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place like home |
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At several points in my life I have tried living in places other than the Midwest. I spent two dreadful adolescent years in New Jersey surrounded by the future junk bond traders and real estate agents of America. During my high school years, I lived in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community that had no sense of community whatsoever, a place without a center and without sidewalks. I came back to Ann Arbor for college, but afterward got a job that allowed me to travel the country, from Coral Springs, Florida, which I loathed, to Thousand Oaks, California, which I merely disliked. My wife and I moved to Boston after we were married, but the people talked too quickly, the roads were too confusing, and the “history” a little too precious. We also lived in Maine, but never got used to sunrises at 3:00 a.m. and never got over the feeling (nor were allowed to forget by the Maine natives we knew) that we were tourists passing through—perhaps a self-fulfilling judgment, because after less than a year there we returned home (it was always home) to Michigan, and here we have stayed. Thus I have
come to think of the Midwest, and the ways it makes me comfortable,
not so much on its own terms as in how it differs from places I
have liked less. As I write this on a night in early spring with
the snow falling outside my window, it occurs to me that the Midwest
may be the kind of place that can only be truly appreciated in negative
terms. It’s not too hot, for example, or too dry; it’s
also not arctically cold more than two or three days out of the
year. It’s not overdeveloped in most places, but also not
stagnant in spite of its Rust Belt reputation. People aren’t
unwelcoming, but neither are they aggressively polite. My inability to positively assert what I like about Michigan, where I’ve spent the majority of my life, may derive in large part from its familiarity. It’s hard to really see something you’ve looked at every day since childhood, which is why so many writers find they must leave the places they call home in order to write about them. It is also why we need writers and artists in the first place—to reintroduce us to the strange particularity of our everyday surroundings. Unfortunately, the Midwest, despite being a great source of writers in particular (including most of the American literary giants of the 20th century from Hemingway to Morrison), has rarely been a great source of material for those writers except as metaphors employed in the cause of sentimentality or ridicule. Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” cemented the myth of heartland cherry-pie Americana; on the flip side, Jay Gatsby’s fatal flaw was his small-town Midwestern-ness, his belief in decency and romance, which F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed as both tragic and foolish. Meanwhile, novelists have rarely had anything kind to say about the great industrial cities of Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland, although in the popular imagination, and to a great degree in fact, those places were the engines that made America’s current hyperpower status possible. Our unwillingness to allow (for example) the outdated American steel industry to die in the early 21st century attests to our collective nostalgia for the time when American factories supplied the world. In the kind of cultural feedback loop we’ve all grown accustomed to in recent years, many Midwesterners adopted such conceptions about themselves and the places they lived with earnest enthusiasm. My grandfather, who worked for decades in the factory town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, noted with pride that Fort Wayne had been number seven on Hitler’s list of American cities to bomb because of its contributions to the American military machine. My mother’s favorite musical as a young woman was The Music Man, with its famous song about Gary, Indiana. And I’ll admit I’m a sucker for George Bailey and his beautiful old Bedford Falls; I’ve occasionally fantasized about running along Main Street in Chelsea and yelling, “Hello, Seitz’s Tavern! Hello, Jiffy Mix plant!” But little of that mythic Midwest still exists today, except in pockets like Chelsea which have been propped up by Ann Arbor money. Most small towns in Michigan are either in decline or turning to tourism to boost their economies; small farms are being carved into generic subdivisions; the schools, once among the nation’s finest, are in steep decline; the bridges are crumbling; the roads are pitted and scarred. Detroit, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Macchu Picchu or Easter Island, a place where giants once walked the Earth and then vanished, leaving behind only their awe-inspiring ruins. Such a cultural landscape can be no one’s idea of heartland America. For those of us who call it home, who have an inability to be quite satisfied anywhere else, it’s time we began taking a closer, deeper look at the place we think we know so well. A2P |
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