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I don’t know whether yodels seek me out or whether my brain has programmed my ears to scan everything from sirens to dog moans for yodeling. Perspective is the struggle . As a media-declared “yodel expert,” I siphon life’s experiences through the search criterion: yodel yes or no, a simple, binary, computational filter that colors all experience—and equal dabs of serendipity and synchronicity . The mere fact that I (grumpy, black-humored, metafictionist) have written a second book about yodeling is manifestation enough that life takes some mystifying turns—chance becomes happenstance, becomes synchronicity, and there you have it—a way of life.1 Take for instance my trip to Disneyland Paris with daughter Paloma as part of a brokered one-day Disney, six-days-wandering-Paris deal during our autumn adventure . I entered a Disney bathroom and while I’m urinating I suddenly hear . . . yodeling! A yodeling restroom ! Who woulda thought!? I yodel along, grab my Flip camera to record it but suddenly think better of it. It’s a post-/ world, after all. Back in Amsterdam, some schoolboys, walking home from school, horsing around, suddenly burst out yodeling, accurately imitating a recent frenetic-genius McDonald’s commercial—no text, all yodeling. Did I really flip them a raised-fist of solidarity?! I no longer deny that yodeling—not religion, not money—is what makes the world go round. I hear you mumbling: Oh, here he goes again. Our fixations, phobias , and fanaticisms determine how we see the world. Dogs go through life following their noses from dog truffle to urine tag. I careen through life, from yodel to yodel. Call it research, audio hallucination, or hypersensitivity , or looniness (that’s OK, loons yodel),2 because I hear everything—antiterrorism, the Olympics, pop music, politics, sex, sirens, “bee-ah-hee-ah” vendors at Yankee Stadium—through the ears of a yodel “expert.” Indiana I’ve been many places to uncloset yodelers. One unusual place is Indiana; you feel eyebrows furrowing as you say “IndeeANNuh?” That’s right, as in normal (there’s Normal, Illinois, but also Normal, Indiana); that Midwest state’s flattest area between Goshen and Berne is home to many Mennonites who immigrated to the New World, heading into the Midwest via Pennsylvania. Indiana, straddling a crooked maze covering three time zones, embodies an immense meditative flatness; you drive through fallow fields seemingly forever. The roads, shouldered by ennui on one side and mesmerization on the other, are littered with signs such as: Yodel-Spotting in the Big-Small World Yodeling . . . is both haunting and soothing. The yodel serves as an audio rope spanning the generations to [an] earlier time. —Kevin Williams, The Amish Cook’s Baking Book  REPENT. CHRISTIAN or HYPOCRITE? I had to stop and take a cell-phone photo of that one. My theory is: hang around in extraordinary surroundings —the Alps—long enough and it all becomes slightly ordinary. The obverse: the normal, long neglected, can appear incredibly exotic. Meeting normal Indiana locals with normal families and normal jobs, we see beyond the tragedy of neglect, into the glory of overcoming this adversity of the humdrum, which spawns extraordinary beings. Fascination can be pressed from very unassuming destinations, and it is up to us to dredge this up— grain silos replacing skyscrapers, water towers serving as Eiffel Towers, expansive, empty parking lots as African savannas. In a local Goshen supermarket I spotted a mound of unusually large loaves of processed white bread in earnest party-color packaging—every bit as exotic as any Stonehenge! It seemed an appropriate place for the nononsense Mennonites, who were not as unfriendly as “the English” (outsiders) had warned they’d be. Being Dutch actually helped navigate me beyond suspicion because centuries ago, as Joseph Yoder, director of Menno-Hof, pointed out, the Dutch offered Mennonites refuge from Swiss persecution.3 They eventually sailed from Dutch ports for the New World in search of their bucolic peace.4 I visited Goshen, a small Mennonite college town, and nearby Berne upon the advice of Brigitte BachmannGeiser , with hopes of finding yodelers because, as Chad Thompson noted, “virtually every Amish person in that county can yodel to some degree.”5 I found evidence that partly corroborated—but also questioned—the pervasiveness of yodeling. I called on the Chamber of Commerce on Berne’s Main Street, where they pipe yodel-edelweiss music through the streets because, after all, it’s Berne, as in Bern, Switzerland...

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