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Fiction from Web del SolThe Flatness
Michael Martone
They are thinking about Northern Ohio, about Indiana,
about the long stretch through Illinois and on into Iowa.
It is flat. The geometry of the fields suggests a map as
large as the thing it represents. The squared township
roads score the axes of coordinates. The cusp of trees on
the horizon, the water tower, the elevator are tokens slid
there representing ground taken and held. The only
dimension marked by z is the state of dreaming as they drive
on the interstates meandering in tangents that seek what the
railroads, who were here with rulers first, called a water-
level route.
There are places in the Midwest that are not like this-
-the limestone hills, the loess bluffs, the forest lakes and
sand dunes, the rills and knobs and kettles. But the people
who only know the place by the driving through it know the
flatness. They skim along a grade of least resistance. The
interstate defeats their best intentions. I see them
starting out, big-hearted and romantic, from the density and
the variety of the East to see just how big this country is.
They are well-read, and they have a vision as they come out
of the green hills and the vista opens up, a true vision now
so vast that at night as they drive there are only the farm
yard lights that demonstrate plane geometry by their
rearranging patterns. And, in the dawn around Sandusky,
they have had enough, and they hunker down and drive,
looking for the mountains that they know are out there
somewhere. They cannot see what is all around them now. A
kind of blindness afflicts them, a pathology of the path.
The flatness.
It is flat. I grew up on a plain scoured by four or
five glaciers, that was once the floor of a shallow inland
sea. On the interstate, when I drove from Fort Wayne to
Indianapolis, the overpasses scaled above the country roads
and railways. On either side of the ascending ramp little
right triangle lakes glistened. The holes, now topped with
water, had provided the fill for the overpass ramps
illustrating some law of conservation that you can only go
as high as you go deep. From the artificial vantage of
these overpasses, I could see, yes, for miles to the islands
of trees or the yawing barn, a house on a reach. And way
off in the distance, the land almost met the paralleling
sky, the flat-bottomed clouds, and there, between the land
and clouds, hung a strip of air without color that the sun
set through.
It is flat for the people who drive through, but those
who live here begin to sense a slight unevenness. As I
drove down the perfectly straight highway, I waited for the
gentle natural rise, no overpass, like a jet at the moment
of take-off, before the climb, just as front wheels of the
plane leave the ground. And then I'd drop back down and
cross a bridge over a river, the Wabash, the Salamonie, or
the Mississinewa. The bump had been the end moraine of a
glacier. The river is still in place from the melting and
washout. These ridges are scalloped together on the plain
like tidelines on a broad beach, a few extra grains of sand.
I know it isn't much, the highlight of a road trip a slight
elevation that could be missed if you were fiddling with the
radio dial. But to such a scale has my meter been
calibrated. Living in a flat country, I began to read the
flatness, to feel the slight disturbances in the field, to
drive over it by the seat of my pants.
And on the plain where I grew up, there is a
continental divide. Unlike the more famous one in the
Rockies, in Indiana it is a matter of a few feet. Two
rivers meet in the city of Fort Wayne and the third one they
form flows back on the tributaries. It looks strange on a
flat map, like a dual lane highway. The new river heads
back north and east paralleling its headwaters going the
other way. Rain falling on the east side of Fort Wayne
eventually finds its way to the Atlantic. On the west, the
rain will fall and travel to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a
matter of a few feet.
Growing up there, I tried to imagine continental
watersheds sloping away from me. I lived in a neighborhood
called North Highlands. Before the developers came up with
that name it was known as Hungry Hill because once during
the winter the horse drays couldn't climb the icy slopes
with food. It isn't much of a hill. But it is another
ending of a glacier. It is just high enough so that it is
the only part of town that never floods. Since I've been
alive, Fort Wayne has had three, hundred-year floods, floods
that are supposed to happen once a century. The flooding is
due to the flatness. After a heavy rain or a good snow
melt, water everywhere begins to rise, in the rivers, the
ditches, the gutters. It pools in sheets from the saturated
ground. It can't run off since the ground is so level.
