Page 20 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

He is growing up, finding his way in the world, documenting a life that is more public than he probably realizes. But how can I not be grateful for knowing, even if the only way to know is to lose our autonomy over our so-called selves? He is alive. He likes John Deere tractors, and is a member of the Future Farmers of America, and he is alive.

Scrolling through his friends, I find his parents’ profiles, and discover that they are still married. He is alive. He likes terrible, overly manufactured country music. He is alive. He calls his girlfriend his bae. Alive. Alive. Alive.

It could’ve gone the other way, of course. But it didn’t. And so I can’t help but give the practice of googling strangers four stars.

INDIANAPOLIS

INDIANAPOLIS IS THE SIXTEENTH LARGEST CITY in the U.S. by both population and land area. It is the capital of Indiana, and I guess it is now my hometown. Sarah and I moved to Indianapolis in the summer of 2007. We drove a U-Haul with all our worldly belongings from the corner of 88th and Columbus in New York City to the corner of 86th and Ditch in Indianapolis, an extremely stressful sixteen-hour drive. When we finally arrived in Indianapolis, we unpacked our stuff and slept on an air mattress in our new home, the first place we’d ever owned. We were in our late twenties, and we’d bought this house a few weeks earlier after spending maybe a half hour inside of it. The house had three bedrooms, two and a half baths, and a half-finished basement. Our mortgage payment was a third of what our New York rent had been.

I couldn’t get over how quiet and dark the house was that first night. I kept telling Sarah that someone could be standing right outside our bedroom window and we wouldn’t even know, and then Sarah would say, “Well, but probably not.” And I’m just not the sort of person who is effectively comforted by probablys, so several times through the night I got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window, expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness.

The next morning, I insisted that we buy some curtains, but first we had to drop off the moving van. At the U-Haul return place, a guy handed us some paperwork to fill out, and asked us where we’d driven in from. Sarah explained that we had moved from New York for her job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the guy said he’d been to the museum once as a kid, and then Sarah said, “So, what do you think of Indianapolis?”

And then the guy standing behind the counter at the U-Haul place paused for a moment before saying, “Well, you gotta live somewhere.”

Indianapolis has tried on a lot of mottoes and catchphrases over the years. Indianapolis is “Raising the Game.” “You put the ‘I’ in Indy.” “Crossroads of America.” But I’d propose a different motto: “Indianapolis: You gotta live somewhere.”

There’s no getting around Indianapolis’s many imperfections. We are situated on the White River, a non-navigable waterway, which is endlessly resonant as metaphor but problematic as geography. Furthermore, the river is filthy, because our aging water treatment system frequently overflows and dumps raw sewage directly into it. The city sprawls in every direction—endless mini-malls and parking lots and nondescript office buildings. We don’t invest enough in the arts or public transportation. One of our major thoroughfares is named Ditch Road, for God’s sakes. Ditch Road. We could name it anything—Kurt Vonnegut Drive, Madam C. J. Walker Way, Roady McRoadface—but we don’t. We accept Ditch.

Someone once told me that Indianapolis is among the nation’s leading test markets for new restaurant chains, because the city is so thoroughly average. Indeed, it ranks among the top so-called “microcosm cities,” because Indianapolis is more typically American than almost any other place. We are spectacular in our ordinariness. The city’s nicknames include “Naptown,” because it’s boring, and “India-no-place.”

When we first moved here, I would often write in the mornings at my neighborhood Starbucks, at the corner of 86th and Ditch, and I would marvel at the fact that all four corners of that intersection contained strip malls. Although I lived less than a half mile from that Starbucks, I often drove because there were no sidewalks. The land had been given over to cars, to sprawl, to flat-roofed soullessness.

I was disgusted by it. Living in a tiny apartment in New York City where we could never quite eradicate the mice, I had romanticized home ownership. But now that we actually had a house, I hated it. Indianapolis’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Home ownership was all maintenance. There were always window treatments to install and light bulbs to change. The water heater kept breaking. And most of all, there was the lawn. God, I hated mowing the lawn. The lawn and the mini-malls of 86th and Ditch became the two poles of my resentment. I couldn’t wait for Sarah to get a job somewhere else.

