Capital-izing: Is Your Town Famous?

My wife loves corn. I’m talking wild-eyed chemistry, a fire that never fades, especially for corn on the cob. After shopping at the food co-op in La Crosse, Wisconsin, she’ll enjoy two or three ears during summertime meals, plucking each kernel with the studied precision of a surgeon at the nearby Mayo Clinic. No conversation can interrupt her focus. Nary a nugget escapes its fate. There’s only predator and prey — and a big smile, Paula’s big, buttery smile.

So you can imagine her thrill one fog-shrouded drive during our first year along the Upper Mississippi, when we came across this beauty near the town of Westby. Trailered in the snow between a saggy-roofed barn and a supplier of maple sugaring equipment, the giant veggie nearly wrecked our car.

“Turn around!” Paula erupted at 50 miles an hour. “That’s an ear of corn. Turn around!”

What can I say? The woman loves fiercely. We parked our Subaru and pulled out our camera, and it’s been that way ever since. That is, everywhere we drive we see things like this, in Minnesota and Wisconsin especially, from supersized foods and cartoony statues to Sunny the bluegill in Onalaska, our riverside town along I-90. It’s the “Sunfish Capital of the World.” The whole world, you got that? The whole world!

And across the river in La Crescent, we’ve got “The Apple Capital of Minnesota,” noted proudly on billboards and websites. Beyond that is Caledonia, “The Wild Turkey Capital,” and farther still is tiny Olivia, population 2,484, a prairie town that’s shrinking rapidly, if not silently. It’s the “Corn Capital of the World,” mind you, the whole world!

What’s with all this capital-izing, anyway? Does everyone’s town have a claim to fame? More importantly, what does it say about our communities, our culture, our character, to make these kinds of gestures? I know, I know, I’m taking this all way too seriously, too negatively perhaps. Maybe we’re just goofing off. Maybe all we’re doing is celebrating, marketing ourselves for a few tourist dollars, or rallying around an annual event or some economic mainstay. To each his own, I guess. But what does a child think when she sees such things? What’s real, she might ask, and what isn’t? I’m telling you, we need to talk about this.

Now I should make it clear I am a Midwesterner, a Hoosier actually, someone born and raised in Indiana. I know a thing or two about corn, and probably much of what the Midwest is famous for, from basketball hoops in dirt-patch driveways to Dilly Bars at Dairy Queen to tornadoes that rip up Rust Belt cities and withering small towns and strip malls. But for most of the past two decades I lived out West, where I met my wife, a park ranger. It was Paula, in fact, who led us eastward for her job at a national wildlife refuge. And now that we’re here, living among Badgers, a stone’s throw from Gophers and Hawkeyes, I can’t help but regard this place with fascination, which, I’ll be honest, is not that simple. It’s part pride, part embarrassment, part confusion.

And it makes me wonder: Have Midwesterners always done things like this — this landscape gimmickry? Was that martini-drinking pink elephant I grew up with not so unique, after all? Was it merely one of hundreds across a Heartland savanna?

Let’s leave it at this:

Please comment with your story. Tell me what your town capital-izes, whether or not you live in the Midwest. Or, if that doesn’t suit you, share a landmark that everybody knows in your town, like Westby’s corn trailer, its kernels made of spray-painted milk jugs.

Then again, you want to hear what Westby is really known for? The Norseman, who’s a dozen feet tall. He’s wooden. He has an axe and a shield. He helps the Norwegian community celebrate Syttende Mai. And to be honest, I love that. I love knowing that my neighbors have roots. So share yours, share them proudly, however twisted. Pink elephants are welcome. Veggies too.

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Check out Hothouse and Newfound for yourself. Lively writing. Rooted.

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Photo: No caption necessary. Paula’s belly-laugh smile says it all. JEFF MUSE

We desperately need a conversation in this country about guns and bombs and violence — and about being a man.

What do you think? Are you alarmed by our culture of late, or is this an age-old display of human nature — the dark side of “boys being boys”? Maybe it’s merely a media frenzy. Maybe by writing this I’m fueling the fire. But I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of this: Is manhood the problem? Are men?

As always, thanks for your readership. All are welcome to chime in.

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Photo: Buddies Adam Russell and Jeff Muse paddle in the backwaters of the Upper Mississippi River. No trouble here, just poking around, tracking wildlife through knee-deep mud. ADAM RUSSELL

Read “The Big Bang,” my recent essay in Poydras Review. Below is an excerpt, though please turn to the journal to enjoy the full piece. It may be a short tale, but the words loom long in my memory, starting at five years old. You could say I first wrote them in flesh, using barbed wire instead of a pen.

