Category Archives: 2012

2012, Archives, nonfiction, travel

Out There

“You need to go,” she said.


Her telling my I needed to go hit me pretty hard. Not because she was wrong, or because she spoke the words in a malicious or hurtful way. Her words hit me hard because I’d been feeling the exact same way for longer than I wanted to admit.


It would be easy to blame the breakdown of my second marriage on living in the fish bowl. It would be convenient, even, to blame it on her job, or my intransigence. People that need simple answers to complex questions and are unwilling to accept any shared bit of responsibility might find such explanations useful.


But I knew better. I’d known for a year or better that something was wrong. Relationships ebb and flow, have ups and downs. I knew I was difficult to live with; but I also knew I wasn’t the only one. Somewhere along the way, we stopped considering one another. Not all of a sudden; it happened bit by bit. Melissa told me later she thought it all started to go south for us living in Arizona; I didn’t notice until a year or so into living in Mount Carroll. My reaction, rather than to talk to her about it, was to say nothing. I had determined early in the relationship that part of my job as a husband was to protect her. And that included protecting her from those parts of me that always seemed to work against having what I had thought was a normal life:


my chronic itchy foot.


It plagued me for as long as I could remember. From the moment I was set loose from the house and learned to ride a bicycle, I was gone. When I wasn’t gone, I was usually off in a world of my own anyway… existing as much in my imagination as I did in the world I shared with everyone else. When the marriage to my daughter’s mother crumbled, for every good reason in the world, I took to wandering. Then I had a car, and bounce between my Mom’s condo and friend’s couches. I wrote. I worked when I had to. Even when I had my own place, the longest I stayed at any job was two months. I wrote. I read. I fed the itch in whatever way seemed to work that would keep me in some geographic proximity to my daughter. Movement and geography crept into my writing. I moved to New Orleans, following my daughter. I moved back to Kentucky — the state that while it is not the state of my birth, certainly has been, over the years, a kind of spiritual home for me. I went back to school. I ran into Melissa again.


It all seemed pre-ordained. Meant to be. And back when I was approaching 30 — an age, I thought at the time, when it was time to settle down. My own father fixed his itchy foot with a military career and was able to settle down after falling in love with my mother. The story made sense.


But I had trouble quelling my itchy foot. We lived in Knoxville, and couldn’t find work teaching — which was, at that point, what I decided I wanted to do to earn money. I asked the universe for some kind of relief. We moved to Cincinnati because I landed a part-time teaching gig at Northern Kentucky University. Cincinnati wore on us both, though, and her in particular. I asked the universe for respite, and a full-time job at Arizona State University fell into my lap. Arizona was eating us alive, and we were both miserable in our work. Again, I asked the universe for help and Melissa was offered what seemed to be her dream job as Managing Director at Timber Lake Playhouse in northwestern Illinois.


The universe, regardless of how kind or cognizant I have been, has always given me enough. As I stewed over the gradual decay of my second marriage, the itch and the idea rolled around and around in my mind — an idea I had once mentioned over drinks with friends of ours in Arizona:


to travel the United States, never settling down any longer than it would take to earn enough money to keep on traveling.


There were all sorts of reasons, also rolling around in my head, for why I couldn’t, or why I shouldn’t. My lousy feet, that hurt more often than they don’t. My lousy physical condition. My age, as I was approaching 40. It seemed the sort of thing that as younger, more foolish man might do. But the more I thought it about it, the more the itch bothered me more than any of the excuses I could think of. My daughter had grown distant since the Arizona move and since she got old enough to start putting something together for her own life, and the distance between seemed to matter less as she marched towards all her preconceived notions of adulthood. There was only one deterrent that really mattered. My marriage.


I’d tried talking her into hitting the road with me while we were living in Arizona. She was drawn to the romantic nature of the undertaking but couldn’t get past the fundamental lack of planning involved. Or to be more accurate, she was not able to embrace the lack of stability. From my perspective, we’d never really been stable in a financial sense; we had the same sort of illusion of stability most people achieve living paycheck to paycheck. Why not throw off the vestige? Why not embrace a life more certain and with less certainty? It seemed that the universe never gave us less than we needed; but it never gave us more, either. I was certain there was some lesson we hadn’t learned yet.
I was certain we could learn it Out There. As it turned out, I would be heading to Out There alone.

