Long Way Home (11 page)

“Aw, gee.” The old soldier beat a hasty retreat.

“They always want the button you don't have.” Dexter brooded for a moment, then got fired up again. “Hey, did you talk to the one-armed guy yet?” I hadn't talked to the one-armed guy. “Well, I'll find him for you. He knows
everything
about the game.”

While he conducted his search, I studied the crowd. The line unraveled into the distance now, perhaps a half mile long, but the new arrivals didn't groan or turn away when they saw what they were up against. Instead they smiled wryly and blurted something like “Wow!” or “Holy Cow!,” abashed at their own innocence in underestimating the enormity of the rally and less willing than ever to forgo their rightful place in it. Off they marched to the end of the line, meek and unprotesting.

I couldn't fathom it. Even if Elvis had risen from the dead to perform, I'd have avoided the Roberts Centre. Here, raised to the highest power, was Babbitt's desire to belong—to almost anything, really. The fans seemed oblivious of the heat and the sun, glad to chat with their neighbors, make new friends, and sing Palin's praises. They came from all over Ohio and beyond, clutching their cameras, cell phones, and even autograph books.

“She's not just a pretty face,” I heard somebody say, and a chorus joined in, “No, she's not just a pretty face!”

“Found him!” Dexter shouted. He summoned me over and introduced me to Daniel Richards, whose card read, “Campaign Accessories, Helping People Get Elected Since 1980.”

“Dexter says you're the man,” I began.

“I've been at it a while, all right.” Richards had a serious demeanor, as befitted the button game's veteran elite. “I started out at fifteen. Reagan and Clinton, those were big years, but this election's shaping up okay, especially since Palin entered the race. She's a novelty item, and that's always good.

“I buy my buttons from N. G. Slater in New York. It's an old firm, one of the oldest. Robert's my contact there. We dream up slogans together. You know ‘Read My Lipstick'?”

“Sure.”

“That's Robert's. It's going well, and so's the one about the pit bull. I like to recycle the traditional stuff myself. Take ‘Country First.' That's from the Reagan era. You can't go wrong with the retro angle. Anything red, white, and blue will sell.”

Richards took a cigarette break. I watched the line inch forward—more VFW and American Legion members, two burly bikers in Harley gear, a woman unaccountably wearing a strapless black sheath and stiletto heels. Out on the highway, cars were backed up almost to Wilmington, eight miles away. Every third car was an SUV or a high-end pickup, either brand-new or just a year or two old. There were no junkers anywhere.

“I'm a staunch Democrat myself, but I do the Republican bit,” Richards went on. “We all do. I know of a company in Greenville, Ohio, that manufactures Obama merchandise as Tigereye Design, and I think they do some stuff for McCain under another name. Anyway, that's how it goes. When I'm not on the road, I'm a stay-at-home dad.”

A toothless old man butted in, tapping my shoulder. “Lot of people,” he remarked, indicating the line.

“Quite a scene,” I agreed.

He pointed to a much shorter line at a side door. “Those special people?”

“Probably VIPs,” I guessed.

“Oh, that wouldn't be me!” he laughed. “That most definitely would not be me.”

To escape from the sun, I hid out for a while at the Holiday Inn's bar. Some vendors were doing the same, relishing the air-conditioning and their cold beers. The woman next to me, a stout, soft-spoken government worker from Columbus, wore an “I Love Sarah Palin” button on her blouse. Her husband was holding her place in line. She couldn't stand for very long because of her arthritis.

“Do you really love Sarah Palin?” I asked, half joking.

“You know, I really do.”

OFFICIAL SOURCES PUT
the Roberts Centre attendance at ten thousand. The first hundred or so people through the door, those who'd stand in the front rows, were given signs to wave for the TV cameras. When the Straight Talk Express, Palin's tour bus, rolled into the arena, the crowd erupted, and the tumult rarely subsided for the next thirty minutes.

The fans cheered her pro-life stance, her promise to lower taxes, and the jab she took at Obama for his alleged ties to Bill Ayers. Indeed, they cheered the simple fact of her, bursting into an incantatory chant of “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.” Like the woman from Columbus, they really did love her.

Palin sounded supremely confident, even full of herself. One sensed that she'd practiced for this moment long ago, maybe as a teenage beauty queen posing before a mirror in Wasilla.

She drank up the adulation, as if it nourished something deep inside her. Her stump speech lacked any note of admonition, nor did it contain much of practical value, but that could be said of most. At an elemental level, she was just having a good time, skating along on the surface of the enthusiasm.