While you’re at Poydras Review, check out the whole lineup — stories, poems, more essays. There’s also a Facebook page. As editor Christina Rae writes, “[We believe] creativity and expression are the foundation of our national culture. We seek outstanding literature with sociocultural integrity.”

Well, here’s hoping I’ve given something to the common good, or at least to the people of Indiana and Kentucky, where this essay is based. And to anyone who cares about family — through ups and downs, through hard times. Maybe here you can find some kinship, and inspiration to tell your own tale. I’d love to hear it.

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From “The Big Bang”:

Perhaps a memory of our wreck lies somewhere deep inside me: twisted metal tearing through my hair and then nearly through my left eyeball. Or maybe it was from the other direction as I tumbled helplessly through the air: a single fence barb first clawing my nostril, then my brow and tender skull.

But the only moment I can recall is standing in the road after we wrecked, the sharp rocks like broken glass beneath my shoeless feet. My chest heaved with sobs, my head stung and spun, and everything was red and blurry. The minibike ticked as its engine cooled, lying in the ditch muffler-side-up. Black cows lingered like shadows, their tails swinging in the afternoon heat. Their mouths gnawed at the silvery grass flattened by the wreck. The barbed wire held them back as I rose to my blood-spattered feet, and the gravel felt like a thousand slivers cutting me with every step.

My brother didn’t black out, though adrenaline masked the instant when his shoulder raked the barbed wire fence. We had shot off the road after hitting a pothole, the dogs trailing close behind us. Stunned by my screaming, he watched me leak like a cracked jar onto a dry, spotless kitchen floor, the liquid streaming down my nearly naked body into dust slightly less red. Then he picked me up, running back to the dog owner’s farmhouse. What did she think, I wonder, and how did we get past her animals? When I asked Alan about it recently, he said the dogs didn’t even bark.

For me, all that remains of the wreck are snippets from the long hours that followed. I remember a stranger’s damp towels on my face as she wiped again and again and again. I remember the echo in our great-grandparents’ house as high voices debated what to do. And I remember lying across Uncle Stanley’s lap in the front seat of the silver Impala. My legs pressed into my father’s thighs as I writhed back and forth in pain, and as we sped to the hospital in Glasgow, Stanley held a compress to my oozing head. Pulling aside my hair, he spoke with a deep, accent-heavy drawl. “Keith,” he said somberly, “I found what’s bleedin’ so much.”

I remember, too, the look on Dad’s face as he cried with his hands on the wheel. It was the first time I’d ever heard him swear, his bloodshot eyes filled with what looked like fear. “I never shoulda bought that fuckin’ minibike!” he said, the curse word percussive and desperate. I heard him say it at least one more time as a nurse clinched my hand through stitches. Twenty-four in all. Needles, tweezers, scissors.

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To read the full essay, click here. And let me know your thoughts, about this story or your own. Safe travels.

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Photo: Thirty-five years later, the barbed wire still stands. Cherokee Trail Road near Glasgow, Kentucky, site of the minibike wreck in June 1975. This photograph was taken in September 2010. JEFF MUSE

Here’s the beginning of “Manly Labor,” just an excerpt. Please consider subscribing to Soundings Review, or any literary journal, for that matter. We writers need cash, not to mention readers. Enjoy!

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“Use this,” the young Navajo man said. He handed me a piece of white cloth that felt like an old, threadbare t-shirt, instructing me to rip a narrow strip from it and then pass it along to the next guy.

“Then what?” I asked, staring at the half-shredded fabric.

“Tie a string around your foreskin to seal your penis,” he replied. “You can’t drip any semen in the sweat lodge. It’s a sacred place.”

I hesitated, stunned.

Don’t drip any semen? I thought. Are we about to masturbate? I don’t even have foreskin — wait a second, does everybody else?

I felt nauseated, nearing panic.

“You heard him,” Kurt said. “Come on, give me that thing.”

I tore a long sliver from the cloth and handed it to my fellow graduate student. There was no turning back now. I shivered in the falling snow.

