Going Home To My Ghosts: A Photoessay

Thursday, July 30th – Iowa City, IA

I’ve never had a way with women
But the hills of Iowa make me wish that I could.
-Dar Williams, “Iowa”

Iowa City is just right. College towns always feel like home. Smart but too small to feel stuck-up. We’re too late to order from the breakfast menu when we get to The Bluebird Diner. You should stay another day to have breakfast tomorrow, the waitress suggests. We’d planned on driving to Chicago that night but well, we’ve already been there and we’ve never been here and if we stay we’ll have a big driving day tomorrow but a big nothing day today and that sounds nice, perfect even. So we have an afternoon squarely situated just far enough from There to feel absolutely Here.

I’ve always wanted to see Iowa City, because this is where so many of my favorite writers lived and wrote and taught: most notably Raymond Carver, whose ghosts I have studied at length, but others, too: A.M Homes, Leslie Jamison, Thisbe Nissen, Stuart Dybeck, Mark Strand, Joy Williams, Kathryn Harrison, Sandra Cisneros, Michael Cunningham, Flannery O’Connor, Curtis Sittenfeld. But now that we’re here I can’t think of anything specific I’d wanted to see, besides The Prairie Lights Bookstore. I guess I just wanted to feel the ghosts. Everywhere he went that day / he walked into his own past, wrote Raymond Carver in “Where They’d Lived.” Kicked through piles /of memories. Looked through windows / that no longer belonged to him.

The Haunted Bookshop, named after Christopher Morley’s 1919 novel, has been in Iowa City since 1978, and we spend an hour or so there. Abby buys books about ghosts and aliens and I buy books about lesbians.

At Artifacts, piles of old magazines are shelved beneath stacks of old postcards, near shelves lined with vintage toys, telescopes, cameras, mugs, and a whole room of the kind of games my Aunt has in the basement.

“Our theme is if it’s boring, we don’t have it,” the owner of Artifacts told The Iowa Press-Citizen this summer on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

Our waitress suggested checking out the Coralville Lake and The Devonian Fossil Gorge, a site of limestone bedrock and fossils over 200 million years old that washed up after the flood in 1993. So we do.

It’s hard to find the fossils but easier to find The Coralville Dam, in operation since 1958, which sits near a sprawling recreation area that reminds me of the Detroit-area metro-parks where we’d go as a family for wholesome fun and later as teenage idiots to get sunburns and drink crappy beer. We’re almost home!

We walk through downtown Iowa City. Abby likes to hook arms and lean into me, and then I’m the husband and she’s the wife. We have dinner at the Pullman Bar & Diner, buy comic books and drive back to Coralville to spend the night in the most ridiculous place possible at a “reasonable” price. That’s sort of the difference between Here and There. There are things I like about the unreasonable place, too. I miss things, of course I do. But I need something different now, something solid, something that had always been wonderful but I’d just never bothered to notice it. Something reasonable.

The Best Western Cantebury Inn & Suites invites you to “journey back to the days of yore” with its “unique medieval decor” “romantically decorated with Renaissance touches.” Our suite isn’t particularly medieval, save a school project style crest on the door. But it does include a heart-shaped whirlpool tub with track lights that, when turned on, give the room a distinct ’80s disco/bathhouse vibe that isn’t entirely off-putting.

We’re not ready for the trip to be over, but, well, it is. I read from Detroit City is the Place to Be until Abby falls asleep, and then I do, too.

Friday, July 31st. Going Home.

We set out early for the longest stretch yet, plowing forward into familiar country. On Saturday, we’ll have to take a U-Haul back to Chicago to pick up the Amtrak Express Shipment of our stuff (mostly mine).

When we finally cross the border into Michigan, everywhere is a place I’ve been. Towns with ghosts of my own. We stop for dinner at Cracker Barrel, my secret favorite. We used to meet up with our grandparents at the Cracker Barrel in Lima, Ohio (later, Glee would be set there, which never really added up), serving as a halfway point between Ann Arbor and Wilmington where my Mom could pass us off.

