Groping for Intimacy
MAROOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union GROPING FOR INTIMACY BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Here are a few diurnal notes on a crazy trip I took recently to Marshall, Minnesota, where several hundred rural people gathered...
...But the rural residents of Marshall are paying their university scant attention...
...Troubled by flagging enrollments and nagged by cost-conscious legislators, the school two years ago hired as president a former state secretary of agriculture, Jon Wefald, who promptly announced he was transforming the institution into a center for rural studies...
...they have been set down in the pasture at odd and unfamiliar angles to each other, and they are interconnected either by glass-enclosed bridges or by concrete tunnels...
...My feeling is that now is the time to set up a program so our young people can major in rural studies as well...
...and 1 am driving into the sunrise, heading back to the Minneapolis airport 150 miles across the state...
...I was happy among friends...
...The occasion was a "Rural Life Institute," which the organizers described as "an ambitious, seven day inquiry into the possibilities for rural people to control their shared destinies...
...At most campuses today you can major in urban studies," he noted...
...Two good titles in a single afternoon—a fair catch...
...My companions are youngish, bespectacled and remarkably stolid—less gaunt but nonetheless true versions of Grant Wood's famous portraiture...
...what helped me rise from my bed each morning was not politics but collegiality...
...The towns 1 drive through or around offer with their names a litany of love and history to one who was born and schooled in this state, but who has not resided here for a quarter of a century: Echo, a sonorous dot on the prairie...
...But you have it," says the other...
...Oh sure, if someone dies, the neighbor will take a casserole over to the widow...
...The dome serves as a skylight for a subterranean lounge in the student union...
...Emerson would have enjoyed the conference...
...Creaky," he said...
...Tuesday: I must say a few words about this shiny, windswept campus on the prairie...
...We find the bar and I buy them a drink...
...Earlier today as I strolled through this ultramodern campus (Southwest State University—SSU—a branch of the University of Minnesota), the sky was a sparkling Minnesota blue, and there were redwinged blackbirds flitting through the tall grass by the road...
...Tactfully they tell me that my speech, in which I must have waxed sentimental over the joys of rural community life, was dead wrong...
...1 asked...
...Saturday: I am sitting "at the gate" waiting for the loudspeaker to give me permission to board the plane...
...Now it is afternoon in a windowless room...
...They decide to walk to the nearest filling station, but the only container they can find in the car is a bedpan...
...They may never see each other again...
...In the middle of all this there is a small, paved plaza surmounted by a dome that rises from the sidewalk like a transparent bombshelter...
...But I may be up to my old tricks by eulogizing Chanhassen, forgetting the gossip and the malice, forgetting the hard days that were lived there before suburbanization...
...He turns to me and says, "You are playing foolishly tonight...
...And I had him ready, but wouldn't you know it...
...We have a brief dispute over who will leave the fifty-cent tip...
...Back home that's just another name for malicious gossip...
...This room seems to me to typify much that is both right and wrong with the campus design: It is undeniably spacious and elegant, and just as undeniably out-of-keeping with the surrounding town, a place of square frame-houses furnished with comfortable, hand-me-down furniture...
...The idea is to locate an authentic-sounding book or story title from out of the flurry of phrases being uttered, and then to assign a suitable author to the title...
...At the Avis counter in Minneapolis I watch the girls in their red uniforms go ga-ga over Harry Reasoner, who is renting a Volare...
...Then up the escalator and down the Blue Concourse to Gate 29...
...With my fellow would-be passengers I sit in silence, once again a stranger among strangers, awaiting light...
...Enrollment is up and so is faculty morale...
...Still, the idea is appealing...
...And whenever a farmer loses out—goes bankrupt, I mean—all the neighbors seem overjoyed...
...I know exactly what you mean," says the young woman...
...someone else says that's all well and good, but our first priority should be to get at least 50 new members...
...It raises questions about the SSU experiment...
...And there didn't seem to be anybody who could tell me...
...The man speaks...
...States of the Union GROPING FOR INTIMACY BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Here are a few diurnal notes on a crazy trip I took recently to Marshall, Minnesota, where several hundred rural people gathered to plot the overthrow of pessimism...
...The talk is light and learned...
...Well, that was the end of that...
...1 am in the airport now, dropping my keys at the Avis counter and looking around reflexively for signs of Harry Reasoner...
...Intimacy abounds...
...The young woman behind the Ramada registration counter told me she once tried to sign up for a course at SSU, "but 1 couldn't find the right building...
...then I cross out that name and substitute "Delmore Schwartz...
...But that's about as close to community as we ever get...
