by Matt Weiland
I saw more sunrises in North Dakota than anywhere I have lived since. They just aren’t worth getting up for in other states. In contrast to the magnificence of heaven, however, there was the earthbound reality of being a mixed-blood nonentity in a world of blazing Scandinavian beauties and gung-ho Valkyries.
Every summer morning beginning at age eight, I went down to the Chahinkapa Park Pool to swim laps behind gorgeous tanned blondes with hard biceps and fluid dolphin kicks. I never won so much as a ribbon at swim meets. I came in last in every heat. I persisted because I had a deadly crush on our swimming coach, and also because there was a certain coolness to being part of the Viking Girl scene—eyes piercing bright over zinc-smeared noses, skin glistening with iodine-laced baby oil, hair streaked lemon-lime from the chlorine bleach, ears stuffed with alcohol-soaked cotton. I kept beating at the freezing water every morning until, eventually, two things happened.
First, my parents thought I was going deaf, and took me to the doctor. He vacuumed out my ears and found two bits of crumpled business letters lodged against my eardrum. I had inserted paper in lieu of cotton, to get that cool swimmer’s ear look. Uncrumpled, the bits of letters were still legible. “Dear Ralph Erdrich.” In the amazing week that followed it was like I’d gained a super power. I could hear the slightest movement of the leaves. I walked about, charmed by the slap of my bare feet on the cement. My sheets rustled. I heard the wind in the eaves. (North Dakotans, by the way, often become attached to the various sounds of wind and feel the musical absence anywhere else.)
I persisted in losing swim meets until age twelve, when the other thing happened. My new swimming suit, a ploy to ensnare the swimming coach, arrived in the mail. I’d ordered it from the Montgomery Ward catalogue. My one-piece was white, and had a bra-let of molded rubber, which I’d upped several sizes on the order form, out of hope, a certain eye-trap.
The first day I wore the swimming suit, very white against my tan, I walked out on the hot disinfected pool cement, and stood in casual anticipation. I was immediately noticed by my crush. His face twisted in complimentary pain; he wrung his hand as if to say, she’s so hot she’s burning me. Then he climbed onto his chair. His eyes stayed on me, as did other eyes, all eyes! I walked onto the diving board, posed, leaped into the air, and did a scornful swan dive. The impact completely inverted my bra cups. I didn’t notice this until I’d mounted the board for a second dive. Then, I looked down at my chest and saw two begging bowls.
Getting out on the shallow end of the pool, where I’d swum underwater—yes, I could swim fifty yards without a breath, after all—I decided that I would quit swim team and take my first job, hoeing sugar beets, a crop that was just then taking over the Red River Valley.
Again, I was up at sunrise. I slipped into an old cotton swimming suit, threw clothes over it, and picked up a lunch that always included a thermos of my mother’s vegetable soup. Chopping seven-foot purple thistles, battling the massed mustard and goldenrod and switch grass that wanted to invade our tender new local economy, I sought purifying obscurity. Anyway, I was making the big money—$1.29 per row. I was on an all-girls crew. The only man, our boss Sam Roberts, a Dakota man and friend of the family, sharpened our hoes with a file at the end of every row and treated me with a neutral kindness. I didn’t look at boys again until I’d actually grown into the top of my swimming suit.
I suppose the swimming suit hubris could happen anywhere, but only in North Dakota could a girl find salvation and start a new life in the blazing heat of a sugar beet field. After my two rebirths—to sound and self-esteem—I got my Red Cross certificate and began working at the pool. I taught a number of Wahpeton’s most upstanding citizens to swim, got another job, and sold Kentucky Fried chicken to a few who now inhabit the town cemetery. I dragged main with kids who are the town’s backbone—judges and funeral directors, police officers and state representatives. Later on, I worked the graveyard shift at Country Kitchen, now The Frying Pan restaurant. I cleaned up after the bars closed, and in doing so felt the panicked self-pity of the young, who vow to go to school and get a job that does not involve assembling Mississippi Mud sundaes or swabbing up after amateur drinkers. During college, I came home and worked road construction on the new interstate highway (I—29) bypass. With that money, I bought my first Smith-Corona typewriter, electric, at Globe Gazette in Wahpeton, and I still write in the hardbound green record books I bought at that store’s sad close-out.
