There’s something about the toll road, when the leaves are orange and auburn and the air is gray with fog, and there’s something about the city, when it’s hot in the summer and the sun’s beating down and there are those long stretches without a drop of shade, and there’s something about floorboards in the winter, and barn walls and frosty, breathy air.
I don’t know what it is about Indiana. Something about that state warms me whenever I step back on into it. It’s like stepping into a movie, in the past but not, or if it is in the past constructed in such a way that its past-ness is hardly noticeable. There’s the decency of the people, and the slower pace than its fellow Midwest, and the subtle eastern identity of it, acquired over the last century and a half, but those are all supporting features. Something thicker is in there. Something closer to the heart.
Gertrude Stein said of Oakland once, “There is no there there,” when she was speaking of it changing and of the home which had been her home being gone when she returned, years in the future. This is the way things are in places prone to changing, but it’s more the case in some changeable places than in others. The buildings of New York have been built and torn down five times and twice over, but New York is still New York. The houses around me here in Austin will be gone in a decade, and this neighborhood will not be what it was. It will be, and already is, really, a different Austin.
I could theorize for hours on what it is that makes Indiana what it is, but I think it’s really this—there is a there there. There’s something about the toll road. There’s something about the city. There’s something about an orange leather ball.
There’s something about Indiana.
