Long Way Home (13 page)

“I know you look pretty happy.”

“You got that right,” he said with a smile.

“Do you play the slots, too?”

He made a disgusted face. “There's no skill to that at all. My wife plays 'em. She's over yonder. She doesn't have a head for math.”

“You figure the slots are rigged?”

“It's a known fact.”

“What about craps? Or blackjack?”

“Too rich for my blood.”

He appeared to be in his early fifties, wrinkly and leathery. Farmers are as taciturn as cowboys, and he'd just about used up all the words he was willing to waste on me.

“Do you come here often?”

“Once or twice a month.” He fed the machine some coins. “It helps to pass the time.”

FROM FRENCH LICK
I drove along the Wabash River to Vincennes, the oldest town in Indiana. Some fur traders, largely of Creole ancestry, built a fort there in 1732 and put François Morgane de Vincennes in command, but he ran afoul of the Chickasaw, who burned him at the stake four years later. The Germans arrived after the French and settled in Dutch Flats, while American Protestants, now the dominant group, lived north of Main Street.

Vincennes is a mecca for train spotters. It has eighty-four railroad crossings over its four square miles, and they can be annoying unless you like waving to engineers. At the first crossing, I spent five minutes counting the boxcars. At the second, I read the whole front page of the
Vincennes Sun Commercial
.

The waiting doesn't bother the locals, or only a little, according to the paper. They're more concerned about what's in the boxcars, often toxic or hazardous materials, and what might happen if there's a train wreck. Vincennes has a terrible meth problem, the paper said, with tweakers and dealers accounting for 70 percent of the caseload in Knox County, the state's second poorest.

Vincennes University, a two-year college that awards some baccalaureates, is the town's pride. It has a good reputation and a residential campus, unusual for such schools. Some townies resent the students, but that's inevitable when you factor in the drugs and the lack of jobs.

One's money does go a long way in Vincennes, though. At the Old Thyme Diner, where a bumper sticker on the wall advocated a Partnership for an Idiot-Free America, a big breakfast of eggs and bacon cost just $4.25.

I remember little else about Vincennes. My curiosity, once boundless, had ground to a halt. A kind of sadness came over me, a dreariness of the spirit, and I couldn't shake it. Even a walk by the Wabash didn't help. The French called the river
Ouabache
after a Miami Indian word that meant “It shines white.” The Wabash flows over limestone. Once you could see clear to the bottom, but not anymore.

It's difficult at times for a traveler to separate his emotions from what he perceives. Someone else crossing southern Indiana might find nothing but delight. John Steinbeck understood this. He experienced it himself. On such a night, he'd batten down the camper's hatches, hole up with Charley, and smooth over the rough edges with a couple of drinks. I made do with a double Kopper Kettle.

If Steinbeck were around, I'd tell him a few things. I'm in a quandary about your prophecy, John, I'd begin—about that bleak vision of our future you articulated to Pascal Covici.

One minute I'm convinced of its accuracy, and the next I think you were just angry because the country failed to live up to your romantic image of it. My trip so far, three weeks and counting, involves a host of contradictory impressions. The monster land is in dire conflict with itself—irresolute, panicky about the future, and clinging to a mythical past.

Fifty years ago, you carped about the blandness of American life. It's endemic now, except in the big cities. The debts you worried about are mounting, and people are no less interested in material toys. Your friend Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry have leaped back to life with a vengeance, the very avatars of real estate bunkum and fundamentalist hokum. Nine percent of our Christians speak in tongues every week, John.

Earlier in my travels, I saw very little poverty, but that's not true of the heartland. I've been shocked at what I've encountered in parts of West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana. It may not be the grinding, terrifying type—not yet—but it's still a sore point in the so-called land of plenty. The citizens are in distress, and they don't know where to turn. They're galled to watch the government hand out millions to the same bankers, brokers, and insurance agents who walked us off a cliff.

The poverty isn't only economic, but you're aware of that. It's intellectual and cultural, and it creates a vacuum that the pundits of talk radio rush to fill. Count your lucky stars you're not around to endure the pieties and falsities as they encourage a divisiveness that contributes to our problems. If I told you about Sarah Palin, you'd take me for a liar.

Our hope, as ever, lies with individuals. There are still heroes around striving for excellence and hoping to make something better of the nation. Certainly, I'm as blind as the next optimist, but I believe we can solve the problems and go forward. It's our slothfulness that threatens to undo us. Joe Talley's remark, uttered an eternity ago on the Choptank, has stayed with me: “Americans have had it too easy for too long.”

