Straight to the Heart

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Shortly after my fortieth birthday, in the summer of 2019, I drove to the geographic center of the continental United States, which lies just outside of Lebanon, Kansas. I had not been adjusting well. I found the notion that, if I was lucky, I had lived half of my life rather unsettling. That something in our politics seemed to be accelerating didn’t help. 

The idea had struck me one day the previous spring as I was waiting for a student in my office. What’s the geographic center of Texas, I wondered for no reason I can recall. And then: what’s the geographic center of America? What would a route between the two look like? I took a screenshot of the Google map and over the next couple of weeks occasionally opened it up. At lunch one day, a friend remarked that it looked like a spine. Maybe it’s the sonogram of your next book, she said in all seriousness. 

I had no plans, at the time, to write another book. I couldn’t see the point. The culture was noisy enough as it was. And besides, none of my books had sold particularly well. I wasn’t sure what was left for me to say, either about myself or our state of affairs, nor could I comprehend how traveling to the heartland would help me to say it.

I had, relatedly, returned to therapy, this time with an older man, a practicing Buddhist, a painter and poet whose children were not much younger than me. His office was filthy enough to make me doubt his professionalism, with disorderly piles of paper and books lining half-broken shelves. The chairs and carpet were stained, and from one high shelf a ratty teddy bear observed the proceedings. I sometimes wondered if it held a hidden camera, so as to produce a neutral view, if there  was even such a thing. 

We make art, Jim liked to say, quoting the anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, because we must. It helps us cope. “You can take the species out of the evolutionary milieu,” Dissanayake writes, “but you can’t take the evolutionary milieu out of the species.” Divorce art from survival, Jim said, and you disconnect it from its power. Treat it as another occupation, with its inducements and rewards, and you misunderstand the enterprise. 

•

In Austin, I met up with two friends from college: Big John and Little Jon, as we called them then. It had been ten years since I had seen Little Jon, twenty since I had seen Big John. Both were average-sized, with little disparity between; their nicknames derived from a slight difference in age. 

You haven’t changed at all, Little Jon said, delighted, outside the restaurant. But while I may have resembled the young man my friends once knew, I mostly recognized him through their memories, as shared over dinner a few blocks south of the Texas School for the Deaf.

Of the two, Little Jon had always been more traditionally handsome, with a chiseled jaw, deep-set brown eyes, and a broad, infectious smile. Big John had his own charms, but they derived more from a magnetism that was at least as material as it was metaphorical. He was the sort of person who rolled his own cigarettes and did things like make cheese. He cut his own hair, which he was often raking his hands through nervously or excitedly. Picture a version of the Peanuts character Pig-Pen, with a figurative cloud of dust encircling him, and you have something like the spirit of Big John as he was, or as I saw him back then. 

My friends in those collegiate days were all rowdy art kids, would-be writers and painters and intellectuals. Shaggy vegetarians who shopped in thrift stores for shiny polyester shirts. One night, a group of us entered an elevator, and at the last moment a woman slid through the closing doors. Y’all look like you’re in a band, she said, taking us in. Only, and here she pointed at me, you don’t fit.

I wanted to, even if that meant, ironically, becoming a misfit. So I adopted my friends’ affectations as my own. I came to look like a member of the band. And in looking the part, I learned to play it as well. It’s a common story, as American as they come. 

We were, for all of our countercultural pretensions, no less adolescent than our mainstream counterparts. That we saw ourselves as outsiders belied the many ways we weren’t. But it was also true, I still think, that our scorn, like our recklessness, was sincere. We nourished it. It fed the adults we later became. People who stood askance, or who tried to and mostly failed, absorbed as we inevitably were into the larger culture.

Let’s not let ten years go by again, Little Jon said as we parted. We don’t have too many of those intervals remaining. Above us, a red, heart-shaped balloon floated like an emoji through the pale blue sky, certain to end its life in an ocean, I thought, wrapped around a sea turtle’s neck.

•

I recognized Texas from the movies: Wim Wenders, Richard Linklater, No Country for Old Men. A gently rolling expanse of brown grass and stumpy trees through which cars moved easier than pedestrians. I passed megachurches and gun shops and elaborate gates marking the entrances to otherwise hidden ranches. 

Outside of Kingsland, on Texas 71, I pulled off at an overturned monument. “The last Indian battle in this region,” it read, “was fought near here on August 4, 1873.” Exactly 106 years before I was born, eight settlers attacked “a band thrice their number.” Apaches or Comanches, I read on my phone, as though the details didn’t make a difference. The local tribes had been raiding ranches, the website read, and when a cow wandered home with an arrow in its side, the posse had taken it upon themselves to root out the rustlers. As though they, the ranchers, were the victims. 

