Saying Goodbye To Hippyville

In 2013, I was living as a starving artist in Keokuk, Iowa next door to a meth den. The tenants over there made our lives equal parts interesting and paranoid. For the first time in my life, I found it necessary to lock my doors every time I left the house (even if it was just for a short game of basketball at the park across the street). I would see them outside strung out and asleep on the grass and I figured that it just didn’t bode well for my property or it’s continuation of being in my possession. On the worst day, I caught a couple people lighting up foil in my garage.

“Come on man, it’s cold out there.” They told me. In July.

But it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes we’d see arguments that didn’t make a single bit of sense and we’d laugh. Other times, we would watch our neighbors as they carried large amplifiers outside to perform bad renditions of Walk by Pantera (over and over and over again) and we would laugh. There was a lot of laughing, actually, despite the unfortunate circumstance. My girlfriend and I found a lot of solace in that.

It was the best of times and the worst of times. Our house wasn’t bad, but it’s location plunked down in the middle of Methadania, USA made the two of us feel dirty by sheer relation to it. My girlfriend found herself depressed, then grew steadily anxious as her wanderlust screamed like a banshee on the moors. There had to be something better out there, she reckoned, had to be some neighborhood in America that didn’t reek of cat piss. Somewhere, that neighborhood existed.

She got the itch to go back to school to finish her media and communications degree after discovering this weird, little hippy town in Iowa called Fairfield. We watched a scathing documentary called, “David Wants To Fly” and I saw her eyes light up about the prospect. Best part of all? The town was but a mere hour or so away from Keokuk.

“People think they can fly there? 85 miles away and there is a town of hippies that all meditate together? In Iowa?!” She explained over and over again for a week straight. I watched her fall in love with the concept of living there, but I personally wasn’t sold on it. After all, I liked our house and I did find a certain amount of enjoyment in the antics of our tweaker neighbors. I didn’t consider the situation as dire as she did and wasn’t ready to leave my hometown again for the millionth time.

That’s when she discovered a university called Maharishi University of Management where they taught you how to meditate in between your course learning. It was a critical component of the education and their website claimed that a daily meditative practice helped with depression and anxiety (both of which she was suffering from majorly at this juncture). It happened to be located in that weird little hippy town of Fairfield.

We traveled to Hippyville one spring day and somehow ended up with a year-long lease at a duplex. I still don’t quite understand how it all played out, but like most things, the decision made itself for me. My brother and sister showed up to help us pack our belongings and we took three long trips in a hot truck to get it all.

It happened so fast. I went from a well-known resident of Keokuk to a stranger in Fairfield in what seemed to be an overnight delivery. My girlfriend enrolled into the university a week or two later and we were off to the races.

The town of Fairfield gained itself two new hippies.

To my girlfriend’s credit, things instantly improved. I was skeptical as all hell, but the meditation she was learning really did seem to have a substantial effect on her psyche. She put her nose to the grindstone and pushed herself back into the world of higher learning and I was proud of her for having the guts to do it.

I didn’t feel like such a fish out of water like I thought I would. Everywhere I looked there was creative people making stuff. It was such a common occurrence that I no longer feared the eventuality of the police showing up when out and doing it myself (something that seemed to happen weekly elsewhere in Iowa).

I was still weird, sure, but I was also never going to be the weirdest person in the room no matter where I went in town. There was an instant charm about that and I used the knowledge to my advantage. I buried myself in my own creative pursuits and tried to make something new every day. I love doing that, creating something from total nothingness and then sharing it with the world. Sometimes it’s profound and other times it’s painfully self-serving, but it always feels good. Living here for a few months taught me that that is sometimes the most important part.

The local ecosystem of commerce in Fairfield was also quite interesting to me. It didn’t suffer from the same pratfalls that other small towns in Iowa did and seemed to exist all on its own in some kind of miraculous vacuum. I started to find commercial photography work for the first time in my life.

Growing up, I always considered myself a creative photographer and never dreamed in a million years that I could ever tone it down enough for commercial purposes. I also didn’t think I was technically sound enough to deliver consistently. But there I was, though, first for a lone company that gave me a chance and soon to several others around town. In that first year, I felt like I was cornering the market on photography and eventually had a constant stream of endless work to keep me busy. I filled in those blind spots and learned how to reconcile and separate my creative pursuits from my professional work. They became two distinct entities that only crossed paths when the creativity needed funding.

My ethos was this: work harder than anybody else. If I saw someone in town creating something, I forced myself to get out there and make something better. If I heard that someone wasn’t pulling their weight commercially, I swooped in like a vulture over a fresh carcass for their job and precious meat. Suddenly, I no longer wanted a slice of the proverbial pie…I wanted the whole damn thing to myself. I gained invaluable social and professional skills and honed it in all over this new-found confidence I had about it, that I could do the job and do it better. Just give me a chance. I’m hungry for it.

And to Fairfield’s credit, they did. I found substantial and meaningful employment doing things that utilized my skill-set. I had my camera around my neck and was absolutely in my element out there. It felt good. For the first time in my entire existence, I wasn’t worried about where the next dollar was going to come from. It started to come to me.

The lease on our first house expired in the spring of 2014 and we were looking for a change of pace. The one downside to our first home in town was the merry-go-round of owners on the property itself. Our first landlord put the building on the market in our first few months there and we had to spend the better part of our whole experience there showing it off to potential buyers. It was frustrating and it felt as if our privacy was being invaded on a semi-regular basis. On the last month of our lease, the property did sell to a guy that seemed nice enough, but the damage was already done. We couldn’t live there anymore.