When I ran out of construction money, the state arts board hired me as a North Dakota Poet in the Schools. I traveled to any place that would have me for a residency, including the Turtle Mountain reservation. There, I could sleep on my grandmother’s afghaned sofa. My grandfather’s mind had started to wander by then, but he still told good stories. In a café, just off the reservation, eating toward each other over an entire sour cream and raisin pie, which the waitress split down the middle when she saw us enter, I asked my grandfather to tell me about the things he had done.
My grandfather mentioned the time he was brought down to Fargo to name a visiting dignitary, who happened to be Tricia Nixon. Naming is a very sacred event in Chippewa life, so my grandfather, who had, after all, testified in front of Congress and managed to keep our tribe from termination in the early fifties, did a very diplomatic thing. He gave her a name that sounded impressive and melodious in our traditional language, Ojibwemowin. I asked him what the name meant, and he said Woman Getting Off an Airplane.
Since those first years of hoeing sugar beets, the crop has become a mega-success and mega-pollutant in the Red River Valley. The beet is rivaled by sunflowers, which everybody vastly prefers, as the beet is a squat and ugly crop that stinks when processed for sugar. North Dakota grows more sunflowers than any other state, which is another thing that makes it beautiful. My hope is that pesticide and herbicide use, and the habitat destruction that is killing western meadowlarks, bobolinks, and so many other eastern Red River Valley bird species will stop. Some years ago, I noticed the absence of birdsong in Wahpeton, so I walked to the edge of town, then past the edge of town, then out of town. Finally, I quit. The air was still quiet. The meadowlarks were gone. But western North Dakota is still bird-rich, and with a little cover and more bug-life, they could easily come back.
I began returning to the Turtle Mountains every summer to teach with my sister Heid Erdrich at the ingeniously constructed and energy self-sufficient Turtle Mountain Community College. Our reservation lies near the Missouri Plateau, up so far north it nearly touches the Canadian border, and is a Great Plains anomaly, since it is composed of hills covered with glacial drift. The Turtle Mountains are a lovely, intimate, richly forested and lake-dotted region. Our desperate tribal history includes an absolute refusal of the Chippewa to be removed from this homeland to White Earth—members of the Pembina band starved rather than leave. Of the original twenty-three township reservation, only twelve square miles, or two townships, still belong to the tribe. Woodticks have now consecrated that area as their homeland, too. Each June, trillions of them come alive and prepare to attach themselves to any animal brushing near. Most of the woodticks die off in late July, and that is why we hold our workshop in August.
Heid and I run the only Ojibwe Writing Workshop that I know of, and every summer it has its own cast of characters, primarily tribal members, but often the sort of people who start a new life in North Dakota. The sort of people, for instance, who start emu farms, and slaughter and process those prehistoric birds for all their healing oil, then hope to get rich selling the miracle substance on the Internet. The sort of people who move from San Francisco to a place along no major geologic fault lines, but who are seismically shocked anyway at the lack of fresh winter produce. One recent winter night at a friend’s house in remote North Dakota we turned on the TV and the lead local news story was that a truckload of ripe peaches had entered town. My friend got up without a word, pulled on her jacket, and got her car keys. An hour later, she came back with three crates o
f peaches, the limit per. People had left their homes at night and stormed the grocery store parking lot.
So in a way my state of origin really is North Dakota—Legendary. My grandfather, whose traditional name, Aunishinabay, means Original Man, will dance for all time, bigger than a president. The sky will outdo attractions in any state in the union. Last summer just after dawn, driving toward the Turtle Mountains, I stopped the car because I could not believe what I was seeing. In the cloudless east a sparkling sun rose in lucid air. But directly over me, as though divided with a compass, the sky split. A storm had boiled out of the west, dropping a black curtain. Against it, the rising sun ignited four fierce rainbows. Lightning stepped through rainbow hoops like a circus walker on blazing stilts. There were distant licks of violent rain. A horizon of surging dark. And on the other side of the world, the baby pure sun continued to rise. Legendary.
