Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

As I pulled into the post office annex I noticed something I normally wouldn’t: a guy whacking weeds.

Usually, when I’m in the car I flip on the mind’s auto responder. The garbage truck. The jogger. The billboard. I pass them without much thought on the way to the gym, the library, the post office. But there this man was, standing in a parking lot at the edge of a field on the outer ring of town, tidying up.

And, strangely, that registered.

For the year that preceded this week the more accomplished person in my marriage served out an internship in a mid-sized town in the Deep South. (This is why no posts for a week; the two of us squeezed an apartment and the Savage Beast into two cars and drove through slices of seven states.) For a Minnesota boy, life in the South was in some ways like life in another country. The greatest shift, I discovered, was a visual one. It wasn’t the absence of 10,000 lakes. Or the presence of sun-induced mind-melting heat waves. Instead, it was the man-made aesthetic difference. Or, more accurately, indifference.

The city we lived in was carved out of out a forest, and yet no one thought to leave a few trees behind. Shade was hard to locate. Asphalt was hard to avoid.

The grid was plotted as though a deck of cards had been scattered for a game of Memory. While about town, I passed strips of unused office space bizarrely erected in the midst of neighborhoods. It was not unusual to find a car dealership set up on a front lawn. There were churches up the street. Churches down the highway. Churches everywhere.

The town had about fifty thousand residents and I can’t imagine any of them could survive a week without a car. Even with one, I couldn’t get anywhere in fewer than fifteen minutes — unless it was 10 o’clock at night and I hit every light.

We rented half of a duplex and the place served us well. We had a plot of grass and trees that dropped pecans onto our driveway. We were away from the heart of a fast food city and lived opposite a seemingly endless road of stores full of discount furniture and shit you can buy for a dollar. In a way, our place felt like a country home and yet the great challenge of my day was always finding a place to walk the Beast. Parks were invisible and those we could locate were mucky. Even sparsely populated side streets were dangerous, as speed limits were calculated, best I could reckon, by multiplying the number on the sign by two.

If I wanted a sidewalk I had to form a search party. So usually we drove to the swankiest high school in town. The reward for our expended gas and wasted twenty minutes was a stroll around a running track next to a football field. The football field was immaculate; a facility many colleges would envy. The track, though, not so much. We were surrounded by weeds and sand and rotted goalposts and trash.

When we did brave the quietest nearby road we were less likely to encounter lovely trees or beautiful flowers than to stumble upon an abandoned television set. One time two guys stopped a truck feet from us, opened a spigot and started dumping a barrel of liquid. I can’t say what the liquid was but I know it wasn’t water. And I’d bet my mortgage it wasn’t wine.

The vibrant part of downtown could be seen in minutes — one half-block with a fine restaurant, a decent bakery and upscale condos sat two blocks from a fine library. Much of the rest was an advertisement for a place that once was: old buildings long since left to rot. There were signs the town had seen more visually appealing days. But few signs those days will return. I hope I’m wrong.

I couldn’t find much in the way of even middlebrow culture and the placeholder was found in the form of a plastic swan. Hundreds of plastic swans, actually. Large multi-colored plastic swans perched in front of businesses throughout town. “What’s up with the swans?” is a question I posed to a townie. An art awareness project, he said. “Why didn’t they just erect some?” is a question I kept to myself.

When you spend months in a place you see it differently than when you spent minutes. There are, of course, many other cities not terribly unlike the one we lived in — cities poorly planned and difficult to live in; cities where big boxes and chicken buckets rule; cities where sightlines are an afterthought. What I learned is how much it bothers me to live in one of them. I learned how much aesthetics can mess with the mind. The more time I spent there the more the physical depression caused a mental one — the more my eyes looked for reasons to complain.

To clarify, material wealth matters little to me (good thing, too, as I make a writer’s salary). Everyone needs a certain amount — enough for a dignified home, adequate health care and food that lives up to the term — and after that much of the rest is the meaningless stuff we box up and cart with us from city to city. So my sense of the place wouldn’t have been all that different had Big Lots suddenly been replaced by Bon Marché. And I generally feel more comfortable around people who make $30,000 than $300,000. (I must also note that some eye-soars were the products of a level of poverty that is real and attributable to forces far more complex than can be explained away, as white guys like me often do, by “personal choice.”)

How a city is planned and managed affects the way its inhabitants live and feel in profound ways. The idea that the cost of living would be cheaper was, at least in our experience, a fallacy, and in some cases, such as at the grocery store, taxes were much higher in this red state and than in the home blue. But, if needed, I’ll pay more taxes. Just give me a sidewalk and please pick up that poor dead cat from the middle of the road.

We had a pretty good idea going in that once the year was up, we’d be out. So I had had an eye on this day — the day we’d return to the permanent home — since before we left. Still I didn’t know how I’d feel after spending most of a year abroad. I expected eureka moments and hallelujah bursts of emotion. But by the time we got back, late at night, I was so worn out from packing-shipping-packing-driving-driving-driving that I didn’t feel much more than exhaustion’s exhale.

The next morning, I checked the mailbox and found a slip notifying me that some of our packages were waiting at the post office annex. I hopped in the car and made my first return trip through town. Northfield is a comely community, punctuated by a lovely downtown. But as I rolled around my eyes didn’t focus on the most charming buildings, the rise of the river, or the plant life of the arboretum. I thought they would, but they didn’t. Instead, the mental snapshots I took included the backside of an old building that has survived despite, not because of, prevailing economics … a school parking lot widened so as to be more safe and efficient … a worker cleaning up after an arts festival talking to a musician who had performed during that arts festival … and a man clearing weeds that almost no one would ever see.

I noticed evidence of people who care about even the least attractive parts of their surroundings. That’s when I started to feel a little less tired, and when my eyes began looking for reasons to be happy to be home.

This post was added on Monday, August 18, 2008 by Tom Swift at 10:37 and is filed under Down Dixie, Rough Drafts.