And that expelled me into my destination, Athens, the home of Ohio University, which traditionally comes in near the top of rankings of the nation’s most noteworthy party schools, a town cut off from the rest of civilization, richly scented with patchouli and greasy onions and last night’s beer, a place where the baby-boom generation’s idealists can still believe in possibility because they live inside a forest, a place where chapbooks are published and read. My most significant personal connection to Athens was the number of friends and acquaintances I knew who’d been arrested there on Halloween, an Ohio rite of passage.
In a way (okay, completely), I was there for a cheap joke: in the county that is well-known as Ohio’s party headquarters, I was planning to compare Athens’s two party headquarters—Republican and Democrat. This was hardly a fair comparison. Athens is an anomaly in the midst of Appalachia, a liberal college town awash in Day-Glo and cappuccino and daddy’s credit limit. A truer destination might have been the nearby Hocking College, which offers courses in lumberjacking, and where some students arrive for class on horseback. But because Athens-the-college-town dominates Athens-the-county demographically and philosophically (Democrats had outnumbered Republicans 9,214 to 2,632 in that year’s primary election), visiting the political-party offices offered a dramatic contrast to explore.
I followed the address for the Democratic headquarters to a storefront next door to a burrito house with a sign proudly stating WORKER-OWNED, and whose bill of fare included tofu fajitas. In late morning, the town was mostly asleep in the way only a college town sleeps, its sidewalks stained and littered with the previous night’s activity, a heavy atmosphere of metabolisms at a simmer. A young man in a baseball cap and loose shorts sat drowsily on the headquarters’ doorstep, waiting for a bus. Otherwise, no one was outside.
The door was locked. The storefront windows were plastered with two dozen campaign signs. Peering past them, I could see a frat-house clutter of telephone lines, computer wires, pizza boxes, bumper stickers, and cardboard cartons askew in the aisles. Later, when I was allowed inside, I saw, on a desk, a handwritten thank-you note from Al Franken to the Democratic Party chairwoman. Even though it was early in the season, pre–Labor Day, young volunteers were constantly coming and going, picking up campaign materials, stopping in for information, chatting, eager, hopeful, certain.
Later that day, I made my way out to the Republican headquarters, in a strip plaza at the outskirts of town. It hadn’t yet officially opened. There was only one phone line, compared to eight at the Democratic office. It could probably best be described as “broom clean.” The party chairman’s air of resignation was hard to miss. Parked next to his SUV, with its SPORTSMEN FOR BUSH bumper sticker, was a car with a KERRY/EDWARDS sticker.
The answer is always in the journey, rather than its destination. It was not Athens, but rather the road to Athens, and the road that would continue for weeks, that illuminated why it was so difficult for me to answer “Whither goes Ohio?” Not because I didn’t know (although I didn’t), but because the question itself was too simple. In just this one leg of my campaign, I’d passed through major manufacturing centers, deeply rooted farm country, a national forest, gaudy suburbs, a third-world Appalachia that most Americans can’t fathom.
Which way is Ohio going?
The answer is “Which Ohio?”
* * *
Just outside Cincinnati, I pulled into the auxiliary parking area across the road from St. Ignatius Catholic Church. The church’s vast parking lot was full, much of it occupied by the tents and carnival rides of the parish’s summer festival, the rest by rows of cars belonging to those attending the event. I parked on a baseball field, under a billboard with the words IN GOD WE TRUST. UNITED WE STAND over an American flag.
On the drive here, I’d been scanning radio stations: Christian rock . . . Christian hip-hop . . . Christian sports talk. I had never heard an all-Christian sports-talk station before, nor, as far as I can recall, even considered the genre. But here it was, and like all mainstream entertainment prefaced by Christian, it sounded exactly like the secular version, only with a highly tangential cast to the content—kind of like biting into a jelly doughnut to find it filled with peanut butter. The discussion that day involved the skimpy outfits worn by the Olympic beach-volleyball players and the larger issue of whether Christian athletes felt compromised by being forced to wear tight, immodest attire. Swimmers in swimsuits and whatnot.
