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: Grace Roberson on Ohio

On Ohio

Grace Roberson

*

Ohio is the quintessential setting in any fictional landscape: it establishes enough humility for a protagonist to excuse any forthcoming pretentiousness. It’s where main characters go to die. Think Ruby Sparks (2012), a film about a writer who constructs a girlfriend from his imagination, only to have the relationship turn sour. He chooses Dayton as her hometown. Why? “Because it’s romantic.” 

     A side effect of living in the Midwest is that it makes you a contrarian by default. If you live in a suburb thirty minutes west of the nearest city, you choose the city as the answer to the inevitable where-are-you-from-first-date-question, or the location setting in your Twitter bio. 

     In high school, I scoured my family’s apartment for loose change, checking coat pockets and couch cushions so I could walk into class with gas station iced coffee that always left a sour taste in my mouth: you can never escape where you’re from. 

     During my last semester of college, I took an introductory Linguistics course. The most common of Northern Ohio dialects is inland, in which vowels are shifted. After midterms, I boarded an eight-hour Greyhound bus from Cleveland, did my makeup in the Port Authority bathroom, and bought a MetroCard. I grinned knowing that no one else on the subway knew where I came from. The illusion shattered when I bought an apple at a bodega and said “I don’t need a bee-ag.”

The #Midwessay: Julia Kamysz Lane, Mall Baby

 

Mall Baby

Julia Kamysz Lane

*

In the right light, the black asphalt parking lot is a shimmering wide moat surrounding the island that is Woodfield Mall, once the largest shopping mall in the world but now just another suburban oasis outside Chicago. You and your fellow shoppers circle slowly around the lot like turtles, pretending to be patient for a spot closest to the door. After 10 long minutes, you settle for the end of an aisle. As you hare-hop your way to the entrance, you dart across yellow painted lines while dodging massive SUVs wielded like steel steeds by impatient, suburban drivers.

     Gleaming, wide automatic doors swallow you inside this large box. Its innards are more boxes, full of clothing, jewelry, shoes, purses, toys, games, knick knacks – anything you could possibly want and nothing you need.

     You hear the teenage girls giggling before you see their young, bright faces pancaked and painted with make-up that makes them look like amateur adults. Suburban moms find things and stuff on sale, delighted with their purchases until they are stuffed in closets and drawers; all will be tossed out in 40 years by their heirs when the moms must move to nursing homes or graves. 

     It is loud. The voices fill the air above you, rising to the high, cold ceilings. You see small, stained children running ahead of parents yelling at them not to run or scream or snack 24/7, which is what the adults all want to do and they are jealous. 

     Listen in to the smallest talk. Which new stores opened? Have you eaten at the jungle-themed restaurant with the alligator snapping at coins in the wish fountain and mechanical monkeys swinging overhead on a vine while you eat overpriced American burgers and fries? Do you laugh at all the people who fall down at the huge indoor ice skating rink? Have you seen the latest romantic comedy or action flick in the mammoth movie theater that requires walking down multiple halls to find your destination, like O’Hare Airport (why is it always the furthest one away?).

     The social shoppers are the happiest, the ones who travel in schools from store to store. Are they smart? Yes, if it comes to bargain hunting, but their impulse buys of the latest trends cross out any cleverness and mark them as human after all. 

     If they're young, they move on instinct. They genuflect at celebrity 'zine covers and practice pouty lips.

     The few lone shoppers are the sharks. The twentysomething man shadowing the school of preteens, picking out the weakest one. She has a little bit of baby fat trimming the waist band of her too tight jeans. There is a little blood drying where she got her ears pierced just now, edging her new birthstone earrings. Tourmaline is beautiful, like her baby blues.

     She is trying the hardest of all of them to belong, to be noticed.  

     He smells the blood. Here he comes.

The #Midwessay: Randy Osborne, Proof of Survival

Proof of Survival

Randy Osborne

*

“Oh McKay, did you see that write-up, ‘The Babysitter and the Slasher’?” From her tone, my grandmother Mad might have been asking if I noticed a newspaper item about the Christmas tree-lighting next Thursday in the main square of our northern Illinois town. But we never attended such things. 

     Mad flipped the June, 1963 True Detective open to the two-page photo spread that began the article. The babysitter’s body lay hunched in snow where the Minneapolis dog walker found it. Cops and newsmen huddled around, taking notes. 

     Her face, I read aloud, no longer resembled a human countenance. At eight years old, I needed help with longer words. Mad glanced up from her sewing. 