So the next time you hear a late-night comedian do a North Dakota joke, you will know better. North Dakota is the place you can live safely and get hired fast; it is cold, yes, but you will learn not to complain. Its billboards will make you Smile. Think. Say Thank You. With fewer people, you can even Be Polite, or if you wish, eccentric. North Dakota is known for its historical eccentrics—King Whiskers, Tree-tops Klingensmith, The Smallest Pioneer, The Giant of Frog Point, and the World’s Champion Miniature Writer, who wrote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on a single 2 1/4-inch strand of human hair. You can be odd, but not weird—you cannot, for instance, sit naked in your pickup truck. Just this past January, law enforcement agencies from northwestern North Dakota and eastern Montana chased a naked Iowa man, who was caught after nearly nineteen hours. At least by then, said authorities, he’d managed to don bib overalls. So keep your clothes on in public. Other than that, you are free to strap on a kite and see what it’s like to fly across the surface of the moon. You can stand in a field of sunflowers. You can eat well at the HoDo. You can attend stirring powwows at United Tribes or the University of North Dakota, or check any reservation calendar. You can hike the Badlands or stay at the Nature Conservancy’s Cross Ranch. And if all of these things aren’t enough for you, just stay home. Don’t bother. Nobody in North Dakota really needs you all that bad, unless you can Be Nice.
OHIO
CAPITAL Columbus
ENTERED UNION 1803 (17th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From an Iroquoian word meaning “great river”
NICKNAME Buckeye State
MOTTO “With God all things are possible”
RESIDENTS Ohioan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 18
STATE BIRD cardinal
STATE FLOWER scarlet carnation
STATE TREE buckeye
STATE SONG “Beautiful Ohio”
LAND AREA 40,948 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Delaware Co., 25 mi. NNE of Columbus
POPULATION 11,464,042
WHITE 85.0%
BLACK 11.5%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.2%
ASIAN 1.2%
HISPANIC/LATINO 1.9%
UNDER 18 25.4%
65 AND OVER 13.3%
MEDIAN AGE 36.2
OHIO
Susan Orlean
The flatness, it turns out, is a myth. There are certainly some long stretches of level land, but there is nothing in Ohio like the endless planed prairies of Iowa or the sheer horizontal Western plateaus: Ohio is actually a bumpy state, with acres and acres of hills and dales, slopes and valleys, banks and basins, rolls and mounds and knolls.
The vast cornfields are also a myth. There are plenty of cornfields—big ones—but if you want to see vastness in Ohio, the cornfields are nothing compared to the General Motors plant in Lordstown, which is truly colossal: almost four million square feet of factory, and that doesn’t count the parking lots. It feels like it takes a good seven or eight minutes to pass it on the turnpike, even at sixty miles an hour. The main factory building is so big that the trucks lined up at the loading ramps look like toy trucks hauling toy triple-trailers.
The hard, nasal, cawing accent is mostly a myth, though now and again, as you roam through Ohio, you will certainly hear words shaped without any roundness or melody. Then again, as soon as you head a little south in the state, you will hear a version of an Ohio accent that is as buttery and languid as something straight from Tennessee. Head west and it sounds like North Dakota. Head north and the accent is uninflected—plain American, without any road map implied.
Even the Midwesternness of Ohio is a myth. The Census Bureau reclassifies Ohio every few years—these days it’s considered Mid-North-Central rather than Eastern Midwest, and someday it may be officially designated West-of-Eastern/East-of-Western/North-of-Southern/Mid-Rustbelt, which is probably closer to the truth. Hell, northeastern Ohio was part of Connecticut to begin with, and even now, 220 years after Connecticut gave it up, this part of Ohio still has more in common temperamentally, sociologically, and culturally, with Pennsylvania and New York than it does with, say, Kansas. Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Buffalo are triplet cities, all clock-punching capitals of industry and enterprise, their rich people scions of the business world, not the agribusiness world, their aspirations to sophistication more Manhattan-like than Chicagoan. Southeastern Ohio is far less Midwestern than it is Appalachian. There is nothing prairie-like, plains-like, or farm-belt about it at all: The landscape is rough, striated, gullied, folded, coal dusted. Like most mountain places, its economy comes from underground—clay, coal, gravel—rather than above ground in broad daylight, as it is in the true Midwest. And like most mountain places, southeastern Ohio is gripped with an ungentle sense of religion and fate—maybe the imminent possibility of tumbling into a rocky void accounts for this—so it is pocked with churches and roadside crosses and Jesus signage and even at midday you can feel the apprehension of dusk. If anyone had the least bit of sense, they would clip off this corner of Ohio and paste it onto West Virginia, where it clearly belongs. While you have your scissors out, snip the southwestern corner of Ohio and tape it to Kentucky, since Cincinnati and Louisville really should be in the same state. In fact, that strip of land at the southwestern Ohio border is officially denoted, geographically, as “The Bluegrass Region,” in case you needed more evidence of where it really belongs.
