The #Midwessay: Gary Reddin, Fish Heads on a Fence Post

Fish Heads on a Fence Post 

Gary Reddin

*

Drive too far into the country here in Oklahoma and you might come across a fence full of decaying fish heads. They might be hanging from barbed wire, nailed to a wooden post, or strung up in a tree like grotesque windchimes. To the outsider, it could be an altar to a dead god, a totem meant to ward off evil, or a display of savagery and sacrifice.  

     And perhaps that’s just as well. Because the truth, as it so often is here in the Midwest, is as clear as creek water. 

     I don’t remember the first time I saw catfish heads on a fence line, but I remember the first time I asked my dad about them. We were on a gravel road and I was watching the ghosts—my name for the trails of dust kicked up by the truck tires—when I saw a fence full of skulls. I had seen them before, but never like this. I counted 20, 30, maybe 40 heads strung up for nearly a mile. Most of them had dried out, but near the end they were fresh, still dripping. 

     Why do people hang fish heads out like that?

     My dad had a way of answering questions that ensured you didn’t ask follow-ups. He preferred to drive with a tailwind of silence rather than against the headwinds of bonding. 

     Same reason you mount a deer head or stuff a good mallard, to show off.

     Though I know he would have believed otherwise, his wasn’t the last word on these strange rural relics. In high school, driving through the backroads toward the Red River for the weekend with a group of friends, I confidently explained that the dried skulls on the fence we were passing were trophies on display. 

     No, people nail them to the post to skin them and leave the heads behind ‘cause no one eats the head.

     My friends were not convinced of my father’s wisdom.

     In college, I had a history professor who claimed the heads were a part of an old wives’ tale. 

     Hang a catfish upside down on a fence and you’ll bring rain, according to the folklore.

     I didn’t have the heart, or let’s be honest, the confidence, to tell him that I’d only ever heard that about dead snakes. 

     And there are always other stories. Other fathers sitting in silence and other kids staring out the windows of a trucks, watching ghosts and counting skulls. They’ll come up with their own truths, and in turn correct others. Out here, the truth is just a series of corrections, like bends in a creek redirecting the water toward the ocean, or more likely, some cow pond full of shit. 

The #Midwessay: Elizabeth J. Wenger, The Great American Desert

The Great American Desert

Elizabeth J. Wenger

*

I find that I can tell people anything about where I’m from. Lies land easily when your home state makes up a big, blank space in the rest of the country’s imagination. 

     “Oklahoma?” people exclaim upon hearing my origins, tasting the word in their mouth like a soured fish. In their heads, they picture a generic state border, something square or rhomboid, and try to reach back to US history class. They’ll remember something loosely about Indians, maybe something about oil…wasn’t there a musical? 

     “What’s down there anyway?” they’ll ask. 

     “Oklahoma is a lot like Australia,” I’ll lie. “In isolation, we’ve developed unique flora and fauna. We have a rare kind of wolf that’s blind in one eye so it walks crooked, with the good eye facing out.” 

     They’ll nod their head, happy to accept the story. They’ll go home and tell their friends: “Did you know that Oklahoma has one-eyed wolves?” 

     And why not?

     I’m from nowhere which means I could be from anywhere. My part of the country was founded on myth, so I don’t find it troubling to perpetuate such tall-tales. 

*

There are many myths of the west, but of the middle-west there is one in particular I’m stuck on: the tale of the Great American Desert. Founded on accounts from Zebulon Pike and Stephen H. Long, two explorers who each summarily wrote off a huge chunk of America’s center as uninhabitable wasteland. Pike compared this part of the country to the sands of the Sahara. Across the tract we now know as the high plains, Stephen H. Long wrote in large letters, “THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT.” 

     Now, that word “desert” just calls to mind vast stretches of sandy land. But at its core, it is about desertion. It comes from the late Latin desertum, literally ‘a thing abandoned.’ I see this myth—now long denounced—that wrote off a wide, diverse region with the word ‘desert,’ as a foreshadowing, and a bit of historical metonymy.

*

My state’s history is bound up in the idea that nothing is or was here—or at least that whatever was here was up for grabs.

     Oklahoma was, in fact, already inhabited land. Even when Long deemed a vast portion of the midwest and west a desert in 1830, the lands of my state were home to the Wichita, Apache, Quapaw, and Caddo tribes. 

