There are still places where nothing bad has happened.
That’s what crossed my mind while I was sitting on a high stool next to a drinks table at the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks, Michigan. The show was about to start—a band headed up by a friend who had cobbled together a band of enthusiastic instrumentalists on a trip back from New York City. He dedicated a song to his mother, who sat right in the middle of the audience of eighteen or twenty people, in rapt attention. The music was good; the drinks were good; three of my friends snuck in late and sat in the front row. It was a lovely evening.
The Acorn Theater, “Southwest Michigan’s arts and culture hub,” is a local haunt, home to plays, concerts, and other performances. There is a songwriting competition and a playwriting competition. They have a rotating exhibition of art by local artists. They host a blood drive. It’s the kind of Midwest institution that may seem like a hidden gem to out-of-town folks, but in fact is the center of a small but buzzing world.
When I am wandering an antique market or lurking in a coffee shop somewhere in the Midwest, I’m often struck by a vague feeling of foreboding. I grew up in fast-paced California, where all lives were private, isolated from one another by crowded arteries of fast-moving cars. I spent my early childhood moving through Orange County suburbs, and I do mean moving through them, just like everyone else was. Nobody got too attached to anybody, and that meant when an unexpected tragedy did happen—when a two-year-old was hit by a car, or a bunch of people’s houses were buried by a mudslide in Santa Barbara, or a high school student got cancer—it was more of a news story than a tragedy.
But in small Midwestern towns with dubious taste in streetside signage, they are attached to all their high school students. It isn’t unusual to drive through a town and see banners on every lamp post displaying the sports stars or the seniors, or even more often, the Vietnam War veterans or active duty service members. In places like these, the tragedies of the world at large are far away—the Key Bridge collapse or the conflict in Gaza—and there is a sort of wholehearted rejoicing in one’s place that feels deeply vulnerable in a way overpopulated California never did.
Maybe I get that feeling because of our current obsession with media that tells the stories of the strange, paranormal, and unthinkable. You only need to open Spotify to be reminded of cults that people have escaped and serial killers that they have not. What makes a good story, whether in a ten-hour researched podcast or a click-ready news piece, is an anomaly. Because we’re obsessed with stories, we are now steeped in anomalies. If you spend long enough listening to murder podcasts, you will start imagining signs of sociopathic behavior in everyone you meet or even yourself.
I recently listened to a podcast about the Unabomber, a figure that I didn’t know anything about. I realized when I was recommended another podcast about another person who was mailing bombs in packages that this was a cultural context when I was growing up that I didn’t know about, just like the fear of kids being abducted or of planes being hijacked. It shed more light on why, one time when I was ten, the Tustin police pulled out their new bomb robot to investigate when an unmarked box showed up on someone’s curb. At the time, we laughed about it—they were clearly so excited to try the bomb robot. In fact, I still think it’s funny now. But I can also see better why, steeped in stories of exceptions, people start to think they might be one.
I think that’s why the loveliness of certain Midwestern towns feels so fragile to me. It feels like the setup to another podcast episode—all was well in Bronson, Michigan, a town festooned with purple in honor of the Bronson Vikings, until the unthinkable happened. We tend to only hear about small towns that are the exception to the rule, that have been made famous by some terrible tragedy. And if you know a small town, you know how vulnerable it is to love a particular place.
When I was a kid, we liked to watch Planet Earth. Narrated by David Attenborough, Planet Earth explored the world through the eyes of a naturalist—animal life, exotic locations, unusual bugs. But it didn’t idealize the picture. The show raised concerns about the destruction of coral reefs, showing bleak scenes of destruction. The circle of life was portrayed in all its cruelty. But when bad things happened on Planet Earth—a gazelle was eaten by a mountain lion or a bug got trapped in a Venus fly trap—it was part of the circle of life. The bleached white edges of the coral reefs did not negate the beauty of what still remained. Destruction was put in context. Throughout my childhood in California, as news stories hit and faded from the headlines, we kept pulling out our Planet Earth DVDs and immersing ourselves in Deep Oceans or Ice Worlds.