As in Wisconsin, she reminded the crowd that God had richly blessed the nation with natural resources, and they chanted, “Drill, baby, drill.” Another allusion to Obama elicited a fearsome “No Bama, No Bama, No Bama.” She invoked the deified Reagan more than once, and titanic applause accompanied each mention of his hallowed name.

“America is not the problem!” she bellowed. “America can be part of the solution!” The crowd roared, “U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A!”

The faces tilted up to her were as vacant as those of stoned kids at a rock concert, absent of any emotion except surrender. If Palin had asked the faithful to form a conga line and dance to Chillicothe, they'd have complied in an instant. They didn't blink when she glided by the DHL stalemate without any hint of a plan to resolve it.

“We will do everything in our power to help you!” she shouted, and those shopworn words were satisfactory enough. This wasn't a crowd that sought to be elevated or ennobled, merely entertained.

“Palin is a common person,” Carla Storer, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of five from Lynchburg told the
Dayton Daily News
later, “and she really connects with the common person.”

AFTER THE RALLY,
I couldn't face dinner at China Buffet (chow mein, pizza, taco chips, deviled eggs, et cetera) or El Dorado Mexican, where the “Happy Our” was under way, so I knocked around until I found the General Denver Hotel, a four-story Tudor Revival built in 1928 and named for James William Denver, a hero of the Civil War. The hotel still has rooms upstairs and a pub that serves good food at a reasonable price, all cooked to order.

Over a steak sandwich and a glass of red, I deliberated on what I'd seen. The raucous energy at the Roberts Centre, so easily harnessed and steered, scared me a little, as did the wild adulation. A team of twenty-five-year-old sitcom wizards in Los Angeles might have invented Sarah Palin and built a show around her—the tale of a common person thrust into the spotlight by accident, who's weirdly prepared for her destiny.

The Palin cavalcade was pure theater. That's what the audience wanted—no ideas, just some contact with a celebrity. They wanted to believe America had gone astray on its own, too, without any input from them. Absolved from all blame, at least in their own minds, they could hoot, holler, and wave the flag, looking to a former sportscaster from a tiny Alaskan village as their potential savior.

When had Americans gotten so soft? John Steinbeck had caught the scent of decline half a century ago—“the haunting decay,” to reprise his words. Americans felt entitled to own a home and a new car or two even if they couldn't afford it, but the materialism didn't bring contentment. Instead it brought more debt, mountains of it, and the abstract longing was still there. Maybe the rally healed the longing for a bit. It bestowed an illusion of meaning.

In spite of Palin's pledge, the merger between DHL and United Parcel Service eventually occurred, and Wilmington did indeed lose those six thousand jobs and became a media symbol for the country's woes.

AN ANGRY HONKING
of horns saluted my departure from Wilmington when a big jam at a McDonald's drive-through window stalled the delivery of McMuffins, McGriddles, and caffeine, thereby infuriating the locals.

Highway 68 led toward Fayetteville and U.S. 50. The air had a fine autumn crispness after the previous day's scorcher, and the fields of corn and soybeans were the same rich, gold color as those in Maryland. This was the Ohio of red barns, forests, and streams, quite beautiful in an understated way.

Over the Little Miami River I traveled, then past Vera Cruz and Marathon to Owensville, where I explored a wonderful park and walked a nature trail that identified various species of trees.

Here I learned that hackberry branches are used for witches' brooms, and the white ash for baseball bats, tennis rackets, and polo mallets. From the eastern red cedar comes the juniper for gin. The elm, notorious for its widowmakers, once inspired a forgotten poet to write, “The elum hateth man and waiteth.”

Along the trail I saw silver maples and pawpaws, red maples and box elders. There were pin oaks, swamp white oaks, and the black cherries that yield hydrocyanic acid for cough syrup. Daniel Boone fashioned coffins from black cherry and gave them to friends, all but the last.

Beyond Stonelick and Perintown lay the greater metro area of Cincinnati, a city almost half African American. Cleveland has a large black population, too, as does Dayton. The highway climbed to a ridge with an expansive view of the sun-dappled Ohio below, then dipped back to flat ground and hewed to the river's course.

Cleves won the lunchtime lottery. You wouldn't want to mess around there. The police keep close tabs on the town. If somebody goes to a “convenient” store, even late at night, they don't have to worry about criminals or any other major issues. It says so on the Cleves Web site.

