (if sometimes through horror, sometimes amusement) the great DFW, a man with sentence patterns like the death scenes in Westerns, all that choking and clutching and then the last surprising stagger before the finish. I aspire to write sentences that die so gloriously. I also aspire to convince my lover that gardening might really be a hobby of mine too, maybe if, in trade, we do over the lawn in gravel.

I suspect T. would prefer an even bigger lawn, that in his native Illinoisan soul he takes a flat green expanse as signifier of the magnanimity of a man, prairie-conquering homesteader. He tricks me into pushing our mower up and down its rows by marveling about the workout it is, by claiming the ritual of the cold-beer finish, grass stuck with sweat to his arms and legs and even inside his ears as he tips back his head to guzzle. I suspect he’s been talking to my mother.

And so, out of love and desire for cold beer, and maybe because I was also always tricked, every time, by my mother’s apple bucket ruses, the other day I mowed our lawn in Illiana.

And, out of what might have been a mixture of love and spite, I trimmed with the good kitchen scissors the rangy grass that rings our unlandscaped house, where it’s too close in for the mower.

“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” T. had pronounced when I first floated this alternate solution to buying a device called a weed eater, a contraption sure enough to condemn our souls to that same circle as Il Duce’s, as Franco’s.

I had to sneak out the back door when he wasn’t looking. I began at a corner, laying scissor-edge to brick foundation. Were the neighbors watching? I felled green fronds like tall hay in a field, or like relatively tall hay in a relatively miniature field, and then I went around the lamppost. I was working along the front of the house when I felt the first stinging blisters, a sudden pain like what as kids we’d called a Snake Bike, and what T. and his naughty Illinois neighborhood kids had called an Indian Burn. I choked up with my grip. I attempted to switch hands. The scissors were harder and harder to work. I kept going. Was I a fascist now? Was I having fun? Was this love?

I finished. Ruined hand, ruined scissors, panting in the grass.

“So that worked?” T. said, calmly from the steps.

Something for Everyone

2010-05-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

There’s something for everyone at the downstate Flea Market and Swap meet: fishing rods, DVDs, tomato plants, children’s inflatable pool toys, King-sized bed linens, knee braces, ducks, handguns, cigar boxes, antacids, bras. All of this and only a dollar (per person) to get in. The center of the property is scooped out by a pond, where children fish for free. At an edge lies another swampy moat, where buyers may be treated to the rare sight of a cow with a blond flop of bangs, a little like Mary J. Blige's, swimming.

We hadn’t even heard of the flea market until our neighbors told us. Since they see us too often in our backyard, childless and apparently friendless, drinking cocktails from re-purposed jars, and since they once caught me attempting to barbeque tofu, they do their best to take care of us, sending one of their amazingly sweet and polite sons over with venison, homemade fudge, or a paper sack of morels. Once they wondered if we wanted to come over for “the fight.” Sure, I nodded. Sure, sounds like fun. What was that about? T. asked. I have no idea, I’d had to say, bolting our door behind me.

So on a more recent afternoon on our front porch steps, watching the neighborhood kids on their bikes in the street bring themselves to peeling stops by direct application of flip-flop to pavement, I heard about the swap meet, and this time had the sense to ask for more information.

It’s open only the second and fourth weekends of the spring and summer months. Vendors roll in to town with their campers and trailers, pulling off the highway to turn down the long gravel drive that runs just next to an oil field and another business that sells oil pipe, right where the red and blue streamers have spent the winter flapping above the tiny signs advertising “Green Peppers! Tomatoes!”

I’d thought the Rural King our local shopping gem, with its selection of deer dressing kits, muck boots, cast iron cookware, belt buckles, and varieties of hard candies that I’d believed extinct, like circus peanuts and fireballs.

At the end of the gravel drive, a sign greets us: hand-lettered, super precise, its message apparently one of great swap meet-specific significance: Please do not leave your trash lying around anywhere.

“Don’t litter?” Translates T., the poet. Buyers are to park to the right, vendors to the left.

“I’m going to buy a flea circus,” he announces next, rubbing his hands with glee.

“I’m going to buy that fishing rod,” I say of the first one I see, at the very first booth not two feet from the car, giddy that we have for once brought cash.

It’s taken us months to get used to the deep disapproval our debit cards induce—and they’re from the local bank! I was even rebuffed at the town newspaper’s main office, though my attempt to purchase a full year’s subscription aroused the first suspicion. Now what do you want? They’d made me repeat myself, as if I were the one a decade behind the times, a hold-out believer in print journalism.

I’m so pleased with my $12-tagged rod and reel—its brand is Shakespeare!—that I don’t even think to haggle. How about I give it to you for $10, the pitying vendor finally says to me, very slowly, just as a Juarez border guard once had to, shaking me down. Handing over my change, he looks at me the way our neighbor did upon discovery that we have an indoor-only cat, whom, when he is not sleeping on our breakfast table, I carry from room to room and coo to like a human infant.

But buying the pole early on turns out to be wise choice, providing each old man behind his table an opening to tease me. Catch anything yet? How they biting?

I take advantage of the joking so I will be permitted to take photos. I call over T. Will you buy this for me honey? T. pulls out a crisp dollar or two, leaning in for his punch line. Now watch, she’ll make me carry it. He’s a hit, the men wiping the tears from their faces. I do make him carry a metal wash tub and some wooden bowls back to the car. I eye garden rakes, tee shirts, He-Man action figures, pink leather purses bejeweled with Crusades-style crosses, a rabbit in a hutch, a scythe, ammo, bins of eye make-up and Herbal Essences hair conditioner, afghans, badminton rackets, a pirate ship lamp, and an antique telephone in its train station box.

A swap meet, it seems, is an entity unto itself.

It is a little like a Portland market in weirdness, though some of the weird factors signify oppositely, politically. The "fresh produce" turns out to be a bunch of bananas. (Local? T. jokes). A man with a long gray beard, almost like a bar-hopping Portland Saturday market Santa Claus, tries to bully me into buying a clearly dead pepper seedling, scowling that he “worked hard” to grow it. Someone has pitched what could be an REI tent by the side of the pond, where he is also casting. It would be like a farmers' market demo, except no one is watching, and the angler, taking the DIY concept further than any Portland market-goer I ever saw, seems likely to clean, fry, and consume right in the midst of the market. That swimming cow better be careful.

At one table an Asian woman with non-native English wants me to examine a pillow slip: “feel how nice, feel how nice." Some things are familiar, familiar to being in a foreign country.

Unlike craigslist, the Portland Rebuilding Center, or a garage sale or consignment shop in any city, the swamp meet seems to put less emphasis on utility and more on collection, the point not housecleaning (for room to buy new) but laying in. One vendor (from whom I want to buy something!) is absent, doing his own shopping. The eclecticism of most vendors’ wares—spanning type, decade, state of repair—makes for curious booths. Yet a few things come to seem true across the board: the items most valued are those that are 1) old, and 2) cheap.

And one gets the feeling, because so many of the old things are also cheap that there is really only one overriding criterion.

At the side of a flat-bed trailer stocked with bins of soaps, lotions, cosmetics, and over-the-counter medication, I decide to ask a vendor where he gets his things. From places going out of business, he replies readily, Wal-Greens, that kind of thing.

In my life I’ve been an avid thrift-store-shopper—beginning with my grandma in the church basement, sniffing at garments that “might need laundering.” I'm not squeamish. I've ordered raw meats from outdoor markets in foreign countries, and drunk things handed to me by strangers, as well as water I filtered myself, while squatted on a bank, thirsty, tattered “how to filter water” instructions in hand.

But I decide to draw the line at after-market allergy, headache, or other pain relief.

I'm over thirty now, and picky about what I ingest. After all, I've spent a year hemming and hawing over where to live, matching my survival needs to my social values and political identity like putting together an outfit around a pair of shoes.

T. finds me. The day is growing hotter—swampier, if you will—and he has been checking out the swap meet’s livestock barn. “You’re not going to want to walk through there,” he says.

“What is it?” I’ve been photographing an antique washing machine, crouching to get it from the best angle while a man who told me he’d sell it for twenty, and then once I took my camera out, forty, told me how he’d found it in his mother’s basement, how she’d used it for years, how it still worked, but just needed a new cord, but how those things were dangerous though, how he’d known a young kid, oh this was years ago, who’d died in one just like it.

T. grimaces. Maybe we have a draw. “Kittens in an aquarium,” he says.

We decide to take that lap around the pond. At a vendor’s table on the far side, I zero in on an old screen door. “Look—could we put this over the garden frame?” We’ve had a bunny lately, at night. The neighbors told us about him, a little guiltily. Their kids feed it. They’ve made a small home for it under their porch. That’s okay with me, though. I think it’s cool that they have their pet. I’m still examining the door, pulling another door away from it, chattering on about the neighbor kids’ bunny, and how the woman with the rabbit in the hutch had given me this tip, that we should just sprinkle a little cayenne or chili pepper on our plants and then the bunny wouldn’t eat it, and I’m prattling on, should we use our good chili pepper though, or can we get some cheap stuff, and finally T. has to say, his voice half-cracked with laughter, with disbelief, “Look.”

