State by State

by Matt Weiland

  My mother wouldn’t let my brothers play football, and she didn’t attend the games. She said she’d seen a boy die on the field once, hit too hard. The story may have been fiction. She’d seen a boy die: That was true. Or she’d seen it in her mind, over and over, the boy on the bathroom floor, in the rooming house. My older brother, thin and rangy, became a high-school pool shark and loved fast cars. The younger one took up spelunking, ski instructing, and spent his twenties at the beach, sailing South Carolina tourists on catamarans. Both left West Virginia and moved South, to the Carolinas and Tennessee, while I moved North.

  In the popular imagination, West Virginia—when it’s considered at all—is a place so exotic, so foreign, so dark and dense with myth as to be unreadable from the outside, just as the primeval, virgin expanse of the mountains was once unknown, unimaginable, to Western eyes cast into its depth and majesty and threat. It’s why Batboy, protagonist of a recent hit musical, was supposedly born in a cave in West Virginia. It’s why the late and lamented X Files, the popular TV series starring FBI agents Mulder and Scully, set its darkest, most primal segments in West Virginia. There was one about a man with a tail, and another about a peculiar inbred family who were actually monsters—all doubtless filmed in LA.

  Celebrities don’t hang out much in West Virginia. In the West Virginia I know, we don’t much hold with celebrity. If you don’t work, and work hard, then who are you? Work makes a man a man, and a woman a woman. You work; you don’t brag or put on airs. It’s day-to-day, the land, the town, the garden, the field, the mine, the family, the business, home. Why leave home if home is here? You don’t leave your place because the going is tough any more than you’d leave your child if he was troubled or in trouble. Family is family. Communal art is respected: quilting, woodworking, playing music, and singing the songs. The talent that challenges, stands out, flares against, often leaves home. Home won’t always have those kids, and the cities draw them like magnets. They make their lives elsewhere, but they know they’ve left home. Home is behind them. Maybe they write about home, or dream about it. Maybe they try to forget about home, and can’t. Home eludes them. It’s the price they pay for leaving.

  They’re one reason West Virginia is steadily losing population, yet it’s somewhere you can find a place to live. The mountains slow global warming somewhat, and the seasons are still inarguable. If you look, you may find an untouched valley, a road along a river, a community. Jobs don’t pay well, but you won’t need much money. You’d better garden, enjoy good physical health, seldom complain, and have a rich internal life. The 200 present residents of Coalton, West Virginia, where the Phillips Cemetery lies in protected silence, have a median family income of $36,875. The average income for single males is around $28,000; for women, $13,469. The largest percentage of owner-occupied homes falls in the $50,000 to $59,000 range; the largest percentage of renter-occupied dwellings include eight or more rooms. Translation: There’s space. And quiet.

  Is West Virginia poor? As poor as inner city anywhere, as poor as towns stranded in the Nevada desert? No. It is geographically isolated and relentlessly exploited by outsiders and some insiders, all looking to sell paradise and make a buck. But you just can’t buy that kind of pride, a stubborn dignity rooted to the land, and you can’t sell it. In our co-opted world, West Virginia remains mysterious, downtrodden, sold short—another country within a celebrity-obsessed American culture that takes no notice.

  Understand: Born and raised in West Virginia, you can never truly leave. Those who stay, and those who don’t, stand in the middle of the story, wherever they go. They share the feel and smell and mind’s eye image of a narrow road in summer, a dirt road or a paved one, bordered by woods and fragrant weeds, overhung with trees, twisting deeper.

  WISCONSIN

  CAPITAL Madison

  ENTERED UNION 1848 (30th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME French corruption of an Indian word that may have meant “river that meanders through something red.”