That leaves the center of Ohio, and that might actually be considered Midwestern, though it has lately made a business out of not being Midwestern, which really is a specific regional personality, but being the American average itself—Columbus and the area around it is marketed as a nearly perfect place to do surveys, test products, homogenize fashion, and study consumers. Even so, let’s call the center of the state Midwestern. That means about one-sixth of the Ohio land mass fits the conventional notion of what Ohio is.
A few more things used to describe the state are not quite myths, but no longer accurate, thank goodness: The fouling of its waters, for instance. The Cuyahoga was once such a stew of industrial runoff that it regularly ignited, most famously in 1969, when flames reached five stories high. The fires in the river had occurred regularly over the previous hundred years; while it enjoyed the greatest notoriety of all, the 1969 conflagration was described by the chief of the Cleveland Fire Department as a “strictly run-of-the-mill fire.” And now? One still would not choose to skinny-dip in the Cuyahoga River, but the fish are back, they don’t have weird tumors, and they even taste like fish and not like steel-plant outflow. Bald eagles live nearby, without needing to line their nests with asbestos. Similarly, Lake Erie, the world’s tenth largest lake, a spill of blue so immense that if you grew up in northern Ohio you would gaze at it and find it impossible to imagine that any ocean could be bigger, was for a long time considered, literally, dead. The case of Lake Erie was so well known that it was almost a matter of distinction—who could name the other Great Lakes, anyway? Everyone knew about Lake Erie, though, even if the reason was unfortunate. But then came Earth Day and the Clean Water Act and nowadays the lake is swimmable, boatable, fishable. Ohio with filthy
water was an object lesson in industry run amok. Ohio with clean water is a better place by far, but gives you much less to talk about.
That is the character of Ohio—it conveys a certain regularness, a lack of wild distinction, a muting of idiosyncratic extreme. The state is a sampling of nearly every American quality and landscape but it levels out to something quietly and pleasantly featureless rather than creating a crazy quilt of miscellany. It is an excellent place to live and a less excellent place to try to describe, since nothing stands out in that theatrical way that allows for easy description. The cities are abundant and they are all medium-sized. The sports teams are always okay, never great but also never sensationally flawed and tragic. Lots of things are made in Ohio—rubber, machine tools, tractors, matches, pillows, cash registers—but nothing that has sex appeal. It isn’t a place that had a grand and dramatic history and then faded into weary, benign irrelevance like, say, Portugal; it has always been a workaday, useful place without airs. In 1940, the WPA Guide to Ohio awkwardly praised the solid, utilitarian nature of the state: “The life of practically everyone in the Nation has been touched, and in some degree made more livable, by the products of Buckeye enterprise.”
The WPA Guide to Ohio is, in fact, line after line of equivocation when it comes to describing the state: “No sudden weather changes. …” “Although Ohio is heavily populated and industrialized, it provides excellent upland game hunting. …” “The better residential sections of most cities in Ohio show examples of the Cape Cod cottage, English half-timber house, French farmhouse, Italian villa, Colonial houses of both New England and southern prototypes, and of numerous other styles. … Ohio has never had a group of writers such as the Hoosier School in Indianapolis … Ohio was settled too rapidly by all sorts of people, it was too much exposed to new developments in the turbulent nineteenth century, too busy cutting timber, plowing farms, building canals and railroads, smelting ore, and doing a thousand other things, to cultivate its provincial heritage, like Kentucky, or to bother its head or heart with the unprofitable job of creating a regional literature. Moreover, the State never has had a center … Ohio is either cosmopolitan or a group of provinces dominated by the great cities. Its authors have usually followed the custom of escaping to the East as soon as possible. …”