I’ve set my fishing pole against the mesh-wire wall where the screen doors are leaning, but all this time I haven’t looked in the cage.

Meeting my eyes when I do bother to look is the biggest peacock I have ever seen, his green shimmering tail fully fanned, the purply-blue eye of each feathered tip staring back at me.

I’m in fourth-grade again, lost to the world for the ending of A Wrinkle in Time, tesseracted to an oxygen-less planet to confront face-to-face a hovering, fluttering deity of feathers and eyes.

Doppler

2010-04-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

I am on the couch watching our Doppler radar channel while T. is doing something in the kitchen. “What’s it saying?” he calls. We’re looking for a tornado. The sky looks likely, the air likely, but the on-screen weather map displays the quilted graphic of area counties, no text, and I’m not sure which one we are. There’s a red and a yellow zone.

T. comes in. “Oh,” he says, tapping a spoon, leaving again. I don’t say that I can’t tell, don’t know where we are.

Maybe that squiggle is the river, the state line, drawing down through the otherwise straight rows like a knife through frosting.

Either way, it is only a watch, not a warning, and neither of us is afraid, not unduly, of Storms in the Midwest—for which there is a theme song and an MTV montage on our local news channel, lightning snaking a purple sky. This Saturday afternoon, we have cows to check out at the farm. In particular, we are to scout for new calves in the grass. On the ride out, the rain falling through sunshine, the whole of the cultivated countryside lit up by springtime, by late-afternoon, blowing-storm color, T. says we can listen to the Ramones. Hey pretty girl, I wanna be your boyfriend….

It’s been a month of color: things shooting upward in our lawn. T. gave our grass its first half of a mowing and our seedlings in cups in the upstairs office-turned-greenhouse grew all the way to poking into the florescent bulbs, requiring the use of more and more books in our jerry-rigged lighting suspension system, the result of which, I knew from the start, will be ruined books but possibly vegetables.

Also this month we took in our second community theatre production, this one, so appropriately, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

I didn’t tell T. what I’d been hearing about the show until we were in the car, on our way. It was the guy who plays Joseph: some dream boat, beef cake. An actual six-pack, I overheard some women in town discussing. And he doesn’t wear a shirt through the whole play, a student told me.

And the show was selling out; every lonely seat matched with cash-paying mate in that gemstone of a new county auditorium. Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Pack. Not to disappoint, the twelfth son of Jacob strips to his white loin cloth by the second song, and the house lights dwell attentively. In line in the bathroom at intermission, one woman asks another which number of performances this made for her, and a sixth-grader at the hand dryer interrupts giggling: four. In the program, we read that Joseph works at Marathon, and that his future plans include “making lots of babies with my trophy wife.”

A week later, T. will see Joseph at Wal-Mart, with the trophy wife. Guess who I saw at Wal-Mart? He’ll report. You didn’t get his autograph? I ask.

At the end of the show, back in our car and nosing our way into the line of cars headed out the one highway, past the one Dairy Queen—conducting a brisk business given the few hundreds of us who’d just sat transfixed by one fellow human’s sculpted shape—T. maintains in a disapproving whisper: No man has naturally that hairless of a body.

T. comes out to the farm to work three days a week, but I’ve only been a few times. The drive takes us south and east about twenty miles, tacking the dizzying grid of county roads. There are wild turkeys to watch for, and today craterous, road-washing puddles. “This will get your gilly-hopper,” T. says accelerating over the one small hill so that we hang in air. Immediately thereafter, he points out a dilapidated, one-room schoolhouse, next a set of county-historic-register oil pumps, still working, somehow rigged to pump in concert by means of an underground lever system, the whole thing so wonderfully mechanical and quaint even an environmentalist would have to love it.

Mechanical is the last age of technology I understand, or so I imagine. But perhaps that is also untrue. Send me back in time and give me one of those enormous, rusted scythes and I would not know how to use it. I would not know what was wheat.

It is pouring, and I pull up the hood on the red slicker I still have from a Goodwill in Milwaukee. It says I am Summerfest Security. We stop at the barn to exchange our car for the Chuck Wagon, an ATV with a golf-cart-like roof that we can use to tool out along the muddy path to the field. I think we will tip. There are no doors and I am hanging on to that small roof, rain pouring directly down my sleeve, and my butt sliding around on the vinyl seat in my purple wind pants, these from a Portland Goodwill. We will get stuck in a rut, I know, but T. laughs, gunning through. The first herd, the steers, clump out of sight, back in the woods. That’s when we begin Y-turning, slide, and get our wheel stuck in the bottom wire of the electric fence. I yelp, pull back my hand, pull up my feet; the sky cracks with rain and storm, and T. says shit.

He gets out a pair of pliers, climbs down from the chuck wagon. He grabs the fence with his hand and yanks it.

What are you doing?

The fence is hardly on, he says, totally annoyed with me. I try to back out of my own mental confusion: we are in something metal and we are entangled in an electric fence. Then I get a feeling to look behind me, where the steer, en masse, have drifted a startling ways from the woods. They think we’ve come to move them to their next pasture and they bellow, advancing in the rain, mounting up on one another’s backs, silhouetted against the almost midnight-blue sky.

He does this all the time, stands among these enormously-breathing animals. At the next field, where the Mommas and calves are, we get out to walk its full length. 2015 stumbles over, and T. scratches the space between her eyes. Then her gray tongue—like the one we have in thick plastic wrapping in our freezer, planned for Lengua Tacos—darts as if to wrap his finger. Here there are pools of poop; it pours from the back ends of cows like the rain is still pouring on us, like small showers, right and left, turned on and off sporadically. The cows watch us, but don’t bother to move—either to get closer or to move away as we cut through their field. The baby calves lie amongst the half-chomped tops of orchard grass, clover, and rye. They can stand immediately, but get tired on their spindly legs. T. looks for the one that has been walking on his knuckles for the past two days, the first two days of his life, tipping awkwardly forward as if unconvinced that the bottoms of his new soft hooves are the part that is supposed to touch the ground. He’s going to have to walk right soon, or he’ll get left behind when the herd moves, when his momma moves. The last time I was out here, T. and the farmer opened a pasture gate and the cows took off at once in their customary group-think gallop, the new calves left mewing behind like kittens. Finally remembering, a couple of the Mommas circled back. They gathered up the other cows’ babies too, neighborhood busybodies, mooing crossly at everyone.

The good Mommas will be kept around longer.

I hope I’ll get to see one born. T. has watched at least one shoot out, legs unfurling in the air, parachutist with sinewy cord trailing. Clearly by their wide sides, several moms are very close to birthing, and maybe they’ll do it right now, out here in the rain. The closest I get is that we do find one newly born calf, new since this morning when T. was last out here. First I spy a long piece of bloody mucus hanging from one Momma, and we look nearby in the grass to see him—he’s huge and square in the shoulders already, bigger than your dog, but sticky, blinking.

T. will tag him, paint his umbilical cord. We’ll record the birth in the spiral notebook, holding it away from the dripping ends of our hair. Back at the farmhouse, the real farmers pull in the driveway as we are leaving; all of us wave from behind our respective windshield wipers.

This whole week leading up to this weekend I have been sick with something, a cold or flu or allergies; I lost my voice for two full days at a conference where I had to honk and rasp through a presentation on Encouraging Classroom Discussions, and where there were people for me to meet, people who might be on hiring committees, but where I was delusional with Day-Quill.

So by the time we get home from the farm and I am peeling off wet layers and running the shower, I am also sneezing.

You’re not a farmer, T. says, smiling, in the kitchen stripped down to his underwear and eating something off the end of a knife.

I’ve got a stack of papers to grade. Maybe, I’m not a teacher either, I say.

By the time I get out of the shower, T’s on the computer, updating his Facebook with something crass, checking out poetry journals.

It’s Saturday night. We grill hamburgers. We read on the couch with the cat. The tornado watch continues until 11, though I am asleep at 10:30, in my bed. The next day, we’ll take our walk, past the Drive-Thru liquor store where the manager agreed to put on order for us some Full Sail and Deschutes beer (from Portland); and past Gabriel’s Family Restaurant, where we have never eaten but which, we’ll see, is closed for Patty’s surgery.

We’ll bicker a little because it’s raining and because we’re out in it again—and with no purpose at all this time really, just a walk, a reason for me to avoid my grading. I have this idea that I want to see the county historical museum, which is near us and which—among all the things that are not open on Sundays—is open from 2 – 4. T. has this idea that walking in the rain is stupid. He also claims not to be big on historical museums.

But then again, he didn’t want to go to Joseph, did he, and that was a good time!

In our raingear, cars whooshing by, we’ll come across the only other person out here walking, a long-haired kid, maybe twelve or thirteen, in jeans and a Rodman Bulls’ jersey, his bare shoulders streaked with warm rain and a wood-handled handgun jammed in his front jeans pocket.

“Really?” I’ll turn to mouth to T., trudging behind me, and also to make sure the kid is leaving, moving on and moving away from us with that gun.

He gives me a look like shuddering—like being weirded out.