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2012, Archives, psychogeography, travel

Archive 2012:// North of Zero Street

2012, Livingston, Montana

I left Mount Carroll hounded by the snow. Although the winter had been mild by Northern standards, the storm that was approaching that day in January felt like the sword of Damocles falling. Jennings Mace, a former literature professor, also comes to mind. Steeped as he was in the tradition of American Southern literature – which is not lacking in it’s use of metaphor and (biblical) allegory – he continually reminded us to avoid what he saw as a cardinal sin among literature students. He warned us against something he called symbol hunting. “Sometimes,” he often remarked in class, “a cigar is JUST a cigar.” He was unswayed by the counter argument that sometimes a cigar is a metaphorical penis, just as he was unconvinced of the phallic the shape of the Washington monument and the titular structure of the Capitol Building. (It was also possible that he was too much of a Southern Gentleman to acknowledge any such thing in public; but, being a natural born contrarian and from the north side of the Ohio River, I tended to reject such social niceties.) I tried to keep his admonishment in mind, however, as I rolled out of town with snow storm within view, following the Chicago-bound car I was in close enough that the rear bumper was kissed with frost.

But even if the weather was not metaphorical, it was certainly appropriate. And on some level, as hung down and low as I felt, I couldn’t help but appreciate that everything behind me was being erased. The car rolled forward and the past was obliterated. Nine years of marriage – my second – was over. It had been for a while, maybe longer than I wanted to admit to. The reasons were still vague. The description of the end was unsatisfactorily reductive. No one saw it coming. At least, that was what they said.

Mount Carroll is a small town. Not more than 1,300 people live in what is considered Mount Carroll proper, and the last census still seemed like a polite over-estimation. County wide, there isn’t more than 16,000 people – which, again, strikes me as generosity on the part of the census takers.

From everything my soon-to-be ex told me her primary concern at that time was that our private life not be splayed out for public display. No doubt her concern was rooted, in part, in the gossipy nature of small towns. If you’ve read Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis, then you might be inclined to believe that small towns are a microcosm America… that the actions, attitudes, and tendencies you find among the community members and residents (there’s a difference) are simply a smaller reflection of the actions, attitudes, and tendencies of the entire country.

With respect to Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, I disagree.

Mount Carroll, like every other small town in America, is not simply a microcosm. A small town in America is an extract of America: all the elements of the region, the people, the country, and all that is good, bad, ugly, beautiful, epic, and miniscule about us is boiled down to a highly concentrated and entirely different – and sometimes incredibly potent – oil.Small towns are not microcosms. To be a microcosm suggests not only a lack of uniqueness, but a sort of simplicity that is simply not accurate. Small town life is slower, yes. There is less congestion, fewer traffic lights, a tendency to not get almost run over jay-walking across Main Street. But to ignore the deep rabbit hole of personal histories, traditions, and petty political natures that can crop up in any small town is not only an insult to the geographic majority of the country, but an underestimation of what people think is important. That two dimwitted aldermen and a former one (still dimwitted) from Mount Carroll have been engaged in an epic character assassination campaign against the mayor probably means nothing to you if you have never been to or have no connection to Mount Carroll. You can claim, with some authority, that it has no direct impact on your life in whatever other place you happen to live. You could argue, with a sense of certitude, that attempting to discredit the City Clerk because she would not join in on the cannibalistic feeding on the mayor’s political and private entrails does nothing to hurt or help your quality of life. But if your insist on believing that such petty, thoughtless pandering does not reflect badly on humanity and the very existence of such rank immaturity doesn’t drag us all down, then you’re not paying attention.

The other part of her concern undoubtably came from the fact that I have always written about my life. This isn’t unique and it’s not like I invented it. Maybe she wanted me to gloss over the less-than-rosy parts of our relationship. It was not long into my second marriage that I figured it out: most women want to be a muse until they actually are one. It’s not their fault: social indoctrinations, Disney movies, moody movie poets who can’t manage a telephone that really, down deep, just wanted to be saved.

But I never wanted to be saved. And as the snow hounded me into Chicago, being driven by a friend of Melissa’s who was probably unsure who he pitied more, I once again thought of Jennings Mace: that wonderful, misguided, and unreasonably optimistic southern gentleman.

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