Lessons Learned on the Road.

1. Minnesota

The peculiar tendency of Minnesotans to dissemble can be construed one of two ways: as dishonesty, or as an honest attempt to make people’s day better. Of course it’s complex; of course it’s both; but an outsider will encounter it, and my experience is that he will have a strong reaction, positive or negative, to it. Minnesotans, like all people, can’t see the forest for the trees, for the most part: I had a conversation with a young Minnesotan colleague of mine lately in which she sort of off-handedly wondered, “What are our values?”

I answered thusly: “Passive-aggression. Dishonesty. Conformity.” I was having a bad day.

Being Minnesotan, she took this rank assholery politely enough, though it was clear from her body language and tone of voice that she was kind of mad. Which just made me feel like being more of an asshole.

I know, I’m not a very nice person. But I’ve never valued niceness; I’ve never lived in a place where people valued niceness. Friendliness, sure; kindness, definitely; but niceness? Even when I’m in a good mood, niceness feels to me like dishonesty, which, I think, is why I am repelled by Minnesotan culture, where other people are attracted to it. I can see its value: there’s something communitarian in the people there, and I think there’s genuine good intent that motivates the behavior. But in the end I always feel like I’m surrounded by people seething with barely-concealed rage.

There’s a cottage industry, in which I have made a small amount of headway, of interpreting New York City, the understanding being that New York is so big and complex that it must always be engaged hermeneutically. It’s true, to some extent; you cannot have so many people of so many kinds packed in such a small space without creating a kind of massive, cramped frontier that will inevitably look incomprehensible at first glance.

Contrast that with the general understanding that Midwesterners are friendly and relatively uncomplex. That simply isn’t true. How, for instance, to read this moment, when I accidentally left a woman standing on my doorstep for five minutes in single-degree temperatures because I didn’t hear the doorbell ring:

ME: Sorry to leave you out in the cold there for so long.

LADY: It was pretty cold.

As though we were just discussing the weather, and she was unwilling to acknowledge my apology because it would imply that there was some minor conflict happening here. I think. How about this, which happened when I was wearing a t-shirt with a small swear word on it:

RECEPTIONIST AT DENTIST: That’s an interesting shirt.

See? You can make a career of interpreting New York, but that’s only because there are so many people there who will actually tell you what they think. Interpreting Minnesota, I posit, is impossible. It’s why the state’s literary giant, Garrison Keillor, is essentially a cartoonist.

2. Iowa

Weirdly, my entire understanding of Iowa is this combination of literary myths; I guess because it is the home of the great behemoth of literary schools, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, it is the setting of a great number of novels that manage to be trend-setting without being remotely avant-garde. And so my image of the place it caught up in Jane Smiley’s Lear adaptation, A Thousand Acres, WP Kinsella’s mythic baseball stories, especially The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (my candidate for greatest baseball novel ever), and Bill Bryson’s memoir / popular history of midcentury America, The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It’s like the border between Minnesota and Iowa is a looking glass, somehow.

So I suppose it’s fitting I’ve only ever passed through. One time my brother & I were visiting extended family in a tiny town in SE Nebraska and his car, an old Volvo station wagon, broke down. We took it to the local mechanic, who regarded it with a distinct air of I don’t truck with this foreign shit, and managed to get it running well enough for us to drive it to Omaha, a hundred-odd miles away, which is where the nearest place that would deal with a Volvo was located. Because that tiny town we were in was so remote, we had to drive out-of-state to get to the freeway, and on our way to Omaha we sliced through the southwest corner of Iowa. We stopped at a Subway sandwiches in Iowa and ate. Though I have driven through the state three times since, that’s the only time I’ve ever got out of the car.

3. Nebraska

I recently wrote a story that took place primarily in Nebraska, which is where my father’s family landed after coming over from Ireland, before leapfrogging out to Oregon. I turned it in for Charlie B’s class. His interpretation — much cleverer than my intent — was that the family involved (a thinly-disguised version of my own) could not live in Nebraska, but ironically could not live anywhere else, either. The story was frustrating to write, in part because I anticipated most of the criticism it would receive in workshop and tried to head it off at the pass — only to have the measures I took create new holes in the story, much bigger and more drastic than the ones it had before. I think I just have to be willing to piss off my readers sometimes.

Anyhoozy, Nebraska, in case you didn’t know, is the flattest, least-scenic state in the union, challenged only (in my experience) by North Dakota. Gertrude Stein famously (almost) said of Oakland, CA that “there’s no there, there”, which, if you’ve been to Oakland, is probably the stupidest possible thing you could say about one of America’s strangest and most interesting small cities. The reason the quotation continues to pop up, though, is not because it is so apt for Oakland, but because it’s so apt for so many other places. I suppose it’s obvious to use it in reference to America’s Big Empty — Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas — but it also applies a lot of other places I’ve been in my life: San Jose, CA; Spokane, WA; Uniondale, NY; Phoenix, AZ; &c. But Nebraska screams for it. It’s not a snotty insult when you’re talking about the vast majority of Nebraska; there’s literally no distinguishing feature to a huge portion of the state: no hills, no forests, no significant rivers, no people at all. A lot of it isn’t even farmed. It’s just a freeway headed somewhere far away, and miserable heat.

