by Sarah Vowell
In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech in Chicago called “The Strenuous Life.” It begins, “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of the ignoble eases, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.” It is remarkably similar to the speech my parents delivered to my sister and me the summer before eighth grade. The gist of it was “You’re thirteen, now get a job.” So we worked part-time at a day-care center looking after kids not much younger than we were. I think I resented it at the time, and I’ve never been able to enjoy apple juice since, but knowing at such an early age what hard work can mean was an annoyingly valuable lesson.
Souvenir shopping in Medora, I observe the girl working the cash register at a gift shop and think, That’s the person I used to be, watching the clock while tourists take time off. I give her my credit card and buy my nephew an official Teddy Roosevelt teddy bear outfitted in the uniform the Rough Riders wore to fight the Spanish in Cuba. I hand it to him, chirping, “Here’s your imperialism stuffed animal, Owen!” He promptly sets out to rip the wire-rim glasses off the bear’s face. Our little Rough Rider is fifteen months old and living so strenuously that I have been leaving 40 percent tips at restaurants all over town to cushion the blow of the post-Owen, post-apocalyptic cleanup.
Medora’s claim to fame is the “Medora Musical,” an outdoor, amphitheater musical revue “dedicated to the memory of America’s twenty-sixth president.” Perky regional song and dance folk reenact the charge up San Juan Hill. The narrator of the musical says that Theodore Roosevelt “was a man who was close to the American heart. His spirit is right here, right now, all around us in Medora. You can see what he saw. You can be inspired by what inspired him. And even on the wind you can hear his voice. It is challenging every single one of you.” This is hokey and yet, I find, true. My whole life, no matter how happy I am I’ve always had this nagging feeling that Teddy Roosevelt is looking over my shoulder whispering, “Is this all you are?” As is my policy toward all well-rounded people, I sort of hate him a little. Roosevelt was a well-read he-man, a bookworm and an athlete, a robust outdoorsman who loved to come home from the hunt and crack open a volume of Hawthorne. He was a jock and a nerd at the same time. As Elting Morison puts it in his introduction to Roosevelt’s autobiography, “He is certainly the only President who read Anna Karenina while on a three-day search for cattle thieves.”
I like my life in the East, but maybe the most western thing about me is that I feel guilty about liking it. What if I’m perfectly content that, on any given day, my only communion with the earth is watching the sun set over New Jersey or burning a “geranium jasmine oak moss” aromatherapy candle?
I find myself talking about this on the phone one day with my friend Matt, a fiction writer who lives in Washington, D.C. Maybe writers obsess over the urban versus rural dilemma more than most because we can live anywhere. “Living in the country as opposed to living in the city,” he mentions. “That’s a big theme in my life. My father had grown up in Harlem. We lived in the country and we spent a lot of time smelling the air. You weren’t supposed to be inside if the sun was shining. He preached to me that ‘The land is what we’re here for, son.’”
How does this jibe, I ask, with the way Matt spends his days—writing short stories about bad boyfriends in a rented office in the basement of the Uraguayan Embassy?
Matt says, “D.C. just sucks all the way around, so anyone who lives here is always thinking about moving somewhere else. My wife would like to move to London or Los Angeles or New York City. She loves cities. But I keep coming up with reasons why we should go live near trees. We’ll be walking along and I’ll say something like, ‘You know how your mind just unwinds when there are no cars around?’”
He asks me if I ever go camping. “Oh, God, no,” I answer. “I’ve never been camping.” (That’s not true. I went camping once with my college boyfriend. It was uncomfortable and boring. We ended up driving to the nearest town to watch the Republican National Convention on the television at a pizza place. Because who wants to stare at a bunch of stars when you can witness Dan Quayle accepting the nomination for vice president?)
Matt continues, “An astrologer once told me, ‘You suffer from what’s called a geographic.’ A geographic is when a person walks around thinking that where he lives will make his life better. The astrologer said, ‘Let me tell you, life is about an emotional connection to people and things and it doesn’t matter where you are on the globe.’”
“So,” I ask, “was that it for you? You just decided to make yourself at home then and there?”
“Mostly, but some days I just want to move to Mexico and learn how to make clothes out of the dirt around my house.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “Only I don’t want to move to Mexico and play in the dirt. It’s more like I want to want that. I like how things are, so I worry that I’m not aiming high enough. I worry that I’m too complacent. I worry that I’m missing out on all the Mexican dirt in the world because I’m perfectly happy sitting in my leather chair watching HBO.”
“Ah, but when you bought your leather chair,” he tells me, “that’s when I knew you were on a roll.”
I mention that one night, not long after I got home from North Dakota, I was sitting in that very leather chair, watching television. An old movie came on, The Best Man. The film is adapted from a Gore Vidal play about the two front-runners in a presidential primary. The striking opening credits superimpose the names of cast and crew over images of every U.S. president from Washington on down. Theodore Roosevelt is the first one who laughs. I shook my head and grinned at the picture of the crinkle-eyed, openmouthed President Teddy. That guy really knew how to live.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Geoffrey Kloske at Simon & Schuster willed this book into being and cajoled it to completion, taking every last one of my many, many phone calls even though he is equipped with caller ID. Other editors and producers who pitched in include my beloved Ira Glass, Julie Snyder, and Alex Blumberg at This American Life; Dave Eggers at McSweeney’s; Paul Tough at Open Letters; Andy Ward at Esquire; Barrett Golding at Hearing Voices; Andrew O’Hehir and Bill Wyman at Salon; Rodes Fishburne and Owen Edwards at Forbes ASAP; and Daniel Ferguson and Conan O’Brien at Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Along with the interviewees, these people helped: Todd Bachmann, Kevin Baker, Steven Barclay, John Flansburgh, Nicole Francis, Robin Goldwasser, Nicole Graev, Jack Hitt, Nick Hornby, Matt Klam, Joel Lovell, Greil and Jenny Marcus, Katie Martin, Doug Petrie, Kate Porterfield, David Levinthal, David Rosenthal, David Sedaris, Stephen Sherrill, and my agent, Wendy Weil. Special thanks to Bennett Miller for taking me to Gettysburg, Matt Roberts for taking me to Salem, and Ben Karlin for taking me to the movies. David Rakoff deserves an exclamation point! My love and apologies to my family—Pat, Janie, Amy, Jay, and Owen.
SARAH VOWELL is the author of Take the Cannoli and Radio On and a contributing editor to public radio’s This American Life. She lives in New York City.