Old Glory (34 page)

We had to learn to talk to each other, negotiating in slow motion like swimmers in a pool. Judith had a story. She told it nervously, searching my face after every other sentence for a giveaway glaze of boredom, but I was completely, tenderly held by it. It contained one kind, at least, of Midwestern life with the literal precision of a mirror.

Judith wasn’t from Muscatine. She had grown up in a little Dutch town far out in the northwest of Iowa. Her family was Dutch. Everyone she knew was Dutch. She remembered her grandparents’ talking in Dutch, and services in Dutch at the Dutch Reformed Church. It was a very strict small town. No one skipped church, and the minister was a more important figure than the mayor. Judith’s father was a truckdriver now, but when she was a child he had been a schoolteacher too. He had been fired by the school board for teaching the theory of evolution.

“And he doesn’t even believe in evolution,” Judith said. “He was just telling the children that this was something that some people thought. It raised a scandal.”

Her father had been as scandalized by his own heresy as anyone else in town. He was a devout churchgoer and, had he sat on the school board, would probably have voted to expel himself from the system. Even to mention the existence of the theory of evolution was, as he now saw, a terrible thing; and he accepted his demotion to the post of truckdriver as a perfectly reasonable consequence of his having strayed into mortal error.

Judith, though, had watched her father’s fall with a mixture of indignation and skepticism. She was a secret believer in the theory of evolution. She was the oldest of nine children, and had had to be grown-up before her time. She’d been marked out as clever at school. There was just one thing wrong with her: she was a girl. Education
was fine, for her brothers; but her parents thought that no girl should learn anything beyond what she’d acquired in the eighth grade.

“They wanted me to be a homemaker, wife and mother. So long as I was engaged to a boy, I could be a nurse, or even a grade-school teacher. But that was the top of it.”

There had been a quarrel with her family before she had been allowed to attend the local teachers’ college, which was run by the Dutch Reformed Church. She had dreamed of going to a real university—the kind of place where the theory of evolution was taught as a matter of ordinary fact. No chance. Judith had gone to the teachers’ college. Then, it seemed, her parents’ prayers were miraculously answered. The minister’s son began dating her.

“They thought that was real nifty—me marrying the minister’s son … God, that was nifty.”

“But he was only dating you; you weren’t engaged, were you?”

“It was the same thing. If you were dating a boy, you were going to be married. Everyone knew that. I knew it. He knew it. The whole town knew it.”

For months, everybody around Judith had talked of weddings. But the minister’s son wasn’t the man she wanted to marry. He was nice, good, earnest and dull. Marrying him would have been like marrying the town itself; she might as well have taken the church, the school board and the long flat streets into her arms.

So Judith ran away. In secret she applied for a job she’d seen advertised in Muscatine. To her, Muscatine, with its twenty thousand people, was a metropolis. It was as far away from home as any place she dared to imagine. She was called for interview on a Wednesday. The school was shorthanded: when was the earliest day she could start teaching?

“I dunno,” she’d said. “I got to go back and get my things. I guess I could make it back here by Friday.”

She had driven home in her old green Ford and packed everything she had into the car. She left a letter for the minister’s son; then she made her great trek east. The memory of that journey still amazed her. It had been the most daring thing she’d ever done. Telling me about it, she made herself sound like a third person, someone she had once known who’d frightened Judith with her audacity.

It had been dark when she’d set off. She had a two-hundred-mile drive ahead of her. The interior light in her car had gone, and she’d struck match after match to follow the zigzag track of minor roads in the Rand McNally Atlas. At ten, she’d stopped at a Howard Johnson’s
and had fallen asleep out of excitement and exhaustion over her plate of eggs and French-fries. A waitress had shaken her awake an hour later.

“I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have an apartment or anything … I guess I reckoned I’d stay in a motel. I’d never stayed in a motel before. I didn’t even know if you had to have a reservation.”

It had been nearly dawn when she reached Muscatine. She parked her car on the levee and watched the sun color the river. At eight, she was at the hamlet six miles out of town where she had been teaching school ever since.