     Then, when Andrew Jackson sent many of the Eastern tribes on that long tragic trail, with treaties and contracts, they were left, people and promises abandoned, in my state, a state my friends are always leaving, a state I myself have left.  

*

As a writer from an imaginary nowhere, I find myself less a storyteller and more a record keeper. With everything I write, I am populating the reader’s imagination. Filling the great desert with all the people that are already there. 

     Oklahoma's panhandle is often called “No Man’s Land.” Out there, dust devils spin like dancers across the infinite stage of highway. The state’s Western lands shift to mesas and ragid escarpments, like some grand excavation God left midway through. 

     Today, I flip through images of Oklahoma Ghost Towns and think about abandonment. I feel shame for the home abandoned (by me, I tsk myself in guilty self-importance). It is a shame I feel most when speaking to people who’ve never been to my home. I find myself denying, deriding, and defending it all at once. My state contains multitudes, all layered up like the ground itself and I am always trying to dig up a few artifacts to prove it exists, and that its existence is more than grains of sand.   

     Perhaps that is why I still write about home and the people who live there. Still write to keep the place vivid, full, brimming with life.

     No desert, never a desert. 

The #Midwessay: Rilla Askew, Belonging

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

Belonging

Rilla Askew

*

     

You could shrink a map of the continental U.S., lop off the protruding tips of Maine, Florida, and Texas, superimpose that map on Oklahoma, and the regional identities would match up. In Oklahoma, Back East (Tulsa) meets the Deep South (Little Dixie) meets the American Southwest (Wichita Mountains) meets the mythic West (the Panhandle), meets the Midwest—or one version of the Midwest—in the tallgrass prairie region along our northern border with Kansas. That’s where I grew up, in a white-dominated midsized town, Bartlesville, where we rooted for the St. Louis Cardinals, listened to WLS Top 40 Radio out of Chicago, and on weekends, for entertainment, drove a twisty two-lane blacktop 25 miles north to Caney, Kansas, to barhop.  

     Some maps of the Midwest include Oklahoma. Most do not. But my piece is Midwestern, or the piece of my raising is. How do I know? My hometown was built up from a prairie outpost to a thriving company town by Midwesterners, particularly an Iowa barber whose last name graced a plethora of Phillips 66 service stations, downtown office buildings, and my daddy’s paycheck. The city’s most famous building, the Price Tower, was designed by the nation’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, a Midwesterner who described his anomalous skyscraper as “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.” My daddy helped build that lonesome-tree skyscraper on the prairie. 

     In Oklahoma we claim several pieces of the Midwestern character. Friendliness, for sure. Oklahoma has it in spades—so much so, in fact, that we had “Drive Friendly’ enshrined on state highway signs.

     Anonymity? Check. Who outside the region can tell you where Iowa lies in relation to Indiana, or Ohio to Illinois, or Oklahoma to any of the above? 

     America’s Heartland? Check. To confirm this, just review news stories about the Oklahoma City Bombing. Count how many times the term “heartland” is used.

     Flyover state? Check.

     Self-identified decent, hardworking, neighborly people? Check. 

     Wishful white people who paper over the darker parts of their history? Oh, double, triple, quadruple check. Here I’m talking about our intentional suppression of the Tulsa Race Massacre, our sanitized reframing of the Trail of Tears, and other such collective forgetting.  

     But I realize I could be wrong. Maybe public amnesia about the dark past is not a classic Midwestern characteristic. Maybe Midwesterners in Minnesota actively recognize the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men at Mankato in 1862, and Indiana teaches its youth about the 1930 spectacle lynching at Marion, and Chicago deeply and truly owns the 1919 racist assaults that devastated the South Side. Maybe public reckoning with such dark histories has long been a part of Midwestern ethos. If so, then my home state is only now just beginning to belong to the true heart of the Midwest.

The #Midwessay: Mason Whitehorn Powell, Okie Midwest, the “Other Space”

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator 

Okie Midwest, the “Other Space”

Mason Whitehorn Powell

*

Deep into midwinter and the pandemic, I’m standing around a backyard fire with my wife and two childhood friends. It’s nighttime in Hominy, Oklahoma, and we’re doing what we’ve done much longer than the law has allowed us: drinking cheap beer.