I stood motionless for a minute in my hiking boots and Carhartt pants and fleece jacket, then slowly, grudgingly, turned my back toward the group, all of them undressing. There was a medicine man and his apprentice — friends of the Yazzie family, our hosts — and my four male classmates in the Audubon Expedition Institute, and “Don O,” one of our new professors. The air in early April was crisp, fragrant with the sweet scent of junipers, but at 6,300 feet in elevation the trees huddled in snow-dusted clumps. I wanted to sneak through their branches to hide between slabs of red rock. The Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona looked as foreign as the planet Mars.

“What if you don’t have foreskin?” I whispered, leaning toward Kurt a few feet away. By now he was halfway to naked, his pants pushed below his knees.

“I mean, how do you seal it?” I asked.

Kurt laughed and said, “Relax. We won’t be graded on this.” Then he pulled off his shoes and piled his clothes on a remnant of orange shag carpet. Several rugs lay near a water-filled trash can steaming in a crackling fire. The sweat lodge itself was little more than a hut, low-slung, covered in clay. It looked woefully small for eight men, especially for long-legged Kurt.

Six-foot-five with sun-bleached hair, he was more than decade older than me, so I considered him to be a mentor of sorts, though we were drastically unalike. Kurt was a free-spirited Floridian who loved the Grateful Dead. I, on the other hand, was 24 years old, a Midwesterner who didn’t party. And certainly I’d never gotten naked with men except while showering after football games, but the circumstances then had been cut and dried — you did your business, you moved on. Yet if anyone could get me through this, I figured, my longhaired hippie friend could. He chuckled while watching me fondle a penis that may have been the world’s tiniest. I was scared. I was cold. My fingers felt like ice.

“Just wrap it like a present,” Kurt said, showing me the progress he’d made. The string dangled against his pubic hair and the pale skin of gangly legs. I stared for a moment, dumbstruck, uncertain of what to say. He didn’t have foreskin either but had managed to complete the task. His penis indeed looked like a gift, topped off with a bright white bow. “My wife would love to see this,” he said. “I wish I’d brought my camera.”

I looked around at the other men in the group, each navel-gazing and fidgeting; then, the Indian elder walked toward the lodge, his butt dark and wrinkled like leather. Before lifting the colorful blankets on the doorway, he shouted some kind of announcement. “Ya’at’eeh!” is what I remember, his hands rising with his voice. His apprentice told us to yell the same thing, to say “hello to the talking gods.” The sweat, he said, was a religious ceremony. There were rules, songs, prayers.

Soon enough, I finished tying my string, stripped off my clothes, and folded them beneath an outcrop. Yes, I folded them, I remember that — what little I could control. I may have been freezing, or only embarrassed, or teetering on the edge of panic, but I knew that eventually I’d step out of that lodge and want my underwear to be dry. A man’s got his limits, I guess.

I walked to the doorway and yelled hello, my first words in the Navajo language. “Ya’at’eeh!” I said, greeting the talking gods.

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What happened next? To read the full essay, visit Soundings Review. And let me know your thoughts. Does this kind of opening appeal to you?

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Photo: Studying with the Audubon Expedition Institute somewhere in the American Southwest, Kurt, Steve, and I (right to left) prepare a group meal on Coleman stoves. It’s the spring of 1994 — another era, another world. RACHEL LEIGH WILLS

From “Ground Truthing”:

“As an Indiana child in the 1970s, I pored over maps during road trips with my parents, though instead of a 14,000-foot volcano, we crossed silo-studded stretches, smooth and featureless. I remember always thumbing through that atlas, asking questions about its symbols and squiggly lines, and how there was a light green shade across swaths of empty space — public land in parks and forests, I was told. Why some places had more green fascinated me. Why didn’t Indiana have as much as the other states? I pondered the mystery with a finger on the Rockies, the Redwoods, the Smokies, Yellowstone. But on trips to Kentucky, my father’s birthplace, I matched the terrain outside the window with my map, at least the blue markings I had come to understand as lakes and creeks and rivers. I remember the moment I pinpointed the Ohio — ground truthing, like a surveyor. The letters on the sign at roadside were the same as those I saw on my lap. And crossing into Louisville was exhilarating. I saw the waves downstream to my right, and though only my imagination could float along, that big river took hold of a little kid.”

To read the full essay, click here. And let me know your thoughts. Do you like this tale? Do you have similar stories? Please share.

