ON WISCONSIN

6 3 R O N W I S C O N S I N D A V I D M c G L Y N N Years ago – before 9/11 or Facebook, before cellphones were ubiquitous or Google became ascendant, before I was married or a father or many of things I’d one day become – I sat on the floor of a friend’s apartment, studying the map of the United States tacked to his living-room wall. The map was as intricate as it was expansive : six feet by eight, webbed with rivers and highways, dotted with towns too small to appear on most other maps. If I let my eyes go slack, the chaotic tangle of colored lines resembled a Pollock painting, but as I moved closer to examine what the lines connected , the map’s layers grew so deep and varied they appeared three-dimensional and to contain the country’s every eccentricity. I traced my finger along Montana’s face-shaped western border until I came to a red point demarcating Sacajawea’s grave, near Lander, Wyoming. Moving eastward across the plains, I landed on her name again – another memorial in Mobridge, South Dakota, nearly six hundred miles away. ‘‘Sacajawea’s buried in two places,’’ I said. ‘‘Two di√erent states. Isn’t that weird?’’ ‘‘She supposedly died in South Dakota a few years after the expedition,’’ Matt said. He lay sprawled on the futon, his arm crooked behind his head and a bottle of Corona propped on his 6 4 M c G L Y N N Y chest. Close to completing his degree in geography, he’d had spent so much time pinning notes to the map and scrawling in its white border that it no longer surprised him. ‘‘Another legend says she rejoined the Shoshone in Wyoming. Both places claim her.’’ Matt yawned and tilted the bottle toward his mouth. But I wasn’t really talking to him. Katherine sat on the floor with her knees propped to her chin. Her shins and gray socks glittered with dust from the Wasatch Mountains, east of Salt Lake City, where we’d spent that afternoon hiking. She wore khaki shorts and the T-shirt I’d brought her from Hawaii – black with a yellow hibiscus, a shirt she still wears. We’d only been dating a few months, but already I felt a momentous hum, an engine running inside my chest, whenever we shared a room. ‘‘I’ve been to the Will Rogers Memorial in Oklahoma,’’ she said. ‘‘We used to drive every year to my grandparents’ house in Arkansas. It was on the way.’’ I moved east along the wall. The memorial was a dot beside the town of Claremore, lettered in red. ‘‘And?’’ ‘‘It was nothing to write home about.’’ Katherine straightened her legs and bent forward until her nose touched her knees. ‘‘All those little towns in the middle of nowhere. They’re all desperate for someone to stop there.’’ ‘‘That’s why I’ll never live in Oklahoma,’’ I said. ‘‘Let the record show.’’ I was nearing the end of my master’s degree and would soon begin work on my doctorate. Utah was supposed to have been a two-year leave of absence from southern California, after which I’d be returning, posthaste, to a city near, and if at all possible beside, the ocean. After two years in the mountains, I still saw the Pacific in my dreams, still heard the waves crashing over the sand and rocks, and so clung to the notion that I was destined – ordained , even – to make my life near it. But now I’d signed on for a much longer haul, and though I was young and idealistic and naive, I also understood what I was up against: the long odds of landing a job as college professor. Anyone who’s come within sni≈ng distance of a graduate program in English knows the market for academic positions has been bleak for decades, with hundreds of candidates – all with advanced degrees, slick publica- O N W I S C O N S I N 6 5 R tions, and extensive...