Five days later, the carnage is everywhere.
After a night spent tossing and turning in my sweltering attic, I abandoned the powerless Airbnb and my plans for a day off in Omaha, pushing out of the city and back into the bliss of air conditioning. Any initial, selfish thoughts–I really wanted to visit the Joslyn Castle!–were dismissed as the magnitude of the disaster unfolded before my eyes. While I didn’t see smashed houses like we did in my Portland neighborhood in January, I saw the same landscape of arboreal explosion. Fallen branches, of course, but also the more unnerving sight of trees snapped in half, mid-trunk. And all of that on wind alone, without the aid of freezing rain as we had. It’s easy to understand now why my departure from Omaha occurred this morning under the cover of darkness, with the intersections in historic Dundee and the University of Nebraska-Omaha not even benefiting from the emergency, flashing red lights. Pitch black.
Most of the walk leads me due west on Pacific Avenue. The street numbers began near the Missouri River. Last night, I stayed on 49th. Today, I followed Pacific past 159th–block after block after block of Omaha, as the sun mercilessly resumed its furious tyranny. Once again, temperatures today would climb into the high 90s.
I pop into a mini-mart to grab a cold drink. The guy at the counter asks what I’m up to. I explain. “Why are you making that walk?”, he follows. I don’t have it in me this morning. “To get to the other side.” This earns me exactly the half-hearted courtesy chuckle it deserves. Later, I decide to take a break at Dunkin. I’m not a donut guy, but it was the cheapest option. The nice woman working the counter handed me the bag, knowing nothing about me, and whispered, “there’s a little extra in it.” Indeed, I had enough donuts to get me to Wyoming.
Just as the sun approached full blast, I finally bid farewell to Pacific, turning onto the West Papio Trail. Detritus covered the trail in places, but work crews had already cleared fallen trees and the largest branches, and that’s a good thing because Omaha residents weren’t about to waste this Sunday morning. As I moved southward, the route wound its way through a mix of bike tracks, residential streets, and one major arterial, and ultimately around two lakes–Zorinsky and Wehrspann. With only 16 miles to cover, I rolled into my destination around noon, and settled into a Hardee’s for cold drinks, A/C, and wifi, until my hotel was ready for me. The guy at the counter made a shushing gesture and gave me a cup, no charge.
What did Dunkin girl and Hardee’s guy read into my appearance? I had no opportunity to explain what I was doing, as I did at the mini-mart. Were their assumptions in the right ballpark–that I was clearly hiking, doing something physical in very hot conditions? Did they see me as a homeless man, a drifter, someone with limited resources and great need? And if it was the latter, did I take advantage of their misplaced kindness?
That was the first thought to crack through what had dominated my attention throughout the day’s walk. Yesterday, I spent a chunk of my last day in Iowa listening to WP Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Kinsella also wrote Field of Dreams, and I was curious what he explored in his second novel combining Iowa and baseball. (Note that spoilers follow.) My curiosity was piqued early on, as the narrator, Gideon, describes his father’s obsession–an insistent belief that a short-lived baseball league existed in Iowa in the early 1900s, which culminated in a visit from the Chicago Cubs. When his father dies, the knowledge magically transfers into Gideon’s mind, who picks up the baton and works persistently to prove the truth of this to the world. Later, Gideon and his friend Stan, who has been chasing a dream of playing in the major leagues well into his 30s, are–once again–magically transferred back to 1908, where they get to watch the game take place.
The opening innings of the game are interesting enough, but then the novel goes off the rails. The game lasts hundreds of innings, spanning weeks, as the town hosting it is flooded and literally washed away. A giant Native American man is lurking in the woods, and we learn he’s competing with the spirits to try to win back his lost love–and the whole baseball game is a proxy war for that struggle. At one point, Leonardo da Vinci shows up in a hot air balloon, for some reason. It was a slog, I confess, to persevere through the last four hours.
And yet, the ending suddenly tossed aside the whimsiness and frivolity that often characterized those chapters. There’s a recurring hymn sung by the religious community in the novel, built around one main line: “I shall not be moved.” Gideon and his dad would not be moved; even when they were mocked or dismissed for their insistence about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, even when it cost them relationships, they held to their faith. Stan would not be moved from his dream of playing in the big leagues, even as it strained his marriage and undercut his earning potential. One might have expected that, having lived out their dreams–Gideon getting to witness this elusive game, and Stan actually getting to play in it–that they would feel vindicated, that this would be a triumphal moment. Instead, the conclusion is coated in melancholy. How much, ultimately, had been sacrificed to get them to that point? Was it really worth it? The judgment, from Kinsella at least, seems to be absolutely not.
Culturally, we are taught from our earliest years to dream big, to pursue them relentlessly, and to be prepared to pay a great price for greatness. And look at me–that’s what I’m doing out here, trying to accomplish something that I’ve been striving to achieve for years now. I left my dream job and potentially my career, in pursuit of a different dream. In the process, I left a community I was grounded in for more than a decade, left my family for months.
I started wondering about this a great deal earlier this year, when talking with my students about happiness, meaning, work, and growth. For every single one of them, the path forward is clear: get into the best college or university they can, wherever it is. In most cases, that college is out of state, far from home. And when they graduate, they’ll pursue the best career option, wherever that might be. Maybe they’ll come back to Portland for one summer during college, but after that, they expect, the internships and research opportunities will follow. The treadmill will carry them forward from there.
They will leave behind their homes, their families, their community–everyone they have known and cared for. And they do this without hesitation. It’s what you do. It’s how you pursue a good life. And even if they recognize the somber reality of the loss that accompanies that life path, they will not be moved from it. It’s what they’ve been prepared for. By people like me.
If I’m experiencing minor self-recriminations, though, at least I’m doing it in an air-conditioned room with robust wifi. And donuts. Can’t forget about those.