     “‘Countenance’ means the same as ‘face.’ He bashed her face in, after he cut her throat.” Mad positioned a sleeve under the machine’s needle. “Or he might have bashed her face in before. Most likely after.” She pumped the pedal and the Singer’s needle jumped, happily stabbing cloth. I turned the pages.

     The same issue offered “Poker, Call Girls and Murder.” I didn’t know what a call girl was, but I liked the name of the prosecutor in the case—Neil McKay—and the close-up police photo of the dead guy in a pool of blood. He looked like my father. 

     On the cover, a man with a shovel kept watch over his shoulder in the woods. His negligee-clad victim sprawled near the deepening hole. “Carole Annette Was Buried Alive”!  

     Also buried in the pulpy pages was a feature about San Francisco’s “social register thieves,” the husband/wife duo caught burgling furs and jewels from the city’s elite. A photo showed the female suspect in custody. She wore cat-eye glasses. “Patty was stunned to hear of another Mrs. Lewis, living under a different name.” It happens.

     After her husband left her for “that slut” he met at the power plant, Mad took in sewing. She didn’t mind accepting periodicals instead of cash, at least not from Mrs. Winter. The aptly named dowager first showed up at our front door with a stuffed paper bag hanging off the end of each arm, like the scales of justice in an overcoat. After introductions, Mad took the left-arm bag from her. A swatch of fabric peeped over its edge. 

     Mrs. Winter sat down with the second bag, which crackled, shifted and toppled over to deal a peacock’s tail of reading material across the floor: crime journals with lurid photos on the fronts, and scattered among them smaller, square-shaped Fate Magazines with bright orange, pink and blue covers.

     “Not for you!” Winter’s knob-jointed finger hooked the air near my face, like a crow’s beak picking meat. She smelled of talcum powder and rhubarb. Mad winked at me, her smile gone when Mrs. Winter turned to her. “I thought you might enjoy these, Madeline.” And we did enjoy them, together, after the harpy winged her way back to wherever she came from. 

     Fate, like True Detective, included a San Francisco article that month: “The Coming West Coast Disaster.” The piece dealt—uncommonly for Fate—with science, but with a clairvoyant angle. Seismologists and psychics agreed that the quake due “any time from the present to 1999” would cause “tremendous loss of life, the greatest in recorded history.”

     Other Fate features dealt with hauntings, UFOs, and mystic experiences. “My Proof of Survival” invited contributions and paid five dollars. H.L. Stalnaker, a lad of seven when his 23-year-old mother died from a blood clot, sighted her ghost under the oak tree where she had done her washings. “Son, don’t ever forget what I’ve tried to teach you,” she said. “Remember it, and remember that I love you.” Stalnaker ran toward her; she vanished. “I told my grandmother and others what had happened,” Stalnaker writes, “but I was laughed at for having too vivid an imagination.” 

     Mad would not have laughed. She took the paranormal seriously. The supernatural, she called it. She would stop sweeping the floor, fix me with her eyes, and whisper, “God will give you blood to drink.” She waited for it to sink in: Matthew Maule’s gallows curse, shouted at Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables. 

     She told me the story many times. Pyncheon wrongly convicts his neighbor Maule of witchcraft so he can seize Maule’s property. On his way to the gallows, he vows that blood will quench the judge’s greed for eternity. Pyncheon builds his seven-gabled house on the land and hosts a grand housewarming dinner—where he’s found slumped in his chair, dead from a massive throat hemorrhage. 

     The Pyncheon family’s fortunes go bad after the judge dies. Phoebe, a distant relation, marries a descendant of Maule, so the property ends up in the proper hands again, along with the mansion. “Except now it’s haunted, McKay, don’t you see,” Mad said. The Hawthorne story might have inspired some of Mad’s own writing, such as her poem “The Greystone House”: 

It stands alone on top of the hill

Forlornly old though majestic still.

The greystone house through the many years

Felt the heartbeat of life, knew its laughter and tears.

The wind moans down the empty halls

On the creeping stairs a footstep falls

Is that a voice in some distant room?

Is that a face in the gathering gloom? 

Have the spirits of those long passed away

Reluctant to leave a life so gay 

Returned to relive a life so sweet

Or to finish some deed left incomplete?

Or is it appeasement or vengeance they seek?

Did death unexpectedly come at the peak,

And leave unfulfilled desires so deep

That even the dead know a restless sleep? 

