Winesburgmotel.com

It’s July, 2001, and my road trip partner Kyle and I check into a motel. Our 2001 edition of Road Trip U. S. A. suggests the Winesburg Motel. The book recommends it; I don’t. Our first genuine dive comes with gold paneling and pink sheer polyester curtains matching the bedspreads. Our double beds are separated by a side table. The floor is covered with the gray carpeting you find in the entrance of a municipal building. The air conditioner is on and the door to our room open—my father would shit Freon if he knew the Winesburg Motel was cooling off the entire state of Ohio. We drop our bags inside and take a ride into the center of town, about a mile away. We park the van near a train station that seems to still in use, though I’m not sure, and walk around. 

Clyde, the inspiration for Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, offers the same cluttered feel Anderson dished out in his thinly-veiled-names tell-all novel. Main Street is empty. Half of the sidewalks roll up by two o’clock on Saturday, the other half by five, with the only busy place the Town Tavern, flagged with a neon sign that says LIQUOR. Two mid-1980s cars are parked on the street. I can see this is still Anderson’s Winesburg. The Clyde Enterprise building is closed. The small newspaper was once the place of employment for Anderson, nicknamed Jobby, because of his need to work to support his large family while his father told tall tales of the Civil War at the local hardware store. 

            In Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson renamed the paper the Winesburg Eagle. I stare through the plate-glass office window. A couple of desks and papers sit inside and the windowsill has an orange beach ball and some coffee mugs advertising a promotion of some sort. At one time this was Anderson’s center for gossip, which he typically kept to himself, until he published his first novel. This is where he learned the stories of closeted gay men, of ministers who stared through the holes of their stained glass windows and lusted after naked, lonely women, of women who were single at the ripe old age of 29 and believed they were old maids with no future, cursed to be lonely and desperate for some sort of human contact. This is where Anderson, like his hero, George, planned his escape from the small town of Clyde.

            The brick facades, turn of the century, are prototypical of a northern United States post-Civil War boom. The drab gray sky and clusters of red brick are accentuated by streetlights composed of three white globes. Were these the same lights shivering with burning gas Anderson saw at night while walking down Main Street? Awnings of black or green, advertising signs painted onto the sides of the bricks, the ominous granite bank building reminding people where the distribution of wealth was decided. Who was the robber baron that started the Peoples Banking Company? Or was it a collection of wealthy farmers who decided to help their fellow agrarians? Did Anderson shop at Wilson’s Clothing and Shoes? Has this always been the main supplier of clothing to Clyde? 

            In a way, this is all a good thing. Could this have been the first part of America untouched by the hands of Ray Walton? The strip malls are conspicuously absent from this downtown and it seems like Wilson is doing fine for himself. No Gap or Wal-Mart is going to take away his loyal customers. The small barbershop, Pearce Insurance and Don Carter Realty are a comfortable change from corporate Century 21, Allstate, and Supercuts.

            If it were Monday, I’d walk into Don Carter and see if Don was in. Maybe have lunch and ask him a few questions about his business—how old it was, who he sold to, and what were the best parts of town. Would he tell me the truth or swindle me? Either way, there’d be no corporate edict from the top telling him how to talk to the customers and there’d be no annoying suggestive selling: “Would you like the coffin included with that life insurance? How about a tort? A little spicy legal jargon to fuck you over in some way, perhaps? An act of God that we don’t cover? Do you like my polyester gold jacket?” There’s something so stressfully peaceful about Main Street, as if Kyle and I are viewing the cold, still body of a relative who died slowly of bone cancer, but it was OK, because they died in their late 90s — it was their time. As we walk down the side streets it’s obvious nothing is going on.

            Kyle and I get back in the van to do a little more exploring, only after stopping at the motel to make sure the door to our room is still locked and the curtains still drawn. We avoid the miracle mile of strip malls that line the border of Clyde and Fremont and drive down country roads.

            “Where’re we going?” I ask.

