by Matt Weiland
Speaking of Barack Obama, he is of course an Illinoisian. He may have spent some time in Hawaii, but he is an Illinoisian in all ways that matter, and is heir to Lincoln in more facets than one. Like Lincoln, he is thin. Like Lincoln, he can deliver a speech. Like Lincoln, he has a wry sense of humor and has the savvy to know when to use it. Like Lincoln, he inspires crowds with his oratory and feels at home around people, all people, all the time. He is comfortable, for example, around Dick Durbin, the other senator from Illinois, a man less magnetic than Obama but no less steadfast and true. In the mold of his predecessor Paul Simon, Durbin looks like a suburban bank manager but he is bold and brave: he voted against the war in Iraq, is frequently called the most liberal member of the Senate, and consistently gets an F from the NRA, god bless him. Durbin is fan and friend to Obama, erstwhile opponent of Hillary Rodham Clinton, yet another proud product of this great state. She was born in Chicago and raised in Park Ridge, a close and comfortable suburb of the city, by conservative parents who instilled in her the importance of hard work and allegiance to conservative values. As a young woman, she worked for and voted for Barry Goldwater, and came to her senses before the election of his heir, Ronald Reagan, yet another favorite son of the state—or at least of its downstate denizens.
Though often thought of as a Californian, Reagan grew up in a way that says everything about the small-town essence of most of Illinois. His family spent time in tiny Tampico and finally settled in Dixon, both towns in the northwest part of the state. In Dixon young Reagan attended high school, worked as a lifeguard—he saved seventy-seven lives—and starred in plays and sports, in various roles and with varying reviews. He attended Eureka College and afterward began a career as a radio announcer, specializing in baseball play-by-play. While calling games for the Cubs, Reagan traveled to California, where he took a screen test, which led to his career as an actor. The rest was the rest, whatever you want to make of it.
In any case, Reagan, too, was made in Lincoln’s image: Like Lincoln he was tall and could ride a horse. Like Lincoln he came from a small town that loved him and filled him with confidence, and grounded his thinking and hardened his sense of right and wrong. And like Lincoln, his every utterance is now used (or twisted) to serve any given side of any given issue. He is the Republican party’s most beloved figure—they’ve given up claiming Lincoln, let’s hope—and while Abe won the Civil War, Reagan won the Cold War, with the help of yet another product of Illinois innovation, the atomic bomb.
It was under the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s football field that the first atomic chain reaction was initiated. This was courtesy of Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, and led to the bomb, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese innocents, and to the end of WWII. Illinois was thereafter home to the first commercial nuclear reactor, Unit 1 at Commonwealth Edison’s Dresden Power Station, and to this day Illinois maintains far more nuclear power plants (eleven) than any other state. Few people know this, including most residents of the state.
It’s possible, too, that Illinois ranks first in contradictions, in self-delusions, in strange dichotomies. It contains both the biggest city in the Midwest, and some of the most intensely rural areas in the country. It contains the most dependably Democratic counties (Cook, home of the Daley machines) and some of the most stubbornly Republican (much of down-state). Chicago, for its part, has been host to some of the greatest strides in civil rights, and yet remains one of the most segregated cities in the world. For much of the twentieth century, in fact, Illinois was Number One in urban segregation. The segregation, evidenced by the almost entirely white north side of the city and the almost entirely African-American south side, was so extreme that sociologists had to invent a new term, hypersegregation, to describe it. The South Side was home for many years to the horribly misguided experiment in public housing, the Robert Taylor Homes, which the comics artist Chris Ware (a Chicagoan) once referred to as “black people boxes.”
The Robert Taylor Homes, named after an African-American activist and Chicago Housing Authority official, comprised twenty-eight wretchedly designed buildings, all of them identical, that stretched in a straight line almost three miles down the south side of the city. At their most densely occupied, the buildings housed twenty-seven thousand people, all of them poor, all but a few African-American. Planned, ostensibly, to provide affordable housing to those receiving public assistance, the development included virtually no trees, grass, public amenities, or anything approaching humane standards of living. Though many prominent figures emerged from the RTHs, including baseball star Kirby Puckett and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, for most residents the buildings were unrivaled in their hopelessness, and standing in the shadow of the city’s constant neglect, they were overrun by drugs and gangs. Thankfully, the city came to its senses after a mere forty-five years, and the homes, every last one of them, were destroyed between 2005 and 2007, to make way for Legends South, a mixed-income community of low-rise buildings.
