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Discover Mid-America — April 2004

Rediscovering Mid-America

Some people find the place they belong right away and never give it a second thought. My father is one of these people. Born and raised in Sioux Falls, S.D., he’s never really wanted to live anywhere else. He’s covered a lot of ground in his 85 years, but he’s always happy to get back home.

I was also born and raised in Sioux Falls, but I fall into a different category of people, those for whom it takes time and lot of trial and error to figure out where they belong. Plenty of error, in my case. In the process I’ve covered some ground myself, with the answer always coming back, “Anywhere but here.” So that’s where I went.

I spent a year in England, lived for 10 years in California, seven in the Kansas City area, two in New York City and spent as much time traveling in as many places as I could - always with an eye out for a resting place.

One summer evening in 1998, I was having dinner with a high school friend and his wife at a Mexican restaurant in Greenwich Village. It was a farewell dinner. Todd had just accepted a teaching job in Portland, Ore. At one point they asked if I wanted to help drive their stuff to Oregon. They were joking but I jumped at the chance. When the caravan (two 26-foot Ryder trucks, one hauling a station wagon on a trailer) stopped at Barbara’s parents’ house in Des Moines, we pulled the station wagon off the trailer and I went on ahead to Sioux Falls.

It was dusk when I made the turn onto Interstate 29 north of Omaha. A while later the strangest thought occurred to me: “This is my road; I’m home.” I turned on the radio and heard a song that was very popular ten years earlier when I was making regular trips between home and college on this very stretch of road. “Welcome to your life,” the singer sang. “There’s no turning back.” So I drove on.

Three years later my fiancée Cicilie and I were driving back to California from her sister’s home in Tennessee. We stopped for the night in Kansas City and stayed with old friends of mine. It was Labor Day weekend and the weather was freakish for that time of year: low humidity and temps in the high 70s. We went to the Plaza for ice cream and people were out strolling, another unusual sight. We kept telling Cicilie, “It’s usually not like this.” And the next day we drove on.

Last year, Cicilie and I took a hard look at our West Coast situation. We were both fed up with the expense and aggravation of life in the Bay Area where freeways are just as often long thin parking lots. We both wanted to make changes in our career paths, wanted a better quality of life. I missed thunderstorms and barbeque, she missed fireflies and summers that are actually warm and not the punchline to a Mark Twain joke. As we made our relocation plans, that pleasant evening on the Plaza kept coming to mind. Kansas City fit with everything else we were looking for: cost of living, quality of life, proximity to family. Last September we arrived where we intend to stay.

So while there is indeed no turning back in this thing called life, there’s also no reason to pass up a fresh look at something you thought you knew all about. A guy from St. Louis put it this way, “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time*.”

Greetings, Mid-America. It’s good to be here. It’s good to be home.

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*T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

> Editor’s Notebook Archive — past columns