-
Epilogue: Feeling Every Bump in the Ground
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
=============================== Epilogue: Feeling Every Bump in the Ground When I was nine years old, my family moved from New Milford, Connecticut, to Neenah, Wisconsin. In the house that we moved into, the driveway was slightly lower than the floor of the garage, leaving a bump of about an inch and a half where the two concrete slabs met. That unremarkable bump insinuated itself into my daily life in several ways. During games of driveway basketball, any airball, errant pass, or baseline dribble would be drawn to the bump with a grim fatality, and the ball would go rocketing toward the street unless one of us hapless players could throw ourselves in its path. The sensation of passing over the bump became an expected, inextricable part of riding in the car as it entered the garage. When I learned to drive myself, I discovered that the bump had practical navigational uses as well: it slowed the car down as I drove it into the garage, and I unconsciously developed the reflex of pressing down on the brake a certain fraction of a second after the rear wheels cleared the bump. A few years ago, my mother, who still lives in that house, decided to have the driveway mudjacked and brought up to the level of the garage floor. On my first visit back to Neenah after she did this, I learned just how deeply I had internalized this bump, how much a part of daily experience in that house it had become. The first time I drove my mother's car into the garage, I had to stab wildly at the brake at the last minute to keep from plowing into the back wall: not only was there no bump to slow the car down, but I also missed the expected signal to start applying the brake. I've readjusted my driving habits since then, but I still feel slightly strange whenever I drive a car into that garage, waiting for a little lift that never comes. My close relationship to this small malocclusion between two chunks of cement reinforces for me an important truth, one which has driven this study from the beginning through a range of disciplinary perspectives and narrative texts: the nature and quality of a place can sink deep into you, influencing and conditioning the way you think, see, and feel, working far down into your very bones by simple virtue of residence and 289 time. I occasionally suspect that my deep-seated awareness of the driveway bump grows somehow out of my being a Midwesterner, of my having spent the last half of my growing-up years in a well-ironed, geographically subtle part of the country where any deviation from the horizontal gets itself noticed. Certainly Neenah is among the flatter places I've ever been, and even now I can close my eyes and remember every slope on its streets-they are that few and, therefore, that remarkable. I know, for instance, that if you are a kid on a bike and you pedal furiously north from Cecil Street on Congress Street and start casting when you cross Laudan Boulevard, the slight downhill grade on Congress that starts there will carry you nearly all the way to Wisconsin Avenue (a considerable distance to a kid on a bike, believe me). I also know that living in flat country has shaped my landscape tastes: I now take a disproportionate delight in rugged terrain, experiencing a secret thrill whenever I'm in a place where the horizon is visible above the rooftops. Having grown up in a geologically restrained, topographically prudish part of the country, I find high mountains and deep valleys to be exotic, voluptuous , geologically shameless and exhibitionistic: when I am in the West, I ogle the Rockies like a schoolboy at a burlesque show. I can't look at them enough. My home landscape has conditioned how I experience the world. Being a Midwesterner has shaped my perceptions in other often amusing ways as well. The Midwest is the land of compass directions, the place where the survey grid mandated by the Land Ordinance of 1785 achieved untrammeled expression. Roads go north and south, east and west, and lacking other obvious landmarks to use as navigational reference points, people learn to orient themselves by the compass. I never thought much about this until I moved back to the geologically rumpled New England, where roads follow some insane logic all their own, and began baffling...