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Photo: Backcountry camping in 2006, near Mount Challenger in North Cascades National Park. JEFF MUSE

The death was ruled an accident. A 14-year-old hunter pulled his trigger when he thought he saw a black bear rustling in the vegetation below, the steep slope and wind-whipped fog blurring the scene. But it was only a black-jacketed hiker leaning over her pack, pulling out a water bottle or a field guide to identify a few plants. A tragedy from every angle: the woman a longtime nature lover who lived in the next valley over, the boy a local kid, hunting legally with a buddy on a Forest Service trail signed for its “extra heavy” use. His grandfather had dropped them off, thinking the morning’s foul weather would keep hikers away.

“Both families lost a life that day,” I recall my neighbor saying, someone who’s lived in the valley for decades and knows the boy’s parents through the school system. At the time, I just shook my head in agreement, not wanting to offend with opinions about safety or questions about hunting black bears on hiking trails, a season that begins on August 1.

That time of year, the subalpine meadows radiate with wildflowers in every color, some shoulder-high, drunk on sunshine and snowmelt. But today — mid-June — there are only these glacier lilies, their petals delicate and creamy yellow, a shade that looks exactly like they taste, like sweet corn eaten raw from the garden. I put one in my mouth and think about the black bears, how they rise from the lowlands in summer to feast on blooms and bulbs and berries. When these gifts become most tempting, why put a bull’s eye on anyone’s back?

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Thank you to EarthLines, a quarterly magazine based in Scotland, for publishing this essay in its November 2012 issue, specifically the department called “A Sense of Place.” Why not submit something yourself? I introduced EarthLines in a previous post, which you can find here. Good luck!

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Photo: Early 1900s homesteaders Hazel Tracy and Sadie Cudworth (right) in the upper Skagit Valley, where Sauk Mountain is located. NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK ARCHIVES.

Obviously, you can fill in the blanks with “Adam Lanza” and “Newtown, Connecticut.” We all know him as the perpetrator of horrendous violence, another school shooting, another massacre of innocents. But an opening like that could’ve been written for millions of people across America, past or present. Or the future, for that matter. Is it really divorce that killed all those children and adults? Did the suburbs do it? Was it the age-old tension between battling parents and their kids, as implied by ABC News? Or was it some cruel combination of being male, young, white, depressed, playing video games, whatever?

At this point, all we know for certain is that the victims died from gunshot wounds. Guns. Period. When are we going to face up to that? That is, when is our country going to face up to it? Do we need to militarize our schools and public spaces in order to safeguard our Second Amendment rights? Do teachers need to carry firearms? Does everyone, even first graders?

Frankly, speaking as a white man who could’ve filled in those blanks years ago, I’m tired letting of this pass. I’m not the problem. The guns are the problem. The guns and the people who pull their triggers, who fetishize them, who celebrate them beyond the deer hunt, beyond the rifle range, beyond the most of basic of human needs: to protect ourselves and our loved ones. In our own homes.

And the people who turn to them in times of anger, or paranoia, or demonic possession — whatever the hell Adam Lanza was experiencing.

So, yes, I agree: people, not guns, pull the trigger. But I have to ask, why are we as Americans allowing American after American to die at the hands of other armed Americans? Is there anything we can do? Anything at all? I’d love to hear the opinions of friends and family, or anyone reading this post. I promise I won’t snarl at you, but rather I’ll listen. I’ll learn. Mostly, though, I want to hear what others are feeling right now. Maybe you do too. Thanks.

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Photo: Alan and Jeff Muse (that’s me, the little guy, giggling in my brother’s arms) with our cousins Doug and Steve Keaton. Grandma Hazel stands behind us. The photo was probably taken in 1972 in Indianapolis, Indiana. We boys were all younger than 10. SAM MUSE

EarthLines, as noted by its editor Sharon Blackie, “explores the relationship between people and the natural world, and encourages reconnection. We want to help forge a new ecoliterature that is truly responsive to, and that deeply and meaningfully engages with, the global challenges we face. Writing that doesn’t just acknowledge, but that actively embraces all the contradictions and discomforts inherent in our relationship with the natural world — those contradictions which surface in all of our genuine attempts to reconnect. We’re not interested in feel-good or ‘wellbeing’; we want grit.”

Grit. Maybe that’s what I offered in my new essay, “Sauk Mountain, North Cascades, Washington,” which appears in the magazine’s department called “A Sense of Place.” I write about a hunting accident in my old neighborhood in the Skagit Valley, where a teenager mistakenly shot a 54-year-old woman hiking on a popular Forest Service trail. Guns, fog, recreational conflicts, questions with no easy answers — “a tragedy from every angle,” as I say in the short piece.