     “Do you think this place is cursed?” I say.

     “Hell yeah,” one friend replies.

     When we gather, my wife, who’s from Italy, is subjected to stories of what we witnessed here. What people did to others, the things we’ve done, friends and family lost to this place, of some that lost their minds—to drugs, to ideologies, to life lacking definition. If there is a curse, it is that Oklahoma reveals the truth of America’s founding and troubled identity, yet rejects it and denies how we arrived here. At the end of the Trail of Tears is Indian Territory, at the end of Indian Territory is Oklahoma; and Oklahoma statehood robbed its Indigenous and Black diasporas of their agency and freedom.

     To truly see this place is to look through a glass, darkly. I’ve known this for a long time, that I grew up in territory that was hard to define except by its degeneration. It was my wife, an outsider, who caused me to question if this land might be cursed.

     In her first essay collection, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, Oklahoma writer Rilla Askew helps frame Oklahoma’s history and invokes our contradictions. “Oklahoma is a wounded place,” she writes. “The country as a whole is wounded, but my home state, birthed as it was in such profound hope and greed, violence and promise, is wounded in a particular way.”  

     Many writers in Oklahoma are moved by the tension of longing for definition and our inexplicability; cut off from a past our ancestors were forced to break from and facing the same indeterminate future. Askew’s essays remind us that Oklahoma represents what it really means to be American, with its legacy of violence, which other states have been quick to forget. America’s troubled past lingers in Oklahoma in tangible ways.

     She writes in “Most American”: “This state that had long been a cipher and a mystery, and, like an illegitimate child, was unclaimed by any region, is not the heartland: it is the viscera, the underbelly, the very gut of the nation. … Paradox and dichotomy dominate Oklahoma’s character, and this is part of what accounts for our mystery, for why we cannot be classified, categorized.”

     Rilla’s writing helps put Oklahoma’s past in perspective, but how does one accept their place among such unkind revelations? The closest I’ve come to answers for these questions, to understanding the space Oklahoma occupies in this nation, is in French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the Heterotopia, or “other space.” (source)

     Heterotopias are physical spaces connected to but removed from society and culture. They are both real and mythic, because access to them goes against and inverts conventional systems and circumstances. As examples, Foucault mentions boarding schools, charnel houses and burial sites, ceremony, colonies and colonization. Oklahoma has been a prominent host to each of these. From pre-colonial earthen mound complexes by Mississippian culture such as Spiro, used for rituals and to inter the dead, to Indian Boarding Schools of the 19th and 20th centuries—the legacy of this place is composed of heterotopic spaces that we have yet to escape. Considering Indian Territory and contemporary issues concerning tribal sovereignty like the McGirt Supreme Court decision, or the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Greenwood, and a current reparations lawsuit against the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma still resists and contests the other while championing itself a mythical place of resilience. 

     This is a place of inequality, tribal sovereignty, and nostalgia. In Oklahoma, we are caught in a heterotopia that reveals our true nature, that the state occupies a space that splits past and present, lawlessness and justice. To paraphrase Foucault, he says Heterotopias are both isolated and penetrable, they are not “freely accessible like a public space,” but the barrier to entry is either compulsory or requires rites and purification. Oklahoma is the land of broken treaties, land runs, sundown towns, and overpopulated prisons—purification was once Native American dances, war paths, and rituals, now this land is molded by megachurches and socio-political ineptitude.

     The circumstances of Oklahoma can either be regarded as a curse, or a path towards empathy and understanding. As Oklahomans, our otherness is a balance between reality and myth, sin and forgiveness. Askew says, “those worst sins are balanced here by the better part of human nature—the best of what’s worst and best in us.”

     For me, with a case of beer, friends, and backroads, the imagination opens. 

The #Midwessay: Gordon Grice, Midwest Death Trips

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

Midwest Death Trips

Gordon Grice

*

 

Can this really be the same notebook, here in my travel bag, that I took for the last family death? That was six years ago, but here are my journal entries, scribbled in hotel rooms. Writing goes slow in my ragged hand. 

     It was summer then. One entry tells of a thunderstorm. It came as if to verify my stories of Oklahoma, so my children would believe. They grew up near Minneapolis. The usual Oklahoma rain ripped through, tossed handfuls of lightning, then had somewhere else to be. From my hotel window I saw a child standing in it (not one of mine), just beyond the eaves, holding his hands out to grasp. 