Vonnegut once said, “What people like about me is Indianapolis.” He said that in Indianapolis, of course, to a crowd full of people from Indianapolis, but Kurt Vonnegut really did hold the city in high esteem. Toward the end of his life, he answered an interviewer’s question by saying, “I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or some place like that. It’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.” Vonnegut’s greatest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is about a man who becomes unstuck in time, and how time conspires with consciousness. It’s about war and trauma, but it’s also about not being able to get back to before—before the firebombing of Dresden, before the suicide of Vonnegut’s mother, before his sister’s early death. I believe that Vonnegut loved Indianapolis. But it’s telling that from the time he could choose where to live, he did not choose to live here.

Late in our first Indianapolis year, Sarah and I became friends with our neighbors Marina and Chris Waters. Chris was a former Peace Corps volunteer, and Marina a human rights lawyer. Like us, they’d just gotten married, and like us, they were living in their first home.

But unlike us, Chris and Marina loved Indianapolis. We’d often go to lunch together at Smee’s, a little family-owned restaurant in one of the 86th and Ditch mini-malls, and I would complain about lawn care and the lack of sidewalks. Once, Chris said to me, “You know this is one of the most economically and racially diverse zip codes in the United States?”

And I said, “What?”

And he said, “It is. You can google it.”

So I did google it, and he was right. The median home price near 86th and Ditch is $237,000, but there are also million-dollar houses and $700-a-month apartments. At that corner, there are Thai and Chinese and Greek and Mexican restaurants, all independently owned. There’s a bookstore, a fair-trade gift shop, two pharmacies, a bank, a Salvation Army, and a liquor store named after the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition.

Yes, the architecture is an unmitigated nightmare, but the people of Indianapolis have gone and made something beautiful anyway. Sit outside of Smee’s for an afternoon and you’ll hear English and Spanish, Karin and Burmese, Russian and Italian. The problem was never 86th and Ditch, which turns out to be a great American intersection. The problem was me. And after Chris called my assumptions into question, I began to think differently about the city. I began to see it as a place where big moments in human lives take place. The climactic scenes in my two most recent novels, The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, both take place at the corner of 86th and Ditch. And I think what people like about those books is Indianapolis.

As with all the best sci-fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut was really good at seeing into the future. Way back in 1974, he wrote, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

That seems to me an even more important, and more daring, endeavor than it was forty-seven years ago. When people ask me why I live in Indianapolis when I could live anywhere, that’s what I want to tell them. I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. And you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after.

But home is also what you are building and maintaining today, and I feel rather lucky in the end to be making my home just off of Ditch Road.

I give Indianapolis four stars.

KENTUCKY BLUEGRASS

SOMETIMES I LIKE TO IMAGINE benevolent aliens visiting Earth. In my daydreams, these aliens are galactic anthropologists, seeking to understand the cultures, rituals, preoccupations, and divinities of various sentient species. They would conduct careful field research, observing us. They would ask open-ended, nonjudgmental questions, like “What, or whom, is in your view worthy of sacrifice?” and “What should be the collective goals of humanity?” I hope that these alien anthropologists would like us. We are, in spite of it all, a charismatic species.

In time, the aliens would come to understand almost everything about us—our ceaseless yearning, our habit of wandering, how we love the feeling of the sun’s light on our skin. At last, they would have only one question remaining: “We have noted that there is a green god that you keep in front of and behind your houses, and we have seen how you are devoted to the care of this ornamental plant god. You call it Kentucky bluegrass, although it is neither blue nor from Kentucky. Here is what we are wondering: Why do you worship this species? Why do you value it over all the other plants?”

Poa pratensis, as it is known to the scientific community, is ubiquitous the world over. Much of the time when you see a soft, green expanse of lawn, you’re looking at least in part at Kentucky bluegrass. The plant is native to Europe, northern Asia, and parts of North Africa, but according to the Invasive Species Compendium, it is now present on every continent, including Antarctica.

The typical shoot of Poa pratensis has three to four leaves, shaped like little canoes, and if left unmown, it can grow to three feet tall and sprout blue flower heads. But it is rarely left unmown, at least not in my neighborhood, where it is illegal to allow your grass to grow more than six inches long.

If you’ve ever driven through my home state of Indiana, you’ve seen mile after mile of cornfields. Amber waves of grain are enshrined in the song “America the Beautiful.” But more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio, or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer and pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.*