Bypass
I was on my way to B., entering or leaving Kokomo on US 31, or scalloping around Huntington, Wabash, Peru, Logansport on US 24, or inching along Eighty-sixth Street, Ninety-sixth Street on what was once the outskirts of Indianapolis. I drove on these bypasses that bypass nothing now. It was the landscape of cartoon backgrounds, repeated endlessly as the animated characters amble along, but jazzier, with an asymmetrical syncopation, arrhythmic but still percussive, anticipatory. Gas station, drivein (hamburger), mall, motel, new car lot, gas station, drive-in (roast beef), mall, bank, new car lot, motel, Wal-Mart, shopping center, drive-in (pizza), drive-in (hamburger), motel, used car lot, gas station, K-mart, mall, drive-in (chicken), motel, mobile homes, drive-in (subs), Target, car lot, mall, gas station, drivein (hamburger), drive-in (hamburger), drive-in (fish). This was "mature clustering," the marketing strategy whereby a place became a place not specifically but generally. A place to go to, to wander through, around in, in a car, until someone decides to stop. I'll get gas, get food. I'll pull in at that next light, the next block. I imagine a time when all of this will connect, when the real estate along every highway that forgot to limit access (why limit access?) organizes itself into one endless corridor of chance and light and existential buildings designed to announce their purpose, their reason for being. "Ducks" architects call them. The duck-shaped building that sells ducks, the doughnut-shaped building that sells doughnuts. My car slid along, impelled by a kind of magnetic levitation, from one franchise to the next, seamlessly, so that after a while it did seem that the background was moving. I simply sat still, took in this endless pageant of desire to desire. The placeless place. The artifice of eternity.
B
Bainbridge, Bargersville, Bass Lake, Batesville, Battle Ground, Bedford, Beech Grove, Berne, Beverly Shores, Bicknell, Birdseye, Black Hawk, Blanford, Bloomfield, Bloomington, Bluffton, Boggstown, Boonville, Boswell, Bourbon, Brazil, Bremen, Bristol, Brook, Brooklyn, Brookston, Brookville, Brownsburg, Brownstown, Bruceville, Bunker Hill, Burlington, Burlington Beach, Burns Harbor, Butler.
Beta
There is no "bee" sound in Greek. No, that's not right. There is a "bee" sound but the letter b does not make it. Think of that-a letter making a sound. The word we know as beta, the "bee" of the Greek alphabet, the "beta" compounded in the word "alphabet," the fragmented "bet" of the word "alphabet," is pronounced "veta." The "vee" sound. To make the "bee" sound one must use mu and pi. I have no idea why. What great phonic shift took place over centuries and miles? Sound is the geography of the mouth. The language itself drifts and wanders, sheep clouding a trackless field. The sound shades into the other regions of the mouth, different articulations of tongue, teeth, palate, and lips. The "bah" lulls up against the "whaa" of the w. "Basil" is the English parallax of "Vasilli," its slightly outof-sync double. Our even more English "William" derives from "Vasilli," and from there, its corruption, the strange diminutive, our Bill. Bill. That will bring us back to b. Language is all babble in the beginning. Then a sense emerges from the sounds we make. Making sense by making sounds. Bah-ed into life. Balled. Or wailed.
Battlefields
Names of. The South named theirs after the nearest town. The Union stuck with bodies of water. Battle Ground, Indiana, settled on the generic name, taking its name not from the name of the battle (which was named the Battle of Tippecanoe) but from the existential description of the place where the battle occurred. Prophetstown had been the town where the Battle of Tippecanoe took place, at the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. Prophetstown, an Indian enclave of thousands, was destroyed by William Henry Harrison, later known as 01' Tippecanoe, after the battle.
The town of Battle Ground grew up after the battle. Its founders seemed not to be able to muster the energy for a more accurate name. Or perhaps the battle itself struck them as so significant. It seemed to them the ultimate battle. It went without saying. It would not need to be distinguished from all the other fields on which other battles had been fought, are fought, will be fought.
For a long time I thought Battle Ground was the B. of "The Heart of the Heart of the Country." Its understatement worked on both a literal and metaphorical plane. Here the internal and intimate struggles of the narrator could be played out in a spot characterized as the address for battles. A town named Battle Ground. Its business was strife, every house a battlefield, every hour a new skirmish, everyone and everything conflicted.
Bypass
My father hadn't listened when his doctor explained what they were going to do to him. I told him as he recovered that it had been a good sign when the surgeon switched his heart back on, that it started up again without a stutter. "Boom," I think I said, "it kicked right on." I had mentioned this as a good thing, as an indication of how strong he was, his heart was, how successful the operation had been.
"They stopped my heart?" my father asked. He couldn't, didn't believe it.
"They can't quilt on the organ with it flopping in your chest."
"How long?" he asked.
"Hours," I told him.
On the other side of the curtain, my father's roommate, who also had had a bypass, was teasing his young doctor. He asked how long before he could have sex again with his wife. The doctor had been sketching out the regimen of recovery, exercises, dosages of pills. He seemed unprepared for the question. The patient's wife giggled. The patient said he couldn't wait to start up again. His wife continued to laugh and snort. My father ignored them. He was concentrating on his own heart, its simple mechanics and none of its poetry.
B-Side
This essay is an accumulation of fragments. It is on the flip side of the hit story "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," which is itself, by design, a fragmentary accumulation of data. What was left out when Gass selected and amplified his observations? I would love to discover the left-out outtakes, the takes not taken, the rejected jam sessions, the negligible leavings from the other side of the track. In the story, a railroad track guts the town of B., the track that sings. In Brookston, at the time Gass wrote the story, the tracks were owned by The Monon, the Hoosier Line. No map can ever map a place exactly. All maps are distortions. The Monon. I am more interested in the trash left over, the stuff that doesn't fit, like all the junk genetic sequencing discovered in the genome. The thrown away. The empty place that must be filled. The space that holds open a place. The nothing that does not fit. Monon. Monon. Monon.
Battlefields
In elementary school, when I first had to memorize Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, I confused "hallowed ground" with "hollowed ground." The graves were a kind of hollow, I figured. The ground did appear to be hollowed out of the rest of the world. These precincts are set aside, allowed to lay fallow as a result of armies, often accidentally, fighting each other at these coordinates, crossroads, campsites. If a hidden component of place is always time, preserved battlefields are ways to stop time. But in doing that, they do more. Places that were, for a moment, so briefly populated, so violently inhabited, are now so often empty of people. Especially the battlefields with more obscure histories like Tippecanoe. They seem like the dead zones of seas at the mouths of rivers, where sustaining oxygen has been sucked out of the water. Who remembers? In busy Europe, wars plowed the same fields over and over. The few battlefields that exist in North America suffer under the pressure of the present catching up. The survival of these dead regions seems more likely in the parts of the world that were remote on the occasion of their violent and definitive occupation.