The Candidates' Debate

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Village People

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

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

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

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

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

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.