“Then go do your job.”
We started in packing cartons. Mrs. Howard spent the day sitting at the kitchen table chain-smoking, silently watching us pack her belongings. She was a ghost. There was a kid too, an awkward teenaged boy named Trevor who played with his electronic game thingy all day in his room. Neither one of them said a word. We packed the house the first day and loaded the second day. I was scheduled to unload three days later and only had 700 miles to travel so I didn’t have any time pressure.
I picked up Interstate 80 in Council Bluffs and spent the night at the Iowa 80 truckstop in Walcott. It claims to be the largest truckstop in the world and even has an antique truck museum on-site. Iowa has lots of truckstops, which means lots of competition, which means they still have actual restaurants. Most truckstops have gotten rid of their restaurants. Trucker staples like chipped beef on toast (also known as shit on a shingle), the iceberg lettuce salad bar, and the all-day breakfast menu are no longer available nationwide. Maybe that’s not the greatest loss to civilization, but did they have to replace every restaurant with a Subway franchise? The floor of my truck is usually carpeted with that Subway shredded lettuce product. You can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, but you can sure as hell spill it.
The next day I picked up I-94 west and stopped for the night in Ann Arbor. In college towns—like Chapel Hill, Boulder, Iowa City, Missoula, Austin, Madison, and Oxford, Mississippi, to name a few—all of a sudden, instead of unemployment, meth labs, and poverty, there are real jobs. Plus you can get a latte and a pack of American Spirit Golds. Municipal officials always seem to want auto assembly plants and call centers, but a real and lasting economic engine gets running when there’s a university in town. As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can boast of vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking. You might think it’s only your town that’s been ruined by sprawl, but it’s happened everywhere. You’ve got the new CVS, the Walmart, the Home Depot on the fringes, while the old downtown is either empty or the buildings have a Goodwill store, an immigration law office, and an “antiques” store, meaning junk. The chains on the outskirts provide the nine-dollar-an-hour jobs and wire the day’s receipts to Bentonville or New York every night.
I hate it personally, but we deserved what we got. We wanted the eight-dollar sneakers and the forty-five-cent tube socks. Well, it’s not unlikely that those socks and shoes were made by a twelve-year-old girl in Madagascar more or less chained to a machine. While we were happily buying goods on the cheap, the developers were buying the local politicos on the cheap and getting the zoning changed so they could build even more big boxes. We didn’t consider that maybe it’d be a better bargain to pay twenty dollars for sneakers and buy them from the neighbor who owns the shoe store downtown and stocks sneakers made in Maine.
It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent underclass. Yay. This underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettoes either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill small towns. It looks like an episode from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American heartland, it has a stake through it. What’s left are factory farms and meatpacking plants far off the main roads jammed to the rafters with immigrant laborers getting paid who knows what. So let’s all enjoy the cheap pork chops while wearing our new sneakers, because we paid a heavy price for them.
This country has almost twenty thousand towns, and I’ll bet I’ve been in or through most of them. The pattern of sprawl on the fringes and decay in the center is firmly established everywhere. The other thing, just as firmly established, is American mythmaking. I love seeing tourist posters of America the Beautiful. In New England the cultural icon is the small town with a white church, in the West it’s the false-front frame saddlery with the hitching post, in the South it’s the roadside peach stand, and in the Midwest it’s a ruggedly handsome farmer in a John Deere hat. Oh really? Is that what America looks like? I’m all over the country all the time and guess what? There are barely any family farms left in the Midwest, hardly anyone goes to church in New England, the Georgia peach groves are tract houses, and towns in the West are either bedroom communities or ghost towns. If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an underpaid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.
Central Michigan north of Ann Arbor was more of what I was just talking about. I arrived in Lakeland the night before I was scheduled to unload the Howard family. The Colonel had picked out the house on a day trip the month before. It was a decrepit farm dwelling outside of town, all by itself on a little rise. It was a lonely, windy spot. I had a couple local guys with me and we went in. Mrs. Howard looked upset. This being a military job I was required to get clearance for delivery from the transportation officer (TO) at the air force base in Nebraska. When I called in, the TO told me to hold off unloading. He said there were issues that might take a couple days to resolve but that I was authorized to receive waiting time. Waiting time is great because it pays something like $450 a day and all I have to do is hang around. I went to talk to Mrs. Howard.
“I’m not authorized to unload today. Do you know what’s going on?”
She gave me a rueful smile. She was pretty in a wounded sort of way. I guessed she was in her mid-thirties.
“Yes, I know what’s going on. I’m refusing to move here. My husband picked this place out. I haven’t heard from him since we left Nebraska, and the last conversation we had was that his job transfer probably wouldn’t happen for a while, so he’d be staying on base during the week and try to come to Michigan on the weekends, or some weekends.”
“What’s his job out here? This doesn’t look like army territory.”
“It isn’t army territory. All his work is online. He can work anywhere.”
“You must have family here, or he does. I suppose it could be a nice place to live . . . if you knew some people or had some connections.”