Which is to say that, culturally, Cincinnati is distinctly different from the rest of the state. It’s a river town, the beginning of the American South, the top edge of the Bible Belt, a highly conservative city whose modern reputation was forged in many minds by the 1990 censorship controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs exhibited at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center.
The event I’d come for was called Igi-Fest, named for the church’s patron saint, and celebrated across a sprawling blacktop spread with children’s bouncy toys and funnel-cake stands and vats of melty cheese and a game called Chippy Pot. I wandered for a long time, without approaching anyone, just trying to absorb it, to find a focus, an entry point. Throughout this whole process I had been trying actively, consciously, probably neurotically, to avoid presumption. It’s the native instinct in a place that’s been plagued by presumption. When you live in something called a flyover state, you recoil at even the slightest hint of pigeonholing.
I once was introduced to Ira Robbins, a New York rock critic whom I greatly admired. He asked where I was from and I said, “Akron,” to which he responded without hesitation, “Oh, I’m sorry.” I’d grown so accustomed to such exchanges that I skipped over anger and went straight to disappointment over the remarkable ease with which he’d exposed his own stupidity.
So, while I had come to this event knowing it reflected a prevailing Christian conservatism in Cincinnati, I wanted to try to get under that surface, or to circumvent it completely, and I knew enough about the gathering process to know that it’s better to get ahold of nuance and contrasts and complexities and contradictions before the conversation begins than to try to extract them once the transaction is under way.
So I literally circumvented, just walking around the outside edge of the crowd, watching. What arose from the chaos of activity was a strong prevailing impression of families, of course—the white, middle-class families of Ohio and the wider region, conveying a nuclear, traditional demeanor of wholesomeness and politeness, entirely sincere and elemental. Golf shirts and department-store denim shorts, softball-league manners, and keg beer in moderation. What I found in greatest abundance in Cincinnati and pretty much everywhere else I went was a polite reticence, even among the most ideologically driven of the people I encountered. Often, people didn’t readily reveal their party affiliation or which candidate they favored. It didn’t seem to be out of suspicion or fear so much as my father’s long-standing Thanksgiving instruction: “No religion or politics at the dinner table.”
So the first two people I talked to at Igi-Fest, a pair of sisters in their seventies named Esther and Joan, responded coyly when I asked if I could talk to them about the upcoming election. Because my purpose was to try to understand the people behind the votes, I always began open-ended and never directly asked about the campaign or the candidates. But that didn’t matter because people just assumed that’s what I was after. I couldn’t blame them.
Esther, winking, said, “We know who we’re voting for.” As the conversation continued, they carefully referred to “our man” and “the other side” without naming names.
However, they also told me they both worked at a Republican phone bank, soliciting volunteers. And that they’d recently attended a George Bush rally. So their position wasn’t hard to figure out. Still, I was charmed by the way they maintained this sense of reservation, that they felt their vote was personal, that maybe they even didn’t want to offend me in case I was on “the ot
her side.”
As I worked my way deeper into the festival, I found, amid booths labeled ICE CREAM and ROULETTE, a tent that sported the sign RELIGIOUS INFORMATION. The husband-and-wife team working a table inside offered me a pamphlet titled “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics.”
This guide, without endorsing any particular candidate or party, contained what could only be described as a mathematical formula for choosing a political candidate, offering five “nonnegotiable issues” and the Church’s position on each: abortion, euthanasia, fetal stem-cell research, human cloning, and homosexual marriage. (I found it curious, considering the urgency of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Catholic principle of peace, that war was not included.)
Following the five nonnegotiables, under the heading “How to Vote,” the guide explained how to apply each of these issues:
First, determine where each candidate stands on each of the five main points. Then “eliminate from consideration candidates who are wrong on any of the nonnegotiable issues.”