But by the kid and the gun? Or still by me and my insistence on this walk in the rain to the county historical museum and maybe that last thing I said about him being a big baby who never wants to do anything I want to do?

I turn around again because we’re almost there.

Conversation Piece

2010-03-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Conversation #1:

Blip. Blip. Blip.

“Now what are these. Collard greens. Can’t say I’ve ever seen those before.”

“You have plenty on your shelf.”

“And fish.” (Makes a face.) “I don’t eat fish. I catch ‘em, I clean ‘em, I cook ‘em, but I don’t eat ‘em. “

“Well, you should try collard greens sometime. Oil and salt on them, they’re great.”

“Nope. No green stuff for me. Just a little bit of lettuce maybe. And every once in a while green beans, but only if they’re cooked right. And I mean just right. I do eat corn. And potatoes.”

Takes one last look at my food, reaching for the end of the bag of greens with only the tips of her fingers, and shudders in disgust.

Conversation #2:

“I used to give a seminar for women and their money. ‘Smart women finish rich.’ I used to have all these figures then, showed how much you’d save over time if you start putting something away a little each month.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen those charts.”

“You’re so smart to be thinking of this now, when you’re so young yet. Man. So many kids around here, they just want to make the monthly payment on their car, make rent. Nobody thinking anymore about the future.”

“And we’ve all seen where that leads, haven’t we?”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah. Take banks. It’s our fault too. We were lending people money we shouldn’t have been. So, English teacher. You know, I’ve written books. Three of ‘em actually. Novels. I’m always working on something, just scribbling away. Course the writings not real good—but that’s what editors are for, right? Clean it all up.”

“ Um, sure.”

“I got a kid, trying to get him to go to the junior college first, get some credits. But they all want to spend the big bucks to go live in the dorms, have freedom. You got your whole life to have freedom, I say. You can wait a few years and save some money first. But they don’t see it that way.”

“Uh Huh.”

“I mean, that’s why you’re so smart to be thinking about your future now. I mean, with this political situation. What we got in Washington, what mess they’re up to now.”

“Mm.hm…”

“I mean, look—I don’t try to get political with anyone. Anyone’s politics is their own business and of course I can work with anybody. But that snowstorm in DC? Now wasn’t that the Lord?”

“Mm.”

“But saving money. Yep. Now here’s how I think of it. Say you walk by a window, and you see a purty dress. I mean, a real purty dress. You want that dress! But it’s way too expensive. So you say, no , I’d just really better not. I mean, a smart girl like you, that’s what you’d say. Then, the next day you come by, and it’s 50% off! Well, now you could buy it. Now you could buy it, and look at all that money you’ve saved. That’s saving money.”

“You know…. I think I’ll just take your card here….”

Conversation #3:

“Excuse me?”

We’re in the pool, sapphire-tinged water, vaguely medical in its hue, lapping chest deep. I push my goggles up, and an older woman, one of the water walkers, is bobbing toward me, parting the surface with her fingers as she glides. “Yes?”

“Did you read that article in there, tacked up to the bulletin board in the locker room?”

“Yeah,” I say, though I didn’t really; I just saw the headline.

“Well what can we do to help? All those teachers are losing their jobs.”

“I know. Mine’s been cut too, actually.” I tell her this as some kind of fair warning. Without my contacts, I am only peering in the direction of her white shape, the sound of her voice, but I know she can't know who I am either.

“And the swimming teacher!” the woman continues. “You know, every fourth grader in the county gets their swimming lesson from her. Every one. Now what are those kids going to do?”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“And they can’t close this pool. Where will people who need it go? You get a lesson from that swimming teacher, you get a work out, I tell you.”

After my swim, I stand in the locker room, dripping and squinting, and read the article. A few decades ago, a local fourth-grader drowned in a river. The PE teacher at the college here started a swimming lesson program, and later it expanded to include all the fourth graders in the county, so there is now a full local generation taught to swim by this one woman.

It’s like my grandmother who, in my town, taught spelling and cursive handwriting to thirty years of third-graders.

And what a power in that, I’ve often thought: a creepy, secretive power, flying under all of our radar.

Group Discussion

“Above all, it’s important to ignore rumors.”

“Oh—and they’re flying!”

“There’s the one about the pool closing…”

“I heard that one.”

“At the pharmacy the other day, there was this woman. Said she knows all about because of where her friend works. Well she went on and, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

“…build a new Wal-Mart.”

“Everyone in town has something to say. And I’ve been getting emails. And you can read all about it on Facebook too.”

“Oh yes. Guess-who was on there. This isn’t a rumor. It’s true and you can go look at it yourself.”

Conversation #4, in Stirrups

“Man, you just got here and now you’ll have to look for a new job! That’s the pits.”

I know.

“Still. You don’t have any family here, how’d you end up here?”

It’s a good question, and one everyone here asks—with that same awe in their voice that seems to end, so weirdly, in disapproval or suspicion. Don’t they live here? Have they no faith in the merits of their own town?

I try to explain; we’re from the Midwest. We’re from small towns. It is a good little college they have here, and I was glad for a job.

“Now, if you want to have a baby some time, I always tell people, six months it might take, after you go off pills. But, it could happen soo-oner.” He ends in a sing-song, a joke with a happy wink.

But I have not asked about having a baby. I’m here, as I’ve specifically explained, to refill a birth control prescription.

“Okay,” I say, and think wistfully of my Portland doc, and her most serious, searching question: Do you wear your bicycle helmet? Every time?

“We’ll see you again next year,” the doc says, and then stops. “Or—man, maybe we won’t huh?” He shakes his head, then shakes my hand. Good luck to me.

A Walk with T.

“Careful. Or I’ll hear about this Monday.”

But he shoves me again toward a mud puddle. I respond by launching myself from a curb into his side, a wrestler descending from the ropes. He grabs my head and scrubs my hair with the flat of his fist.

No one was coming out of any of the houses to save me. We joke about this. What will they say after we’re gone? Remember that teacher we had that one year? The one whose boyfriend beat her?

Or, they’ll remember him as my husband, since that’s what so many call him here, bank tellers, grocery store clerks, co-workers. People here even mention to me “my husband” when I am alone and when I have never met them before, causing me always to want to double-take, to turn around in a circle looking over my shoulder.

It’s like I suddenly grew old enough, crossing those 2200 miles to get here. Maybe it happened at the Continental Divide. But maybe it was halfway through Nebraska, where, for me, the bartender gallantly opened a Lite beer.

If we did stay here, they’d marry us off for sure, just through force of repetition. Even people I gently correct forget by the next time I see them, so it’s like sweeping a drift of sand.

“See? We should have brought the movies,” I say as we pass the video store: Spotlight Video, with its neon sign and new release painted windows and one strangely boarded-over window, like a car drove through it.

Once I’d walked in to return some movies, and one of my students was sitting behind the desk, working on an assignment I had given. She looked up at me in total surprise. I was an apparition.

It made me remember a math teacher, new one year to our middle school, who was not married but living with her boyfriend, to whom she referred, in a way that deeply embarrassed us all, as her partner. She also went by “Ms.,” the first woman I ever knew to do so, and as if it were related, was skinny—skeletally skinny—could be seen around town running, of all things, and gave us her home phone number so we could call if we had homework questions, even at night. We thought she was the weirdest adult we’d ever met. I don’t think anyone ever called her with a homework question. I think that because one night when I called her she seemed so surprised, and even annoyed, like she’d forgotten that she’d offered.

Any questions? I joked with my student at the video store, and was grateful when she shook her head no. I was in a nubby jacket, not in my teacher clothes.

Everything is mud. We walk along the road, where it is less muddy. Grass everywhere is browned and matted, the fur of a long-sleeping or dead animal; trees are sticks and twigs.

“Look.” T. grabs my arm. There’s a small dog inside a house, stock still and staring over the back of a couch. Framed by the front window, it’s like a painting, the dog’s little face rigid, ears perked.

“Doesn’t it look like a painting?” T. says. “I thought it was, for a moment.”

On and off, in different places, at different times of day, we talk about where we’ll move next, when, what kinds of jobs we’ll find. What can we get? But also, what do we want actually?

We don’t know, of course. But we keep talking in the same circular way that had been enough last spring to tornado us here.

I MapQuest our route again, and that purple line stretches so unbelievably long back across the country.

“Let’s go to that library.” T. teases me as we approach a dip, a ditch, and then a looming brick building, new and tucked behind winter bare trees. “I’ll vouch that you’re my friend.”

“Very funny.” There, to my mortification, I’d nearly failed to qualify for a library card, unable to provide the name and number of one other person in town, someone not living with me, who knew me.

I’d had to pull out my big guns: I’m an English teacher. At the college. The librarian—after looking over her shoulder—whispered that I could just put down my office number for my reference.

It was too bad the student of mine I’d seen outside the library, on my way in, had ridden away already. He lives about ten miles out of town, and in my class had written essays about riding his bike long, and then longer distances, starting with the first time he’d left the end of his grandparents’ long driveway. We’d chatted there in the parking lot, and he’d showed me the big four-wheeler gloves he’d outfitted to the handlebars of his bike, for the wind.

