Day 5 – 7/3 – Blountsville to Muncie, IN – 15 miles

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I slept marvelously well under the shelter at Blountsville’s Cardinal Greenway trailhead, and then strolled merrily through the shortest walk of the trip thus far, arriving in Muncie before 10am. Once in the center, I split from the Greenway (and the ADT), in order to follow White River westward through the Minnetrista Gardens, allowing for a visit to the Bob Ross Experience. From there, I continued further west through Ball State University, eventually arriving at my bed for the night.

I have three stories that I want to tell about Muncie, and they all revolve around failure.

First, the story of the city of Muncie itself. There was a time, not that long ago, when Muncie was known as “America’s Hometown.” As it happens, the city drew the eye of Robert and Helen Lynd, a pair of sociologists at Columbia, who published a pair of intensive studies on Muncie in 1929 and 1937, using it as a case study of a representative, small US city. Decades later, PBS built upon that foundation with a documentary series of its own, Middletown. At the time, the most influential family in Muncie was the Balls, who launched a mason jar empire, making them patron saints of hipsters today. The city, like many others, enjoyed a post-war boom period, with the population jumping by 10,000 over the 1940s. Heavy industry drove high rates of employment, particularly in the realm of auto parts, through BorgWarner.

As those decades passed, though, cracks started to appear in the perfect image. By 1977, a researcher from UVA found that Muncie was outpacing the nation in divorce and death rates. Its population peaked around 1980, at 77,216, and has been dropping since. One after another, Muncie’s industries shut down; BorgWarner was the last to shutter in 2009. At the same time, corruption spread throughout the city’s political apparatus, earning the nickname–utterly uncomplimentary in this case–of “little Chicago.”

Like so many other Rust Belt cities, Muncie found itself flat-footed in the face of global economic trends, and the city suffered profoundly as a consequence. This is one failure.

Here’s the second: in September 1985, two teenagers, Ethan Dixon and Kimberly Dowell, were killed in Westside Park in Muncie. To this day, the crimes have never been solved. This is hardly unusual in Muncie, where a staggering number of murders have gone unsolved over the years. I learned about this in Douglas Walker and Keith Roysdon’s The Westside Park Murders: Muncie’s Most Notorious Cold Case, which is also where the historical info above comes from.

Perhaps even an outstanding investigation would have turned up empty. Pre-DNA and other forensic technology, it was even more challenging to close some cases. But this suffered from all the hallmarks of sloppy police work. Detectives leapt to a conclusion that Kimberly’s step-father was the killer; despite ample evidence to the contrary, they effectively ruined his life with the cloud of suspicion that they enmeshed him in. Locals speculated that the police officer who discovered the bodies was the one to blame. Others embraced the ludicrous Dungeons & Dragons panic that was rampant in the 1980s. And yet, years and years passed without anyone giving a close look at James Swingley, who told people on the night of the murder that he was the shooter!

There is no shortage of criticism that can be fairly placed on the shoulders of those responsible for solving this crime. And yet, my hunch is that in the vast majority of cases, these individuals were making a good faith effort. Going by the numbers alone, it’s fair to suspect that a family member or friend could be responsible for perpetrating a violent act, and even more so a step-parent. When the pressure coming from above is blisteringly intense, it’s tempting to take short-cuts, and police are often advised in training to trust their gut.

Nonetheless, this is certainly a failure. 39 years later, the families still lack any semblance of closure.

This brings me, somehow, to Bob Ross. I can’t say I was a loyal fan of his painting show on PBS. In reality, he was little more than a meme to me, well before memes were a thing. How many times have I made a passing reference to “happy little clouds” overhead? Before mapping my route through Muncie, I had no idea that the man had any affiliation with the town, but it turns out that the studio where he shot his show was situated in a home of a member of the Ball family, just off the White River.

When you enter the Bob Ross Experience, you’ll find his studio off the entrance to the left. To the right is a living room, complete with four episodes of the show available to watch. I randomly clicked on one and perched delicately on the edge of the chair, trying not to sweat all over the furniture. The episode’s focus was on what to do when a painting goes wrong. This led to one of Ross’s most famous aphorisms: “We have some happy accidents sometimes, but we don’t make any mistakes.” He proceeded to show how he could transform a painting he was dissatisfied with into a masterpiece, and it was a remarkable process to behold.

For Ross, there are no failures. And his larger point is that the fear of failure stops many from painting at all. Why embarrass yourself and waste money on all of those materials, if the final product will be a mere mockery of your hoped-for creative vision? That’s a logical, if defeatist, response. By contrast, though, Ross would have us see those canvases as works-in-progress, as steps in a process, as possibility not finality.

In education over the last decade, there has been growing concern about students carrying a heightened fear of failure. We have actively worked to combat that a) by normalizing failure and emphasizing that it’s a universal inevitability and not a personal indictment, and b) by stressing that those are formative experiences we can learn from, build from, and ultimately arrive at success because of. That’s essential for learning–we have to inculcate these beliefs.

At the same time, I wonder a little if we’re getting our lines crossed with the discourse on failure. Some failure, of course, is essential, and it should be encouraged and celebrated. But other kinds of failure are more damning–the stakes are too high; the consequences too dire. City, state, and national leadership has to identify and proactively address employment trends. Police detectives have to continue to refine their investigative practices. Perfection isn’t the standard; that’s impossible. We’ll never close 100% of all murder cases.

But we have to approach failure with more nuance, and hold two things to be true: that Bob Ross is a model of creative process and would also probably be a terrible city mayor.