I grew up in California, mostly in a quiet little valley just off the central coast, where you were constantly surrounded by mountains. I loved how the mountains looked—different moods in different weather, sometimes topped with strange wisps of clouds, sometimes forbiddingly dry and brown.
The first time it rained on my birthday I was turning thirteen, visiting distant family in Oregon who were the remnants of our original ancestors who had arrived in California via the Oregon Trail. I had never seen so much green in my entire life—it felt wasteful, extravagant, all this unfurling of green leaves along places where people wouldn’t even appreciate them—along the freeways and in big tangles behind houses, creeping up out of cracks in sidewalks. In California, plants like that only grow if you have made them grow, if you have carefully allocated some precious water to their upkeep, if you watch them carefully so they don’t scorch in the sunlight or freeze in dry desert air. Nothing grows in a crazy uprush of moisture that seems neverending. Water is precious; green leaves are precious; anything that grows grows because it has been carefully kept alive.
I fell in love with Michigan in the passenger seat of a rental car as we drove down a two-lane road through a lane of trees. It was October, and it was raining hard, and yellow leaves were spiraling down through the rain onto the car windshield. To a Californian, this is like seeing gold falling out of the sky. Precious water, the even rarer fall leaves, all being thrown about as if they come for free.
I write a lot about the Midwest. The reason why I can write so much about the Midwest, and the reason why I am so obsessed with it, is because I will never be from the Midwest. I can’t really write about California, where I am from. The place you are from is full of the strangeness of old memories, the emotional tugs at the heartstrings that come with remembering a certain smell or a face. Joan Didion has a book called Where I Was From about California, which is where she was born and spent most of her life. It is not called Where I Am From. Didion calls the book “an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.”
The Midwest is not where I am from, and it is not really a part of me. I think that’s why I love to write about the Midwest—I arrive at it with alien eyes. To me, everything about the Midwest is vivid, the way that every season deeply imprinted itself on me the first year I lived in Michigan, attuned as I was to the tiny changes that were the only harbingers of summer or fall or winter in California.
One of the few remainders we have of being born in a place is area codes. I only had a flip phone in high school, so I actually left my 805 cell phone number behind. But if I get a call from an 805 number, I’ll probably pick up. If I get a text from an 805 number, my heart skips a beat—it reminds me that the past I left behind is still there. My high school class has scattered, but most people probably still have 805 numbers. 949 numbers are kindergarten and first grade. 760 is the beginning of my grandparents’ phone number, to which my mom composed a singsong tune that I still mentally run through whenever I call them, like you sing the ABCs when rifling through the dictionary. Area codes follow us through our lives, reminding us where we are really from—or at least where we were from. When someone pulls out an unexpected area code, Georgia or Texas or Colorado, you realize that they aren’t from here. So few of us are.
I spent most of the afternoon after the 2024 total eclipse worried that I would go blind. I had initially intended to meet some friends to watch the totality, but as the usually-hour-long drive to Toledo stretched to two and then three hours, I realized I’d probably miss them. As start and stop congestion goes, though, the traffic was pretty personable. With the occasional exception of an annoyed person trying to get to work (or in the case of truck drivers, trying to do their work), everyone knew exactly what everyone was doing—we were all going to see the eclipse. There was a sense of camaraderie as lines of 30 cars made their way gingerly through four-way stops on back roads. Drivers waved one another ahead. Since it was a Monday afternoon, it felt like all of us were, collectively, getting away with something.
As the time crept up on 3pm, I realized I wouldn’t make it to where my friends were waiting at a golf course, and I pulled off the freeway to watch the eclipse from a Bass Pro Shops parking lot.
There were lots of people there—kids running around, people with lawn chairs and snacks like it was a tailgate, someone with a giant speaker playing songs like “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” But above all, by the time I pulled up, everyone had their eclipse glasses glued to their face, staring at the sun in the surreal dusk.
There aren’t a lot of natural phenomena that can still gather everyone’s attention together—at least, there aren’t a lot that aren’t life-threatening. There’s a deep and intense feeling of belonging when you are at a concert, or at a football game (at least, I assume there’s one at a football game for people who actually understand football). Everyone’s eyes are glued to the sky, or the road, or the window when a tornado warning or a flash flood sweeps through. But I can only compare the feeling of watching the eclipse to the feeling when a stranger points out a rainbow to you, but multiplied by however many people are in your personal Bass Pro parking lot looking up in wonder and awe.
And there’s also a bit of fear. Given how big this eclipse was there was a remarkable amount of educational media available, almost all of which emphasized that if you weren’t careful you would blind yourself looking at the sun. Or maybe it was my own paranoia seeking it out, googling what could happen to you while I sat in the weird half-light of the eclipse reading about a woman who never saw the same again after looking at the eclipse with fake glasses she thought were real.
That feeling of risk, coupled with the strangeness of the eclipse itself—the strange light, the sun glinting off car windows with glaring brightness, the hush that falls over the world as you experience a surreal sped-up twilight—helped me understand why historical eclipses were often hailed as the end of the world. (There were even sects claiming it was the end of the world this time around.) As the sun goes down suddenly in the middle of the day, you realize how fragile and somehow arbitrary all of it is—something as ordinary as the sun hanging from the sky is contingent. The earth is small enough to fit in something’s shadow.
Then came the moment I had driven three hours to see—the totality. A ripple of excitement whirled through the crowd as we took our glasses off, and when I looked up I half-shuddered, half-gasped. It was, just as everyone had told me, like nothing I had ever seen before—totally otherworldly and yet totally worldly, a blazing circle under a circle forming a blue, burning ring.
I put my glasses back on and took the long journey home. Shaken up by the emotional experience of the eclipse, and with little black dots dancing in my vision from the strange light (or maybe I was just aware of them from all my googling), I became suddenly full of paranoia. What if that great strange ring was the last thing I would see? What if I woke up blind? What if I had just made the biggest mistake of my life? My brain ran through the possibilities—never seeing my children, having to find a new way to write, adjusting to everyday life without being able to see. It sounds ridiculous when I put it in the past, but my runaway imagination is never in the past.
The spots in my vision continued through dinner. My fiancé and I decided that I probably wasn’t going to go blind. I went to bed. And when I woke up, I could still see. Everything looked new, beautiful. I sat in my car and enjoyed the view through the broken windshield. I’d never thought so much before about how much I appreciated sight. If you have seen a total eclipse, you are suddenly aware of the gift that is having sunlight all the time—and vision.
I love the Midwest because I don’t really belong here, or at least because I didn’t always. My extreme awareness of Midwest-ness—of rolling fields and country kitsch and the long-suffering Germanic work ethic—comes from having only seen the tiniest traces of it in my childhood, and that’s what makes me want to write about it all the time. I’m aware of the beauty of the Midwest in the same way that the cloudy drudgery of fall, winter, and most of spring makes Midwest summer sun so vivid and glorious. If I had grown up here, there’s a bare possibility that I would have been more well-adjusted. But I highly doubt that if I had grown up with all these things I could really see them.
Unless there had been an eclipse of the Midwest to reset my vision. But being from somewhere else causes you to look at everything with the same new eyes.
I’ll be back: in late May with some bonus pieces in June!
Elsewhere: I’m reviewing the tortured The Tortured Poets Department.
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