Once that process is complete, the voter can choose freely from any candidates who pass this test. If there are no acceptable candidates, “you may vote for the candidate who takes the fewest [wrong] positions . . . or you may choose to vote for no one.”
Applying a corollary formula, Hamilton County, which Cincinnati dominates, had voted for the Republican candidate in each of the previous six presidential elections; Cincinnati has a strongly conservative identity; ergo, Cincinnati is “red.”
Unless you ask the ever-unfolding question: Which Cincinnati?
The following evening, a few miles away, I went to another Cincinnati festival, the final night of a three-day punk and metal marathon at a combination rock club / Laundromat called Sudsy Malone’s. (According to the ads: “You can do laundry, get drunk and see live music all in the same building!”)
The first message I encountered was scrawled above a men’s-room urinal:
I’m worried about the economy.
The second message came from the doorman, a squintily gregarious twenty-five-year-old with a bull ring through his septum and those wide, earlobe-stretching rings that always give me the willies. He had a lot to say (he was definitely antiwar), but had to shout above a band called End It All. His name was Tom and he had a two-year-old daughter and lived with his mother, and he told me he thought the upcoming presidential election would be “like voting for Lucifer or voting for one of his lesser demons.”
Which rang oddly in light of the Christian voting pamphlet, because theoretically a staunch believer who calculated “zeros” for two opposing candidates might make the same harshly rigid judgment as Tom, using precisely the same hell-and-brimstone language, even though this imagined voter would be perceived as Tom’s cultural opposite.
I left Cincinnati less certain about a lot of things but much more interested in the uncertainty.
* * *
I got a bad case of poison ivy once when I was in college. Every person I mentioned this to had a surefire remedy. Baking soda. Calamine lotion. Jewelweed. Bleach. Hot water. Each of these people spoke with such conviction that I couldn’t be certain which was the right choice. (An aside: Don’t try the bleach thing. Especially if you’ve already been scratching a lot. Seriously. Just . . . don’t.)
A similar bit of the American nature plays out in Ohio every four years. Some swear that if it rains on Election Day, the advantage goes to the Republicans. That a candidate who can swing just ten votes in every Ohio precinct will be guaranteed the presidency. A colleague at the Cincinnati Enquirer told me his editors were toying with the theory that they could scrutinize demographic data so closely as to pin down the one undecided Ohio voter whose ballot would swing the state and thus the nation.
Canton, twenty minutes south of Akron, sees a quadrennial media pilgrimage, as some analysts swear Canton is the quintessential “typical” city in America, and thus, if you can suss out its mood, you can accurately predict the national outcome.
The editor of Canton’s newspaper, the Repository, has referred to this as the “Winerip effect,” after New York Times reporter Michael Winerip moved his family to Canton in 1996, became an actual citizen, and filed a series of insightful and refreshingly nuanced dispatches under the title “An American Place.”
* * *
The Amish man told me a joke:
“A traveling pollster knocked on old Eli Hershberger’s door and asked who he was voting for in November.”
“‘I don’t vote,’ Eli said. ‘But I pray Republican.’”
The Amish man didn’t smile when he told the joke nor laugh at the punch line.
And he didn’t tell it to me because he was enjoying my company. He didn’t want to talk to me at all. He was only doing it because he knew I’d get it wrong if he didn’t.
In truth, even though they often claim otherwise, and even though the entirety of their arm’s-length-from-mainstream-society public image (with special emphasis on church/state separation) would suggest the opposite, the Amish do vote. Probably in far greater numbers than we know. They’re just very, very private about it. Just as they are about pretty much everything else.
The largest concentration of Amish in the United States is less than an hour from Akron, in Holmes County, Ohio, and its surrounding areas. I’d driven there on an early-autumn day, easing instinctively off the accelerator as I left the main highway, flattened turds on the roadway always being a signal to slow down. It’s never long before you come across a square, black buggy clip-clopping along the edge of the road. Some of these drivers have attached triangular, orange safety reflectors to the backs of their vehicles, some have not. It depends on how strict they are about their distance from secular society, and from the rules thereof. They call us “the English.” Some tolerate us more than others.
