Flyover Country
Every person has a story — even pathologically nice Midwesterners.
While I haven’t quite lost my sense of East Coast exceptionalism I wrote about a while back on my personal blog, after living in the Midwest for two years for school, I’ve learned to stop referring to everything in between D.C. and L.A. as “flyover country.”
Before visiting the University of Missouri, I had never been to the Midwest. I’d been all up and down the East Coast, all through the Southeast — yet for all my cosmopolitan airs of city-bred culture, I’d never been west of the Mississippi.
While I was born just outside Memphis, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, I’d never crossed to the other side, the “rest of” America. I’d grown up a stone’s throw away from the nation’s capital, taking field trips to see the Constitution in the flesh. I’d basked in the beautiful cityscape of Charleston, stood awestruck at the sheer force of life pumping through Gotham. I’d been up and down the Atlantic. But I’d never been to the Heartland.
I remember the first time I landed in Columbia, Missouri. I’d flown into its small, regional airport. At the time, it was only accessible by catching the odd connecting flight from Memphis International Airport. After recovering from the initial shock from the contrast between the two airports, I looked around me. This has to be the wrong place, I thought.
On the short drive from the airport to our hotel near MU’s campus, I began to feel like an Atlantic sturgeon out of water. Traveling along what I later came to see as a drive through majestic rock formations and vast fields, I began to wonder if we’d ever reach the campus at all — would we miss it? was it in a cornfield? The sign will be rendered invisible by a massive wall of cows, I surmised.
Eventually, we reached the city of Columbia, what must’ve been the only civilization for miles, I thought.
Any readers who have been to Columbia (or have even ventured beyond their gilded metropolitan enclaves) could laugh at my ignorance and naiveté.
But they wouldn’t, because, as I soon learned upon touring MU, they’re all afflicted with a sense of sincerity and warmth so feared on the East Coast. They hadn’t been hardened by the Real World. If they’d lived in a Big City, they’d see what life’s really like — terrorism, violence, pain, suffering — and their idyllic charm would turn to a healthy sense of cynicism. I would’ve felt a smug sense of superiority if they weren’t so painstakingly, terribly nice.
In February, I described the East Coast’s famed iron-wrought, adversity-forged exteriors, forever twisted in a defensive stance:
“…[A]fter being hardened by the toughest of crowds and the harshest of winters. Then the snow melts, and you’re still standing on two feet, staring down whatever’s thrown at you, ready to hit it out of the park. You hail from a land of legends, of storied histories. Your determination and tenacity run deep as the Atlantic. Let them call you a damned Yankee. Let them call you cold, gruff. You learned to be resilient in the wake of tragedy and loss. Let them call you tightly-wound, aggressive. You’ve been fighting the pressure to live up to the greatness of your city since you were small.”
When I began school at MU, I felt a sense of duty to prove the Midwest’s epidemic of congeniality isn’t better than the East Coast’s pandemic callousness. I wanted to show we, too, can be as mushy as Italian ice and as sweet as saltwater taffy. I refused to let my homeland be reduced to a schtick by a campus of 35,000 impeccably polite students.
The irony of this need not to be viewed as a mere stereotype hit me about two days into my studies.
OK, so maybe they are real, complex, people despite their superhuman capacity for niceness. But I’m still in the middle of, like, a cornfield.
My idea of Midwestern geography had, before MU, been pieced together from movies and television — this is “flyover country.” I’d been jaded by the metropolises through which I traipsed and the landmarks I took for granted. This is flyover country. There’s nothing to see here. It’s flyover country.
My first few weeks, I didn’t venture too far from campus. Sure, I’d explored the downtown district of Columbia — the other one — and its coffeeshops, concert venues and vegan eateries. But this was a college town, of course it was different.
But as I continued to wander aimlessly through what locals affectionately dubbed “CoMo,” I began to appreciate its quirky brand of charm. I saw local musicians, influenced by bigger scenes in St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit and Chicago.
