Age 8:
It’s a weekday morning in the mid-summer and I am outside my uniform house sitting in my uniform driveway in my uniform suburb waiting for my friend across the street to wake up when I suddenly feel a sense of unease so strong I remember it for the rest of my life. For a long time I will be unable to explain it, but I felt incredibly isolated in my own front yard. I feel like I live on the moon.
Age 10:
I am fascinated with the idea of the arctic. I want to study wolves. We have an exceptionally rough winter where for one day, it’s colder where I live then it is in Antarctica.
Iowa is boring. Nothing happens here.
Age 12:
My grandmother always gets these nature magazines that she gives me, and they always, always have a picture of a cedar waxwing on the front. It confuses me because they clearly don’t do it on purpose, but I’ve never seen a cedar waxwing in my life where I live in my uniform house in my uniform suburb where things simply do not move during the midday and midnight. The covers always picture the birds sitting in brambles, but where I live the only thing that gets above waist high is the corn and the straggly young trees that line my street, planted by the development, too young to provide any shade from the beating sun. I do not know where the cedar waxwings live, but they certainly do not live where I do.
Age 14:
It’s midsummer and my little brother and I enter the cornfield that borders our housing development by stepping over a gap in the barbed wire and making our way past a half-destroyed chicken coop. The corn is taller then we expected it to be and we leave quickly.
Age 16:
I am still obsessed with the arctic, and for the first time I realize why: because when I drive to school I pass desolation for miles.
It’s hard to explain where I live to my friends online. What do I tell them, that it feels like a desert? That there’s miles and miles of nothing between destinations? Because that isn’t entirely true: or at least, it feels like it shouldn’t be true. There is something there- corn, miles of it- but when the corn comes down in winter, I brace the steering wheel against sub-zero winds pushing my mother’s van from side to side. The wind pushes flakes of it in thin rivers between the cornfields, just thin enough to hover over the road and catch the headlights on it’s way to the next field over. There are no trees here to buffer it. There are no cedar waxwings.
Age 17:
I tour the University of Iowa’s natural history museum, where I am taught that some 95% of Iowa’s native prairies have been bulldozed for agricultural development. It dawns on me that I do not live in Iowa; the cedar waxwings live in Iowa. I live in the shadow of a nuclear blast. I live in a biopunk sci-fi hellscape where yes, things do grow for miles, and that’s the problem. I live in a liminal space spanning acres large, with cities and towns and uniform suburbs forming oasises in strange, fragmented intervals. I live in the belly of a beautiful and terrible thing.
In my independent botany studies I learn that Iowa was not always as suffocatingly humid as it is during the summer months each year; no, it’s humid because the sheer mass of all the corn transpiring water into the air changes the very weather in which I live. I’m not sure how to digest this. I do not know what I thought I knew. Iowa was not always this harsh and unforgiving.
Age 18:
I go to college and for the first time the trees are big enough to shade me when I walk to class. I can bike to a grocery store; I can go places without a car, because there is no corn between me and the next urbanized place. I feel less isolated; there are native flower gardens in central campus and I can’t help but imagine what it must have been like before the corn came.
There was a time with cedar waxwings building nests in heaps of dry grass and prairie soil. There was a time where the snow fell and stayed where it fell, because the trees and plants buffered the dunes. What a sight that must have been, I think: Iowa in it’s full glory.
I can’t imagine it. It is too far removed from my home.
Tumblr Exodus 