After the battles, the history, the facts of the matter, are done, gone, over. We are left with the residue-the roadside marker, reduced to the inscribed steel plate bolted to a boulder. And this absence of anything. Something happened here, and because it did, nothing can ever happen here again. A sign marks Prophetstown with a paragraph, no longer than this one, of history. A mile down the road, Tippecanoe's obelisk is in a fenced grove of trees, a monument to its own insignificance. The fence allows for a notice that reads Entry Is Prohibited each night forever more after sunset.
Bonneville
I first went looking for B. in my parent's big green Bonneville. I left from Butler soon after reading "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" in my literature class. The car handled like a boat, wallowed along the secondary roads I followed toward West Lafayette and the archipelago of B-beginning towns within commuting distance of Purdue, where Gass had taught. Battle Ground, Burrows, Buck Creek, Brookston, Bringhurst, Boylestown. After thinking B. was Battle Ground, I settled on Brookston and searched its back streets, navigating by means of prose, on the lookout for landmarks. I never found the row of headless trees, the sidewalk that crumbles into dust. Consulting a ragged phonebook in a phone booth outside the phone company, I found a few names of characters, and, for a second, considered calling the Motts, but stopped myself. The author, I assumed, had consulted the same or similar phonebook during composition, borrowing a real name for the story's reality. Mott, who could top that?
The lights were coming on in the houses as I cruised the streets. It was a pale Indiana winter, with the diminished sun a long way off to the west. In the gloaming, I continued to look for that stand of headless trees until I picked up a tail-a local police car-who trailed me, as curious of me as I was of his town, at a respectful distance until I crossed the city limits on Indiana 43 heading south toward Indianapolis.
Bypass
Jigsaw puzzle pieces look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each have the telling knobs and corresponding scoops, the bulges and depressions save for the welcome exceptions of the edge and corners. Apart they look almost alike. I like the particular jig that cuts that notch, heart-shaped, a wedge more defined than the simple swelling fingers and peninsulas of other, less radical cuts and curves. My father began to piece together puzzles to pass the time while he recovered from his surgery. His heart had been puzzled back together, and he, of course, in his convalescence pondered the puzzle of the heart.
"You will be sad," his doctor had told him, including among the prescriptions antidepressants, mood enhancers.
The puzzle picture of a bucolic landscape or a placid river that he pieced together made him weep. Exhausted by the effort of manipulating the cardboard chips and processing the sentimental narrative coming together on the table before him, my father had me walk him down the driveway, a journey of a thousand miles, where he fixated on the crackled crazing of cement in a square of sidewalk. It brought tears to his eyes. I gave him a puzzle I ordered from the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art. No picture, just each piece a different primary color and each piece brightly colored on both sides, the heads and tails. It looked easy, but it was harder than it looked.
Butterflies
Indiana rests in the lee of Lake Michigan. As far south as Indianapolis, the clouds produced by this coincidence cast the state in shadow. Gass acknowledges the phenomenon in a section called "Weather":
In the Midwest, around the lower Lakes, the sky in the winter is heavy and close, and it is a rare day, a day to remark on, when the sky lifts and allows the heart up. I am keeping count, and as I write this page, it is eleven days since I have seen the sun.
In the Gothic gloom of Jordan Hall, whose limestone facade mirrored the veneer of limestone clouds, I read those words and was comforted to imagine that weather mine, particular to me, a map of my own interior state. I stood at a specific intersection of climate and topography. Chemistry too.
Indianapolis had been a sad town then, but years later, when I stopped en route, on my way again to B., the old ramparts, stockyards, and warehouses seemed transformed. Even veiled in its usual shroud of haze, it felt different to be here. I remarked to my host, Susan Neville, "What gives?" Without missing a beat she responded, "Prozac money," referring to the pill, locally formulated, that seeded the weather of the heart while, at the same time, made glad the pocketbooks of the heartland. Naptown awoke in spite of the weather.
It reminded me of another local miracle I witnessed years before, while trudging across the bleak campus. A cloud of Monarch butterflies navigating their migration to Mexico suddenly saturated that grassy strip of mall, oriented north to south, where I slouched toward class. I was, for a moment, completely engulfed, cocooned by their swarming. The raining fall of spring flower blossoms. But they didn't land, continuing instead to swirl and dance, so many I thought the flutter of their wings had reached a mass critical enough to create an entirely new sound only I could hear. A flap perhaps. Magic seems to lodge somewhere else for those who live in the lee of the lower Lakes.
Blue Bridge
When I was home, I borrowed my mother's car, a bright red Volkswagen Beetle, and drove it along the end moraine of the last continental glacier from the most recent Ice Age. I left my father convalescing in Fort Wayne, bent over a thousand-piece puzzle, depicting, when complete, a still life of fruit and flowers. In the borrowed Beetle, my mother had arranged her own bouquet of plastic black-eyed Susans in a vase that was strange standard dashboard equipment. The road, like a river, skirted the floodplain of the Wabash, meandering from the moraine, down into the valley, over the running stream, then out onto the black bottomland and back. I was sailing.
Once, this was the bed of an ancient inland sea, a vast washout field from a stalled glacier, a sheet of water spreading out. I tacked; I reached. I thought of stories. Of "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," of course, my destination, the landscape, which I was again reading and reiterating on my way to Brookston. I thought of a story I wrote years ago, under that other story's influence, about a dairy farmer on this very road heading toward, in mind and body, an absent lover, his absent love. The daisies clouded the dash, obscuring the dials. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. Suddenly I came to a truss bridge, freshly painted a cheerful primary blue, the only color in the landscape save for my little red car, its cargo of yellow daisies. The bridge was only wide enough for one car. I waited at its entrance. A traffic light regulated the one-way flow, the one-at-a-time passage. I waited. No car was waiting on the other side. I thought of the valves of the heart, the hydraulics of locks and dams, alternating current, the magnetism of love. I imagined a ghost car approaching, an alternate universe, another journey from another time. My farmer in his Continental. Gass on his way to class, on his way home. Me, returning from another mission through the same pages of these familiar fields. The light turned green and I eased out the clutch, weighed anchor, made way into this parade of other possibilities.
Bernoulli
What did I know of sailing? I am from Indiana, land-locked and a long way from the sea. Yes, there is that pesky easement to Lake Michigan, a seeping valve in its heart, but I grew up a long way from water. I like the ending to the Odyssey, where the hero is ordered to walk inland with an oar until the natives he meets no longer recognize it for what it is, mistaking it for a flail. Why are you carrying a flail? That would be me, the land-locked boy, asking. I knew nothing about sailing, nothing about tacking or heeling or coming about. I figured that a sail caught the wind, that the boat got pushed from behind. You could only sail one way, in the direction the wind was blowing. I knew nothing of the principle of lift, of wing. Not until later did I understand that you could sail into the wind, or almost in that direction, in any direction, really, as long as you had a wind. I finally understood the paradox of the wind. When it is most difficult to move, when the wind is in your face, it feels as if you are moving the most, an illusion created in the confusion of your senses. Inching forward, almost standing still, makes for the most interesting sailing; such tacking amplifies the sensation of motion, moving to get into the position to move.