OK, Chicago doesn’t count, because it’s a big city…
Again, irony hit me in the face like a nor’easter.
As I progressed in my studies at MU, I also progressed in my knowledge of and appreciation for the Midwest and its diverse, complex culture and rich history.
A microcosm of this evolving understanding came with a multimedia journalism project that led me to the small town of Sedalia, Missouri. My team’s project required us to become invested in the lives of the local Section 8 housing’s residents as we documented the people and organizations working to “Save Sedalia.”
Our project took us to the aforementioned housing authority, a food bank in downtown Sedalia, the local chapter of Mothers Against Methamphetamine (MAMa) and inside the home of a Sedalia resident.
As I compiled interviews, photos and videos of the “real” Sedalia, any preconceived notions I had about this rural, Midwestern town melted away. These people — and certainly, I, a student journalist — weren’t here to “save” Sedalia so much as to preserve what they saw as worth preserving.
No, there are no national landmarks lining these streets. But does it matter? No, your chances of running into an internationally-known politician, actor or athlete are not very large. But does it matter?
I didn’t encounter stereotypes. I talked to people, real, flesh-and-blood, strength-and-weakness, honest-to-goodness people. I didn’t wander around in a rural hamlet. I learned to use my pen and my camera to tell stories about a town rife with them. I began to see the beauty in the small things: the way locals exuded an air of familiarity as they went about their daily lives in their hometown; the way one of our subjects, a mother living in the Sedalia Housing Authority, worked to instill Midwestern (universal?) morals in her children; the way even the mundane things, the ordinary things, the seemingly unremarkable things, had meaning and importance and beauty. These were people going about their daily lives, and that’s magnificent in its own way.
Part of my newfound philosophy, that life in and of itself is an incredible gift and a thing at which to marvel, came from a less enlightened place: the psychiatric ward of the University Hospital.
For the uninitiated, depression isn’t a big, cartoonish cloud hovering over you as you go about your normal routine. It’s a monster, a leviathan, set on killing you in the slowest, cruelest way possible. After sucking the life out of you, it replaces your joy and will to live with dark, evil thoughts. You’re worthless. You’re hopeless. This is your life now, and it will never improve.
This isn’t good for your quality of life.
So, after a series of circumstances that I won’t detail here — best not to romanticize the work of the leviathan — I ended up doing a 96-hour mandatory stint in the psychiatric hospital on suicide watch.
While my release from the hospital certainly wasn’t the end of my battle with depression, for a brief period that spring, I realized I didn’t want to die, at least not right now. I had so much to live for. For the rest of my time working on the Sedalia project, I had a(n albeit fleeting), sense that life was important — not just mine, but others’, too. How could I possibly have wanted to die when there was such beauty here in life? As a friend had reminded me, while having a contextualized and broad perspective on life,
…[Y]ou can also narrow your perspective when you need to. Seeing a ladybug or a falling leaf would be enough to keep me from killing myself if I was at that point. Way too fucking interesting. There’s too much going on around me to leave.
There was too much going on in Sedalia for me to leave. There was too much going on for me to pack up my equipment and leave for somewhere more “interesting,” more “bustling.” There were too many stories to tell.
There’s too much going on in the Midwest to write it off as “boring.” Every person is a story, waiting to be uncovered. From Chicago to Sedalia, the Heartland is rife with stories of trial, triumph, betrayal, love, wins, losses — just like the East Coast, and like everywhere else. It’s not the political clout, the wealth, the fame, the cuisine or the “culture” that makes a city worth saving and worthy of one’s attention. It’s the people.
The Midwest is not the East Coast.
I still don’t know what t-ravs are. I’ve struggled to find a decent vegan brunch spot outside CoMo. And I don’t quite understand their obsession with casseroles, although I appreciate the gesture of bestowing them upon people in need.
And that’s something worth preserving.
There’s too much going on in the Midwest to call it “flyover country.”
