Dredge

Two years shy of his fortieth birthday, a Midwesterner named James B. Hill filed a patent for a machine to dredge the hell out of his native state. He named the contraption Buckeye Traction Ditcher. It ditched the entire Great Black Swamp, an unfathomably large miasma snaking its way from Indiana to Ohio. Once the gargantuan machine had gorged itself, its young inventor took it to Louisiana, where it simmered and stewed and eventually drained the devil out of that state, too. Meanwhile, the same year the farmer-professor's father won his home county's award for combating the scourge of soil erosion, the Farm and Rural Life Poll found two-thirds of the farmers in the Fatherland felt the nation had some seriously dirty water, while just 20 percent reckoned the water on their own farm was polluted.

Life in Sunnier Climes

This chapter discusses the sudden flight of the author's father from their Midwest family farm. For a Middle American in the 1950s traveling to the Sunshine State meant traveling to a sort of terra incognita. In his escape, the author's father has defied logic. He is leaving home rather than coming back to tie up loose ends, as do the archetypal heroes of old. But if it is possible for a person to be born out of time, an old soul, then surely it must be possible to be born out of place, a displaced soul. Maybe in fleeing the farm for Florida, the author's father is returning to the home that might have been had his parents chosen to settle permanently in the Sunshine State rather than perennially snowbird their brood from the frozen Midwest.

Ghost Players

This chapter narrates the author's experience during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Field of Dreams film. The celebration, timed to coincide with Father's Day, represented a chance for the movie's disciples and defenders — the fellowship of the Field — to experience communally the spiritual satisfactions of an intensely personal cinematic experience. For the moment they do not care about the film's many detractors, movie snobs who find it too allegorical, too Midwestern, or simply too corny. They came to nourish their souls in the company of others who have likewise come to associate the film with peace and renewal: the crisp clapboard house with its long curving verandah, the upright picket fence, the Eastergreen grass, the handsome boy-next-door movie star who might as well be Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, and the storyline and setting that is so powerfully elemental. On that night, the Field's devoted followers, seek paradox: achieving personal salvation together.

Afterword

This afterword reflects on how the author spent his father's birthday looking out the window of a cabin on the edge of the Ventana Wilderness in rural Monterey County, California. By comparison with the author's native Midwest, the obituaries run in the local newspaper, the Pine Cone, are long and almost incorrigibly joyful, crafted by survivors chock-full of joie de vivre. The author then talks about how a growing number of observers wrongly regard life in Middle America as a self-inflicted health hazard or risk factor, a dangerous lifestyle choice accompanied by grave consequences. While the rest of the nation sometimes begrudges the heartland their abiding necromancy and fussy cult-of-the-dead, it is worth considering the many ways in which a culture that speaks to, and with, its deceased is a culture more timeless, by definition, than that enjoyed by good-timers and death-deniers living elsewhere. These days, Midwestern Fatalism is part catchphrase, part internet meme, and part regional stereotype. Ultimately, the author maintains that to love life is first to know and to respect death.

Death by Mail

This chapter addresses the potential closing of a post office (PO) near the author's home. The author located the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) community meeting location nearest them — Buffalo, Iowa — and made plans to be there in person to hear the death knell. The proposed service reductions, part of the vaguely nefarious-sounding Phase 1 of USPS's POStPlan, are slated to impact over thirteen thousand post offices nationwide. In 2011, the Postal Service shuttered more than 460 mostly rural offices in a series of closings disproportionately impacting Middle American states. With several hundred post offices facing reduced hours or “discontinuance,” Iowa's 322 would-be victims placed second only to Pennsylvania's 445. Calculating a post office closure/hours reduction rate per capita reveals a moribund ground zero smack dab in the nation's breadbasket.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the portrayals of Middle America. How can such a beating-heart section of the country, the very cradle of regionalism, psychically ground and spiritually anchor a nation while simultaneously serving as its ultimate cautionary tale? Those who chose to leave Middle America sometimes hear in its portrayals a chilling message: Middle America is a place to avoid getting stuck in, a place whose fatalistic machinations the monied and mobile do well to escape. Many regionalists present Middle Americans as a Gothic people, from cradle to grave as mindful of death and dying as of living and thriving. Their stories and canvases illuminate an almost funereal-life-art practiced with fidelity in the heartland, where fictional characters and real-life citizens alike undertake the difficult task of living passionately and purposefully against a backdrop of finite and sometimes tragic limits. For true regionalists, however, the homegrown Gothic amounts to much more than mere pessimism or fatalism; it is an homage to Death, Life's less heralded twin, an animating force no less instructive and no less worthy of its own pages.

Life and Death in Oz

This chapter illustrates how the author came to Kansas to seek answers for how to bring a rural town back to life. Like much of the region known as the “Big Empty,” portions of central and western Kansas are experiencing such profound depopulation that they have taken a page from the Homestead Act and begun to offer free land to a new generation of hoped-for homesteaders. The youth out-migration problem there is so pernicious and long-standing that it has now been battled by multiple generations. As far back as 1966, editors at the state's leading newspapers, including the Lawrence Daily Journal-World, owned the problem by name in a column entitled “Our Brain Drain.” Forty-some years later, in 2008, the same story was told by NPR's Noah Adams. The author met up with the good folks of Tescott, Kansas, population approximately three hundred, whose creative city burghers have offered free land to families willing to build a home on the city-owned lots next to the K–12 school the town has fought to keep.

Cornfield Cathedrals

This chapter focuses on Foxfield Golf Course, run by two unpaid employees, a father and a son. Some say this cornfield mecca never really existed, apart from some inexpensive business cards printed once upon a time. And yet the author played it day after day. However, Foxfield is no more. Theologians, mystics, literary theorists, and quacks insist people become pilgrims only when they realize what they lack. A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in light of a story. The author then talks about how they wanted to go back to their home farm. After thirty-odd years of such middling Middle Americanism, of Protestant work ethic and prudence bordering on Puritanical, the author was ready to be a true pilgrim, to do what pilgrims do: travel across the burning sands in search of a mecca.

Exhuming the Regionalist Body

This chapter recounts the author's quest to find the memorial stone of the man who is arguably the Midwest's most forgotten regionalist poet: Jay Sigmund. As of his untimely passing in 1937 at the age of fifty-one, Jay Sigmund had authored at least six volumes of poetry and four books of short fiction, an output made doubly impressive by the demands of his day job as an insurance executive in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Today, Jay Sigmund's Waubeek amounts to a ghost of a town, an unincorporated huddle of weathered buildings hugging the south bank of the Wapsipinicon River. Even internet searches come back mostly empty save for the place's coordinates, roads, and time zone. And yet Sigmund grew up there, and later made a summer home in Waubeek in the midst of a successful insurance career. The author sought out the Sigmund memorial stone hard beside the local watering hole in part because the author made it a personal goal to exhume and resurrect the forgotten literary voices of the native Midwest.

The Casket-maker’s Son

This chapter looks at a conversation with Ross McIntire, the casket-maker's son, during lunch at an upscale sandwich shop in Naperville, Illinois. By all rights, the village on the banks of the DuPage River should be perfect digs for an aspiring young actor and playwright like Ross McIntire. Yet he talked about how he does not belong there, even after the successful debut of his one-act play about small-town life, Blight, at North Central College where he has recently completed a theater major. Home for the casket-maker's son is Galva, Illinois, an hour and a half west. Up until his recent graduation, Ross wore the cap of college student. While the casket-maker's son appreciates his four years living in Naperville as a college student, the place is alien to him in many ways.