Judith’s story was a classic American autobiography in miniature. She had traveled two hundred miles; people little older than her own grandparents had traveled five thousand. I had met a man whose grandfather had come from Luxembourg, sailing in steerage to New York, from where he had walked across six states, taking odd jobs along the way, to reach the farmlands of Iowa. Yet Judith, a third-generation American, found even Chicago too remote and alien to believe in as quite real. Literal distance was meaningless. She’d flown to Hawaii for a summer vacation with a girlfriend, but that was a trifling little expedition when set against her nighttime drive across the state: a journey that had all the essential features of a myth. It explained to her who she was, in exactly the same way that the epic stories of immigration had defined the identity of her ancestors.

I told her about my own journey and how I saw it as really the same American story. Sitting with Judith in the hotel restaurant, calling up a second bottle of Gamay, I had, as it were, just reached the Howard Johnson’s on the empty road, with Muscatine still half the night away. Fellow travelers, Judith and I were suddenly, comfortably close, our narratives interwoven.

Keeping our distance like married people, we walked across the dark railroad tracks to the levee. There was a light over the dock where I’d left my boat. I wanted Judith to see it. It was sitting low in the water, flooded by the storm earlier in the day. Two of my battered gas tanks were afloat, along with a tide wrack of empty Budweiser cans, plastic bags, cardboard boxes and a white football sock.

“Is
that
it? God, it’s so little. I thought it was going to be more like some kind of a
cruiser.…
”

“Are you disappointed? Did you want staterooms and cocktail cabinets?”

“No. It’s just so little and scary.”

“Would you like to come on down to the Gulf of Mexico with me?”

Judith shivered, appalled at the thought; but she snuggled kindly against my shoulder.

“You really could. Then it’d turn the trip from an epic into a fairy story.”

I was sad that Judith thought I was joking.

In the morning the sky was empty blue, but the high wind was back, to my relief. I walked around the river bluff on the southwest of town where Muscatine’s Victorian grandees had built their mansions. Nestling up to their eaves in chestnuts and sycamores, these houses were glorious imaginative flights of unbridled nineteenth-century ambition. I had seen nothing like them. Some, clinker-built like ships in white-painted siding, floated like ships over their lower stories. They had used the airiness of wrought iron and delicate wooden columns to defy the ground on which they were built. Their poop decks and forecastles sailed over the trees, Old Glory flying from their mastheads. Others, in brick and plaster, were English Georgian country houses, four thousand miles adrift from Wiltshire. There was a shingled onion dome from Byzantium; a Roman villa; a German Gothic cathedral; a stone portico from a Florentine palace. Geography and history had been no object for the builders of Muscatine: they had cheerfully looted the world for the best and showiest of everything, from everywhere, and put it up higgledy-piggledy on this wooded hill. Clerical … secular … Moorish … Steamboat Corinthian … Queen Anne … Cosimo de’ Medici. Together, they lorded it over the river in a fantastic and exhilarating display of cosmopolitanism run riot.

In other towns I’d seen the scabby ruins of such houses. In Muscatine they were smartly kept up. Their white paint was fresh, their box hedges trim, their verandas swept for an admiral’s inspection. They managed to suggest that—against the odds, in flat contradiction to the standard history of the Mississippi river town—the world was still Muscatine’s oyster.

The exuberant, free-floating architecture of the bluff was rooted in the serious town below. Most of the places I’d stopped at had given the impression that the chief part of their day was devoted to lounging, spitting, scuffing their heels and swatting flies in bars. I’d felt that my own profession, of being at a perpetually loose end, fitted in pretty well with the general spirit of things. It wasn’t so in Muscatine. The few people who were out on the street walked straight, with appointments and destinations in their heads. The rest were locked up in the
factories on the flats, industrious bees in the Muscatine honeycomb.

Brad Funk had offered to show me around the Grain Processing Corporation, and he picked me up in his car looking as trim and shaven as one of the box hedges on the bluff in his blue button-down shirt and tan oxfords. He was spilling a cascade of big figures. Each day, he was saying,
x
hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain were turned into
y
hundreds of thousands of proof gallons of alcohol.