     In the morning we found an elm tree had lost a branch thick as a thigh, its wood broken and blond.

*

“I never travel without my diary,” Oscar Wilde said. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

     My old notebook is not sensational. Mostly it’s blank. Plenty of room for fugitive scribbles I’ll make on this trip. I don’t expect to get any “writing” done. But I know that, in the cannibal manner of my kind, I will eventually return to make something of these pages, or waste more paper trying.

     It’s winter now. The hawks start in Kansas, on an eternal stretch of Highway 54. On a post the first of them sits fluffed against the wind, chocolate spots on a white breast, decapitated—or so it seems, with its head tucked like a turtle’s. Five miles further on another glides over billows of winter grass, turns, stoops—but we’re beyond him, too fast to see what he’s about. The next I would have taken for a plastic bag tangled in last year’s weeds, except that we know their colors by now. We know he’ll step any moment into the air.

*

The night after he died I dreamt my father forded a snowy river, which was also the street we lived on when I was five. His white hair streamed behind him. On the far curb, he lay back exhausted. His feet dangled in the river. Or maybe he had no feet. In real life I had worried he’d lose them. They were always thick as snakebite and leaking plasma and he hated to take his diuretics. 

     “I worry about your heart,” I said to him in the dream. 

     “It only takes a heartbeat to turn things around,” he said. “Yesterday they thought I was finished.”

*

I live at the ends of a lightning bolt, north for everyday, south for death. It hurt my father when we left. Now he’s left. My move won’t hurt him anymore.

     I don’t know. Writing for me has something to do with where I came from. My wife said one time maybe all my writing troubles would disappear if we went home and stayed there. It’s a small town. It’s bleak. I was never happy there. 

     And yet. 

The #Midwessay: Kathryn Savage, Fly-Over

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

Fly-Over

Kathryn Savage

*

 

Lights flank tarmac. Everywhere, staircases on wheels waiting to be rolled beside small planes, wet from rain. At the airport, at night, in the Midwest, a plane descends slowly and I watch a man in a reflective vest out on the ramp wave it down like he's nudging a shy animal from the sky.

     Boarding the plane, a man in first class, the aisle, brazenly watches softcore on his cellphone. Women’s bodies tangle the way new puppies do, all that flesh and sucking. I take my seat, watch the others who board see his screen and look down instinctively. This is a small plane. We are shoulder to shoulder, flying between small midwestern cities. 

     I remember this party in high school. Then I'm going into a bedroom with my friend R and this guy who wants to have sex with us together. There was a desktop computer in the corner of the bedroom, screensaver rotating through a pattern of abstract geometric shapes. The emanating light dull and soft as the belly of a flower. We took our clothes off, licked and felt. We were clownish, a performance. Hair all down my back, skin strangely lit. I wanted to be a performance, a painted on grin of a body.

     The plane lifts. All last year, I kept recording dad's dying body with my phone. His voice, his walking, his words, so I could play him back. Then I couldn't watch any of it. To see him performing his living was also to see him performing his dying. After the funeral, me and some cousins screamed along to the radio, speeding and drunk through night-shaded cornfields. It was a beautiful feeling—the cool wind and the cigarettes we smoked down one after another and our shared youth and blood coursing between us. 

     Eric Gamalinda: “Because memory moves in orbits of absence.” The women on the man's phone in first class were on their knees in a kind of worship. They performed presence and aliveness so well. I used to want to be a good performance too. Then I changed. The cars I've driven too fast in. The bad parties. People I've loved and fucked and hated here. My Midwest is so many small monuments. Memories that orbit, and depart, and resurface. Here’s a memory: When we lived in extended stay motels, me and dad, I remember watching Arachnophobia starring Jeff Daniels and John Goodman. It was the first film I watched entirely while jumping on the bed. 

The #Midwessay: Becky Carman, It's Not That, Either

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

It’s Not That, Either

Becky Carman

*

The colloquial Midwest is a huge swath that none of us can accurately draw borders around, so forgive me, Chicagoans, for focusing on the prairie, where our whole thing is talking about leaving or not talking about staying. Re: us, everyone else’s thing is fixating on our most apparent qualities. The bad ones. Thanks a lot, John Steinbeck (who was from California).

