The decision to bypass Chicago had been a good one. Instead of the tolls, rough roads, and traffic jams of the hog butcher of the world, the car had clear sailing as it hummed (not roared, at least not yet; the hole in the exhaust system’s midpipe would not open up until the next day) through the centers of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

It was also territory that was known to me. Especially this part of Ohio. For, while the rest of the trip to this point had been mostly place after place that I was “just passing through", I had lived four years in Columbus. It would be good to see some old familiar sights, even if the schedule I was on demanded that I merely wave to them from an 80-mph distance.

I was in the heartland. The flat expanse of corn, soybeans, trees, and factory towns that, so say the ads for pickup trucks, embodies All That Is Good in America. The Peorias in which, we hear, all the dreams and schemes of the madding crowd in Washington, D.C. had better play, or else.

It was here that I, who then knew only the surly or silent clannishness of New England, and the clammy self-absorption of the Pacific Northwest, first learned that the words “open heart" were not obligatorily grafted to the word “surgery", that “hospitality" was not an abstruse concept, unknown outside of theological discourses.

It was here that I showed up at my first real job, presenting myself to a man I hardly knew, with a freshly-minted Ph.D., a suitcase, and $11, and got, without asking, all my first month’s living expenses covered. Out of his own pocket.

Oh, yeah – at the time, I was your classic slouchy long-haired weirdo, and he had (still has) a crew cut and, from grooming and bearing, looked for all the world like he’d been in the Marines. Our four years together made my career.

It was here, and in my 53 years, only here, that I entered a church one Sunday morning and found myself dining with a church family that very afternoon. We stayed.

I evolved an explanation for all this. The beauty of the people, it went, was directly related to the harshness of their surroundings. Not only was the land flat and featureless, it was also impossibly hot and humid for six months of the year, and impossibly cold and frosty for the other six. There was about a two-minute interval in April, and another in October, between the times when you were huddled close around the stove, wearing fourteen layers of clothes, and when you were sprawled naked in front of the air conditioning vent. If you could afford a place that had air conditioning. And, if you had it, it deigned to work.

Nor did the challenges to the pursuit of happiness in the heartland end with the climate. For, as I drove through Indianapolis in air-conditioned comfort, listening to endless radio post-mortems of the just-completed NASCAR Brickyard 400, and the hand-wringing over the perennial ineptness of Indiana University’s Big Ten football program, I recalled another August visit to Indianapolis in a car. A car that was full of graduate students and postdocs headed for a meeting of the Botanical Society of America. A car that did not have air conditioning.

It was a beautiful morning in 1981 when we started out on that trip from The Ohio State University, and it was my first real introduction to corn that was as high as an elephant’s eye. And to giant ragweed reaching up to the sky. With all that pollen coming my way through the open windows as the car did 70 on I-70. Windows that had to be open, or we would have arrived at the conference’s banquet all toasty and tender, ready to carve and serve. All the rest of that year, until killing frosts at last brought an end to the pollen season, I was miserable, alternating between a burning itch that nearly put out my eyes, and the antihistamine-induced stupor that was my only relief.

I figured, in a place such as this, the genuineness of the hospitality and generosity of these people was the only thing that kept them here, and kept them from killing each other.

It was nearly dinnertime as Hotel Subaru approached the western outskirts of Columbus, and a restaurant that was a favorite of my benefactor, postdoctoral supervisor and colleague advertised itself at one of the I-70 exits. I decided it was time to eat something that was not out of a brown bag, a clown, or a vending machine that wouldn’t take silver quarters. I could sit down, eat leisurely, and indulge in pleasant memories.

It didn’t work out quite that way. The place was nearly empty; not a terribly good sign at the dinner hour. The food was, to put it as kindly as possible, indifferent. As was the service – though at least the screwups were delivered with a smile instead of a New York snarl. But it was a disappointing experience. Not what I had expected. Not at all. Perhaps, thought I, I’d just been unlucky. It had been a bad day for the cook, or maybe I had landed in one of the less competent franchises. It felt, though, like a bunch of corporate accountants had found A Good Thing in that restaurant chain, and had proceeded to ruin it in the Name of the God of Shareholder Values.

I got back on the highway, got through – or, more properly, around – Columbus, and headed northeast on I-71 in the general direction of Youngstown and Pennsylvania. The city was about half an hour behind us when it became apparent that both the car and I needed freshening up.

I pulled off at a truck stop. It was similar to the other truck stops I had seen, but this one seemed somehow to be smaller than ones I had visited west of here. Smaller, and dingier. Less prosperous. Certainly quieter. There wasn’t much happening either at the pumps or in the shop. At least that meant that I could put gas in the car without either waiting in line or feeling like there was somebody ready to pounce when I was done.

Then it was my turn. The indifferent meal was speaking to me. I would have been better off with the clown after all. This was going to be a sit-down job, and it might take awhile. I found the right room, found an unoccupied and minimally trashed stall, got in and closed the door.

The door was covered in graffiti. I had not seen anything like it since leaving the San Francisco Bay area. Most of it was smudged and illegible; there had been a half-hearted attempt to wash it off. But the dominant message had been added after the last washing, and as it was all in capitals and covered half the door, it could not be missed.

I HATE NIGGERS HERE SO GO HOME.

Someone had crossed out the “I". And written “WE".

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

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