Why time began on Memorial Day (or, how I plan to make you care about Hannibal, Missouri)

 How a ‘69 Chevy can make a kid feel like John Steinbeck

What you do when it’s 55 below zero and you live in the most maligned town in America

 Why I learned to read at age 23
 What I have in common with a 46-year-old, third-shift machinist
How I know God exhales over the Idaho sky

 Where my heart skipped a beat: in the desert
How dipping my feet in Lake Erie scared me back to the sixth grade

 What my oldest chum and my first love taught me about fashion and friendship
What mushroom soup says about my independence

 Why a computer geek likes to pump his water from a well
 A horse is a horse, but can a barn make a Hoosier?

IT’S BEEN SAID more than once that Rockford, Illinois, sucks. It’s said to suck because it has no sense of itself. Its schools are still segregated. Its political and economic visionaries seem to commit civic suicide whenever possible. And its regional planners have embraced the strip mall as the answer to development woes. There is no Wrigley Field, no Golden Gate Park, no Guggenheim nor Smithsonian. There is scarcely a downtown to speak of.

Vital stats: Rockford
Poulation 150,115
Households 63,570
Median home value $82,193
Median household income N/A

What's doing in Rockford?
   
Today Theater
Music Art
Family Dance
Recreation

Worse than that, though, there is nobody to stand up and say what Rockford is good for. I believe the average Rockfordian believes his or her town is the pits. And that is what’s most depressing: There seems to be a built-in sense of inferiority — of a need to apologize to out-of-towners for a half-imagined ugliness.

Rockford is the second-biggest city in the fifth-biggest state in America, yet people 62 miles to the south in Chicago can’t say quite where it is. They think of it as “downstate,” as does the General Assembly, Illinois’ legislative body. In a three-year period, Rockford was twice ranked by Money magazine as the absolute worst major city in America in which to live, and in the third year it came in No. 298 out of 300.

True, Paris Rockford is not, but neither can it possibly be the baseline. After all, the cost of living is exceedingly low, the homeless population is virtually non-existent and access to everything a top-notch city like Madison, Milwaukee or Chicago can offer is within a 90-minute drive. (That’s a one-way commute for some workers in more sought-after urban centers.) But when people continue to emphasize to you how much your town resembles an armpit, you begin to believe it does.

The truth is Rockford is far from extreme in any measure. In fact, if the 2000 census numbers bear out what those in 1990 did, Rockford will actually prove to be as average is average can get. By racial breakdown, by median household income, by average home value, by mean educational level — any way you slice it, Rockford is America, to the hundredth of a percent. As my friend, the Rockford author/historian Pat Cunningham pointed out, there’s a question marketers sometimes ask when introducing a new product — “How will it play in Peoria?” But really, as Pat says, they ought to see how it sells in Rockford.

My town is unique in some ways, though. As a newsman, I should point out that Rockford has yielded some pretty unusual stories — and that’s kept things interesting. Allow me to offer a selection of the stuff that’s passed through my hands since arriving as an editor here:

  • HIS SINS SHALL BE FORGIVEN: A Catholic priest rams his car headlong through the doors of Rockford’s only abortion clinic, gets out, and, wielding an axe, threatens the people inside before he’s subdued by a Good Samaritan who unloads a shotgun in his direction.
  • DEAD DOGS ON THE HIGHWAY, MEDIAN CATS ARE GROWLING AT ME: After an outbreak of Parvo virus at the county animal shelter, officials are forced to euthanize several dozen dogs they believe to be infected. A public outcry erupts, but the shelter moves forward. After the pups are pronounced dead, and as their bodies are en route to the doggie crematorium to be incinerated, a car broadsides the doggie hearse, which tips over and spreads 40 little doggie carcasses in little blue doggie body bags across one of Rockford’s busiest streets at the height of rush hour.
  • DEATH BE NOT PROUD: In the bitterly contested mayoral race decided in April, candidates had been seeking to separate themselves from one another. Guy Spinello, a twice-bankrupted locksmith without a high school diploma, succeeds in a most unfortunate way: One of his campaign henchmen, after opening his mouth to the wrong person, is revealed to have done time in a federal penitentiary for his role in a horse-slaying-for-hire racketeering ring. In the scheme, dozens of thoroughbred horses were mysteriously butchered in the middle of the night and, ultimately, a wealthy stable heiress with ties to Churchill Downs in Kentucky was murdered.
  • OH, WILBUR: Another horse makes news, this one on the receiving end of a crazy, naked and horny man on a tree stump behind it. The uncommon affair is reported by appalled elementary students who notice the incident on their way home in a school bus.
  • THAT’LL HEAL RIGHT UP: One of the Rockford area’s delegates to the General Assembly, Rep. Dave Winters, takes a leave of absence from lawmaking to recover from a mishap on his farm. Henceforth, he is referred to lovingly as “Four-finger Dave.”
  • WATCHING BIG BROTHER: A local roofing contractor, George Boswell, enjoys a starring role in the hit CBS reality series “Big Brother.” But after the Rockford Register Star follows a true report in the National Enquirer that George once killed his best friend in a hunting accident, Boswell’s nationwide popularity crumbles. A national anti-George campaign, much of which plays out on the Register Star’s Web site, ensues, and George is voted off the show. Back in Rockford, George has failed to capitalize on his fame, and his roofing concern is presently on the verge of bankruptcy.
  • A CUT ABOVE: A junior high school volleyball coach, frustrated by a referee’s calls, storms out of the gym and returns with a meat cleaver in hand. She is apprehended by some heroic parents and fired from her post later that night.
  • NAKED BODY-SLAM: A 275-pound man, fresh from a bath in his Rockford home, responds to the cries of his wife and children by finding two armed home invaders demanding cash and jewelry. With a shotgun pressed to his temple, the victim wrestles his assailant down the stairs and body-slams him across a plate glass table, shattering the table and leaving the robber dazed and bleeding all over the rug. The original victim, still naked, picks up a 2 X 4 and chases the incapacitated assailant’s accomplice down the street as police arrive on the scene. They laud the man for his heroism.
  • ROAD RAGE IN THE EXPRESS LANE — OF THE GROCERY STORE: A U.S. Army veteran chases a young shopper across town and runs her off the road in the wake of a nasty exchange in which the man had accused the 26-year-old woman of taking 11 items through the 10-item express lane. The chase ends in Janesville, Wis., where the man tells police: “I didn’t fight in two wars for people who can’t count.”
  • FIRE, FIRE: While one fire engine from the station in my old home village of Cherry Valley is off on a routine call, the other catches fire inside the firehouse. Firefighters return to see the firehouse burned halfway to the ground.
  • GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT: In an effort to raise money for their faltering VFW Auxiliary Post, a group of 80-year-old women, in defiance of the village code for tiny Roscoe, Illinois, invite a troupe of strippers to the post for an all-male revue. The event raises controversy, $1,000 and no doubt the spirits of some of the widowed ladies in attendance.

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Photo gallery: Cherry Valley in winter
Photo gallery: Rockford in the fall

SO WHEN IT COMES to the strange, the crazy, the wacky and the absurd, I am in the right place. Nevertheless, Rockford will not forever be for me. I knew that when I took this job. But I saw an opportunity: Having no desire to settle in Rockford, I undertook a project of learning to live in virtual isolation, on a soybean and corn farm, more than 20 miles out of town, plopped into a 4,000-acre field yielding reduced-tillage crops come late fall. It was a long-distance call into town and my television got only one channel — a faint NBC signal.

My floor was not insulated — it was a series of 2-by-10-foot planks over a frame that swayed with the unforgiving wind that cut across the plain. Add to that the facts that the pipes from my ground well sometimes got a little frosty, and between the farm, my landlord and myself, our need for electricity blew a few fuses. And get this: to get to my kitchen and bathroom, I had to go outside and around the house and unlock a different door. So in the harsh winter, where air temperatures reached past –20 and the wind chill factor registered 55 below zero, my will was tested. It was a little like camping in every night.