“Then there’s cornstarch—that’s used as a bonding substance in the paper industry … there’s dried syrup … feed-recovery products … corn oil …”

“Stop, please; I’m lost—”

It looked, in fact, as if GPC had been deliberately designed for people to lose themselves in. It rambled over the best part of a mile of riverbank in a wild tangle of chutes, smokestacks, pipes, ladders and gleaming steel cylinders like Brobdingnagian soup cans. Even in the strong wind, the air was putrid with the smell of rotten bread. Wearing a shiny scarlet hard hat, I scrambled after Brad as he led me on a vertiginous chase through the maze. We went hand over hand up ladders, marched across high catwalks, climbed a spiral staircase up the inside of a grain elevator, crossed a metal footbridge over a canyon, and reached the roof of the highest cylinder of all.

“You can see the whole operation from here—”

The cylinder topped the bluff. One could see right over Muscatine to the bumpy, browning grain country beyond, with its roads as straight as runways on an airfield, its pale, solitary farms, its fertile desolation. Brad was talking facts and figures again: this happened to that, that happened to this, this was transferred across there to here, where, in simple terms, the basic
a, b
and
c
of it was thus and therefore. The general gist of the thing, as far as I could gather, was that GPC was a massive digestive system. Its tanks and tubes were gizzards and intestines and bowels. It could swallow half the wheat of Iowa at a gulp and whirl it around in its gastric juices. Its rear end jutted out over the river, where the fleets of chemical barges were moored at the terminal. The hoses that fed them were GPC’s urinary tract, peeing crystal showers of pure alcohol. The cornstarch and the feed-recovery products went, I think, elsewhere.

“There’s a whole lot of stuff here even I don’t understand,” Brad said.

“Thank God for that. The view’s terrific, though.”

“Yeah, you can see better than twenty-four, twenty-five miles from up here. Smells clean, too.”

We made the long, twisty climb down to the Chemical Division in the basement of the plant, where a man in a white coat gave me a thimble glass of clear liquid.

“This here’s the bottom line,” he said. “This is what it’s all about. Go on, try drinking it.”

I tried. I found myself balancing what felt like a live coal on my tonsils, and only just managed to prevent my eyeballs’ popping from their sockets.

“Hundred-and-ninety-proof spirit.”

“It’s a bit much before lunch.”

“Now …” said the chemist. He cut it with water. He did some fancy work with his “botanicals,” adding minute traces of the tinctures of juniper, lemon, coriander and macassar. “There. Best gin you’ll ever drink. I think I got some Martini in the closet. Reason they used to put juniper in there was because there was so many impurities in the spirit, juniper was the only flavor that was strong enough to hide them. That’s why it’s called juniper juice. You say ‘juniper juice’ where you come from?”

It was like watching the elephant straining to bring forth the mouse, the relationship between this tiny glass of spirits and the gigantic scale of the operation that had gone to produce it. I could sympathize with Brad’s irritation when he’d talked of the patronizing way in which outsiders conceived of the Midwest. For Muscatine was a true industrial capital of the unconsidered object—the button on one’s shirt, the stiff drink in one’s hand. Muscatine’s secret was that it knew that it took just as much imagination and intricate labor to manufacture these things as it did to make television programs or newspapers or deals on Wall Street. The TV producer, fingering his buttons, or ordering up his lunch time martini, never gave a second thought to Muscatine, but Muscatine watched television and saw more than it wanted of Los Angeles and Manhattan. It felt that the imbalance was unjust. The floating mansions on its bluff, or the pipes and cylinders of GPC, were really just as worthy of the loving gaze of the film camera as Rockefeller Center or the roller-coasting freeways of Hollywood and Santa Monica. But, no. When the TV producer bothered to represent a town like a Muscatine, he would show it simply as the birthplace of a comic hick chewing on a straw.

The wind had dropped and school was out, and Judith was sitting up in the bow of my boat. In five years of living in Muscatine she had never been on the river.

“I never even think of it as like a river. It’s more a kind of a lake.” We drifted around the bend below the bluff where the Mississippi turned south.