Now he’s ridden as far as the state line, and across it.

Passing the library, T. and I come upon a street decorated with basketball cut-outs. The boys’ team has won the state basketball championship. We pass a small boy on a makeshift pitcher’s mound in his side yard, a bucket of baseballs at his side, and a man squatting to receive these pitches eyes us. What do we think we’re doing—walking around?

“Pitchers and catchers,” T. says gamely. We turn on to a street named Oil.

Earlier—while I was upstairs prowling for jobs and googling cities, and T. was making a spinach soup—he reached far into our second-hand dishwasher to fiddle with a metal loop sticking up, something out of place. Extracting the thing, he found it to be a tiny, child-sized engagement ring, with five plastic diamonds in a row. He’d called me downstairs, wonder in his voice. It was like our dishwasher had proposed to him.

For a minute—for one minute—it was like this town had tried to marry us.

I take the opportunity near the end of our walk, while T. leans to inspect the new buds on a tree—he knows the names for everything, he knows the genus and the species—to give him one more good, loving, relieved, terrified punch to the arm.

The Candidates' Debate

2010-02-19T11:58:00.000-08:00

Post Removed.

Village People

2010-01-27T01:52:00.000-08:00

Remember those Christmas village sets (maybe your mom or Grandma has/had one) that depict wintery scenes from Victorian-era towns, each little ceramic building maybe white-bulb-lit from within, and the whole set connected via running electric cord that had to be somehow hidden beneath white cotton batting (the snow) or behind plastic evergreen sprigs sprung from bark bases (the trees)? Yes—it was holiday time in some European-ish northern-clime, and transported to your living room. The bells from the steepled church were practically ringing in storybook satisfaction. There was a bread maker’s shop, a post office, a grocer’s store, and maybe a cobbler’s. One set in my family included skaters jerked along by magnets over a small Disco-blow-sized mirror pond (half hidden amidst the felted snow). A great aunt’s collection was locally famous, stretching across multiple card tables in a new arrangement each season—the spread reflective of arduous, minute, and entirely fictive civic planning. As a granddaughter, I remember the Styrofoam packaging most distinctly: the perfect negative of each house and the squeak as each was (delicately) pulled from its place, and then refitted at January’s end, even the cord and plug re-nestled in their bed.

The idea of a small town is appealing to a certain part of the brain: the idea that there only needs to be one of things; that a town’s layout, involving so few things, could be so simple and logical so as to be apprehended all at once, as if viewed from above. That people and the businesses their families owned could be synonymous, and as permanent as brick buildings.

Can you imagine anyone now taking a name to denote his or her trade? Baker, Blacksmith, Occupational Therapist?

Maybe it’s the same part of my brain mesmerized by form-fit Styrofoam that wants to idealize a small community. But ride with me here, for a moment. Forget the bad stuff: gossip, groupthink, nepotism that isn’t even recognized as such. Think of a cemetery where some of the names on even the oldest, most sunken and crumbling tombstones match those in the yellow pages, the local Ford dealer’s name or beauty salon owner’s name, and where some newer stones have names with birth dates and a waiting hyphen, someone—maybe working out at the gym right now—nevertheless claiming her place. If this is getting too Spoon River for you, go back to my previous paragraph. Imagine inheriting a needed and respected trade: being taught all the skills of the craft right along with your abc’s, and then handed a capital investment and an assured place in your community.

On a bike ride last fall we came upon just such a cemetery. We propped our bikes against a gate and walked around. We were so newly arrived that I felt a physical uneasiness leaning my bike against a gate and walking away without locking it—this in an empty cemetery on a deserted state highway, miles from town, surrounded by thousands of acres of corn. I kept my bike in view as we moved among the stones, as if some ghost had been waiting for something just like it.

Some of the gravestones were so old they had begun to sink, even these markers of retracted life in retreat. Others lay toppled or crumbling; their decay seemingly paused to us, even while ongoing just as we were stepping along through the rows. We made out names and dates from as late as two centuries ago etched into soft purplish-colored stones and on a few towering monuments, complete with their own tiny fenced gates and carved angels. Of course there were veterans’ slabs and baby graves, and paired spinster sister graves, and, yes, there were two graves for women from a century ago not labeled with their names at all but only their titles, in this case weirdly identical: “wife of Dr. ____. “ From the dates, and study of nearby markers, I didn’t gather that these were in-laws, but Dr. ____’s first and second wives.

He, of course, was the one with the private fence and stone angels nearby.

There would have to be a cemetery or two in a Christmas village set of my town—along with a water department building, salt trucks, the Goodwill, Rural King, Taco Bell, and Napa Auto Parts.

If seen the other night from above, roofs peeled back, I would have been found in the yoga studio in final relaxation, some of us in a variation called "feet up the wall."

The studio doesn’t have its name on the front, by the way, like the Mill from my grandma’s Christmas village, because why does it need a sign? Everyone knows it’s the yoga studio.

And next door to that would be the The Curling Iron, a beauty salon, and on the other side of that Cellular One, and a block further the GM dealer. In our town, small as it is, there are more than one of many things: three banks, two grocery stores (one, Super Wal-Mart), about ten car washes, three or four insurance agencies, a Verizon Wireless place, a cable company, a Mexican restaurant, a few consignment stores.

We do have a skating rink—but it’s indoors, for roller skating, and used now mostly for Zumba.

As well there are not one but about fifteen different churches, each with its own separate, active congregation (according to an events listing that takes up a quarter of the newspaper).

And there are bars, dry as it is on Sundays. One of the rowdier ones is on the other side of the Yoga studio. This night, as we lay in corpse pose, staring upward, a woman in the street outside began to yell. I pictured the bar as if its roof had been peeled back: its karaoke machine, Nascar flags, and Budweiser taps (still considered here, proudly within a driving range of St. Louis, an American beer).

Her voice wafted over the studio, crisp on the wintery air.

“If I don’t want to have fucking sex with you, I won’t have fucking sex with you.” She was not endangered, but lecturing. We in our corpse pose were a group of women stretched on floor mats in a room without furniture—not a non-silly contemporary pastime for an adult. Each of us was trying to relax, trying not to think the racing thoughts of our day, me trying not to think of Christmas village sets, what could be for dinner, how I ever ended up in this room, on this ground, in this Christmas village set that is really not mine at all, but that is as odd to me as tiny ceramic eighteenth-century German carriage house to my aunt’s living room in the 1980’s of Brussels, Wisconsin.

And all of this not two hundred yards from the courthouse, yep that one with its Back to the Future clock, its white moon face to the night.

Piece that begins and ends with partial listing of season-specific sensations

2009-12-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Knuckle skin cracking from dry winter air; lips a mess

Smell of car heater air mixed with chlorine smell coming from me, after lap swimming, wet hair under my hat stiff brushes sticking to wool of hat

White, white light—so diffuse, is it seeping in at the horizons? Whole sky one cloud sweater. Then all light pinkish at night before blue, and then total black, save lights from the refinery, like a carnival cruise ship come in to dock in the middle of town, white spume and Olympic torch, nude fire blast like fog horn

Total dearth of street lights. Blank windows like black paintings on our walls. Inside house at night, lights out, coffee table vs. shins

Most corn fields in sight from the road hacked down to stubble, but tractors still float past at morning intersections. Picking through New Year’s this year

Smell of fully melted pumpkin seeping over my desk

Shock and then even a little anger at mini, inflatable holiday nativity scene tethered, like hot-air balloon, to the courthouse lawn of our town. Then amusement at sight of it in daytime, deflated. (How seriously can we take these culture wars?)

Also inflated penguins sliding atop inflated mailbox, waving letters to Santa in the direction of the post office, courthouse south lawn

Winter branches, first top-frost of snow, grass blades and mud still poked up through; neighbor kids on their trampoline bouncing the shards of an ice puddle

Whole dead deer on highways, backs twisted acrobatically

Coming to full stop at a desolate country four-way, accelerating again all the way back up to highway speed

Letter to the editor: Our Christmas spirit needs revitalized. We’re the only town with no Christmas tree? And those same old wire snowflakes.

Christmas office party treats made with Eagle Brand, Tostitos Queso, marshmallows. I make a dessert with Vanilla wafers.

Trips through many towns, all the way to Iowa for Thanksgiving, up to Wisconsin and Minnesota for Christmas and New Years. One wonderful absence from list of seasonal sensations: airports. Anything airport related. Motoring (still, with our Oregon plates) through towns with names like Oblong, Eureka, Montezuma, Mount Pulaski, each with its own water tower, grain elevator, church steeples, Dollar General. At every town entrance, proclamations of local high school greats: division-clinching girls’ softball program; state champion football team; a pole vaulter, a wrestler. Along the main streets, names of more young people, each nailed to its own telephone pole with a yellow ribbon.

Invitation to a living nativity stuck in our back door. Will there be live donkey? Someone’s real baby? We are actually curious and want to go, but fall asleep on our couch.