Skyline Chili beckoned. I'd been tipped on it, after all. Nicholas Lambrinides from Kastoria, Greece, opened the first Skyline in 1949. It overlooked downtown Cincinnati, hence its name. Located in a Catholic neighborhood, the shop did a booming trade on Thursdays, and on Saturdays after meatless Fridays. Lambrinides' recipe—a secret one, of course—reportedly includes chocolate and cinnamon.

Skyline Chili was bright, clean, and cheerful. The young staff evidenced none of the usual hangdog misery of franchise employees. In seconds, I received a menu and some oyster crackers to nibble. I ordered a regular bowl of five-way—spaghetti, chili, diced white onions, red beans, and shredded cheddar cheese. The dish clocked in at 840 calories, with 45 grams of fat, 2,850 milligrams of sodium, and 150 milligrams of cholesterol.

Once a philosopher, I thought, and twice a pervert, as Voltaire said. As I waited, I developed a case of nerves and cast a cold eye on the five-way when it landed on the table. No way, I muttered to myself. The chili looked more like a sauce or a gravy, but I gathered my resources and dived in. A few bites later I was a convert, if not precisely an enthusiast. If I lived in Cleves, I'd have to monitor my visits to Skyline carefully, or else invest in some bib overalls.

A
GAS STATION
SIGN
caught my attention in Aurora, Indiana.
FREE CHICKEN WITH FILL-UP
, it advertised. The offer hadn't sparked a stampede, probably because chicken isn't included in the four main Hoosier food groups. Those would be beef, pork, beer, and Jell-O salad with marshmallows, according to a comic I heard on the radio.

Hoosiers are a self-deprecating bunch, apparently, and not afraid to laugh at themselves. If you carry jumper cables in your truck, have ridden a bus to school an hour or more each way, and know several people who've hit a deer, you're a Hoosier. When you ask Hoosiers if they enjoyed their vacation in an exotic new place, they reply, “It was different.”

Nobody's certain about the origins of “Hoosier.” An early theory, since discredited, called it a corruption of hussars. John Jacob Lehmanowsky spoke of the light cavalry soldiers in “Wars of Europe,” a lecture series he delivered in 1893, but the term was in common parlance before then. Another theory, equally dubious, suggested that settlers on the frontier cried out “Who's there?” whenever someone approached their cabin after dark.

There's more substance to the notion that riverboat men on the Ohio, fierce battlers who “hushed” their rivals in fights, were responsible. The word first cropped up in print in the title of John Finley's poem “The Hoosier's Nest” (1830), a paean to the state that goes in part:

Blest Indiana! in thy soil

Are found the sure rewards of toil

Where honest poverty and worth

May make a Paradise on earth

Indiana was something of a mystery to me. It isn't a high-profile state that fills you with preconceptions and expectations long before you visit. I knew that it's mostly flat, grows lots of corn and soybeans, runs on coal, and has very devoted sports fans. Wal-Mart is the leading employer. I knew that, too, and also that Hoosiers haven't supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in '64.

The landscape between Aurora and Versailles looked much rougher than the sweet Ohio farm country. If anyone had given a thought to zoning, it didn't show. Tangled up on the highway were commuters, gamblers aiming for casinos on the river, and locals on their usual rounds. The snarls can be so vicious that some elderly drivers boycott this strip of U.S. 50 on account of the many suicide lanes that live up to their name.

Forsaking the free chicken, I bought some gas in Versailles. It's pronounced, or mispronounced, Ver-sales, and you wonder if this isn't an unconscious rejection of any foreign connotation since the village considers itself so all-American. That translates into twelve churches for eighteen hundred some residents, plus a Dairy Queen, a McDonald's, a Family Dollar store, and an active American Legion post.

Not a whole lot goes on in Versailles. People were still talking about a big storm in September when trees blew down and some neighborhoods lost their power. One amateur filmmaker had even posted a video of the deadfall on YouTube. Shot through the front window of a pickup, it's called “Storm Debris,” and it ends with a montage of splintered branches, a collapsed fence, and a mess of telephone cable ripped free from a pole.

The same amateur contributed a home movie of the annual Versailles Pumpkin Show, when the carnival comes to town and the prom king and queen ride by on a float. Every hamlet in southern Indiana has a similar festival, it seems, and they often reflect a nostalgia for a simpler, more heroic past. North Vernon, once a hub for trains, hosts a Railroad Days Parade, while Seymour reaches way back to the 1940s to inspire its Victory Over Japan Parade.

Life in Versailles may appear wholesome, but it's a hard life. Ripley County is among the state's poorest. On the side roads I saw boarded-up and abandoned properties, with scrawny dogs patrolling them.