When this summer began, I decided I’d had enough of my home on the range. I packed a few loads in the back of the pickup and headed for a swanky downtown apartment three blocks from work. In the new place, I get up 10 minutes before my first meeting, brush up, hit the coffee shop where I now have a monthly account and cruise into work bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The two-story living loft, in a historical landmark building in the midst of Rockford’s Victorian district, is across the street from a park and only two blocks from the river. For this I pay the meager sum of $480, utilities included.

So why, then, would an up-and-coming professional with yuppie tendencies and grand aspirations have chosen to live in the middle of nowhere for a year, without the full assurance that basic amenities like electricity or water would work every day and where contact with the “outside world” was slim and difficult? What would he possibly hope to gain by placing himself in of such an absurd set of circumstances?

I needed to grow up and assure myself that I could survive the burden of independence. I needed to escape the comfortable and challenge my normal way of life. Most basically, I need to be different. After three years at a sparkling suburban high school and four on a spectacularly accomodating college campus, I needed to rough it a little.

As a result, the way I spent my free time changed drastically. Instead of going to SPAC to work out, I did push-ups, rode my mountain bike across fields or worked with my landlord in one of the barns or stables. Sometimes, even when the wind was nasty, I shot baskets inside the barn on the hoop I put up. I couldn’t really watch TV, since I barely get a broadcast signal and cable didn’t come near where I lived. So because of that, I learned to read again.

It sounds strange, but I sort of forgot how to read when I went to college. The textbooks and academic articles that you have to go through require you to look for key words and repeated ideas... you scan for facts and figures and lines of argument. And that’s all fine and good, but you never have time to read any fiction or adventure. You forget what it’s like to watch a character grow and develop, to imagine a different place and time, to escape. But out on the farm, I took the quiet time to devote myself to reading again, and I couldn’t be more pleased about it. I have found that I get the most out of short stories or articles that transport me to places I’ve never been — places I vow to go before it’s all said and done. Among the work I’d recommend:

 Girl with a Pearl Earring
1665-6, J. Vermeer
Oil and canvas. 18 x 16 in.
Mauritshuis, The Hague

ALSO, JUST TWO DAYS AGO, I finished a most astonishing book. Based on the 17th-century painting by the same name, Girl with a the Pearl Earring is a narrative in which the American author Tracy Chevulier seeks to bring alive the mysterious girl created by Johannes Vermeer. When I first heard about the book, I was shocked. Five years ago, my high school English teacher, Martin Galvin, had sent us off to the National Gallery in Washington to critique an art exhibit. I chose the Vermeer show, which was to that date the widest collection of his work ever assembled outside the Netherlands.

Though many of Vermeer’s paintings depicting everyday life seemed to transport me back to the place and time in which they were created, I kept coming back to Girl with a Pearl Earring. The young woman was so beautiful, so enchanting, yet so forlorn. Her look of longing and helplessness haunted me, and I went back several times to try to understand her. And now comes along this author who brings her to life. I thought the way Chevulier described the life of a young woman in the Guilded Age was disturbing, but nonetheless captivating. I’d recommend this book as a must-read.

IN ADDITION TO MY newfound love of reading, I also have stayed busy by playing in the local industrial athletic association. This summer, I have been playing on five softball teams and this winter it was two basketball squads. My teammates are older, drunker and work mostly in factories. For example, one guy, a 46-year-old machinist at a plant that manufactures parts to the toilets that go on cruise ships, explained to me that he makes the stuff that makes stuff work. It sounded to me like the BASF motto: “We don’t make the products you buy; we make the products you buy better.”

While I can’t relate much to the conversations about marriage, divorce, kids and mortgages, there is a lot my teammates and I have in common. We all are looking for something better. For many of them, perhaps, their goals are shorter-term: Pass the time at this softball game, or drink beer instead of going home after work. For me, I seek broader improvements in my life, but the feelings are the same. What these guys have to say about and show for their lives reminds me of certain things I want to have in my life — and other things I don’t. The guys with the stable, loving families, like my machinist friend, seem to want for the least.

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