For someone like me, who lives in the city, who has always lived in the city, who thinks city, this stretch beyond my borders had always been an inspiration. Entering this part of the state in the fall, as the leaves are changing and the earth is releasing the perfume of its postseason spice of harvest, the air infused with intoxicating, hyperbaric oxygen and nitrogen and an infinity of reds—it felt like another universe. One of the things I love about Ohio (and in great part because this is the opposite of the prevailing outside perception) is how radically diverse it is. Less than one hour in any direction from my house, I can be in a vast acreage of soybean fields that stretch to Iowa, or on the shore of one of the largest bodies of water in the United States that leads to Canada, or in one of the most malignant postindustrial regions in the country that stretches far to the north and east, or in the heart of the nation’s Amish culture.
I began my tour with the Amish equivalent of low-hanging fruit, in Sugarcreek, a touristy, shopping-friendly village with a quaintly stylized motif—the Little Switzerland of Ohio—and a constant flow of tour buses, usually carrying retirees with cameras and discretionary cash.
The cameras are unwelcome. Amish people generally do not like having their pictures taken, but are also highly nonconfrontational, so sometimes crass insensitivity goes unchecked. A common sight on these roadways is an amateur photographer parked off to the side, aiming a camera at a bearded farmer driving horses across a field, the farmer trying to crane his face away from the lens while simultaneously keeping an eye on his team.
The cash is not unwelcome. Sugarcreek is neatly lined with shops that sell Amish rocking chairs and wooden Amish pull toys and Amish cookbooks and Amish woven rugs and little souvenir Amish-boy hats and little souvenir Amish-girl bonnets and heavy loaves of Amish bread and Amish rabbit hutches and Amish quilts and Amish whirligigs and DVDs about the Amish and little wooden boxes that just seem so . . . Amish. Moving beyond this orderly commercial center, stretches of road are stripped with banners and signs and sidewalk displays, and it is impossible not to regard it as a woven and wooden version of the dense suburban co
mmercial strips along the interstates. (Serious shoppers can obtain an Amish Passport, which is like a preferred-customer discount card.)
Farther into the country, where clothes hang drying between trees and fading white houses without electrical wires stand amid chicken coops and low silos, homemade signs are propped at driveways and intersections, their block letters advertising eggs and apples and lop-eared rabbits.
The balance of all this is not unlike the balance of a place like Ohio against the larger America—always as complex as it is tenuous.
I once interviewed David Kline, a well-respected Amish author of books on nature and farming. His books are widely distributed, he has been reviewed (quite favorably) in the nation’s major newspapers, embraced by the likes of Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver, and he was unreservedly open to being interviewed. But to set up the conversation, I had to mail him a letter making the request, then await receipt of his return letter, which instructed me to call him at an appointed date and time on the community telephone that he shared with his neighbors, which was outside, in a common space. This convoluted arrangement preserves a delicate philosophy to resist technology, to preserve a lifestyle and an ideology and a set of values by a people who are rigid in their beliefs but not at all didactic about them. And it upholds a certain practicality, that the phone can be used as a tool, but its use should be considered, always considered. It’s kind of awesome to someone like me who comes from a highly self-conscious culture where doing things the hard way is the highest ideal.
* * *
The Amish code is the closest thing I’ve ever encountered to the punk ethic. I came of age playing music in the underground rock culture of the 1980s. Almost everything I believe ethically and even morally either derives from that experience or was reinforced there. If you have ever rolled around on a basement floor soaked with beer and sweat at an all-ages show, amid swinging arms and stomping feet, you understand the entirely practical implications of “democracy” and “personal responsibility.”
The Hard Way on Purpose Page 18