Americana

Mississippi River, 2021.

Greeting a river is, in many ways, the same as greeting a person. 

“Oh, hello there, Mississippi, pleased to make your acquaintance,” I’d shyly say as I am intimidated by how dark its waters are. 

“Why, child, come on right by my shores. Nothing to worry about here but this awful summer heat that can kill a bird in mid-flight,” I imagine the river saying to me as I inch myself closer to the shore and smile at its grandeur. The river is large, wide, dark, and undisturbed. 

If the Mississippi were a woman, it would be a grand old lady dressed in her Sunday best. Hat with feathers, flowery dress blowing in the breeze, white leather pumps, and matching kid gloves, ready to walk the aisle to the choir line to praise the Lord. 

So much of the Mid-West is like that - ready for church, ready for a wedding, ready for a funeral. Never mind the blinding heat and the humidity that can be cut with a dull knife. Never mind the segregation and aggravation that crime and violence can deliver to the big city’s streets. Never mind the ‘bless your hearts and isn’t that precious’ that rolls off the local folks’ tongues. Never mind the gun shows, anti-abortion, and sex shop billboards that litter the side of highways, all targeting the same type of Joe. Never mind that they deep-fry ravioli and bake pepperoni/cheese casseroles and call it pizza. Honestly, Romans are rolling in their thousand-year-old graves at the thought of a Chicago Style pizza. 

And there is more, so much more. It is surprisingly humbling for a West-Coaster, world traveler, and immigrant from an exotic land to be charmed by the Mid-West. And yet, I am here to tell you - it can happen, even if the spell only lasts a couple of days; it can happen. 

Like pulling up a curtain and finding a world dressed in perfect Americana. 1960’s Americana, complete with red and white waxed table cloth covering a picnic table. Corn on the cob, barbeque, potato salad, cheap cold beer for the gents, strawberry wine for the ladies. Children are playing in a pool. Someone is cutting grass. Cicadas are screaming from the top of their little bug lungs, and then you can’t hear them anymore because you get used to it.

Little villages dotting the river’s shoreline are all the same and yet different. Some have grand plans to become a big city someday; others are small and fiercely proud of their minute measures. But there is always the church, the pub, the cemetery. The barber and the grocer. The police car parked under a tree, waiting for trouble to happen, but when it does, it is always the high school boys drunk in beer and spinning their cars in the back of the post office’s parking lot. 

The nostalgia of days gone by persists even after you squint at these little towns, untrusting their good nature. It is there in the eternal brick and mortar of the architecture that makes old and new houses look the same. It is there in the cottage gardens grown wild over the summer, buzzing with bees. It is there in the slow walk of the townspeople as they move from place to place. Here is the 8 am service, and now, here is coffee with the pastor, and now we shall all walk across the street for pancakes and bacon and that syrup that is not maple. By late afternoon, the local pub is crowded with people, drinks flowing while the baseball game flashes on old TVs hanging precariously above the bar. 

I am a visitor here, a guest that owns a business and works long and interminable hours.  I often eat lunch in front of a computer and exercise primarily due to the daily fear of what stress can do to my health. So, I am fascinated by these people in their hometowns. Are they consciously ignoring the speed at which the world moves, or have they tried to catch up and gave up with a heavy sigh of ‘well, darn it, we got all we need right here’? I don’t know. I think it is likely a combination of the two, and I marvel at the vast diversity of lives that make up this country I call home. 

There is so much beauty in the ordinary, so much unexpected goodness. As I drove from one tiny hometown to the next, I encountered the agricultural landscape that anchors farmers to the soil. Cornfields gone dry, golden and evoking the eeriness of Halloween; soybean shinning a blue-green so rich against the sun it looks as though one is looking at a lake; vast expanses of freshly cut hay, the barrels left here and there as if I am passing through a Van Gogh painting and not farmland in Illinois. I take everything in, studying the space around me and retaining the memories. 

Before heading home, I sat on a park bench dedicated to a man named Chuck, beloved by his wife and children and community, forever to be missed by them. I wondered about Chuck’s life and envisioned a broad-chested man wearing a dress shirt tucked neatly into his dark denim pants. Maybe suspenders to go with the comfortable old leather shoes. I imagine a kind smile as he looks at his wife and children and all the other people who found that missing him was hard enough; they needed a bench to sit on and grieve.  I imagine his love for his home, for this flat expanse of land covered in a mantle of vegetation so foreign to me. His love for his community, beating with a steady rhythm of blood, animating his heart.

 I sat there, on Chuck’s bench, in front of a lake with waters as mysterious as the Mississippi, and I imagined all the underground water channels that net the land together, sprouting a lake here, a river there, a creek elsewhere. I realized it is all the same water connecting these many communities, feeding their crops, bathing their children on a hot summer day. From East to West, it is also all the same people, gathering, melding, unifying, and turning us all into villagers of this enormous land. 

 As I got up, dizzy in the heat and eager to find shelter, and sent a quiet thank you to the Mississippi for meeting me and its midwestern way, making me feel at home.