Just south of where the Robert Taylor Homes stood, the urban bustle of Chicago gives way, quickly and decisively, to rural country of unrivaled flatness and quiet. Nowhere else does a massive city dissolve so conclusively—drive south from Chicago for twelve minutes and you’ll see the flattest, most rural country imaginable. For much of its 56,650 square miles, the flatness of the state seems plain weird. The land is without contour and the roads are straight. On I-57, one can drive for hours without feeling even the gentlest slope, or having to turn one’s car even a few degrees in any direction. This makes possible the most incredible feats while driving, including reading, shaving, sandwich-making, outfit-changing, and flossing. Every student living in the north of the state and attending college downstate, in Champaign-Urbana, for example, knows of these possibilities, even though none would ever attempt them, knowing them to be dangerous.
But this is lovely country. It’s the Midwest, after all, for all of its curses and blessings. And as sophisticated as so many Illinoisians try to be, and as quickly as so many of them attempt to leave the state once of age, nearly all of them are quick to claim themselves as Midwesterners first and foremost. “I guess it’s the Midwesterner in me,” they say, to explain, for instance, their reluctance, once installed in a more cosmopolitan and jaded place, to join in experiments involving pipes, ropes, candles, or gerbils. “We don’t do that in the Midwest,” they say, and here they’re thinking about those drives down I-57, passing grain silos and Stuckey’s, when they’re thankful for the plainness of the land and the moral sense of its people—most of them, anyway—and their disinclination to overthink a simple concept, like stopping for someone who’s run out of gas.
For instance, you may be driving downstate some day. You may be driving from your former home in the far north of the state, past Chicago, past its ridiculously beautiful Loop, the lake—we haven’t mentioned the Lake!—past the now-cleaner Chicago River cutting perfectly through the city, all the bridges carrying people over, and you’ll keep driving south, past the city, past where the Robert Taylor Homes stood, and onward down the state. You will be driving down to Champaign-Urbana, where you went to school, and after the hours of flat unturning road, once within twenty minutes of the twin cities, you will notice that you are running out of gas. How is this possible? Twenty years with a driver’s license, having made this drive 100 or more times, and you run out of gas on I—57 in January. The temperature will be no degrees, and the wind chill will be 18 below zero. And you will be wearing a windbreaker.
But you are in the Midwest. This means that you will stand outside your car, your bones so cold that all you can say is “Oh my god oh my god oh my god” in rapid succession while dancing in place, but you will not stand for long. Every car will stop. Every car. The first few will be full of dogs and will be going the wrong way, so you will allow them to continue along. The third will be full of a mom and dad and two kids and two teens, and they will have the windows open. You will get inside, the car riding so
low with the weight that a speed bump will send you all to the ceiling. And with the windows open—why are the windows open?—it will still, somehow, be warm inside.
The couple’s kids are eight and eleven and seventeen, and the teenaged daughter, white, has with her her boyfriend, African-American. He will be more comfortable with the parents than the teenage daughter, who sulks as a matter of nature. The kids and teens will be sitting on each other’s laps, laughing about it, tickling each other, while you sit with them, on the left side of the backseat, apologizing for running out of gas in the middle of the day, on such an impossibly cold day. They’ll laugh and laugh about that, and then quickly go back into what they were all talking about before picking you up—whether they should go to St. Louis that weekend to see the Arch—just about forgetting that you’re there at all (so routine is it to pick up frozen strangers). They’ll drop you off at the gas station, and you’ll tell them not to wait, and they’ll head out, off to take the daughter’s boyfriend to a job interview. After you fill your red jerry can with a gallon of gas, you’ll step out onto the road again—oh my god oh my god the cold, it’s irrational and mean as a snake—and it will take maybe fifteen seconds before a trucker sees you, nods for you to jump into the cab, and will drive you back to your car, two miles down the road. The whole thing will take twenty minutes. This experience, which you had in various forms four other times while attending college downstate—because your ‘81 Rabbit’s gas meter didn’t work so well—means that Illinois is Number One, for you at least, in terms of its sense of goodness, plain goodness that makes you happy to be from there, and from nowhere else, because where would you or anyone be without its uncomplicated virtue, its contrast of the horse sense of its flatlands and the progressive-pushing-forth done up north? The land, you have to admit, makes you sappy. The land makes you proud. You’re a wuss for loving that land, Land of Lincoln, as you do. But you do.