Jobs are scarce and usually involve a long commute. Workers are watched closely at most companies and subjected to a constant stream of random drug tests. Even a trace of nicotine can be grounds for dismissal, I was told, because insurers consider smokers a health risk.

The employers, if perhaps overzealous, can't be faulted. Southern Indiana has a huge meth problem and labs by the score. It requires very little money and no special skills to cook up a batch of crank, the poor man's cocaine, from such readily available, over-the-counter ingredients as Sudafed, lantern fuel, ammonia, lye, and brake cleaner.

Each batch of meth produces about five pounds of toxic waste, and the cooks aren't choosy about how or where they dispose of it. Cleaning up a house that's been used as a lab costs a fortune. The tweakers are ordinarily young, white, and out of work.

At Family Dollar, I talked with a restless Versailles native of nineteen, who noticed my New York plates. He wore his ballcap backward and affected a rebellious stance. He was eager to leave town, although not eager enough to join the army, a traditional means of escape that keeps the rolls of the American Legion stocked with former soldiers.

“I read a book by John Steinbeck once,” he bragged, pausing to spit.

“Which one?”

“
Of Mice and Men
. They made it into a movie.”

“Did you like the book?”

He shrugged “It was all right. Kinda corny. But I wouldn't mind seeing California.”

“Long way from Versailles.”

“Tell me about it. The farthest I've been is Bloomington.”

“What stops you from just taking off?”

“My folks, I guess, and the people around here. They're real decent. Honest, too. If you're in trouble, somebody'll help you out.”

This refrain is common. Rural Hoosiers regard themselves as salt of the earth types, whose decency and honesty compensate for their occasional hardships. Each tightly knit community acts as a mutual support system, as well as a shield to ward off any negativity or criticism. To fit in, though, you must pretend to be the person you've always been—or are presumed to be—and that was a challenge the youth at Family Dollar couldn't meet.

IN NORTH VERNON,
three times the size of Versailles, there was another revealing sign of the times taped to a café window:

DUE TO THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE MARKET

I WILL BE CLOSED NEXT WEEK.

CALL THE SHOP FOR UPDATES.

The Baltimore & Ohio once propped up North Vernon's finances. As many as seventy trains passed through every day, but that was ages ago, and the town hasn't recovered or invented a new identity for itself. The franchisers rushed into the breach, and now State Street is Any Street, U.S.A. It's demoralizing to take note of the pattern yet again. The repetitiveness robs travel of its essence. There's nothing left to discover.

I stayed in a motel off State Street. An Indian family operated it, members of the vast Patel clan. They were warm and solicitous. Their little son rode a tricycle through the lobby, madly ringing his bell. I smelled a curry cooking somewhere and wished I could invite myself to dinner.

At a park across the way, an astonishing number of people were trying to peddle second-, third-, and probably fourthhand goods without much success. I didn't know whether to attribute this to the economy, or blame eBay for fostering the idea that every cast-off item on earth has an intrinsic value to someone.

For a while I watched a team of Little Leaguers taking cuts in a batting cage nearby. They faced a diabolical pitching machine as tough to hit as Tim Lincecum. The machine must have been broken, because it threw bullets. The frustrated lads banged home plate with their bats and bit their tongues to keep from swearing. Their dads, fireplug guys in shorts, coached and corrected them.

“Don't step in the bucket, Timmy.”

“Stop swinging for the fences, Robert. Just try to make contact.”

Like the boy on his trike, the enduring baseball clichés lifted my spirits. Even in the gloomiest of times, the world goes about the business of quietly renewing itself.

The railroad tracks downtown, stretching into the distance with no train on the horizon, lent the evening a ghostly aspect. I crossed the tracks, thinking I must be among the last Americans who'd prefer to walk rather than drive. The Hoosier Grill looked promising from afar, but it was closed, and so, too, was Christopher's, possibly forever, judging by the dust.

Miller's Tavern was the only option, so I gave it a whirl. It's still legal to smoke in some public places in Jennings County, and the smokers at Miller's were doing a bang-up job. The bar was like the gin joints of my adolescence, where a pack of Camels and a phlegmy hack were emblems of emerging manhood. My Uncle Ned could clear a room with his cough. The cigarettes he referred to as “coffin nails” proved to be just that.

Once I might have squeezed an ounce of romance from Miller's, but no more. Instead I retreated to the motel, my eyes stinging, and flipped through the weekly
North Vernon Plain Dealer
, whose editors had lately conducted a straw poll on the election. Seven out of ten respondents were dissatisfied enough with the status quo to vote for Barack Obama.