The marker, I learned, had been defaced before. Someone had spray-painted “White History Celebrates Genocide” across the inscription. Others in the region had been tagged with the Lakota phrase “mni wiconi.” Water is life. 

Of course it’s all stolen land, I thought, driving away, so who were the real vigilantes? Who were the intruders and thieves? I remembered a line from the writer Elissa Washuta: if you really want to help, go home. Pack up your stuff and cross the ocean. Give us back our land. And if you won’t leave, the vandals seemed to be saying, at least give us back our history. Let us keep our water, like our stories, safe. 

The whole thing felt both familiar and like a portent. I drove deeper. 

•

At the start of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, the novel’s narrator, Axel, joins his uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, in his study. The two discover, in an old manuscript, a possible route to the planet’s interior, which requires descending through a volcano in Iceland. Axel maintains, citing geologists of the day, that given the heat of Earth’s core any such route is impossible, but Lidenbrock isn’t convinced. “‘Ah! those tiresome theories,’” he says. “‘How they hamper us, those poor theories!’” “‘This is what I settle,’” he continues, “‘that neither you, nor anyone else, knows anything certain that is going on in the center of the earth.’” 

Lidenbrock is at once a maniacal character, oblivious to both food and others’ feelings, and a man who either knows or can figure out just about everything. And even if Lidenbrock couldn’t have been more wrong about the earth, within the context of the novel he’s right. In Verne’s imagination, the center is a hospitable place, brimming with life. Late in the novel, having followed the path of a subterranean river, Axel records a vast plain “of probably 3,000 square miles,” on which is “concentrated the whole history of animal life.” “The lives of a thousand Cuviers,” he says, “would not suffice to reconstruct the skeletons that lie in this magnificent assemblage of organic remains.” Ironically, as the party progresses, driven on by their insatiable curiosity, their feet crush these bones beneath them. 

It isn’t long before Axel sees “immense forms moving under the trees…giant animals, a herd of mastodons, not fossil but living.” And then: “About a quarter of a mile off, leaning against the branch of an enormous kauri pine, a human being—a Proteus of these subterranean regions—a new son of Neptune.” As for what a human could possibly be doing living deep inside the Earth, on the far side of a giant boneyard—well, he’s herding mastodons. 

The function of Verne’s interior, in other words, is to reflect, maybe to aggregate, its exterior. At the center, all times are equally present, all life equally valid. With the exception of the human overseer, of course, who is just another version of Professor Lidenbrock, bending the world to his will. The novel promises new and undiscovered worlds, but what it delivers—what its concordance between interior and exterior upholds—is the world as it is, or as it has been. Not a journey to the center of the Earth, in the end, but a journey that never leaves its surface. 

•

When I stopped for gas in Brady, it was well over 100 degrees. I walked around the central square, circled its stately sandstone courthouse, ducking into every patch of shade, not that it helped. Cars passed, or mostly trucks, but I was the only one on the sidewalk. It was as though the town had gone extinct, and yet people continued to live in it. 

Brady, I would realize, had it better than most. There were bars, a taqueria, lawyers and antiques. Other towns had fared much worse. Picture-postcard main streets where the windows were papered over, boarded up. The miles in between went by in a blur of agricultural abundance, but abundant for whom? 

“From the exact geographic center of our country,” Sarah Smarsh writes of her hardscrabble Kansas childhood, “we raised the wheat, the beef, the pork that got shipped around the world.” “Our work feeding strangers,” she says, “was our sole sense of connection to places we had never been.” 

As for those being fed, those of us who have everything we need, writes Edouard Louis, “politics changes almost nothing.” Your labor never destroys your health or savings, it never breaks your back, and so whether the government is right or left, just or unjust, doesn’t really matter. You won’t be mucking out the stalls, dispensing the feed. You won’t depend on this or that program to protect you, or your health, or your savings. I, for one, was solvent that summer. I was healthy. I was driving to the exact geographic center of a country where I had never seriously doubted that I belonged. I was figuring out why as I went.

•

In itself, “the geographic center of America” is a meaningless designation. The marker outside of Lebanon is not the geographic center of all fifty states, which is somewhere in South Dakota, nor is it the population center, which, from the first census in 1790, has moved steadily west and south, and which, in 2010, was located roughly three hours southwest of St. Louis, near the small town of Plato, Missouri; it has since moved 30 miles further southwest. 

Any such “center” feels to me like a symbol begging to be troubled. Because what do you make of a heart that keeps moving? A center that is many?

