Dear Reader: This was my very first blog post, written in 2007. I wouldn’t write again for years, but I’m keeping it here, a milestone and a tribute to the place I called home for eight years.
This morning Michelle left for Kenya, and she’ll be keeping a blog about her adventures there. And I’ve been thinking, I’d really like to start a blog, too. Hey, I like to write, and I have adventures. But… I’m in Madison, Wisconsin, not Kenya, and I’m just kind of living a “normal” American middle-class liberal white educated twenty-something life. There’s not really anything very interesting about that.
Maybe I should look at this blog as an adventure story, an American adventure story, an adventure here in my own backyard. I guess I should have started it nine months ago when I arrived here from Portland. But I can still write about Madison, and all the things I notice all the time that remind me I’m in a “foreign” place.
I’d say perhaps the biggest thing is the bunnies. They’re everywhere. We don’t even have wild rabbits in Portland, just squirrels and chipmunks and raccoons. Here in Madison, there are these cute little bunny rabbits everywhere.
I pulled up to my house this evening and there in the headlights was my usual bunny, munching thoughtfully on something in our broad back lawn. As soon as I got out of the car it hopped over to the far side of the lawn, just out of my attack range I guess. They’re usually pretty indifferent to me, but wary. They’re soft-looking and gray, and right now there are little adolescent bunnies out, and they all chase each other around, and they’re completely silent.
And speaking of wildlife, the birds here are amazing. East of the Rockies, it seems, is where the colorful American birds live. People who grew up here are surprised when I comment on the brilliant red cardinals, but I didn’t see my first one until two years ago. They’re spectacular! I can’t believe so much of the country takes them for granted.
Michelle and Megan and I went on a bike ride a couple weeks ago and we saw orioles, their bright orange and blue flashing as they flew. And swans? We have swans, right here in the Midwest? I always thought of them as fairytale birds. Then there are the cranes, which look prehistoric, like long-legged brontosauri, like spindle-necked dinosaurs with mohawks and eerie calls.
And of course, the geese. Even I can see how they’d be a nuisance, leaving poop on the beaches and eating the grass. But to see geese, almost every day of the year, flying in their sacred V, is magical to me.
Fireflies: I saw my first one of the summer last night! Yet another thing that doesn’t happen west of the Rockies. Yet another bit of magic to me, the stuff of Terry Brooks and Lord of the Rings.
Saturday night, at a farewell party for Michelle, we gasped in surprise as Josh spotted flying squirrels gliding right over our back lawn. Only a few of us saw them, and the rest thought we must have seen bats. But we didn’t. I saw one—it was a stretched-out square with little feet at the corners, sailing swiftly from a tree to the roof, then disappearing.
I know I know. It’s flat here, no mountains on the horizon, and the trees are all the size of toothpicks. That’s how you can’t help but see the Midwest when you’re from Portland. But Wisconsin, and Madison, have a special magic. Not the Northwest’s spectacular, in-your-face beauty but something simpler, closer to home. It’s driving out of town into the rolling farm country, miles and miles of beautiful hobbitland, tall corn and humble beans across gentle hillsides, nestled with trees in the crevasses, big red barns and horses and cows (“black and white buffalo”).
Working this summer with farmers, hearing their down-home accents, hearing their stories, I see now why this is called the heartland. The farmers have been here for generations, many of them on the same land—old patriarchs whose sons farm just down the road from them, who spend the day alone on their tractors, who don’t own cell phones, who know everyone for miles around.
All of these new experiences, from bunnies to Madison’s lakes to the Midwest farm country, are helping me see my whole country with new eyes. Like Michelle, I spent time in Africa, and there I came to realize that for better or for worse, I am an American. Coming home to Portland, I itched to see more of my own country.
Portland is isolated, its own special niche in the corner of America, cut off by the Rockies and the Cascades, surrounded by rainforest, waterfalls, and ocean. We have our own climate, our own ecosystem, our own culture. But I realized in Peace Corps that American culture is dominated by the Midwest and the East Coast. You’re supposed to have a muggy summer, a brilliant autumn, and mountains of snow in the winter. You’re supposed to follow sports and tuck your shirt in.
For whatever reason, I wanted to come to my roots as an American and live here, in the America that you see on TV and in most of the Sunday comics.
So I suppose that’s something I can write about. Even if no one reads this, I have things to say and I want to say them somewhere. So I’ll just write, and throw it out to the virtual wind, and know that at least the Internet Gods have heard my voice.