I’ll post the essay here in the future after EarthLines gets its due. For now, please check out the magazine on your own. You’ll not only learn about “the culture of nature,” as Blackie writes, but other ideas, other voices, even other ways of piecing together words. Cultural diversity, like biological diversity, is well worth celebrating.

I’m excited to step across the pond. I hope you are too.

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Photo: Sauk Mountain in Washington’s North Cascades. JEFF MUSE

That afternoon Alan, Leslie, Paula, and I headed farther upriver to a boot-worn trail beneath cedars and firs and hemlocks, beneath dangling lichens the length of our arms, then up Thunder Creek to its suspension bridge where we listened to the pounding rapids, to a few raucous ravens, a kingfisher, maybe a dipper chittering and hunting for bugs. And I remember looking up at a sky so silent and streak-free that it made me wonder what good might come of the day, if the silence itself was a good start, the right start.

Where were you that morning? Please share. And thanks for remembering with me.

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Photo: Our long-ago rental house along Diobsud Creek in Washington’s North Cascades. JEFF MUSE

It’s a fascinating piece, I think, reflecting the sentiment that often arises during my environmental studies classes at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. That is, the notion that scientific information is not always enough to sway people to change their minds, let alone their behavior. Take smoking, for instance. Or obesity. Or any number of maladies we all struggle with, be they acute, observable challenges with one’s bodily health or the biggies facing the planet’s body — such as climate change, something that looms on the horizon like doomsday, so outlandish as to seem unreal, or at least too distant and impersonal to even worry about.

It’s funny, really. When it comes to environmental issues, I’m pretty sure the smartest people in the world are doing the most harm — people like me, from one of the most educated, most developed nations on the planet, a nation that leads all others in its rate of resource consumption and waste per capita. Why is that? I wonder. What’s the psychology behind it? Is it denial, greed, a sense of entitlement? Is it Darwinism or just straightforward religious zeal? What do you think? What makes you tick?

For starters, read the article and let me know your thoughts. I’m mostly interested in the psychology behind these things, especially if you’re someone who isn’t inclined to investigate (or worry about) environmental issues like I do. Here’s a snippet to entice you, courtesy of Grist:

Why is skepticism about climate change so persistent?

The answer might seem to be obvious: ignorance! People just don’t understand the science. Their education has not equipped them to discern good evidence from bad, or reason properly to valid conclusions. The media is not giving them the facts. They need more, better information and improved reasoning skills.

However intuitively plausible this answer might be, it suffers from one important flaw: It is wrong. Better educated people are not less likely to be skeptics. Greater scientific literacy and reasoning ability do not incline people toward climate realism. Where skepticism exists, additional information and arguments only serve to reinforce it.

This has been evident for some time, but a fascinating new study in Nature backs it up with numbers. Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues tested the question directly: Is it true that greater numeracy and scientific literacy reduce polarization about climate science?

Again, you can read the full article here. It isn’t very long. As for my response when I first read the piece, I wrote this on Grist’s Facebook page:

There may be true skeptics out there, if only because they aren’t willing to learn and support the scientific consensus. And I suspect they struggle to accept much of what science explains (e.g., the age of the planet, how water quality works, you name it). But I think most people — our culture as a whole, really — can understand the step-by-step outcomes resulting from increases in CO2 emissions and the average global surface temperature and yet they still aren’t willing to sacrifice. Because that’s what it feels like to most people: a sacrifice. ‘In order to believe in climate change,’ they might say, ‘I have to give up too much of what I need, too much of my lifestyle built on (the very recent rise of) industrialization.’

The scientists are doing their job. It’s up to our educational system and economy, our churches and spiritual centers, our community leaders and especially our families to show that ‘sacrifice’ is really a healthier, more sustainable, and more pleasurable way of life. We have to keep laying out and implementing a vision that makes people feel as good or better than our current lifestyle based almost solely on fossil fuels. At the same time, we have to put people to work: where there is no gainful employment there will be little if any change. Look around the planet. Environmentalism must pervade every aspect of our daily lives with the same ease and expectation as fossil fuels do now. What would that look like?

What would that look like? I’m all ears. I’m eager to hear your worldview.

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Photo: Windmills and soybeans along Interstate 39 in north-central Illinois. When I took the photo in July 2010, the thermometer in my car read 97 degrees Fahrenheit. JEFF MUSE