Instead, it rises. There is a skim of water in the streets.
The parks are lakes. The flooding is gradual. Often it
takes days. The water is finding a balance, finding the
contour that runs through the town like a fault, before it
moves. The water keeps rising and spreading. The water,
never running very fast in the river beds, stops altogether
now, quivers at the brim of the old levees like that lip of
water, a couple of molecules thick, that shimmers above the
rim of a full glass. Fort Wayne floods are slow disasters
with people going to work as usual while others pump their
basements or fill sand bags. There is always plenty of
warning. There is always nothing to be done. There is not
much raging water. Homes are inundated at the same speed it
takes to repaint them. And when the owners repaint the
houses, they dash a little line on the doorsill to mark the
high water of the flood.
The flatness informs the writing of the Midwest. The
flatness of the landscape can serve as a foil, the writing
standing out, a kind of Blue Hotel, in opposition to the
background. There is enough magical realism to go around
here. A friend, Michael Wilkerson, goes so far as to call
the Indiana Toll Road the Bermuda Triangle of Highway
Travel. It's true. People who drive through the state have
stories. They report mysterious breakdowns, extra-dimensional rest stops, the miraculous appearances of state
troopers. In the white-out of the passage through the
flatness, dreaming can take over. The dull colors richen.
The corn in the field begins to sparkle like the cellophane
corn on the set of the Wizard of Oz. And that movie with
its film noir depiction of the Midwest suggests another way
of capturing this place.
I can still remember Danny Kaye introducing the movie
on TV, telling the kids at home not to worry, that the black
and white of Kansas was just the way they made the picture.
Then as now, those grays of the monotonous landscape
interested me more than the extravagant color. I have my
mirages, but they are nothing fancy--the mirror of water
that coats the hot road ahead reflects the flat sky and
galvanizes the horizons. For me this Midwest is the perfect
setting, this matter of a few degrees, a few feet either
way. Here is ground that turns at once into swamp then into
sea, each a solid calm surface. Beneath them all is a
slight tilt, a tendency really, a bias so subtle you never
notice you've crossed a line, that you've reached a crisis,
that your whole world has changed.
I dislike the metaphor of the Heartland. True the
Midwest is somewhere near the physical center of the map of
America. But the Heartland implies that, here at some exact
center, lies something secret, hidden and important, an X
for a buried treasure. The Midwest is too big to be seen
like that. I think of it more as a web of tissue, a
membrane, a skin. And the way I feel about the Midwest is
the way my skin feels and the way I feel my own skin--in
layers and broad stripes and shades, in planes and in the
periphery. The Midwest as hide, an organ of sense and not
power, delicate and course at the same time. The Midwest
transmits in fields and waves. It is a place of sense. It
sometimes differentiates heat and cold, pain and pleasure,
but most often it registers the constant bombardment, the
monotonous feel of feeling. Living here on the great flat
plain teaches you this soft touch. Sensation arrives in
huge sheets, stretched tight, layer upon layer, another kind
of flood.
Perhaps I make too much of geology, topography
imprinting on our lives. It was the Romantics of the last
century who gave us mountains as something beautiful to see
instead of as impediments to get over. From them too we
have inherited "the view." I grew up in a landscape not
often painted or photographed. The place is more like the
materials of art itself--the stretched canvas and paper.
The Midwestern landscape is abstract, and our response to
the geology of the region might be similar to our response
to the contemporary walls of paint in a the museums. We are
forced to live in our eyes, in the outposts of our
consciousness, the borders of our being. Forget the heart.
In the flatness, everywhere is surface. This landscape can
never take us emotionally in the way smokey crags or
crawling oceans can. We stare back at it. Beneath our
skins, we begin to disassemble the mechanisms of how we
feel. We begin to feel.