INDIANA
CAPITAL Indianapolis
ENTERED UNION 1816 (19th)
ORIGIN OF NAME Meaning “land of Indians”
NICKNAME Hoosier State
MOTTO “The Crossroads of America”
RESIDENTS Indianan, Indianian, or Hoosier
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 9
STATE BIRD cardinal
STATE FLOWER peony
STATE TREE tulip tree
STATE SONG “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away”
LAND AREA 35,867 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Boone Co., 14 mi. NNWof Indianapolis
POPULATION 6,271,973
WHITE 88.6%
BLACK 8.4%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%
ASIAN 1.0%
HISPANIC/LATINO 3.5%
UNDER 18 25.9%
65 AND OVER 12.4%
MEDIAN AGE 35.2
INDIANA
Susan Choi
Last summer, I flew home to Indiana. The day I landed, in August, was the midpoint of a historic heat wave. My father picked me up at the South Bend Regional Airport with an unopened quart of milk, an unopened quart of orange juice, an unopened box of granola cereal, a half-pound of smoked German-style bologna, an unopened jar of brown deli mustard, six slices of rye bread, two nectarines, two pears, and absolutely no ice, not a single cube of it, packed in a cooler in the back of his Volvo. I’d told him I hoped to start our car trip as soon as I got there. He took me literally. He lives fifteen minutes from the airport, but we didn’t even swing by his house. His overnight bag was in the back of the car with the cooler.
I’d said I had to be there for my work, but I’d really come back to see him. Four months earlier, I’d turned in my third novel, and once again, although the book was fiction, I’d plundered my poor father’s life for material. This time I really had gone too far. Even my mother thought so. “Has your father read this?” was the first thing she demanded after I sent her the manuscript. At the time of that call, in June, I wasn’t sure. Now, in August, I still wasn’t sure. In between, in July, my father had been to New York, but all he’d said about the book was that he hadn’t yet finished it.
And so a week after he left, I called and said I had to visit Indiana for the piece I was writing, and then I’d booked a ticket, fretful with my actual purpose, to see if he was angry with me. With him it had always been easiest to talk in the car or while drinking. I was eight months pregnant, so I proposed that we drive around Indiana for a couple of days. We’d see the sights he’d never seen in his forty-odd years living there, or that I’d never seen even though I’d been born there, almost forty years before. He agreed with delight, and for the rest of the month mailed me guidebooks and maps, all the while never uttering a word about the book I had written.
Until my parents split up, in 1979, the three of us lived in a subdivision of South Bend called Miami Trails, after one of the many no-longer-indigenous tribes of the region. In some ways, we felt like frontier’s people. Our ranch-style houses had been built for us on lots that were cleared for the purpose, and while I lived there, the rest of the nearby woods were chopped down and made into lawns. In summer we kids would run wild long after our bedtimes, scaling heaps of dirt from the freshly dug foundations, and jumping into the unfinished holes. (And once, in the case of Dana Mickel—whose name now surprisingly blooms in my mind from the tombs of long-lost memory—gouging a main artery, so that an ambulance came.) All that churned dirt yielded Indian beads: minute, white, cylindrical, unevenly scored, less like the makings of man than the droppings of ancient insects.