  NICKNAME BadgerState

  MOTTO “Forward”

  RESIDENTS Wisconsinite

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 8

  STATE BIRD robin

  STATE FLOWER wood violet

  STATE TREE sugarmaple

  STATE SONG “On Wisconsin”

  LAND AREA 54,310 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Wood Co., 9 mi. SE of Marshfield

  POPULATION 5,536,201

  WHITE 88.9%

  BLACK 5.7%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.9%

  ASIAN 1.7%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 3.6%

  UNDER 18 25.5%

  65 AND OVER 13.1%

  MEDIAN AGE 36.0

  WISCONSIN

  Daphne Beal

  There are people I know, people west of where I am sitting right now by about a thousand miles, some of whom I am related to, some who saw me through my adolescent worst, who will smile—genuinely, indulgently, courteously, knowingly, all at once, because this kind of multilayered smile, flickering with contradictory sentiments, is a specialty of my home state—when they learn that I am writing about Wisconsin.

  “You? But you left Wisconsin when you were what? Fifteen? Eighteen?” I imagine these people saying in a kind way, because, in most situations, Wisconsinites adhere to a certain unshakeable kindness (distinct from its close cousins, niceness and politeness). “You, who have never even been to a Packers game wearing a gigantic wedge of yellow foam cheese on your head, much less added your name to the list of 74,000 people waiting for season tickets?”

  “Yes, me,” I imagine myself saying, smiling, always smiling because that is the state-determined social contract among us, and perhaps adding that such a wedge (a cheddar-Swiss hybrid, if you’ve never seen it) took up a precious amount of room in my New York City closet for a long time.

  The fact is that not only was I born and raised in Milwaukee, but I am from the state in a way that feels programmed into my DNA, as if one of the double helixes was coded with W-I-S-C. Even though I have chosen in my adulthood to live in a universe far, far away called Manhattan, I still claim Wisconsin as my own and head back several times a year to the state where my maternal ancestors settled in 1874 in the then-bustling town of Racine, poised on Lake Michigan’s rocky shore, almost halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago, or as I recently heard the area called for the first time, in this age with its penchant for proper-noun amalgams: the Chiwaukee Corridor.

  It is where I return each summer with my husband and children to spend time near the lake that my son, Owen, is named for, nestled in the heart of the Chequamegon (pronounced Shawamagon) National Forest in the northwest corner of the state not far from the Great Lake—Superior—that borders Wisconsin’s northernmost edge. (Surrounded by Lakes Michigan and Superior and the Mississippi River on three sides, the state challenges the definition of landlocked.) My parents and sister are there, as is my childhood home and the rolling farmland—rising and falling away from the roadways, interrupted by stands of trees, and met at its perimeter by a mildly domed sky that once seemed to contain everything I knew. After years of driving through this land, seeing it head on from behind the wheel, and, when I was younger, while tumbling from the backseat of a station wagon to the “way back,” or looking up from a book, a conversation, a squabble, a game, I realized this terrain is my internal landscape. It’s the land that came first and the one that abides.

  Because of this, when people ask where I grew up, I say Wisconsin first and Milwaukee second. The memories of my childhood are described by a long, skinny obtuse triangle within the state. The first point is Milwaukee in the southeast corner; the second is Racine, where my grandparents and cousins lived, forty miles farther south; and then Lake Owen in the northwestern corner, some 400 miles away from the other two, where we drove several times a year in a kind of staircase pattern, climbing the state through towns with names like Spooner, Tomahawk, Black River Falls, Waupaca, and Fond du Lac (pronounced Wah-packa and Fondalack, because lack of preten
sion is another proud Wisconsin trait).

  Milwaukee in the 1970s and ‘80s was—both subjectively and objectively—less a cohesive entity than a series of atomized destinations. The business district downtown was a collection of imposing Germanic-style buildings (neoclassic, Renaissance, Romanesque) that lined wide avenues whose sidewalks were mostly empty. Outside that fifteen-or twenty-block radius, the city, threaded through by highway interchanges, became a series of factories, each with its own signature odor: the sour smell of hops from Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, Miller (only the latter survives, flanked by a handful of microbreweries); the stomach-turning rankness of paper mills; the acrid scent of tanneries; and blissfully, the one we begged our parents to drive us by, the sweet, Willy-Wonka fantasy smell of the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory.