Does the name Paul Dreiser ring a bell, John? I'll bet it does. He was Theodore Dreiser's younger brother, and composed the Indiana state song, “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” while staying at the West Baden Springs Hotel in 1897. The song sold more than half a million copies of sheet music in a single year. It's a melancholy ballad of yearning with a chorus that goes,

Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash

From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay

Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming

On the banks of the Wabash, far away

Tonight I can't step out from under the sadness, John. I find it hard to believe America ever inspired such sweet sentiments, but tomorrow is another day.

M
ISO SOUP FOR
breakfast. I recommend it as a remedy for too much Kopper Kettle. It came in powdered form in little sachets tucked in among the Lipton Tea and artificial sweeteners at my motel, slipped in there like a secret. Just when I thought the predictable would swallow me whole, the unexpected sounded a grace note.

I dumped the contents into a coffee cup and added hot water. Delicate green shreds of seaweed and scallion swirled around as I inhaled the gingery, head-clearing fumes and studied my road atlas. The Illinois of U.S. 50 amounted to fewer than two hundred miles between Lawrenceville and the suburbs of St. Louis, a drive of two days or a leisurely three.

The miso mystery was solved when I paid my bill. The motel's Japanese owner did a steady trade with Toyota executives who flew over to visit the company's factory in nearby Princeton. Perhaps it was my grogginess, but he seemed hyperalert for so early on a Sunday morning, one of those energetic, probably clean-living types who cause a certain unease in backsliders like me. I asked him for directions to Olney.

“Olney,” he remarked genially, tapping at the atlas. “White squirrels.”

Had I been given a koan to ponder? I remembered the great poet Basho and the tribulation he faced on his long journey to the far north of Japan. On his return, fed up with others invading his peace of mind, he closed the gate of his hut for a month and wouldn't see a soul, only to emerge with a renewed acceptance of the mundane world. I'd try to do the same.

Lawrence County, on the Illinois side of the Wabash, was farm country writ large, and the look of it differed considerably from southern Indiana. I don't understand why this should be—such a radical alteration in a matter of miles—but everything changed, not only the look of the land but the smell and feel and very texture of life.

The prairie ran flat to the horizon, and the woods had been thinned to make room for crops. Here the autumn color wasn't so ravishing, reduced instead to a few modest flickers of red, yellow, and gold. The air carried a tinge of chemicals and fertilizer. Grain elevators and water towers were fixtures along the highway.

In an age of agribusiness, Lawrence County defied the trend. Individuals or families owned the vast majority of farms, but the impact of GMOs was still immediately apparent. The soybean yield had roughly doubled in the past fifteen years, while the amount of wheat grown had been halved.

There was lots of corn, too—77,429 acres as opposed to 86,971 for soybeans—and hog pens aplenty, but farmers rarely bothered with other vegetables and had planted just 21 acres to orchards.

The clock had not yet struck nine, but Lawrenceville was already wide awake. The IGA supermarket was open and had been since five-thirty
A.M.
Farmers are early risers, so the place was packed. As I stocked my cooler, I noticed another difference, one of tone. Here the clerk engaged me and chatted readily. The market reverberated with a lively, alert babble of voices.

Lawrenceville looked functional and intact. It belonged to the present, not the past. A grand old courthouse anchored the central square, and the stores around it were still in business. The prices were right, too. For a mere seven dollars, you could devour a catfish platter at Anthony's Towne House. Though flags waved here and there, they didn't overwhelm you. Sometimes the patriotic displays smacked of aggression or defiance, but not in Lawrenceville.

I crossed the Embarras River, pronounced am-brau from the French, and circled in on Olney an hour or so later. It had an aura of solvency as well—a sturdy, rooted quality. Like Lawrenceville, Olney is poor by Illinois standards, but it seemed flourishing compared to Vincennes.

There are indeed white squirrels running around. They're albinos, and two conflicting legends account for their discovery. The legends conclude the same way, with the squirrels in a green box in a window of Jasper Banks's saloon to induce passersby to bend an elbow.

As quiet as Olney must have been, it's still hard to imagine someone blurting, “Wow, check out those squirrels! Let's have a drink!” At any rate, the law ordered Banks to release them. Over the years they became plentiful, but their numbers have dwindled to fewer than a hundred.