As we get further into the midwest we seem unable to resist the mating call of the crappy chain restaurants we grew up on. I couldn’t be in the midwest with someone who isn’t from the midwest, someone who can be very specific about their organic produce but also about their order at Steak and Shake. Who knows everything bad and terrible about this land and everything green and hopeful about it, too. Who wants our children to have a childhood not unlike the best parts of my own, where there are museums and parks and community theater and cities and country and all four seasons and maybe money left over to see the rest of this planet. We also both want land, and she wants to grow things on that land, just like everybody before us, the whole mess of ’em.

Before we left I downloaded this app, Roadtrippers, that I used throughout the trip. Roadtrippers is what I’ve never been able to make Google Maps do. You tell it your route, it tells you what’s along the way, and you select from surprisingly specific categories regarding what you’d like to see: Vegetarian & Health Food, Abandoned, Zoos & Aquariums, Offbeat Attractions, Swimming Spots, Public Art, Bed & Breakfasts — it’s buggy, but I’m sure they’ll sort that out soon enough. I use it now, even, just to find things one or two towns over if that’s where we’re going for the day. It’s odd that an app can do so much for how you see the world, but it honestly did, because it’s a great way to visualize how much stuff there is to do everywhere, how there are cool places to live everywhere.

There’s a reason we keep writing stories about driving across this country. This country is a blood-soaked disaster but the land we live on is beautiful, that’s a fact. It can also be terrible and spooky and yet many of us have this guilty, perverse attraction to its garbage, to its wild abandon, to what’s been left to rot in the desert so mercilessly, to freeze to death, to need rainwater or a drink of water. The problem in Detroit is not abandoned land, it’s abandoned buildings. Now, it’s rebuilding. It’s a rough customer. (Joan Didion was once told she was a “cool customer,” it haunted her.) Did you know the woman who wrote “America the Beautiful” was a lesbian?  A Tripadvisor review of the Camelot-themed hotel we liked in Iowa City reads: They had theme rooms of the King Arthur period of history which were so neat. Last year they rid of those. I knew it was going downhill then.

We arrive in Royal Oak, the Detroit suburb my Mom moved to while I was in college, late, to her house, which I’ve never seen before. We go to bed right away so we can get up early and head out for Chicago in the morning to pick up the boxes.

I spend the next few weeks giving Abby tours of all my ghosts, one story slapped over another, like Eberwhite, where I spent my first three years of elementary school, and then, where the whole neighborhood came together to build a playground, and then, where, in 2003, after a nasty, heart-ripping feud with my not-boyfriend, I’d driven and parked but left the car on, hoping it’d eventually run out of gas, leaving me stranded. I’ve got no idea why I thought that was a good idea or even an idea at all? I was very stupid that year, I mean, really truly stupid, and frustrated by the landscape’s lack of stupid choices to make that didn’t involve prescription drugs. I guess I wanted something certain to happen, a set of circumstances to align themselves in a way that’d limit me to a definitive set of options for what to do with the next minute or hour, like “getting my car towed.” I don’t know why I chose Eberwhite, either. I waited for hours but never ran out of gas. At some point I must have just gone home.

I show Abby where I got caught ditching class the only time I ever ditched class, The Macaroni Grill where I worked through college, the house I grew up in, the houses I lived in, later, in undergrad at University of Michigan. I show her the crumbling, filthy fraternity house in nearby Ypsilanti where I gave away my pride like a cup of punch. The hill where we went sledding, the spot in the diag where Bianca pulled my pants down, the deli all the cool kids worked at. One morning, we get a tour of Detroit from somebody who has lived there a long time and knows everybody, really, absolutely everybody. We keep reading. Abby gets a job, I set up an “office” at the kitchen table using what I think is bathroom-oriented furniture scavenged from the basement. It’s a huge adjustment to live with my Mom after spending so long in our self-made life, but we’re saving up for a new life. The belief in an attainable paradise fuels the restless idealism that keeps this country agitated. (Rebecca Solnit, of course.)

The thing about this life is that if you are anywhere long enough, you will accumulate land mines and ghosts by the hand-full and then the truck-full, and the best any of us can do is to live with them. The most reasonable thing any of us can do, really, is to take them with us everywhere and introduce them to our new friends. I love Michigan! Abby says so many times every day that I remember how to love it, too: haunted, rapturous, abandoned, born again, home. 

Next: Itinerary and Bibliography.