No, those who have gone from this earthly life

Left much they have felt, whether joy or strife

Impressed on the dwelling they leave behind

Forever to challenge and baffle mankind.

Unfortunately, Fate didn’t publish verse. 

     When Peter wanted to conduct a séance so that we could speak with the spirit of C.V., Mad agreed right away, though I believe she saw through it from the start. C.V. had died of emphysema less than a year earlier, in the arms of Barbara. For us he was neither a voice in a distant room nor a face in the gathering gloom, quite, but maybe we could change that. 

     We joined hands around a card table in the dark. I was scared already. “This is stupid,” Kathleen said. 

     Peter told her to shut up. He waited a moment and said in a lower voice, “C.V., come to us. If you are able to sense our call, come to us.” Neither Peter nor Kathleen ever called him “Dad” or “Father,” and they called Mad by her first name.

     “How are we supposed to know if he’s around?” Kathleen said. “Is he going to light up a Tareyton?”

     Peter called her an idiot and told her to shut up. C.V. would drink the water, that’s how we would know. Peter demanded silence. Kathleen said her nose itched. Shut up. Shut up. 

     We waited. 

     “I feel him,” Peter said at last. “He is among us.” 

     I wanted to know what “among us” meant, exactly—above us, or in the general vicinity, or maybe between me and Mad, in whose bosom I suddenly wanted to hide? And why didn’t Peter just say, I think he’s here?

     “C.V.,” Peter said, “if you are among us, drink ye the water we offer you.” Now I was even more frightened. Why was Peter talking like a pirate, or Jesus? Was he turning into someone else as a result of contact with...the other side? We shouldn’t be doing this. 

     Then I heard the water glass slide across the table. One soft gulp. Two louder gulps. 

     “I declare,” Mad said. “That is one noisy ghost.”

     There was a choking and spluttering, then an explosion of spray. Kathleen jumped to flip the wall switch. Peter had me holding his right wrist, with Mad gripping his right hand, and the glass of water in his left hand. 

     Everybody laughed, but it was the quick-fading noise of a surprise party where the guest of honor knew all along. Kathleen clicked the switch on and off, on and off, on and off. In the strobe-like flash, Mad seemed distracted. She sank into herself—thinking, I suppose, of real-life witches, things unfairly taken and situations never made right.

     “Stupid,” Kathleen said, and walked out.

The #Midwessay: Denise Low, Not Missing Kansas

   

 Not Missing Kansas

Denise Low

*

After decades in Kansas I moved away, but it was too late. My bone and teeth structures are made of Kansas plants and animals, leeched from my digestive system. Folk wisdom says it takes seven years to replace all the elements in the body, but I know from constant repairs that my teeth have not been replaced since they appeared at age ten. Each one is a Kansan. I chew with grinders formed, indirectly, from Flint Hills limestone.

     My memories spiral constantly, filled with people and sunsets, streets, and thunderstorms—set in Kansas. Yes, I miss friends and relatives, but they were with me so often, they still seem close at hand. 

Body and soul, I am made from the central geography of Kansas. Inside my brain, some magnetic orientation aligns me with a different homing beam, like a migrating bird. I look for the rising sun on a broad horizon. 

     So away from the region this second year, in California, there is little I miss. I carry Kansas within me. I am a solid hologram composed of many forgotten meals and filled with images of the past. My corporality and memories are portable—an asset of our roving species heritage.

     Odd things, though, arise. I miss lilacs. I miss rows of lilac bushes in the country that delineate old farm households. I miss spring’s profligate eruptions of French lilacs, white lilacs, and the standard purple-laden bushes with their heart-shaped leaves. In my new town, few people grow lilac bushes, and those that do complain that they only bloom once in the year, not continuously like crepe myrtle and oleander. 

     I miss the spring cacophony of birdsong. In northern California, a few quail call plaintively in the early morning as males entice mates. A kettle of buzzards circles our house silently every afternoon about four o’clock. A small clique of golden crested sparrows pecks nervously in the garden at twilight. The crows—well, the crows are always crows. No one ever misses them because they never depart.

     Lance Henson, a Southern Cheyenne poet, once told Joseph Bruchac how the intangible energy of a place interacts with a person, intermingles. Here I experience how skin is indeed a permeable boundary. Fog rising off the river today leaves a film of water everywhere, until the sun burns it away. I inhale the atomized blend of river and air, like in Kansas I inhaled the aroma of sweetgrass carried on the same circling winds. Not much is left behind.

