Persistance, Midwest - Journal Entry

Here is how I spent many of my weekends while in graduate school. Like the bear, I would go over the mountain to see what I could see. This is an old entry (note ref. to Iowa floods!) I pulled out based on my drives. [Along the way, I also bought a lot of wonderful fresh fruit and produce and pulled over to take some nice photos of broken down barns.]

Saturday morning, driving nowhere.

It's rained for months.There's a pond in every cornfield & in the distance trees tower like cracks in the sky.These field-trips save me, remind me of home, where scruffy towns skirt main roads like debris that fell from passing trucks & went to seed.

Just inside the city limits kids wave a sign scribbled in crayon: GARAGE SALE STOP. Their parents relax in lawn chairs. Chopped wood is piled on porches. On the tavern roof, four men, shirts off, sit on shingle packs, their backs glistening. In a field by a school the football team scrimmages. I realize, making these notes, I have been reading too much James Wright, and the world does not need another Autumn Comes to Martin's Ferry. But I keep writing.

I come to Lindy's cafe. Inside, footage of Iowa's obliterating floods on the television. A small boy on a stool asks his mother, how come they don't put fire on it? Nice idea, kid. I remember the kids I passed driving into town, three of them holding a single sign, all flapping arms & hopping together like birds of a shared wing, & the fattish parents lolling half-alseep, all so certain of the ground beneath them, while these poor bastards on tv just seven hours south, point at their roofs, all that's visible now, like pitched tents in the dark rivers of their neighborhood.

I know it'll all pass, and they'll go on however they can. But that brutal erasure of everything. I would call this town Persistance if that's not already its name.