But in every other way Miami Trails was tame and bland. Every house had a station wagon in the driveway and a skinny tree from the nursery ailing in the front yard. All the mothers stayed home, and all the dads were like my best friend Dawn’s dad, who was a salesman for Procter & Gamble. My father alone was anomalous. The other adults on the block were Dana’s Mom, or Lizzie’s Dad, or, in cases of thin acquaintanceship, Mr. Booker, but my father, a Korean-born professor of math at the local university, was only “Dr. Choi.” My parents, when referred to jointly, were “Vivian and Dr. Choi.”
I’ve always shared that impression: of my father as different, a short-term and uncomfortable tenant in Indiana. After my parents split and my mother and I moved to Texas, my father’s ongoing residence in Indiana seemed at best improvisational, at worst unlikely survival against terrible odds. Yet the first stop on our itinerary was my father’s suggestion, and a place about which he was clearly excited: the town of Rolling Prairie, briefly the site of a progressive institution called the Interlaken School. The school had long since been razed, but my father wanted to go there anyway, because the sculptor Isamu Noguchi attended Interlaken for one month in 1918, at the age of thirteen. Noguchi’s white American mother had sent him there from Japan, after his Japanese father rejected him.
My father has long carried on a romance with Noguchi, who apparently arrived in Indiana at thirteen all alone, with little more than a bag of esoteric carpentry tools. My father had turned up in Rolling Prairie on a recon mission, to find the school before my visit, with little more than its name. He found it by interviewing daylight drinkers at a skeevy-looking roadhouse. Most of the men hunched along the dim bar had no idea what he was talking about, but one of them thought it had been beside a pond called Silver Lake, on the grounds of the Apostolic School of Rolling Prairie.
Now my father directed me into Apostolic’s parking lot, and we glimpsed Silver Lake in the distance. But he was far more eager to introduce me to the man from the roadhouse. “Turn down here,” he insisted, gesturing me out of Apostolic’s driveway and into that of a trim little house just a few hundred yards down the road. The man who emerged from beneath an aluminum carport looked at us blankly, but my father still made for him, one hand extended. “Hello!” he said. “Do you remember? I came and asked you about Interlaken?”
“Oh, yeah,” the man recalled in a savoring way, as if reliving that diverting incident.
Mr. Galloway turned out to be seventy-seven, an
d as we stood in his driveway he announced that he had lived in the house for fifty-five of those years. The house had flowerbeds on all sides and a thriving rose garden in front, with a scarecrow in the form of a grandly dressed lady in long gloves and a big floppy hat. There were also many pairs of antlers mounted over the doors. Mr. Galloway’s pickup truck, gleaming brightly beneath the aluminum carport, bore decals reading “National Wild Turkey Federation,” “National Rifle Association,” and “Pheasants Forever.”
In his more than half-century here, Mr. Galloway had ambled the margins of Silver Lake untold times, and it was on one of those walks, years ago, that he came upon a fountain pen inscribed “Interlaken.” It was a rare find, in his opinion. Back then any boy who lost a pen from his pocket would try hard to reclaim it. “I’ve found pennies out there too, but nothing larger. Anything larger you’d look for, just as hard as you’d look for a pen.” I expected him to produce the artifact for us, but instead he bent his beneficent gaze on me, gigantically pregnant in the shimmering heat. He’d been one of twelve children, he told us, “and none of us died!”
“She’s writing about Indiana,” my father explained. For the sake of appearances, I took out a notebook and recorded the spelling of Mr. Galloway’s name.
“A book?” Mr. Galloway practically twinkled.
“No, an essay …”
When we thanked him, and wished him a good day, he invited us to come any time. “We’ll always find something to talk about,” he predicted.
“A nice man,” my father said, beaming with satisfaction as we drove away.
Apart from my first two books, which he read with a diligence not necessarily compatible with enjoyment, my father has never been much of a reader of fiction, at least not since his college days in the late 1950s, when he attended the University of the South on a church-sponsored scholarship after emigrating from postwar Korea. It was entirely in the interests of manipulating our conversation toward my book that I’d conceived of our road trip as a sort of Hoosier literary tour.