As a teenager, I read Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, as the title was translated (by Donald Keene) in the first edition I owned. Back then, I could make little sense of the subtle references on every page, but I immediately understood that what seemed superficial—cherry blossoms, gnarled pines—was quite the opposite. The poet was playing a kind of double game: by walking deeper into the country’s interior, he was traveling deeper into himself. And yet it was primarily through surfaces—through the exterior—that, in the context of Basho’s aesthetic, this interior could be known. 

A trip to the heartland, I had somehow intuited, might make me newly legible to myself. But how to trust these surfaces when I didn’t trust the interior they seemed to suggest? 

•

A few hours outside of Austin, at the top of a repurposed hunting blind with the usual graffiti carved into its railings, a plaque described “an imaginary point” five miles to the northwest “whose co-ordinates divide the state into four equal areas.” The terrain of these quadrants, it read, ran “from the subtropic Rio Grande valley to the trackless great plains,” from “lush forests” to mile-high peaks thrusting into the sky. Fifteen of the fifty states could fit within its borders. The view, alas, was unremarkable. 

In nearby Brownwood, to my disdain, I ate at a Subway while gazing, almost longingly, at the Burger King across the street. The restaurant chain, a banner announced, had just launched an impossible sandwich. I, on the other hand, felt stuck in the plausible world. The unpreventable world. The please-someone-stop-it world. Through the window, I watched a few head of miserable cattle bouncing around in the back of a truck. I had to keep going. 

North of town I passed more ranches set back from the road, their lonely gates inscribed with predictable names. Animals crowded under trees or sheet metal shelters. Burn ban in effect, a sign read. 

Later, in Wichita Falls, a scruffy couple seemed to be stalking a man who was bleeding from his mouth. The three of them looked like zombies, the slow-moving kind. You could film the apocalypse here, I thought. Most of the buildings—including one clad, over a dozen floors, in blue aluminum—were in disrepair. The sign above a shuttered furniture store promised “Magic Credit.” The only restaurant I could find was, like the “Picker’s Universe,” inexplicably closed. 

There were more than fifteen states within these borders. More than fifty even. Among them: disinvestment, dereliction, exploitation. By the time I reached the edge of Texas, I was eager to leave.

•

After 2016, a lot of ink was spilled on places like this. What’s the matter with Kansas, people wanted to know. And what had happened in my home state of Michigan? Why was the white working class so angry? 

I knew the kinds of people described in the journalistic accounts I read, but I often didn’t recognize them as rendered. The journalists filtered their subjects through the presumption of something that, in my experience, isn’t exactly there—or not in the way the journalists think. They proceed, often, as if there are meaningful depths to plumb, as though cogent analysis might bridge ideological divides. But in my experience, there wasn’t more to what people believed, or to how they acted on those beliefs. There was less. My family member who believes that snakes are the devil means exactly what she says. As did all those other relatives, so many of them women, who chanted at feverish rallies: lock her up. 

In middle America, these articles argued, was the secret that would reveal why things had turned out this way. In forlorn diners and working-class bars lay the solution to a mystery hiding in plain sight. If one could only drill down into the center of the country’s psyche, one might reason a way back from the brink. This was, in effect, to enact the very elitism one promised to eschew. 

It was as though the country were a character in a novel, someone whose motivations were not immediately apparent, but about whom one might speculate: perhaps it was her upbringing, or watching her parents’ marriage dissolve. Any character’s interiority is a fiction within a fiction, however, constructed by the author to move the plot along. The danger of this kind of reportage, then, lies in its misleading plotlines about red states and blue, about the coasts and the flyover country that gapes between them. In a political environment where listening to each other seemed to enjoy a short-lived renaissance, some journalists were acting more like novelists. More than one heard what they wanted to.

Over time, and in this way Little Jon was wrong, I’ve become progressively less certain about my own interiority. I’m not sure whether a first-person account of my thoughts and feelings, my traumas and memories and dreams, would be any truer than an account of my settings, the towns and regions where I’ve lived, or else of the events that continue to swirl around me. I’ve long felt, on that note, that if I were to split the country down the middle like a peach, I would find only an indigestible pit.

•

The thermometer read 107 when I arrived in Lawton, and—this was strange to me—there were no rooms at the inn, the first or the second. Maybe it was the Army base to the north, or the string of casinos, but something had drawn the hungry ghosts across the flat and empty plain. Fort Sill, I learned over dinner, had once been a detention center for Native POWs and, later, Japanese internees. Soon it would be a prison for migrant children. “Illegal Aliens are Criminals,” read one bumper sticker at the third hotel. Geronimo, I learned from a pamphlet I picked up at the front desk, was buried nearby. 