A side note: Nebraska is the first place I ever heard a white person use the word ain’t as anything other than a faintly racist mimickry of the way black people talk. I was driving through a few years ago and stopped at a gas station. I tried to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights, but they were out. The woman behind the counter said, “Ain’t got those.” If I were cleverer, or more energetic, or had more space here, I might spend some time to dissect why that threw me for such a loop, but I’m not going to right now.

4. Wyoming

The less said about Wyoming, the better.

5. Utah

It’s awful, in the old sense of the word, how quickly the terrain turns from flat, ugly, and pockmarked to mountainous, green, and beautiful, once you’ve crossed the state line from Wyoming to Utah. In Utah the mountains erupt from the horizon and loom so large they seem to ask astonishing, fundamental questions about creation that it’s a bit hard for a bitter atheist like yours truly to answer: perhaps it’s not such a coincidence that the Mormons landed there and had no difficulty sustaining their faith. Utah is nothing if not beautiful.

In my life I’ve spent one night in Utah, and one in Wyoming. In Wyoming, I stayed in Laramie, which is a prosperous college town that I found exceptionally ugly and alienating — flat, wooden, dull. In Utah, I stayed in Ogden, which is an impecunious college town that I found beautiful — vertiginous, green, pleasantly odiforous. I don’t wish to read into the character of each state too much about its physical geography, but I do believe that the differences b/w Laramie and Ogden pretty much encapsulate every reason that northern Utah is lovely and wondrous and plentiful while southern Wyoming in desperate and monotonous and desolate.

The one thing I noticed in Ogden — the thing that made me know that, for all its beauty, my personal reaction to that part of the world would likely be even worse than the one I’ve had to Minnesota — was the preponderance of billboards dedicated to anti-abortion causes. Now, anybody who has ever driven cross-country knows that almost every tiny town out in the middle of nowhere has some kind of anti-abortion billboard either at the town entrance or at its exit; but Ogden is part of the substantial metropolis that surrounds Salt Lake City, and yet is littered with this kind of culturally conservative (for lack of a better word) propaganda. These range in subtlety: some are simply ads for adoption agencies that urge the viewer to “do the right thing”; others are as nuanced as a ball-peen hammer, with Bible verses arrayed in block letters beneath the smiling fizzes of crushingly adorable infants.

So, here’s the question: what’s the effect of these billboards? I have no doubt that the people who put them up believe, very sincerely and almost certainly fervidly, that abortion is a moral wrong and (if the rhetoric of your average Republican congressman is to be credited) something on the order of a crime against humanity. I don’t really agree, but I am also that rare person who is so ambivalent about this issue as to feel like he doesn’t really have a firm position. (Or maybe we’re not that rare. Anyway, we’re not that loud.) But I would suggest that the cumulative message here is less a pro-life one than a pro-conformity one; these kinds of ads, meant that way or not, function like the paintings of Saddam that adorned the walls of every town in Iraq before the late unpleasantness: OBEY, they tell you. Whether or not everybody agrees, they know what the normative position is. Being pro-choice in otherwise lovely Ogden, Utah is a defiant stance, and thus a difficult one. And that’s in a big city. Imagine if you live in some pooshit town in rural South Dakota, and the only billboard you’ve EVER seen is the one that tells passing motorists that every fetus is a sacred object to be protected above the lives of actual adult humans who have committed sins (ie, all of us). Must be a bit rough.

6. Idaho

I showed up for third grade and there was a new kid there: Adam B. He seemed all right, but at the time I don’t think either of us made much of an impression on the other. He had come from Boise. Years later, he and I would forge an ironclad bond as two of very few open atheists in a Catholic high school. To tell you the truth, that is all I have ever known about Idaho: it mints my friends.

7. Oregon

I suppose that Oregon is, in large part, not that different to these other places. But as I crossed the Snake River just east of Ontario, OR, something washed over me: though it was another five hours to my home — half the daily drive — I felt myself unclench, relax. I felt like I could have pulled over in the Drinkwater Pass, bivouacked, and been at home. It helps that that pass is the most beautiful part of the entire 1900-mile drive from Minneapolis to Bend, full of weird geography, little valleys, swollen streams, mesas stained with vegetation, skies so radically blue that, again, one begins to have astonishing thoughts that challenge his beliefs. But not really. I realize that there’s nothing particularly natural, or perfect, about my home state — that Idaho could extend another hundred miles west, or Washington envelop the whole thing, or whatever, and it would make at least as much sense as it does now — but I have sufficiently absorbed the idea of Oregon as My Home that the instant I crossed the state line I felt good, for the first time in months. It’s been a rough semester. Minnesota is a rough place for an Oregonian to live; we share dark winters and long summer solstices, but Oregonians are trained to believe that the fundamental and important thing about other people is that what they do is none of your goddamned business, and Minnesotans are trained to believe precisely the opposite. Oregon is not about Don’t Tread on Me; it’s about Don’t Tread on Him. Minnesota is about Don’t Let Him Tread on Us.

God, I’m glad to be home.