We found a little cottage in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of town and fell in love with it. It was far enough away from people to not be encumbered with them, but close enough that we could stop and grab a bite to eat with no real consequence. The building was new, the utilities would be cheap, and we would get to see the entire landscape as the clouds folded in and washed over the edges of town. It stormed the first night we lived there and I was dumbfounded at the beauty in such vastness, to see the lightning with no silhouetted trees to block the view.

I could get used to this. I thought.

My girlfriend graduated in 2016 and I was never more proud of her than I was in that moment. I remembered back to the time when we first met and that punk-rock lifestyle we lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I remembered how poor we were back then, how we had to wash our clothes in a bathtub, and how depressed she became about not finishing her degree the first time around. I remembered the Keokuk house and the meth-heads passed out on their lawns, the smell of cat urine wafting in the air. We met at the most traumatic time possible and I remembered how dark it all was as I watched the Colgate smile appear her accomplished face. Her mom cried. Her grandma took photos on a disposable camera. It was a nice feeling.

I was working more than ever and burning the candle at both ends. I found myself constantly tired at this point. My ethos was becoming my own worst enemy as I plowed through the days and nights with almost no time to myself. If I wasn’t working for a company or for my own, then I was on the road working on Forgotten Iowa. That project developed a life of its own and was featured all over the globe throughout the year, starting with a VICE article and culminating to CNN, The Atlantic, The Des Moines Register, American Pickers, and countless magazine and newspaper articles. It was overwhelming and amazing, but it was also all very stressful. I started to sleep a lot less and was worried about meeting deadlines like never before.

We moved into a bigger house on the nice side of town and I pined for the days when I could still wake up bored and have nothing to do. I missed the time back when I had no money in my wallet, back before I had a wallet at all. I started to wonder if, just maybe, I’d went overboard with all of this.

And then I hit a brick wall.

I started to get very depressed in the late summer of 2016. It hit me out of nowhere with an empty realization that I had no real reason to feel that way in the first place. Historically speaking, I was always able to pin negative feelings on specific external circumstances. I was sad because I was hungry and I was hungry because I was broke. I was broke because I had no work-ethic and I had no work-ethic because I was sad. Just like the economy of Fairfield, it was self-sustaining, but it also made sense. This particular stretch of bad vibes didn’t have such an obvious culprit to pin it on. In fact, it didn’t seem to have one at all. I wasn’t broke. I wasn’t nameless. I was building something tangible and real. I had true focus for the first time in my life and I was ambitious and motivated.

Still…I felt an emptiness.

There was a ceiling in Fairfield. I understood that before I ever got my first gig here. I knew exactly where that limit was, where the ceiling started, and how far I’d have to go to reach it. And to further blanket me in bleakness, I realized that it was more than likely that I probably reached it. This was all there was and it was here and it was now. I loved this weird, little hippy town and I met so many interesting and impassioned people living here that I didn’t want to leave it. I never felt more in place, more appreciated, more respected in all my life. I’d built something here and I didn’t want to let it go.

But I did, too, all at the same time. My heart wanted the peace that Fairfield gave me, but my mind wanted so much more than it could ever possibly offer. I couldn’t reconcile the two. I grew angry with myself for not considering what would have to happen after reaching the ceiling in Fairfield. It always seemed so far away from my view on the ground, but I suddenly found myself trying to punch through the cement and drywall.

No luck, just bloody knuckles.

My big gripe about the commercial ecosystem in Fairfield is that it’s often a revolving door of companies. Most businesses open and close here in a very short window of time. I’ve seen restaurants come and go in the span of one month. I’ve watched little shops pop up and disappear overnight. The town square is almost completely different than it was when I moved here. I mention this because it’s noteworthy in that it’s actually quite hard to find consistent employment in this town. As a photographer, I have found it fairly easy to find gigs, but very rarely for a company that has its roots deep into the black, Iowan dirt. Most of it is transitory work.

Enter the ceiling (and then, to fall from it).

I lost half of my income in one day. My computer crashed and died a few hours later. Suddenly, I got this sick feeling my gut that I was back on the road toward poverty square. It didn’t feel as rosy and warm as my stupid nostalgia made it feel mere months prior.

My girlfriend no longer felt the excitement about the weirdness of Hippyville either and we grew distant as our jobs started to swallow much of our time. The town exploded for us with a heavy cloud of uncertainty and we started to resent the very things about this town that we initially enjoyed the most. I wanted meaningful employment that I wasn’t independently contracted to do. I wanted to eat somewhere new, wanted to have a meal that I hadn’t already experienced two dozen times. The weird people in town were no longer as quirky to me as they were painfully misguided and anti-scientific. Our house was too big and too expensive. I knew there was just as much falseness in those things as there was truth, but it didn’t seem to matter much. I am nothing if not totally susceptible to my emotions, after all.

So what does one do when faced with such a dilemma? When the colorful glow of your home abruptly turns monochromatic and gray? When the peccadillos of local culture become unforgivable grievances? When the rivers dry up and you lose half of your water in a single day of drought? When you hit the ceiling and gravity assumes its natural, gradual push back to the bottom?

Where do I go from this place?

That’s where I am right now. I’m trying to figure these personally mountainous situations with just a modicum of grace (never tried that before either). This article is probably pointless to anybody that isn’t me, but I felt a certain duty to write about this magical little place as I’ve experienced it. To create something out of nothingness feels good.

And if I’ve learned anything at all, anything worth sharing and saving, it’s that sometimes that’s the most important part.

Here’s to new adventures.