East Fork Lake is a hot spot for largemouth bass along with white squirrels, but my fly rod was worthless without a boat. I couldn't cast far enough to reach the fish, so I chose to invest in some spin gear. On Route 130, I found a Wal-Mart Supercenter and almost fainted from the extravagance as usual. Wal-Mart makes you feel paltry for owning so little. It's as if you haven't kept up your part of the bargain.

First I got lost in electronics, then in furniture, and finally in toys, where an unattended child was liberating a G.I. Joe from its package, before I hit sporting goods. For $19.95, I bought a rod and reel combo that included some bass lures. The gear was total crap, and I knew it. For another $20.00, I could have had an outfit that actually worked, but—also as usual—I foolishly talked myself into saving some gas money.

“Going fishing?” the cashier, an upbeat teen, piped.

“How'd you guess?” I replied drily.

“Well, it's pretty obvious!” She, too, was overly bright for the hour.

“I suppose that's true.”

“Hope you catch a big one!”

I threw my gear in the trunk and made for East Fork Lake. The morning was hot, already eighty degrees at least. Outside a house on the road, three girls in shorts were gathering up garlands of toilet paper from the shrubs and bushes. They'd been rolled, as the saying goes, either by their boyfriends for an unstated offense or maybe because of the random churlishness that strikes small-town youths on a Saturday night.

At the lake—a reservoir, really—I put on my Paints cap against the bruising sun, set up the rod, and muttered, “What a piece of crap.” It's astonishing how tenacious our neuroses can be. You'd think someone my age could outrun them, but you'd be wrong.

The heat was bad news. The bass would lurk in the cooler depths, and that's why so few anglers were around—just two, an old couple drowning worms. My stab at casting was hilarious. With the chintzy rod and reel, I could only lay out about fifteen feet of line. Hopeless, in other words. The white squirrels were just as elusive.

I recouped in Olney, where Daylight Donuts advertised, “A Donut In Each Hand, Now That Is A Balanced Meal.” Miso rests lightly on the belly, so I squeezed into Hovey's Diner for a more substantial meal. Churchgoers had flooded in after services, a Sunday ritual, and they hopped from table to table to gossip, generating a kindly warmth.

My waiter was an African American, the first I'd seen since Chillicothe. Considering America's extraordinary diversity, the Caucasian belt that runs from West Virginia to Ohio and beyond is an anomaly indeed, even a country within a country—white, Republican, and conservative.

In contrast to the diner, Olney's Main Street was sobering. All down its length, yellow ribbons were draped on light poles topped with cardboard placards that honored the local men and women enlisted in various branches of the military. Each placard bore a soldier's name—Wayne Sauza, U.S. Army, for instance, or Mark Sauza, U.S. Marines—and below it a brief, prayerful sentence,
Bring Them Safely Home
.

A slick new car was parked across from Hovey's, with Goarmy.com painted on its doors. It looked scintillating against the backdrop of tired old buildings, like a still clipped from a movie. If you grew up on a farm or just dreamed of a more promising future, the sight of it might be enough to propel you to the Army Career Center recruiting office. It's easy to forget our wars in much of America, but not in towns such as Olney. Their families pay the price and make the invisible human cost of the effort achingly visible.

IN THE
Clay
County Advocate-Press
, I read a story about Alpesh “Al” Patel and his father Balder “BJ” Patel, who own Midtown Liquors in Flora, Illinois. The story told how the Patels were sick of their customers mistaking them for Iraqis, Israelis, Muslims, or terrorists when they were Swaminarayan Hindus from Gujarat, India, near the Pakistan border, who believed in nonviolence and were even vegetarians.

The plight of the Patels came as no surprise. In Olney, I'd heard Flora was a tough redneck town. Oddly, the rednecks—if that's what they really were—did not fit the stereotype. They had far too much hair. They wore ponytails, mullets, modified Prince Valiants, and flowing Jesus locks, to which they added such au courant touches as piercings and tattoos. Meth was not unknown in these parts, either.

A heady slate of NFL action had started a run on beer in Flora. When I got to Midtown Liquors, BJ Patel stood at the drive-through window patiently explaining to a lumpy, recalcitrant woman in a bathrobe why he couldn't cash her check—because she bounced one last week. She didn't go down without a battle, fighting bitterly and irrationally until succumbing to the irrefutable logic.