     From the inside out, it’s a chip on our shoulder—a conjoined pride and shame about our theoretically idyllic, if flyover, way of life, with our ample parking and slow summer nights and giant grocery carts. From the outside in, it’s the Dust Bowl and then corn fields and also complicated family dynamics centered around religion. 

     Even the prompt for this essay—”What is the #Midwessay? What is the Midwest?“—emphasizes the writerly burden of geographical and cultural exposition, whether to readers or to ourselves. We’re in the netherworld, called western but really central, with a coastless, varied landscape most people couldn’t describe if asked. Flat, kind of? But hills, sometimes. Cities! Small ones. Low cost of living and driving to food trucks, for some reason. Good veterinary schools. Nobody needs to ask Joan Didion what New York City is like to understand what she’s talking about.

     Being Midwestern is about recognizing one’s roots if not one’s home. As essayists, it’s apparently to write despite one’s circumstances instead of because. We cling to the idea of expatriates having done us proud instead of, more truthfully, abandoning us, trying to prove our worth. Anyway, humorist Will Rogers was born in Oologah, Oklahoma, left as soon as he could to make his name as a globetrotting Hollywood film star, and died in a plane crash in Alaska. We named Oklahoma City’s international airport after him.

The #Midwessay: Phyllis Brotherton, My Midwessay

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

My Midwessay

Phyllis Brotherton

*

The Midwest for me will always be home, and even though “home” has been many places over the years: Chicago, Tehran, Fresno, California, and now Reno, Nevada; Oklahoma City, my place of birth and life for the first 25 years, will always signify my origins and claims a forever hold on my heart. 

     What could be considered more “Mid” than Oklahoma City, a short 355 miles +/- south of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the 48 contiguous US states? What Neil Gaiman describes in American Gods as “a neutral ground where the modern and old gods can meet despite the war between them,” which seems particularly percipient, given the area’s 35+ registered Native American tribes and the crisscrossed remnants of former federally demarcated Indian Reservations. Though the West long ago was designated as everything beyond the Appalachian Mountains, exploration, migration and settlement later shifted that “frontier,” so that the vast expanse west of the Mississippi River became known as the West.

     My Midwessay would include the farm where I grew up, just south of Oklahoma City, where when asked, my family described, in our linguistic-lazy Okie accents, as “six miles south-a the airport, a mile west-a Meridian” and eight miles west of the town of Moore, where I attended all twelve years of primary and secondary school. The dirt road leading to our rented 100-year-old farmhouse nestled on forty acres, was lined all along the south side with hickory trees and still is, though they are shadows of their former selves now, ravaged by Wizard-of-Oz tornadoes and Northers certain to storm through every year, over and over, like clockwork. That rickety cellar door Dorothy stomped her foot on to get in, blown back again and again as she tried, was the spitting image of mine.

     The pecan tree in the backyard, beyond the cellar, windmill, and outhouse we used when the toilets clogged or the septic tank filled up, still stands in all its Papershell Cultivar glory. It watched our young family of four move in, shaded my Dad’s greyhound dog pens, and saw us pull out of the sandy driveway twelve years later, to a new home further south, all our own. On a visit a few years ago, on yet another drive-by to see how the place was getting on, I’m greeted by the owner, who shares that the tree, likely two centuries old by then, produced over 400 lbs. of pecans that year, almost ten times the average. I immediately write down this happy longevity story in my notebook. Of course, the old house and even the cellar by that time, only existed unseen below ground, since the former had been dozed and buried on its very spot, while the latter ultimately caved in on itself.

     For me, my Midwest Essay is full of color: the red dirt of the South Canadian River, the red cardinals perched on snow-drifted fenceposts, the golden sway of wheat fields, the black-green sky of a Cat. 5, the flaxen hair of broom corn, and the clear colorless glass of icy highways. And smells: fresh-baled alfalfa, the petrichor of raindrops on parched soil, the must of fallen leaves or the sharp scent of the first cold spell that pierces your nostrils like a dull knife. The Oklahoma winds could have their own dictionary, and maybe they do. All of this, the shade and scent of nostalgia, of childhood memory, of that place that was your first remembrance, and really your only—home.