When we visit the main streets—Story City, Iowa; Palestine, Illinois; Vincennes, Indiana—we get the feeling shop owners are calling ahead to one another down the line, letting them know we’re coming, though we’re really not buying much of anything. In Vincennes, we are given free peanuts in a newspaper cone, and organ music is piped out over the sidewalk. T buys a cast iron pot, and the clerk teases me: Now what will he want me to cook? Even the small PC repair shop seems to be in the antique business, even the record store, where the gray-ponytailed clerk/owner ambitiously offers to mail me a copy of the Dylan Christmas album on Tuesday, once it comes in (which he does, though not after calling me on Monday to assure me it’s coming). A woman in a thrift/Antique store has set up a murder scene from a famous play we do not know, but which once appeared at the local theatre currently being restored, she told us as if we knew all about that theatre. There are antique gun and blood and poker chips and liquor bottles on an antique bed. She has also turned off the heat in the shop. We drift through with our hands shoved under our armpits, searching for something we can pay her for. Her inventory includes remnants of her real life. She jokes about how she inherited the china in the glass case from an in-law, earning the set after decades of hand washing each piece after holiday gatherings, never breaking a one. Of course she’s the last one living of that clan too. That, she reflects, is also why.

Cold Frame

2009-11-18T19:55:00.000-08:00

This week we missed Portland.

T. was invited to a poetry reading. I heard a friend had an art show, and saw an email about the last shindig of the season at our old favorite, the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. Subsequent horrors included Facebook photos of fall hikes in the Gorge and, most heart-rending, one afternoon a slim, forwarded flier advertising the second half of an OPB documentary on wild horses. Now, we would never know what had become of Cloud. Finally for me, everything culminated in a dream: a bus moving around a downtown square, not in Portland but some dreamland city. Waking, I flashbacked to my youth. So many friends’ mothers had professed unabashedly, even proudly, the inability to “drive in a city.” (Luckily, not my own mother, who’d back a flat-bed down an aircraft carrier’s runway, just to see if she could.) But it could happen to me one day—this Midwestern-woman’s fate. I saw myself trapped in a center lane, white-knuckling a steering wheel, totally bereft of my once legendary ability to parallel park.

In my experience, the bottom of any midnight cycle of self-loathing and regret, the nadir of its swirling waters, returns one always to the same place: craigslist. And just as the post-break-up haircut is contra-advised, neither should one scour the postings of a longed-for city. Look away from the vintage furniture, upcoming micro-brew festivals, and shelter kittens.

Near the end of the horrible week, my parents called. “What are you guys up to this weekend?”

Not much. T. was attempting a dish with turnips. He’d been given a free bunch, greens included, which in Portland would have been like being given a glove slap to the face: a challenge to which one rose, or buckled in shame. But as I’d reported apple pies the previous week, a second culinary experiment as highlight seemed depressing even to me. Not only did my boomer parents have cooler music and hair in their teens than me, their social lives as retirees put T’s and mine to shame.

But on Saturday morning, the actual dawn of the weekend, we surprised ourselves with a plan. Today was the day we could make the cold frame.

In Portland, we’d lived in a third floor apartment and our garden was a pot of Basil on a sill. Here, moving into a house with a yard, we built a raised bed before we unpacked all our boxes. It was August, and the locals, with their pristine acres of fiercely-tended lawn grass, doubted we’d get anything going—but we did: radishes, spinach, lettuce, arugula, kale. Only the beets didn’t make it. As of November 15th, our garden is still blooming. T. thought we could keep it past Christmas if we built a cold frame, an enclosure with clear top panes sloping toward the south.

We just needed an old set of windows. But what we needed for that was a place like Portland’s Rebuilding Center. What was the equivalent here? In an antique shop in a town nearby, T. thought he’d seen a basement supply of old windows and doors, and so we headed there first—not realizing the odyssey upon which we’d set ourselves.

The path to the antique store took us first past an auction.

I’d seen a few advertised in the paper here—and I know that auctions occur all over the country and are not indigenous to the Midwest; there’s just something about them that feels like they are. Perhaps it’s all the old men in coveralls, the collective and public process of coming to consensus on the worth of a neighbor’s household of things—thing by thing.

The auction was much like a yard sale crossed with a tent revival. (Between the auctions and the yard sales, on a summer Saturday in one of these small towns it’s as if there’s been a community disaster, all that furniture out on lawns.) Two large groups of people moved with two jabbering auctioneers, one circling carefully organized tables in the back yard and one in the front. Were there any storm windows? No. But there were twenty plastic garbage cans, eighteen rakes, exercise bikes and end tables, quilts and cake pans and then boxes of things like handsaws, sewing patterns, glass lanterns, Christmas table runners, and half-used jugs of laundry detergent T. began fondling a cast iron pan. We could really make a pork chop, he began to murmur. I counted the cash in my purse. We were getting a number.

The auctioneer rattled off roasting pans, pitchers, mixing bowls, moving quickly down to single digit prices for first choice, then down to whole groups of items. T. and I tried not to look at each other, our eyes the same size as when we heard the price to rent an entire house. When the auctioneer announced the furniture, we slipped inside the house for a peek.

And there they were: a nubby, curving, three-piece sectional couch, a velour chair, a Wurlitzer, Murphy bed (working, the sign proclaimed), mod dressers and credenzas. The house could have served as a set from Mad Men. In the thin air around my thudding heart arose the wails of urban hipsters, choir invisible. And though I’d scoffed at those kids in their skinny jeans and body art back when I’d lived in PDX, I came charging out of that house with my number, freak flag, flying.

And I won that gold velour parlor chair for $2.

Do you want the sectional too ma’am? The auctioneer teased. The audience laughed, this joke being repeated for me. No one had wanted that couch, not even for a dollar.

We picked up a cast iron pot for $5, and then a granite roasting pan for $4. Now how will the windows fit in the car? T. said, the first to recall the day’s intended project as we struggled down the street with our purchases.

We would eventually find our materials—but not before an afternoon of rabbit trails from Antique stores to a glass shops, to random dumpsters by the railroad tracks, various yard sales, and a junk shop run by a little old man, a World War II vet, who held forth on aging, wives, Idaho, and school buses all while standing in front of a barn of used storm windows—but, oh, no, he didn’t have anything for sale. All those windows he was using. It was finally a tip from a employee at Rural King—a warehouse store deserving of its own entry—who frowned, shook his head, frowned, shook his head, and finally admitted he had almost backed his truck over someone’s discarded stack of used windows the other night, and where had that been? Finally, he remembered: his daughter’s neighbors. What street did she live on? He shook his head. Oh, no. But, he could describe how to get there—and we braced ourselves for another set of local directions: turn right by the new fence, left where the big tree used to be…

By the time we began building our cold frame, the sun was slipping behind the neighbor’s house. In the past few weeks, with most of the corn suddenly vanished, shorn down to its stubby stalks, our town’s true land formations have revealed themselves. The world is flat and bare here, even the leaves flying away, sometimes spinning straight up into the sky. I am aware fully of how different is this landscape from the one I knew in New Mexico, and in Oregon; at the same time, with all these stick-figure trees and burr-ish bushes, the great white-washed slate of sky, I feel so weirdly at home.

So how was our Saturday? How would we have spent this day if we were in Portland?

I knew enough not to ask T. directly—not after the week we’d had.

We surveyed our work and cracked two Stags, a brand we’ve begun drinking because it comes in aluminum. Our new town doesn’t recycle glass.

Now that we’re here—either exemplified in contrast, or exaggerated in holdout—we’re such Portlanders.

Then T. says he thinks we can plant another row of lettuce yet. We’ve still got all those seeds.

Zombie Night

2009-11-02T19:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, working the door at my school’s trick or treat event, I greeted some 2,000 of my fellow citizens while dressed as the bride of Frankenstein. Attendance estimates ran indeed as high as my white-and-black-striped beehive wig. But even if overestimated by half, the figure’s enough for bafflement. Barely does the entire county boast 20,000 souls. Apparently, from transformers to T-Rexes, from Hannah Montana to Hanna-Barbera, we all love our Halloween. Picture it: a small town and a dark October night (given, a year when the World Series involves two other teams) where a community event can actually draw the community.

I came home bushed. The librarians built a spooky maze through the stacks. The chemistry teacher, a former monk, wore a cowled robe as he passed, purple smoke brewing in a test-tube. Students in 70’s platforms or 80s rocker skirts, dressed as nerds, Geishas, cowboys, or news anchors helped direct traffic. One of my co-workers had lit upon the trick of inserting a balloon into the top of my sagging wig, but still, I’d left exhausted by all that hair. How were there so many people in this town? Who were they? Most had no idea who I was, but they’d smiled at me as I bent to smile at their children, my black lipstick cracking.

I’ll to add it to my list of things to do when new in a town: go out in a disguise. It’s nice to be where no one is very sure of every name; where all of us are in zombie make-up.

Luckily, back home, there was a frozen pizza in the fridge (no energy tonight for quinoa, not to mention squash curry or pumpkin gnocchi—most recent, grasping attempts to retain foodie-status so hard cultivated as Portlanders).

Luckily, too, an episode of 30 Rock, T. already in place on the couch.