  Claiming the state before the city may also have to do with the fact that I’m not from Milwaukee proper, but from a suburb just north of the city—OK, not just any suburb, but the suburb of River Hills, which Milwaukeeans have all sorts of notions about, namely that it is not true Milwaukee. The address is too far north and too posh for the proudly working-class city, whose largely Polish and Germanic heart lies farther south and west. River Hills is not the Milwaukee of beer halls and polkas, Catholic churches and Friday night fish fries. People from “down by the south side,” as Milwaukeeans say, look at you skeptically if you say you grew up there, as if you’d just said you grew up in, say, a Fabergé egg. But while my childhood knew nothing like privation, I like to think that if we could have lived in opulence, we would not have. It’s not the Wisconsin way.

  As children, my brother, sister, and I were ferried from the suburbs to see the Chicago Symphony at the Performing Arts Center, A Christmas Carol at the Pabst Theatre, or the Bucks or the Admirals play at the Milwaukee Arena. At County Stadium, each time one of the Brewers hit a home run, a man went down a slide beneath the scoreboard into a giant mug of beer that erupted with helium balloons. School fieldtrips took us to the Domes, which looked like three glass breasts among warehouses and factories—filled with exotic flora. Up until a few years ago, the Milwaukee Art Museum was housed in a serviceable if not dowdy building from the 1950s, but is now a $120-million-dollar white-winged ship-bird, poised to set sail across Lake Michigan, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. (Like Bilbao, the Spanish city that is home to Frank Gehry’s titanium-skinned Guggenheim, Milwaukee is a hard-working town that’s made good, recessions and Rust Belt economics notwithstanding, and claims itself as a destination in its own right—that is, according to an ongoing PR campaign, “A Great Place on a Great Lake.”)

  All these cultural institutions were just slightly longer drives from our home than our regular spots—the Bayshore Mall for ballet and piano lessons; Brown Port Mall for bowling; Silver Spring Avenue to shop for party favors at Winkie’s or gifts at The Changing Scene (which never did change), or to see a movie at the Fox Bay Theatre; and the Milwaukee Country Club (aka the MCC) for tennis lessons followed by cherry Cokes and patty melts by the pool. But because all these locations were disconnected from each other, nothing in my experience made up a city as I knew them to be from books, movies, or visiting my aunt and cousins in Chicago. There were no sirens at night, no newsstands or subways, no spraying fire hydrants when the hot weather came. And there was nothing shining and sparkling on a hill, no collection of glimmering towers making a jagged skyline in the distance in some approximation of Oz. To judge from reading the WPA’s Guide to the Badger State, published in 1941, this effect had been true for decades:

  Newcomers and visitors sense a reason for [Milwaukee’s low-crime] record in the suburban, rather than the metropolitan face that the city presents: the low buildings of the downtown area, … the acres of field and forest in one of the country’s outstanding park systems, … the neat cottages in the German and Polish neighborhoods, … and a nocturnal quiet that often produces the waggish comment: “You could fire a cannon down Wisconsin Avenue [downtown’s main thoroughfare] at midnight and never hit a soul!”

  Approaching Milwaukee by car on I—94 was, and remains, something of a nonevent, interrupted by bursts of recognition of far-flung landmarks: First was the large block-lettered sign on a factory roof that said HEIL, the company my Boston-transplant father worked for, selling garbage trucks to municipal governments from Riyadh to Santiago. The German name—which was definitively not emblazoned on trucks sold in Europe—came from its founder, Julius Heil, who started the company when Milwaukee was becoming “the machine shop of the world,” and who, ironically, was governor from 1939—43.

  Then comes St. Josaphat’s gold-domed basilica, known for being “built by the pennies of the workers.” We always looked to see if the Koss company had changed its billboard: James Dean in headphones was “Rebel With a Koss,” and Whistler’s mother sat in her rocking chair wearing a pair beside the reminder to “Phone Your Mother.” Downtown Milwaukee is almost invisible from the freeway, except for its lone skyscraper, built in the early ‘70s for First Wisconsin Bank. After I-94 turns into I-43, the modest two-story A-frames of peeling paint with leaning porches of the North Side line the highway, and a more recent sign notes the exit for America’s Black Holocaust Museum, a manifestation of the fact that Milwaukee is now known as the most residentially segregated city in the United States, despite Wisconsin’s strong history of abolitionists and Underground Railroad activity. The GOP, in this sometimes-blue—sometimes-red state, was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, on the anti-slavery platform.

