The Robert Frost line in the title is often how a lot of stories, particularly crime, evoke setting. In particular, when a character returns home after a long absence. Jim Thomsen, an editor friend, set me to thinking about this when he tossed out a quote from Justin Ward's An Unfinished Season:“The Midwest was so fertile, so enormous, the horizon line stretched to the limits of the known world. But there was no space to breathe.”
Growing up in and around Cleveland as the steels mills and auto plants died, I had a different take. But Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, all those lakeshore cities, have more in common with Chicago and New England than they do the Midwest in general. It also depends on your definition of "Midwest." I grew up thinking it was Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. That could easily be called the Rust Belt and was called the Steel Belt when I was a child. The passage could just as easily apply to Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. When you get about fifty miles away from the rump auto industry along the Great Lakes, the above quote pretty much describes the rest of Ohio, most of Indiana, and southern Illinois. The slavish adherence to the evangelical creed and 1950s notions of decency die hard here.
But group think isn't limited to the heartland. Mention Texas, the deep south, New York City, or California, and you get some pretty solid notions of what the culture is like there, whether it's accurate or not. And the less someone's been to these regions, the more adamant they are about their image of it. And the more annoyed someone who lives there gets with it. Ross McDonald, a fixture in Santa Barbara (upon which he and Sue Grafton based their respective Santa Teresas), once wrote there was nothing wrong with coastal California that a sudden rise in sea level couldn't fix.
It's not all negative, of course. Ohio recently hijacked Threads for about six weeks before the election stole everyone's thunder. And it wasn't about JD Vance or legalizing pot. It was about Hocking Hills and Amish country and Cincinnati-style chili. The entire state took a page from Cleveland's playbook and said, "Screw the bad image. This is who we are." Likewise, when you read about New York, you see the familiar (because we're all forced to see NYC and LA on television like there aren't other cities in the northeast or California), but you see what individuals do with their lives. Suddenly, the places are not monoliths. They're home.
Well, someone's home.
Jim, that's what I was kind of saying in my last blogpost. The Upper Midwest / High Plains are vast, largely empty, and easily ignored or made mock of. But it's home to a lot of people, and there is a culture here that is very specific. Hotdish, chislic. Instead of "Bless your heart", they say, "Well, that's interesting" or "Well, that's different". And they're very nice.... so nice that you may not notice that they don't like you. Or that they do...
ReplyDeleteJim, you mention the steel mills and auto plants dying and I immediately thought of the textile manufacturing plants closing here in the South, which now have transformed into parking garages, restaurants, and hotels. I see them and think of those workers, generations of them, who made their money the hard way and were damned proud of it. And then when I watch a TV show about the South and out comes the banjo music, I just want to scream! (And grab my banjo and play along.) Great essay.
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