Two months ago, T. and I forswore cable, snobbing it up for the guy from Mediacom, whom we weren’t averse to letting assume more noble pastimes on our part. Or, so we’d assumed. Instead, he’d looked around our barren rental, its piles of flimsy boxes of flimsy books, and, as if reading right through to our barren souls, said, “Oh, you’ll want cable soon.”

“We’re going to try it first and see,” T. squeaked in response, already suspecting he would indeed come to wish we’d sprung for cable. I’d have been more scared, too, but was busy sweating out a previous prediction, delivered moments earlier by our Mediacom oracle as he’d run a cable to my second floor office: it could take “a few hours” for our Internet to activate. What was I supposed to do for two hours offline? Learn to knit? (But how!)

The big secret—don’t tell the cable guy—most nights do find T. and the cat and I flopped on our beleaguered, well-traveled couch griping about Jay Leno, and his show that now dominates one-third of our channel options. How can that idiot be so popular? How can any majorly-produced, “mainstream” program derive so much humor from seventh-grade homophobia, with so little remark? How does any respectable actor agree to appear on this circus of dog tricks and fake tans?

But, on Thursday nights we get 30 Rock.

I began peeling the layers of my Wal-Mart Halloween-aisle nail polish. This season’s first few episodes have taken up my material, invoking the divide of urban and rural, blue and red, the coasts and the heartland. At the end of the season opener, fictional New York network executive Jack (Alec Baldwin) leans in to glare at the home audience while reciting, “Give the people what they want,” as the show cuts directly to, yes, Jay Leno’s. What else does America want? Country, answers the blond star Jenna, donning white boots and vamping to the Monday Night Football theme.

In tonight’s episode, Jack and Liz (Tina Fey) drive south, leaving their urban island for a rural outpost in search of a new cast member to whom “the people” will respond. “There is no ‘real’ America,” Liz insists, directly countering a distinction drawn by Sarah Palin (as well as recalling Fey’s impersonation). Jack—the Republican, a romantic cynic, nostalgic for the good old days of the good old boys—maintains there is more heart in the heartland, and that it can be brought back to Manhattan for profit. Before they leave, his aide attaches a fake (lesser) label over the real label on the underside of his tie, effecting Jack’s “country” disguise.

The joke of the episode turns on Liz’s assertion coming true: the rural inhabitants of Stone Mountain are just as mean-spirited, foul-mouthed, and clubbish as the New Yorkers. “We’re all the same. We’re all Americans,” Liz taunts Jack.

Beyond the gore-splattered surgical masks tonight, I didn’t see much that was, truly, evidence of the one all-encompassing ugly American. An overheard exchange confusing a student dressed as a Geisha (yes, a Japanese figure) with “the real Chinese students,” referring to actual Asian International students, not Chinese (and who were dressed as monsters, and naughty nurses), would have stopped the heart of my Study-Abroad-Administrator sister. But I fear this is a mistake made often in New York too.

It’s always the lesson: it’s too easy to lump black and white—or, red and blue. This small town in Illiana is not interchangeable with any other; it’s not like the one where T. grew up, 200 miles away, and it’s not like the one I’m from, 300 miles further. One “heartland” town isn’t the same as any other, just as Seattle is not Houston, Boston not San Diego.

Tonight, hundreds of fellow citizens came out to a cornfield for free candy, for a family event with neighbors. This is in a community with a major chocolate brand as a major factory employer, with so many acres of that corn grown for snack chips. Less than a mile from the school, a state prison houses a population nearly one-third of the town's, and at night its tower lights glow over the corn like a moon. The clown shoes, bloody butcher aprons, and Disney princesses only fit amidst this weirdness.

I am told that when we give away groceries for holiday meals later in the year, the lines will stretch out the door.

But even as the categories, urban and rural, feint and dance from the claimed corners of their distinctions—in wealth, opportunity, power, values—they dissolve.

One of my students was giving away carved pumpkins—these from the garden, where two weeks ago I’d been on the team rescuing the last produce from the frost. A green, un-ripened pumpkin can be cut early and brought indoors to keep turning as long as its “intake” stem is put into a vat of water.

“I didn’t think you’d be in to that sort of thing,” he commented as I loaded my car with my prize.

A pumpkin? A community garden? Wearing a beehive wig (lilting to the left now) and black nail polish?

“Small children?” I joked as trick-or-treaters came and went. “Only once a year.”

The pumpkins he’d carved were beautiful, each with a panel cut away, flipped around, carved with a ghoul’s face, and re-inserted deep within the pumpkin. I’d never seen the trick before. He’d researched it online.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, embarrassed. Then, “it’s cool. Never mind.”

And we laughed. And went home, probably, to eat our same candy giveaways in front of the same TV shows.

Unless he has cable.

On the Road / Going East, Young Man

2009-10-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

At the DMV the other day, side-by-side at computer testing stations and competing for points on our driver’s exams, T. finally beat me, and by a point more than he had the last time.

“You didn’t miss the question about the blind in a crosswalk again did you?” he asked as we dug out our passports and utility bills, ready to pose for our pictures.

“Worse. I missed the one about a red, octagonal sign.” It’s test anxiety, I’ve become certain. I suffer from it only at DMVs, though luckily, in the four states in which I’ve lived over the last decade, I’ve always passed.

We each took our turn sitting and grinning, accepting our new state ID’s, relinquishing our old. It wasn’t until we’d been living here in Illiana a month or so that I began to realize how entwined is the story of T. and me with moving; how, if chronicled, our relationship would be a road-trip novel and not a sit-com because there’s no set. Perhaps it was this second major move of ours that showed me: we were good at loading a van, forwarding our mail, plotting a route with the atlas. We were too good, knowing tips and tricks: getting copies of medical records, taping the screws for the futon frame to the futon frame.

We’d first met as transplants, expats, the stories of each of our lives—short as they’d been at that point—parallel stories of moving from small towns in the Midwest to colleges in the Midwest, and then to graduate school even further away. Of course that’s a common story: to grow up is to move on, and to go to college is to go away, maybe especially in the Midwest where success is measured in distance traveled from home. But just because it’s as old as Sister Carrie doesn’t mean it isn’t formative.

Nor is the territory we’ve now covered as a young couple, even unmarried, unusual for our generation: many of our friends shed addresses annually, enrolling in programs, accepting jobs, or moving to a city without a job, the couples carrying on commuter relationships or taking turns following one another—or not. Our best friends live hundreds of miles from us, scattered, and in constant motion. I sometimes wonder if cell phones and Facebook would so easily have replaced address books if it weren’t the case that address books stopped working; that physical addresses now slid from people.

The one difference, of course, is that this time we’ve moved back: we’ve returned to T.’s home state, and to within one strong football rivalry of mine. And from the beginning of our relationship, begun in the wilds of New Mexico, some part of it has been about the Midwest and this myth of our shared heritage.

What did it mean to be Midwestern? Among our grad school friends, we were not uncommon in our fly-over roots, though the others who claimed the lineage seemed to me to have come from less Midwestern-y places. (Is Kansas in the Midwest?) And some had come from Midwestern cities, whereas T. and I could count our hometowns’ stoplights. I knew what it was to drive an hour for the event of back-to-school shopping at Kohl’s. T. knew what it was to be the first of his family to finish college, and subsequently the only member, even of the cousins, to leave. But to New Mexico he’d brought a set of the homemade-game Washers. For friends, I prepared “Midwestern tacos,” which featured iceberg lettuce, ground hamburger with spice from packet, and black olives. Back home, these concoctions were only called “tacos,” just as any food paired with rice and soy sauce was “Chinese.”

In T.’s writing there were corn cobs and crows; in mine, silos and Saran-wrapped casseroles “keeping” on the frozen floorboards of Fords. Maybe I in particular claimed the label Midwestern all the more fiercely once I’d left the place, indulging that perverse part of my personality that refused to accept even gentle teasing and had instead learned to embrace and incorporate such feedback—about my smile, patience, or cheeriness—like a tree growing around an axe blade. When told that my Midwestern stories were, um, nice, I decided I was a regional writer, misunderstood, writing about a region that was misunderstood: its underlying passion masked by a veneer of simplicity; the subtexts of its dialogue too faint for the untrained ear. Maybe, like Alice Munro, what I was doing was Canadian Southern Gothic. The result: twelve more “plots” in which women and lonely teenagers did a lot of longing and staring, driving aimlessly along rural routes or talking politely in diner booths, usually about the weather. Though that was fitting as my primary antagonists were forms of weather: tornado, snow, and the sheer cold of cold itself.

To some dear Texan and New York girlfriends, city-savvy, with whom I huddled in a bar booth at least one full year of grad school, Midwestern meant white bread, fairly synonymously. A sit com of us during that time, or so we said during a dry spell for everybody, would be called No-Sex in Not-A-City. That set would have been cheap, consisting entirely of one torn, plastic-covered bar booth. Of our bartender, viewers would see only a pair of hands. My character, the Midwesterner, would have been some kind of cross between Miranda and Charlotte: a woman, maybe a little awkward or perhaps chunky or geeky, but friendly, one with Miranda’s no-fuss, no-make-up tomboy look and Charlotte’s general prudishness and culturally insular upbringing.