AMERICANS LOVE TO
hunt, as John Steinbeck knew. He called it a “natural-born” trait inherited from the pioneers, and the Hoosiers back him up with ardor. They shoot or trap red and gray foxes, coyotes, coons, possums, beavers, weasels, muskrats, minks, skunks, rabbits, crows, ducks, geese, quail, and wild turkeys in addition to the white-tailed deer they covet as trophies.

Deer season hadn't opened yet, but ruffed grouse and squirrels were fair game, so I heard the distant report of firearms at Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge in the morning. The refuge covers 7,724 watery acres and provides a superb habitat for more than 280 species of birds, along with an excellent breeding ground for mosquitoes. They attacked the instant I left the car, aggressive little vampires on the wing. I'd have paid ten bucks on the spot for one squirt of insect repellent.

Storm Creek and Mallard Pond were swampy, ringed with bulrushes and thick with lily pads. I spotted an eastern towhee kicking over some dead leaves, and ticked it on my Muscatatuck checklist, still shocked to take such pleasure from birding. The activity made no sense to me as a boy in a denuded suburb, where the only birds, it seemed, were robins, sparrows, and seagulls. Birders were weirdos, too. I'd no more scan the trees back then than get caught with my pants down.

That all changed when I was an aspiring writer, semistarving and living in the vineyards of northern California. The trailer I rented looked out on an old oak hung with Spanish moss, and one morning I noticed some bright yellow flashes high up in the branches. A quick trip to the Healdsburg library taught me they were Bullock's orioles, or small blackbirds. This thrilled but also bothered me. It felt abnormal to be thrilled. I'd fallen into a universe I had previously ignored.

I followed a path along Storm Creek. The mosquitoes followed me, settling on my neck and forearms. I brushed them away, rolled down my sleeves, and kept an eye peeled. Birding requires the same intense concentration as hunting, really, except that no creature dies.

Killing a buck every autumn is still a rite of passage for many Hoosiers, and not only men. They rely on rifles, both standard and muzzle-loaded, and handguns and bows and arrows. Steinbeck had no argument with hunting if it's done cleanly and fairly. He resented, as I do, the “overweight gentlemen primed with whiskey” who'll shoot anything that moves or looks as though it might. An honest hunt should be conducted on foot, not seated on an ATV.

In my two hours around Storm Creek, I added seven more birds to my checklist:

•
white-breasted nuthatch (common)

•
Carolina wren (common)

•
tufted titmouse (abundant)

•
purple finch (common)

•
belted kingfisher (common)

•
house wren, I think (uncommon)

•
northern cardinal (abundant, the state bird)

Then I took to the highway again, sorry to leave the reserve. I could still hear the distant reports, a muted preview of the cannonade that would echo through the woods in mid-November. Along the road were support services for hunters—taxidermists, of course, and deer processors, or specialty butchers, and a deer and wild turkey check station for recording any kills.

The check station was part store and part clubhouse, as bleak as a run-down Greyhound bus terminal. Some people drank coffee and solemnly played cards, as if they were doing time. In truth, they were waiting for a carcass to turn up, since deer and turkeys can be harvested on private preserves before the season begins. I could think of better ways to pass an afternoon.

In Hayden, I reentered the realm of earnest commemoration. A plaque there honored Richard Nixon's mother, who grew up in Butlerville, not Hayden. The Junior Historical Society, boosters in training, donated the funds to pay for it. Nixon spoke at the unveiling in 1971, no doubt glad to be invited anywhere after the Kent State massacre and the ongoing calamity in Vietnam.

Hayden also boasts the Center of Gravity, a mystifying force field. In its prime, the field impeded the progress of cars and trains so severely that the railroad tracks and a section of U.S. 50 were rerouted—unbelievable and yet true. You can buy a Center of Gravity T-shirt at the town museum.

Seymour upped the ante as the former abode of the notorious Reno Brothers. They were the progeny of J. Wilkinson Reno, a Kentuckian who wed a Hoosier and farmed twelve hundred acres or so around Rockford. Four of his five boys were rotten apples and a match for the Snopes. In spite of being raised as strict Methodists, they cheated travelers at cards, stole a horse, and burned down so many buildings the whole family fled to St. Louis for a respite in the late 1850s.

The rotten Reno boys were Frank, John, Simeon, and William. The good one, Honest Clint, really wasn't. He never joined his brothers' gang, but he was arrested for assault and operating a gambling den. Honest Clint ultimately lost his marbles and suffered religious delusions in the Topeka asylum where he died. Elvis played him in
Love Me Tender
, loosely based on the Renos' exploits.