The Pursuit of Happiness

514

Last week I went back home to western Minnesota, drove through a lot of small towns hovering on the South Dakota border, felt high gear wind blow through 90° heat all day long every day. It was like stepping into a Mark Rothko painting, Four Darks in Red at dawn, or No. 61 (Rust and Blue) when the sun went down. There’s nothing sentimental about the prairie; it is abstract, rational, as pure and emancipated from decoration as a ‘55 Karmann Ghia.

Food in western Minnesota is abstract and rational, too. It is brown or white, with an occasional side of orange Jello salad with shredded carrots. A daring chef might mix the carrots with red Jello, but that seems wrong somehow. You don’t see it too often.

The roads are bad. (I didn’t say “too,” linking roads to food. The food is food. I don’t judge it. But the roads are awful.) That’s because the earth moves and trembles when it freezes and thaws; potholes and valleys and jaw-breaking tumbles lay beneath the asphalt like Broadway hoofers waiting in the wings for a Springtime encore. It made me think of Arkansas’ roads with some fondness.

I stopped in junk shops and thrift stores along the way to scout books. It’s been slim pickings for the last few years, but I was gratified to see that small town Minnesotans still read serious literature. I found a nice copy of Joe Heller’s Closing Time, and a tattered The Franchiser by the superb and utterly forgotten Stanley Elkin. It made me smile to think of some old Lutheran reading Elkin’s story about Ben Flesh, a Cadillac-driving Jew and traveling man.

I guess the best part of going home is running into folks who speak your language. No one finishes a sentence in Minnesota because people communicate telepathically. Someone may begin a story, but all stories end in the middle with “…well, you know…” saying it softly, their voice drifting.

And you do. You answer, “Yah, you bet.” And then you both drop into a comfortable, peaceful moment and stare at a point 15 or a hundred miles out west.