That night felt heavy. Through the wide windows of my tacky room, I looked out at what might have been the longest fenced lot I had ever seen, the state of the vehicles within gradually deteriorating the farther back one went, until finally there was no mistaking it for anything other than a junkyard. My idea had been to describe the interior and by describing the interior describing myself. But I didn’t want to see myself in this landscape. I didn’t want to be this sort of American. I wanted to let myself off the hook. There was no way around it though. The deeper I went, the deeper I went into myself. 

In the morning, I joined men in ill-fitting suits helping themselves to the breakfast bar. They seemed to know one another in a soldiery way. In the wafer-thin local paper, I read about the state’s efforts to starve the public schools. Then I read about the rehabilitation of drug-addicted mothers, and about the political fates of the state’s favored sons. After pocketing a few mini-muffins for the road, I continued north, past Lake Lawtonka, the Wichita Mountains rising above it in the distance. The roads were damp, but the storm had passed, and as dark clouds moved to the east, the sun peeked through. I drove through rolling hills and green fields and listened to a Sharon Van Etten album, Remind Me Tomorrow, on repeat. Oklahoma, turns out, is beautiful. 

Passing through Sawyer, Kansas, later in the day, a bright blue water tower loomed over the fifty or so houses, the handful of empty storefronts. There were never a lot of people living here, but between 1990 and 2000 the population decreased by more than thirty percent. If I called this place home, I thought, if I passed through it every day, I might feel like my life was disappearing. Might feel that disappearance as loss, my grief as anger. A few towns retained their grocery stores, Mom and Pop operations that had seen better days, but in the distance, maybe fifty or a hundred miles away, loomed the Walmarts and Home Depots that had bankrupted the local merchants. I was more likely to see, around any given bend, the Dollar Generals that had popped up in the vacuum. 

•

Five years have passed since that summer, and although I might have hoped that interval would have turned out differently, the journey feels more relevant now than it even did at the time. 

We may want our lives to be voyages of discovery, but the truth is that we have all of this empty space inside of ourselves, like one big country you can drive through indefinitely. You might get bored. It might be worthless. You might not find what you want to. You might see your reflection in everything, or you might see, instead, only vacancy: where the heart once was, a center emptied of meaning. 

You travel further, you dig deeper. You find more of the same. You try, no matter how difficult it is, to see clearly.  

In the end, we’re all playing Basho’s double game. There’s only the dappled sunshine on a rippling pool. It’s just as superficial as it seems, and if only for that reason, not quite. Make it mean what you will. 

What, then, is the purpose of creating things? Form, texture, content—all of it can be pleasing to the senses, to the mind, to what is sometimes called the soul but which feels to me rather like a deep well in the chest. 

We lower the bucket, farther, then farther still, because we need the water. Because our bodies are largely comprised of the stuff. We can only survive for a few days without it. 

•

Three rough hewn crosses faced the little park outside Lebanon, with its picnic tables and grill, its lone rocking horse for the kiddos. Dirt roads led north, south, and west, but I drove in on the same paved road I drove out on. People had left their names and zip codes on slips of paper provided in the chapel. They had pinned them on the corkboard. Words like azimuth and geodetic were engraved on a weathered plaque. April 25, 1940. 

Steve and Ellen Boyd from Winsboro, South Carolina, had passed through on August 3. The Weak family from Hodredge, Nebraska, on August 4. My birthday. A coincidence, yes, but it tracks. 

At the front of the chapel a wooden cross was superimposed on a carved map of the country that had been painted red, white, and blue. Above it, someone had carved “Pray America” into a semicircle of stained wood. A pamphlet warned about a ringing doorbell, while free copies of the New Testament encouraged me to “Experience the presence of God in everyday life.” A ceiling tile had fallen onto one of the tiny pews. I might as well have been anywhere in a country whose heart, because it is everywhere, is nowhere. 

Outside, someone had planted a Lebanese cedar. Stay true, the plaque exhorted.  

I started the Nissan and entered into my phone the address of a hotel in Manhattan, a couple hours to the east. From the mouth of a garage, a farmer watched as I passed, wrench in one hand at his side, the other half-raised. A farewell, a hello. Or maybe: I see you there. Seeing me here. Seeing you there. Hello. Safe travels. Welcome home. I thought of Axel’s shepherd, herding mastodons on an imaginary plain. The farmer was no realer for me. He is the reflection I have made him.

Was there a world, I wondered then, in which I wouldn’t have kept going? A world in which the bones wouldn’t have crunched beneath my feet? 

The sun was at my back. The sky was bright and clear.