The #Midwessay: Pamela Dawes Tambornino, From a Cherokee Herbalist

    

From a Cherokee Herbalist

Pamela Dawes Tambornino

*

Kansas in the spring and summer are a time of renewal and provide gifts from nature that I use year round. The sweet grass I pick and dry will become wreaths and smudge braids for my house; the blood root harvested from beside streams will provide soothing balm and tincture; and the bounty of Mother Earth will provide more than that.

     As I walk rural Kansas, I am overwhelmed by the new plants, herbs and “weeds” that are coming into new growth. It is with these that I remember my grandmother, and her mother, as they showed me the roots, leaves and barks that would help people heal spiritually and physically. Each year I gather, from the backroads and fields of Kansas, these gifts of nature and take them home. It is there that I dry, boil, or bottle what I will need for the coming winter. Dandelions are often seen as weeds, but I see them as starts to a wine that is a good replacement for alcohol, but also a rather powerful wine. 

     As I relearn Cherokee, I am now able to recall the names for many of the things I gather now and gathered in my youth. Sweet grass (u ga na s’dv ga nu lv hi), dandelion (gi ga ge  a di ta s’di), and strawberries (ani) are gifts to the People. They are the provisions provided by Kansas soil.

     Many tribes have called Kansas their home among them the: Cherokee Indians, Cheyennes, Chippewas, Comanches, Delawares, Shawnees, Fox, Illinois, and Senecas. Four tribe have reservations here: the Iowa, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox nations. Northeast Kansas is home to Haskell Indian Nations University, and of the 579 ratified tribes (recognized by the Federal Government), about seventy tribes are represented by students each year by this University.

     It is amazing in Kansas to be surrounded with so much culture that enriches the soul and helps me to remember my culture. My walks continue daily as I strive to gather the bounty that Kansas offers. It is not just the State of rolling waves of wheat, farms, and famous universities. It is the home of many cultures that thrive together. 

The #Midwessay: Aislin Neufeldt, A Place That Is Another Place

 

A Place That Is Another Place

Aislin Neufeldt

*

Oz park is about two miles south of me. I know this because when I run there and back it’s four miles. There and back is a tracing, an act of going and returning, where going there is predicated on returning back. 

     Oz is a place that is another place. When Dorothy and Toto are swept up in a Kansas twister and placed there in Oz, Oz might not be separate from Kansas, but maybe a reimagining of the state; Kansas farm hands are recast as fantastical characters, and Dorothy carries back the remembrance of Oz.

     Before I knew Oz Park had a name, I knew it had a hill. I’m from the Flint Hills region of Kansas, now in Chicago. I don’t find hills here often, and the one in that park was the first I saw: one small lump, catching my peripheral eye as my bus passes going down Halsted.

     There matters. Sara Ahmed says in Queer Phenomenology, “[i]t matters how we arrive at the places we do.” I consider there because of this quote, but seldom view returning back as being part of arrival.

I love The Wizard of Oz: it was a favorite tale of mine growing up. It’s infamously rendered Kansas visible, and because I’m some iteration of a “friend of Dorothy.” Being from Kansas and being queer makes being a “friend” deliciously poetic for me, especially as running there and back on Flint Hills somehow allowed my queerness to distill, burgeon: to come forth.

     Oz is about a place that is another place, and so is Oz Park. Whether Oz or the park, I still think they are about Kansas. Neither nearly resemble that almost-rectangle in the heartland, but Oz Park is that of Kansas for me: it doesn’t have multiple hills, its hill isn’t even close to being as tall, but it’s my appropriative memorial, a site where a ‘friend of Dorothy’ can be in a place that is another place. 

     I seldom view returning back as part of arrival. I think this is because such a return doesn’t always feel possible. The there and back of running Flint Hills stopped as I went there: Chicago. I wonder about the ways I can go back.

     Oz is about who can run there and back, who can remember Oz and Kansas, who is reimagined in a world of yellow pavers and emerald infrastructure, and who simply remains in one place; I don’t know if I’m Dorothy, the Scarecrow, or Auntie Em. Maybe I’m just a “friend.”

     From my studio to Oz Park to my studio is my literal there and back, but I still go to Kansas in this way, climbing that one small hill in the park, expecting to see valleys creased by the other Flint Hills but instead, not being able to gaze over the brownstone buildings of northern Chicago. It’s still my Kansas memorial though: my place that is another place. Kansas, my Oz: to which I go there and back.