  Beyond that, just east of the highway, the LED sign for Kopp’s Frozen Custard stand announces daily flavors such as cherry amaretto cheesecake, banana walnut chocolate chunk, and German apple streusel, all with twice the amount of butterfat of regular ice cream and squirting, somewhat indecently, in long, thick trails from gleaming stainless steel machines. Finally, we exit at West Good Hope Road, and our first turn north leads us windingly into River Hills.

  Because my experience of home has always included long stretches of highway, driving to Racine, as we did countless times a year to visit my grandparents, was just an extended version of the two-and-a-half-mile drive to school each day. After the smokestacks and the cabbage fields came my grandparents’ house of hushedness—stately Midwestern, elements of Prairie style, not too big, not too little, with a muffling effect on all of us. We always entered through the heavy oak door to the slate-tiled front hall. Beyond it the living room sat untouched except on Christmas or Easter, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting, dusty-rose drapes, and cabinets with mesh-screen faces protecting my grandmother’s porcelain Doughty birds. The large plate-glass windows that lined the room faced a rolling lawn, with two large willows (their thick trunks filled with concrete to keep them upright) like sentries at its edge, and then the lake.

  Not that we did much more than look at the lake. It was always cold, but more than that, for many years its rocky beaches were lined with windrows of rotting alewives, ocean fish that came in through the St. Lawrence Seaway and were prone to massive seasonal die-offs. Between the stink and the biting flies, we were quick about our lakeside expeditions: hunting for flint rocks to bang together for a spark in the dark of the front-hall closet while the brass hangers clanged above us, stones for my grandfather’s polisher, or fossils—coral, trilobites, and brachiopods, we learned in eighth-grade paleontology, dating from some 500 million years ago, when Wisconsin was still under a shallow inland sea.

  Despite the feeling of limitlessness that came from the lake’s distant horizon my memories of Racine as a child take place almost entirely at the house—games of gin rummy at the card table, golf on the TV, drinks at five o’clock for the grown-ups with Planters cheese balls and sodas for the kids (soda is soda in Wisconsin, not “pop” like it is in Michigan or Minnesota), holiday dinners where we quietly unbuttoned our waistbands as we became progressively more stuffed, and birthday lunches with Oscar Mayer wieners and angel food cake. There were long days around the kidney-shaped pool, whe
re all boisterousness occurred, and where my grandfather kept watch over us—wearing a straw hat on his pink head and a slightly worried expression on his face—as he tended to his horse chestnut tree, one of whose smooth nuts he always carried with him for luck, a tradition my mother continues to this day. My grandmother labored over her rose garden and would sometimes stand up to shout, “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go!” before we tried a new trick off the diving board. We made the occasional excursion to the Piggly Wiggly for groceries, the Racine Country Club (more subdued behavior required, but they had candlepin bowling in the basement), and to the small zoo, which amazingly included—for a city whose population has increased only from 67,000 to 87,000 since the WPA Guide came out in 1941—a giraffe and an elephant.

  I remember only a few of the streets. It was never particularly exciting to leave the compound. But whether I knew the lay of the land or not was irrelevant, because I knew from an early age that this city, all of it, was a part of who I was. My mother, aunt, uncle, grandfather, and great-grandfather were born and raised there. I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that racine meant root, but it seemed perfectly apt to me. Of course this city was the root of things, of everything, and it had nothing to do with the Root River or the Miami Indian origin of its name. It was where my maternal family started, where this quiet sense of prosperity had been hatched and nurtured. Much the same way the painted signs along the wide, greasy automotive strip of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, would not be advertising Walker Mufflers in 2008, if my great-grandfather, Willard Walker, had not helped develop and produce the first “louvered” automotive muffler (which apparently worked, unlike its predecessors) in 1930—if not for the city of Racine, I would not exist.