When girlfriends of mine visited from home, my New Mexico friends commented that we all had “such beautiful Midwestern hair,” which I think now means healthy, but totally unstyled. Pony-tail ready. One of those Texan friends has since relocated to Minneapolis, and I keep meaning to ask about the effects on her hair.

In Portland—a place like the Midwest where women can wear tennis shoes and leave hair unstyled—there were lots of Midwesterners; they were all successful people who’d left—that is to say, left successfully. Many whom I encountered were catering, or adjunct teaching. (I was doing both.) When we’d meet up, without speaking of it directly (after all, that wouldn’t be nice), we’d acknowledge what we knew to be the reason for leaving: the Midwest was boring. A Prairie Home Companion was funny, but who could listen for more than an hour? And maybe not at all if you weren’t in the car.

Of course there were people who’d left the Midwest for more serious considerations than bookstores and art scenes, say they were other than white, or gay, or simply men who don’t love football, but who do like to cook, and maybe even bake a little bread or perhaps play the trombone past high school... Or women who wanted to go someplace they wouldn’t forever be known as girl. (There’s one across the street from me here. I haven’t met her yet but I’ve been told by other neighbors: “And that little girl over there? She’s a chemist at Marathon!”) There are reasons that, on the west coast, even people-from-the-Midwest-originally will say, with a wink, “Have a good trip back East,” when you are only flying to Milwaukee.

Perhaps there is something in the American imagination that suggests that those who landed in the Midwest were those who’d headed west, young man, but who hadn’t made it very far. Even here, T. and I have noted the odd quickness with which some locals will put their own town down: All we got here… Now if you wanna drive to Indy… My students write copiously of their boredom and disdain. They long for a place where there’s action, where it’s cool—like, maybe, the glittering Terre Haute.

So maybe it was a very strange thing, and not a normal move, for T. and me this time to load up our life and point our Budget truck East, back to the Midwest, and to the rural Midwest at that: the red patches even in these blue states. When I mentioned that we were leaving Portland to a young man all alone at a vacant truck stop in a deserted stretch of Idaho, he said as much to me, utterly mystified: doesn’t sound like a good trade.

Though we were moving for better jobs, and for a chance at affordable housing, it felt like the end of an odyssey.

We were returning to where we’d come from, originally, to where our stories had started.

And it felt a lot like failing.

A Water Witch

2009-09-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

My birthday is the 11th of September, now Patriot Day, a day that belongs to history books and TV news shorthand, and to a whole lot of people, worldwide, other than just me. “9/11,” grocery store clerks, insurance operatives, and DMV attendants repeat sadly, and sometimes suspiciously as if I’ve brought something evil into their room, bearing those numbers. My students are Y’s, or Milennials, and in the language of generation coding, 9/11 belongs to them—along with Columbine and social networking. The events of my birthday outmoded me, all of us X’ers, aged us as surely as MTV did the Boomers.

Yet for me, my birthday has always been synonymous with finding myself in a new place and time and the world around me made over completely. That’s what happens with a birthday smack at the start of the school year (and then, “the academic calendar”). Each year my birthday has had to seek me out, track me—sometimes only to the next classroom down the hall. (In those years, it was both perilous and exciting to decide if bringing cupcakes was going to be cool.) Other times, I’ve been newly living in a new city on my birthday, and three times this decade in a new state. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was waking up alone in my first apartment, having recently relocated across the country to a southwestern desert corner where even the weeds were unrecognizable.

Maybe everyone has that feeling on a birthday: that of holding closely an enormous and personal secret, something at once childish, as commonplace as a navel, and yet also irregular, as we know from the mad-hatter’s inversion, the wickedness of a party for an unbirthday.

This year in Illiana, my birthday had to find me in a washer and dryer repair shop on the edge of Amish country. It was not a significant birthday—not a 21 or a 30 or a 40—and having given it a big slip this year, another cross-country move, it did not seem right to ask too much of the day, that it deliver or perform like a younger model, or a special commemorative edition. Yet on this birthday in 2009, I, bearer of the mark of the beast, would be discovered a water witch.

Ken H

He’s dowsed all over the county—and even out of state, in Arizona. Doodlebugging, it’s called, when searching not for water but oil. Anything might be sought through dowsing: pipes, missing persons. Incidentally, Arizona’s also where this year’s national water witching convention will be held, which seems like it’s the joke—dowsing for water in the desert. Or it’s the ultimate challenge, as serious as serious gets, like scuba diving in the Bermuda Triangle.

My first go at dowsing, and my first success, was in dowsing for Ken himself.

First to find Ken H’s town, wind your way through the Illiana corn maze in a southeasterly direction; then, to find his shop, just look for his truck. You know, Ken’s truck. Inside the shop itself—larger on the inside than it looks from without—confront the second maze, inner coil of your journey: this, the graveyard of used major appliances, Kenmore, Maytag, and Frigidaire, with representatives from every recent (and not so recent) decade, in every state of repair. Amidst the rowed machines lie spare dryer ducts and agitators, ice cube-maker bins and heating coils. Every once in a while, humming beneath this jumble, one of the machines, dryer or a deep freezer, turns out to be on—extension cord snaking through unseen holes back to a power source.

And on the wall by the cash register—amongst other tackings and postings, a sign about old fishermen, a tongue twister concerning the shop’s loose hours of operation (here when we’re here, not open when when we’re not)—hung a photocopied newsletter article concerning a Kentucky water witch, a man with a long white beard. Not, incidentally, Ken.

I’ve been intrigued by water witching ever since T. told me he had a grandfather who was one; somehow it makes him sexier, like his eighth, or maybe it’s sixteenth, of Cherokee blood. My parents have a collection of troll dolls from Norway, and one with a warty grin and knobby hands holds a crooked Y-shaped stick toward the ground, leering and suggestive.

“Pretty wild stuff, huh?” Ken H., white-haired (no beard) but twinkly-eyed himself, returned his pencil to its perch behind his ear. On a previous visit (I’m a terrible buyer, a hemmer and hawer), we’d talked Maytag washer transmissions (new ones are shoddy, Ken averred) and I’d countered with a question about energy use. Keep an old machine out of a landfill, keep a new one from being built, Ken had shrugged, and I suspected him of spying right through to my liberal heart and its weakness for the eco-chick. Or, of noting my Oregon plates.

Yet Midwesterners and environmentalists do share a common ground when it comes to reusing, and making do—or, at least some of the older ones still do, like Ken.

And this time, I dowsed him: “You can do it too. You can witch water.”

He blinked back in surprise, and then again, sneakily, proudly.

“What’s the date,” he was saying a few moments later, looking up as he filled in the receipt. Then, the water witch shivered again, two brisk tsk tsks under his breath: “What a horrible day.”

I finished my check with a flourish. “It’s my birthday, actually.”

Range, depth, belief

Like I said, I didn’t have big expectations for the day; I spent my birthday morning buying a used washer and dryer, the first I’d ever own, no quarters required, and what day more appropriate for a thing like that, which, surely, must age you?

After he and T. wrangled the machines into our basement, a house the water witch thought he might have been in one time before, Ken H strode abruptly back to his truck, and then returned. He’d brought rods, two L-shaped dowsing sticks, each with a small copper tube on the end where he gripped so as to show clearly any abrupt swivel was of the rod, and not of him.

He said, lip twitching with a secretive smile, we’d just see if I could do it.

“I can tell depth, too,” he’d told me in the shop, which was more than the man in the news article could do. Back in the day, as dowsers have done for centuries, he’d used a fruit tree branch, Y shaped. He showed me how he’d hold it, palms and wrists up, arms and stick out in front straight and loose. When that sticks drops, he said, you feel bark burning in your hands, twisting abruptly and taking you with. You couldn’t stop it if you wanted.

How does he tell the depth?

“The stick points down, and then it bobs.” He gestured with his hand, palm down, like patting a small child on the head, slowly. “Count one, two, three bobs. Four.”

“What are the bobs? Feet?”

“Feet. Then—then, can you reckon what it’ll do when it’s hit the bottom of the water? It will shake side to side then, like saying ‘no.’” He swept with his palm.

In Arizona, that water he’d dowsed was down 400 feet. Oh yeah, there’s water there in Arizona. Just pretty far down for anybody wanting to get at it.

“Here you go,” he said, after showing me once, taking a quick turn around our lawn, a rod in each hand, his strides long and sure, like pacing out the boundaries for a backyard volleyball court or horseshoe pit.

The Skeptics Dictionary notes that there is no scientific explanation or evidence for dowsing—for water, oil, minerals, or otherwise, and therefore suggests the practice be considered divination. I like that it is, in this way, considered at all. I’d expected a sharper rebuke. One explanation for the phenomenon is that the rods merely reflect the subtle movements of the witcher’s hands, the witcher in expectation of water skillfully reading—whether consciously or not—other clues of the landscape. Of course the scientific studies that have concluded as much have dumbfounded water witchers, and people who have watched water witchers, who will detail the myriad times water has been found—or oil, or what have you: the proof in the pudding.