...Ernesto, a friend from Las Cruces, New Mexico, is the chief victim of my luck both times...
...It's like a happy occasion...
...Monday: Tonight some of us have gathered in room 259 at the Ramada Inn to play poker...
...The man sits in 8B, the woman in 12F...
...I made several speeches there and also attended smaller sessions of the board of Rural America, a Washington-based group that preaches equity for those 60 million Americans neither urban nor suburban...
...It occurs me that I have been groping for an easy intimacy among strangers whose lives have been hard and fiercely private...
...Let him pay for it, John," she says to her husband...
...They are constantly groping for intimacy," he wrote...
...Sleepy Eye, named unaccountably for one of the chiefs who led the massacre...
...and Chanhas-sen, a singing name for a once-upon-a-time village that has lately been subdivided for people who commute to Minneapolis...
...It is a very long session...
...Coming from the gentle Ernesto, the words seem censorious...
...The road is straight and empty, a constant, gas-guzzling temptation...
...What does it sound like...
...A moment later a friend across the room quotes Bernard Shaw: "He who believes in absurdities commits atrocities...
...A good example comes my way, courtesy of Orissa, a delegate from Washington state...
...our words are wingless...
...The disparity of landscape between town and gown is not just an architectural problem...
...Someone answers that we are here to take over the country...
...New Ulm, site of the 1862 Sioux massacre...
...Twice within the hour I draw a king on my last card to an inside straight...
...To pass the time, I play "Titles," a game I have invented for occasions such as these...
...The chairman asks us to cope with "the goals" of our organization...
...The woman settles it...
...One speaker went so far as to credit Andrew Jackson with having decentralized the Federal government—a reading of history that might surprise Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...In The Fall of Public Man Richard Sennett complained that people nowadays no longer treasure their privacy...
...Orissa is telling us about her efforts to organize a grassroots group in her farm community...
...People in our town don't share and they don't care...
...I used to think that God was the whole ball of wax," he says...
...Decentralization was the small town talisman that everyone—liberals and conservative alike—appeared to be counting on...
...The corn that whizzes by me on either side of the road is not yet "as high as an elephant's eye," but it is a rich, deep green and upwardly mobile...
...An Iowa farmer once told me that on quiet nights in mid-July, standing in the middle of his cornfield, he could actually hear the corn growing...
...Another ABC lesson in intimacy...
...So they carry the bedpan to the filling station, have it filled with gasoline and take it back to the car...
...Wednesday: It is about 6 a.m...
...One minister stares at the nuns, shakes his head and says to the other minister, "If only our people had such faith...
...They have never drawn a king to an inside straight...
...Tonight I am munching popcorn with some of those scholars, sitting around Joe Amato's living room...
...Yet few such cavils show up in my notes...
...It's on the contract...
...I write on my yellow pad, '"The Biggest Loudmouth in Quincy Valley' by BretHarte...
...It is the woman's turn again: "You talk about community...
...And to think I doubted him...
...It was filled with brave declarations on the virtues of self-reliance...
...It makes sense to assemble some first-rate intellects to study the riddle of rural America...
...Later, in the lobby, I run into a farm couple from South Dakota who say they heard a speech I made in the afternoon and have some questions about it...
...someone else beat him to it, and it was Herman, the biggest loudmouth in Quincy Valley...
...We got a situation down there where farmers are going under —they can't make ends meet...
...He's got the money...
...I should have asked him for his personal autograph...
...The buildings are of brick and glass...
...We queue up and file into the plane...
...I tried to get a respected leader—someone everybody else would follow—to be the first to sign up...
...I am having a fine old time...
...Darn it," says one, after Reasoner has departed...
...You couldn't even call it a community...
...Near me are a young man with a beard and a young woman with a tennis racket...
...The leaders of villages that had long suffered from waning populations and eroding economies were urged to pull themselves up by their own one-horse harness straps...
...Sunday: Some 40 of us are sitting around tables joined in a long rectangle...
...It's worse than she says," the man explains...
...It's not like that at all," the woman says...
...But lately I've come to feel that love is the only thing...
...Amato teaches history at SSU...
...We are not above exchanging sectarian jokes, and the one I like best goes like this: Two nuns, who work as nurses at the local Catholic hospital, are driving along the highway when they run out of gas...
...I pencil in the title and add "Ionesco...
...It was built a decade ago, near the end of the academic boom, with space for as many as 1,500 students, but the enrollment since then has never reached half the capacity...
...As the nuns are emptying the contents of the bedpan into the gas tank, two Lutheran ministers happen to drive by...
...The rural approach seems to be paying off...
Vol. 61 • July 1978 • No. 15