It’s much more difficult to make beautiful things interesting than to make ugly things interesting. Usually “good news” channels, well-intentioned as they are, end up being hokey and boring. That’s because good news general enough to share isn’t really news at all. No bridges collapsed this morning. A lot of people are making enough money to provide for their families. The days are finally getting longer. These channels usually have to fall back on feel-good stories about sick monkeys recovering at the zoo or millionaires giving laptops to public schoolchildren.
The real opposite of bad news is not good news. The real opposite of bad news, to contort a saying, is no news. The opposite of bad news television is television about the beauty of the Earth or the joys of skiing (the perennial topic of the leftmost TV screen at my gym). This is harder television to make, but it can be done, because the Earth is very big and very interesting, and, as I have learned while on the elliptical, there are a lot of good skiers.
Over Easter weekend, I visited Gallipolis, Ohio, a very pretty little town just across the Ohio River from West Virginia. We stopped by a coffee shop where there were Bibles on the tables, each one with a praying biker guy on the cover. I had a breakfast sandwich on a hamburger bun because they were out of croissants. At some point, a tall man with a scruffy beard walked by our table and said, “Welcome to our world.”
The streets of Gallipolis were studded with white-petaled trees. The town was neat and tidy, the buildings were clean, and women in pretty Easter dresses were eating brunch at Bob Evans. One wanted to feel that it was somehow surreal—that everyone was too nice, that the town was too lovely, that there was some uncanny valley quality to it all. But there simply wasn’t.
In those childhood days when I spent a lot of time watching Planet Earth instead of a lot of time listening to Up First and Darknet Diaries, there was a lot that I didn’t know. There was a national, even global context of awareness of senseless tragedies that informed a lot of grown-ups’ daily lives, and did not inform mine. But even then I wasn’t too out of touch with the world around me, because the fact is that most of life isn’t tragic exceptions. On most days, what happens is just ordinary—not extraordinary, but also not leading up to senseless tragedy. Most of life is sparsely-attended local concerts, high school sports, and catching bugs. In most places, nothing bad has happened.
At least, not recently.
There is a beautiful, large park in the center of Gallipolis, Ohio. When we were there, there was a memorial service for Vietnam War veterans. We paused for a moment on the edge of the park, listening to the names. One of the boys was eighteen. The veteran giving the memorial made the apparently old joke that he went “from prom to Nam.”
There is another memorial in that park. As you walk by, it is impossible to miss a cement pillar, topped by some sort of metal object. Engraved on the pillar is a simple, efficiently-told story. “Broken rocker shaft of steamer John Porter that brought yellow fever to Gallipolis from New Orleans, August 18, 1878, causing 66 deaths.” The pillar does not elaborate—the moral is clear enough. 66 people died, and we are still here, to build a memorial with the broken rocker shaft of the steamer John Porter. High school boys died in Vietnam, and we are still here. Our town is plagued by the opioid crisis that has ravaged West Virginia and Ohio, and we are still here.
Maybe there aren’t really places where nothing bad has happened. Maybe there are just places where the bad things that have happened have been set firmly to the side—they see tragedy as behind them, not ahead of them. Maybe what is naive is not the sweet little Midwestern town, but me, with my morbid obsession with what can go wrong. Resilient places take their tragedies and set them in context like the death of a gazelle or the destruction of a coral reef. They do not minimize the misery of the world, but they also don’t make it the headline.
In February 2012, Bob Swan, an actor, writer and singer, the founder of “Opera at the Acorn,” and an early and constant supporter of the Acorn’s work, was driving to meet with the theater’s co-founder David Fink to discuss some upcoming shows. He lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a telephone pole, totaling the car. He was rushed to the hospital and was in a coma for five days. A cancer survivor, he emerged from the coma and quipped, “It’s not time for my swan song yet.”
Swan passed away from liver cancer at age 78, in August 2023. The Acorn Theater hosted his celebration of life.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only post on why American Girl dolls are like ATVs. If you want to read that one, sign up for a free trial:
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It actually is: a pretty good Unabomber podcast. But watch some Planet Earth too.
I couldn’t find a place to put this story in: one time when I was at the gym one of the usually-depressing news TVs was suddenly showing footage of some horses that got away, running through freeway traffic, relativizing cars with their enormous size. The image of those horses running up a freeway ramp, the wild freedom of it, was burned into my memory. Here’s the clip if you want to watch it.
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all good