Track Mangoes

The other day I was walking down the street and a man approached me and my friend and struck up a conversation. He's one of those familiar faces you see around downtown, always playing music in front of the CVS, smiling and greeting everyone who passes. From start to finish he was all smiles and high energy. It was a little disconcerting, but in an non threatening way. Near the end he guessed where my friend and I where from: "Maine and.... Ohio!"

Surprisingly, he was pretty close. It caught me off guard for a moment. "Actually... I'm from Iowa." He then went on the say that he thought that Midwestern girls are the prettiest, a sentiment I disagree with wholeheartedly. Please note that I have a special place in my heart for the Midwest, and think its a starkly beautiful place, but to say that the prettiest girls are from the Midwest, a sentiment, might I add, echoed by Jack Kerouac in On the Road , is misguided and superficial.

I began thinking about the beauty of flat, the beauty of plain, the beauty of scarcity. Since I've moved to the east coast, I've become accustomed to mountains and trees, but whenever I return home I'm always struck by the comfort I find in the wide, open skies of Iowa. An image from Danny Wilcox Frazier's amazing book Driftless came to mind. It is titled, "Shooting bottles along the Iowa River, Johnson County, 2003". I grew up near Johnson County, and I welled up with nostalgia when I was flipping through Frazier's book last falll, which I came across quite by chance one day in the library. In the picture there's a solitary, identity-less man, facing an unknown foe, surrounded by flames, and framed by trees and gray sky. The smoke, the hoodie, the framing; everything hides and obscures the truth of the situation. The beauty I find in the Midwest lies in this feeling, not in the chubby, overly processed face of a farmgirl, although I suppose that's almost symptomatic of what's under discussion.

And then again maybe I'm just trying to reject my place of birth, set myself apart (that's why I moved to Massachusetts, isn't it?). Sorry Iowa, but I quiver at the possibility of a stranger identifying me as Midwestern, I know too well what it implies and entails.

It's a love/hate relationship.