Was it hereditary? I’d asked Ken H.

It’s more about belief, he’d said, after thinking for a moment. You had to believe in it.

I held my arms out yoga-straight. My first few tries, striding about my lawn on my birthday, no underpants on (and I hoped no one knew; you should have seen my pile of laundry!), I was pretty sure it was the wind that caught and swung the rods, sending them spinning and crossing into an X. Then the right one moved so sharply inward I thought it might whip a 360 fully and catch me in the face. I turned and walked back.

It works best when crossing over a vein, Ken H. explained. If you’re walking along in the vein, the rods may just be confused.

We walked along the front of the house, and found something again. The gas meter? We were next to it. The rods crossed like ski tips.

“This is also where our basement leaks,” I said, laughing. The thing about witching is that you don’t really know you’re right unless you’re willing to dig up your yard.

On the side of the house, my sticks crossed as I crossed the two eaves trough lines, and uncrossed in the dead space between the downspouts. Ken H. and T walked around behind the garage, looking for the likely water pipe line from the house.

I handed Ken his sticks. Quickly, he found what must surely be the main water line, catching it on both sides of the garage, following it back to the house. We all ended up at garden hose, where the rods crossed for me, too.

Of course, Wikipedia also suggests that in most geographic locations, water can be found nearly anywhere, at some depth. In our wet Illiana valley, the spring rains this year flooded fields until June, affecting dramatically the corn crop, which was not knee-high by the fourth of July, but barely planted in the sopping ground. On the news we’d been hearing about it, and in the grocery stores, and post office, and bank lines, though when I ask around, I haven’t found people yet who are corn growers themselves, or who know the corn growers; and yet we are surrounded by the corn and when it rains we think and we talk about its effect on the corn.

Here, we are employed by the Marathon factory or the Hershey factory or Wal-Mart; otherwise we work in gas stations, car washes, tanning salons, government offices, funeral homes, real-estate offices, the hospital, the state prison, or the schools. There is an ethanol plant, though it’s unclear how many it employs. There are not many cars.

“How was your birthday?” T would ask, later.

I did laundry; I’m wearing clean clothes, and eating M&Ms, sugary from corn syrup. I don’t like to turn on the TV on my birthday, so we went to a movie: a blockbuster thousands of people across the country, and around the world, watched with me today. It will gross 100 million, though in our small theater we were six, and one older woman fell asleep, snoring.

During the movie, even I forget what day it is. Birthday. National Day of Remembrance.

Well, it found me, I tell him. Even here.

August Arrival

2009-09-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

Day 2, a Monday, (August 10)

The cicadas here are as big and round and wrinkled as your thumb, their squat bodies as seemingly unfit for flight as bomber planes. Our morning began with an inspection of a dead one on our sidewalk, its wings like paperclips that had been once unfolded and then, for not quite the same effect and never again the same use, folded back. At night, those suckers can sing. And they’ve got something on the evening sounds to which we’d grown accustomed in Portland (rattling shopping carts, stoop-conversations, very early morning delivery trucks). You can tell there are millions of cicadas out there in the corn. That’s why their size, once you get one up close, is so completely alarming.

Today, our second day here, was our first for goods and services. Yesterday, a Sunday, we couldn’t find a place open for a beer, striking out four for four as we traveled by bike to the local taverns. It wasn’t just the bars; on Sundays the super Wal-Mart and Marathon station go it alone in conducting their businesses, the infidels. Except, this August Sunday, the pool was also open. We’d first spied this gem from Portland, on Google maps: the outdoor rec center pool, not three blocks from the house we’d be renting, a mysterious sapphire rectangle wedged within a bigger greenish rectangle, near a couple of baseball diamond shapes. In person, there was also a long curving slide, diving boards both high and low, mini-golf, and concessions.

It was a hot day, the kind when steamy air catches in the throat already at nine a.m., and with nothing open we padded our way to the pool in our flip-flops, paying $3 to the high school-aged girl in the booth in the shade who took one look at us and—as we were conspicuous, I guess, in our age and our childlessness—correctly pronounced, “You haven’t been here before, have you.” She explained about the hourly safety checks, one of which would be happening shortly, right as we were walking in. At a blast of a horn everyone cleared the pool, heading toward lawn chairs and towels, tugging at swimsuits and pressing damp footprints onto hot concrete. We began scanning for white plastic chaises of our own, T already naming the dives he would complete once re-entry was permitted. In the meantime, we watched the teenaged lifeguards climb down from their towers, stretch both lazily and self-consciously in their summer tans and sunglasses, and then make their own dives into the pool, surfacing with languid breaststroke kicks to shake their hair gently. Safety check: a wake-up for the guards. For the swimmers, a hint toward toilet use, sunscreen re-application, and concession purchases.

But that was Sunday, the day when nothing was open. Today we had business, and set out on a short walk to the town square, around which traffic circles counter-clockwise only and at the center of which sits the courthouse, still the tallest and most impressive building in town. (It’s Protestant country, here in Illiana. And, though the two competing banks are multi-storied they are still too new-looking for full grandeur of presence.) Other businesses on the ring include a nail parlor, a Goodwill, the Post Office, a bar, the Cable company, and a few other bank/investment type places, and a handful of antique shops. With the shops—faded facades and mismatched awnings, window cases dusty—it’s a little as if a few of the craftiest proprietors simply out-waited their neighbors, took on the whole shebang of the square’s aging, unsold inventory, and changed their signs. Voila! Antiques! The museum of What Was Before Wal-Mart (B.W.M).

It wasn’t quite as hot as the day before—or, we were pretending it wasn’t as our plans for the day did not include the pool and instead we were toting our wallets and ID’s, insurance forms and contact numbers. We crossed the railroad tracks—the long straight seam that divides the town, north and south, and which stretches like the equator itself from both ends toward the diminishing horizon. Then, coming upon the square from the west, we found it: a two-story affair on the back side of the courthouse ring, white bricked and with narrow stairs and high windows. We rounded the corner, assessing casually another emptied, once beautiful building…except, there was a light on inside this one, and a man in a white apron sweeping. A well-designed but homemade sign spelled out opening, each letter occupying its own white square, strung across the window like a necklace.

I convinced T to come with me to inspect. So far, it didn’t seem like we’d be the ones to err on the too-friendly or too-nosy side here. In our quest to find beer, a young person I’d singled out by his long hair and black tee as a likely drinker not only offered a run-down of all the package stores in the next county over and their respective driving distances, but also his cell number in case we got lost. A neighbor had offered to help carry our moving boxes, and a co-worker had presented a phone book (laughably thin) that she’d personalized with labeled sticky tabs for services a newbie might require. At the new corner shop, our new best-friend-to-be didn’t disappoint either. He met us at the door, and invited us in to look around. He had muffins, was opening a bakery. Oh, and he’d recently lived in Portland; he’d just returned to his hometown so he could start his own business.

I’ve moved to new towns before—new towns that are very different from the ones I’d left—so I’ve been preparing myself to rationalize all the feelings correctly, with proper perspective. But hearing the name of your old town unexpectedly on a new person’s lips is like hearing your name spoken once again by a dead lover, raised from the grave—or so I imagine. Out that bakery window flew all the rules T and I had agreed to (we would not talk endlessly about our old town to people in our new town; we would not let on that our new town, with its super store, seemingly no recycling, and smoke-belching, night-glowing, high-fence-having oil refinery built half on top of an old cemetery terrified us just a little).

Also chief among my worries has been the age-old one of any newbie: we wouldn’t make any friends. In our new town, like in the small Midwestern towns both T and I grew up in—there might be a real glut of people in our age group—not to mention people in our age group coupled but not married, with school loans instead of home loans. All good small-town mythologies have it quite clearly that to be successful is to leave—though this doesn’t lessen the moral failure in doing so. (Returning eventually rights the wrong, if you’ve been properly humbled by the failure of your big-city dreams.)

With the baker we talked shopping, whole grains and chain stores and Amish products and grass fed beef. By the time we left, he was pulling out a post-it-note and writing down the name of his friend who teaches yoga classes in town. “There’s no sign or advertising,” he joked. “But if you come to the 6 o’clock class, there’s a few people who know the poses.”

I told him about the yoga class I’d attended in another small Midwestern town. Someone had cross-stitched wall hangings of the various animals and elements after which the poses are called—mountain, pigeon, fish. East meets West. The marriage of the Vedic Tradition and Joanne’s Fabrics.

“Now there’s three of us who don’t belong,” our new friend the baker said, maybe mischievously, maybe ruefully. Later, I’d mention his name and the new bakery to a neighbor who would say, sighing, “Oh, him.”

I was reminded of a co-worker who’d said softly while shaking my hand, “Don’t let the culture here scare you.” Then there was the bookstore owner I’d spoken with on the square. She’d looked carefully around her (completely empty) shop before whispering to me, “There are places to go other than Wal-Mart.”

“There are some good people here,” the baker said finally, and I began to wonder if these were the words, roughly, of a secret code. “You’ll see. There’s a few of us here.”

And maybe there are—and maybe in droves, just like those cicadas that haven’t stopped yet, out there in the corn.