“Ah, well,” BJ sighed. In a more evolved universe, he'd have the means to solve such problems, or so the sigh implied.

BJ had immigrated to the United States in 1990 to work at his brother-in-law's motel in St. Louis, where his son Al attended a multiethnic school. Al's education in that liberal environment did not prepare him for the abuse he received after 9/11. While he was in college, an angry mob looking for Muslims to harass assaulted him, and only the entreaties of a friend saved his life. There'd been no attacks in Flora, only slurs, curses, and vague accusations.

“We try to tell who we are.” Al's sigh duplicated BJ's. “But everybody still says something all the time.”

Al sat at a table in a corner, noodling on a laptop. He and his father were about the same size, both short and stocky. They had red dots and a pair of thin lines on their foreheads. The dot wasn't a caste mark. It signified instead that Al and BJ were God's followers, while the lines represented God's feet. Al was comfortable discussing his religion, but BJ kept his own counsel, unwilling to ruffle any feathers.

The Patels had bought the store from a fellow Indian in 2005. Their customers worked on farms and in factories, and every last one of them relied on the drive-through window rather than their legs to make a purchase.

“So you like Flora?” I asked BJ.

“Very peaceful,” he said with the hint of a smile. “No bombings. In Gujarat, twenty-four bombs in one day.”

Al put it more forcefully. “The bad ones who are doing the bad things, they don't believe in God,” he argued. “The ones who destroy, they don't believe in God. Whether they are Muslim, Hindu, or Christian.”

BJ claimed he wasn't interested in politics, but I suspected him of diplomacy again. Al hadn't yet decided how he'd cast his vote. He thought the candidates looked silly and unprofessional when they squabbled in debates.

“They act like children,” he complained. “Everybody digging up each other's dirt. You can't judge a person on his past.”

“What does America need, Al?”

“The president should be a strong leader. Someone to guide the economy.”

“Has George Bush been strong?”

“He did what was right for the country.” Then Al elaborated an intriguing theory. “If he wasn't good enough, he wouldn't be elected twice.”

He cut short our talk to help his dad as the cars and trucks lined up. I might have watched a football game myself, but downtown Flora, less congenial than Olney, was locked up tight. The only weekend activities listed in the
Advocate-Press
were a Kiwanis Club porkburger fest, a talent show and ice cream social at First United Methodist, and Faith Tabernacle's youth ministries annual blowout. An ad for Beltone hearing aids took up the paper's entire back page. Flora had a rapidly aging population, with one fifth of the residents over sixty-five and another fifth between forty-five and sixty.

I nosed around Clay County for a while. The towns named in my atlas sounded enticing, but Bible Grove, Wakefield, and Passport were all of a piece. One saw old dogs asleep in the sun, guys washing their pickups or motorcycles, forlorn parks absent of people, yard sales, and barbecues.

Only Noble had a sense of fun. It rode to prominence on an oil boom in the 1930s, and had the nerve to call itself the Oil Center of the World. Its jail, described as “very popular” in Noble's heyday, used to imprison both bank robbers and drunks. It sat on a side street like a forgotten block of concrete. A latticed window gave inmates a punishing peek at the life they'd been deprived of.

Salem was the Gateway to Little Egypt, a sobriquet bestowed in the 1820s when a drought gripped northern and central Illinois. The settlers hitched up their wagons and went south to search for food, an incident that echoed the biblical story of Israel dispatching his sons to Egypt to buy some grain to prevent starvation.

Halfway to St. Louis, Salem was much more affluent than Olney, Flora, and Noble. It had reaped the benefits of oil, too, pumping ninety-three million barrels in '39, and its fields still produce, although not so lavishly.

When the roustabouts from Texas and Oklahoma first arrived, they knocked the Illinois farmers as “punkin' eaters.” They'd never seen such horrendous working conditions. The mud was so deep it could swallow a Caterpillar. You could drive to some fields over corduroy log roads, but if your tires skidded, you were pitched into the ooze.

Among Salem's notables were John T. Scopes, indicted for teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, where William Jennings Bryan, also born in Salem, prosecuted him in the infamous “monkey trial.” The G.I. Bill of Rights was drafted in Salem, and Max Crossett, a café owner, sold
his
secret recipe for X-Tra Fine Salad Dressing to Kraft Foods in 1941 for a measly three hundred dollars.

Salem, the ancestral home of Miracle Whip.