            Kyle isn’t in a talkative mood at all — this is when I learn of his ability to totally turn off his senses and bring it all inside. We don’t speak as he drives the van down the streets of Clyde, back streets where soybeans and wheat grow in a geographical outline around the Whirlpool factory that takes up the same amount of space as a million football fields, devouring thousands of acres of former farmland. The sun is getting ready for its descent, and because the sky is overcast the sunlight defaults to a pale blue, blooming in the sky contrasting the verdant soybeans. Kyle looks around and I read the street signs and farm names out loud. Kyle’s not responding to anything I say. It’s only after a half hour of driving down the agricultural corporate grids of Clyde that Kyle stops the van.

            “Look at that shit, man,” he says. “All that wheat goes for miles.”

            “I want a piece of it,” I say.

            “Well, go get it.”

            “No. I can just see the police following us back to the room and arresting us for stealing a piece of wheat.” I’m serious about that—the dueling banjos are playing in my head for no good reason. It’s so still and quiet, I feel the cops probably have nothing to do here but harass a few “city boys.”

            “Do you really think you’ll get arrested?”

            “Well, if you don’t, go get it.”

            Kyle jumps out of the van and grabs a stalk of wheat. The first yank causes the head of wheat to pop off. Kyle grabs another stalk and pulls it closer to the bottom—three, four, on the fifth yank it comes out. Kyle runs back to the van—the theme to Mission Impossible starts playing in the background.

            “Go! Go! Go!” I scream as I take the wheat out of Kyle’s hand. He slams the door and puts the van in DRIVE. 

            “We’re gonna get caught, you fucker,” I say. “I don’t want to be the Ned Beatty of this trip.”

            Kyle laughs and continues his personal tour of Ohio wheat. Kyle looks around town as I hold the wheat stalk in my hand feeling the texture, smelling the seeds, and trying to chew on one. I can’t help but wonder who was the first person who decided to take a stalk of wheat, grind it into powder between two stones, add water and yeast, let it sit for a few hours, and bake it at a few hundred degrees to make bread? Wonder, Sunbeam, Pepperidge Farms, Staff, and every food store and bakery in the world sells this food—this substance is the symbol of survival, of feeding the hungry, of making peace at home, of being a prisoner. Bread, at one time a major food group on its own, now carries so little meaning and sustains so little in a nation full of Olive Gardens that use it as a way to sop up rosemary flavored olive oil on a plate—bread is now the condiment of a condiment.

            Kyle leads us across the roads and it becomes clearer we aren’t just on roads. The tarred pavement creates a grid system—a solid moat—around Clyde’s most important products: washing machines, apples, and wheat. Kyle stops the van and we stare across a wheat field. They really are amber; even against that drab sky the wheat glows a golden yellow, and that shine is its life force—the songs weren’t just hyperbolic. Kyle and I are now a part of all of this.

            The wind blows and the wheat stalks crackle against one another and everything around us becomes attentive to that wheat. The wheat is; Kyle and I are; we are wheat, waving, waiting, waning in life. It’s quiet and there’s not one person near us. I hear my heart beating, pumping a lifeblood through this scene—we are a part of this, as if we entered a painting, a piece of the visual that is alive with glowing, living gold.

            To see the stalks with clusters of wheat seeds on their ends within the splendor of middle-America, within rows of one another for acres around all one like one like one—this is Zen. We are, wheat is. This is how people are supposed to feel when they sing America the Beautiful and sing the lines, “Across the fruited plains.” The men who bring us this wheat are the most important people in the world to me right now, and Kyle and I now know it. This is why America’s economy bloomed… then busted.

            Kyle turns to me and we look at each other for a few seconds too long in silence.

            “That’s amazing, isn’t it,” I ask.

            Kyle nods and takes the van onto the main road—McPherson Highway. He looks in the rear view mirror and his face goes white. 

            “The cops are behind us,” he says. 

            “No.” 

            “Yeah… They’re pulling us over.”

            “What?” My blood spins through my veins and I can hear my heartbeat again and I feel my pulse in my neck without moving my fingers there.

            “Just kidding,” he says. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

            “Jesus, Kyle! Just when I was feeling good about something.”

   We stop back at the motel to pick up our computers, worried about leaving them there, and as we leave I look at the Winesburg Motel sign, excited to see it’s neon glow when we get back…

Originally published in The Palo Alto Review, Vol. XXIV