Somewhere Between Everywhere and Nowhere
Depending on how you look at it, I was born in the middle of nowhere—or the center of everywhere. Indiana is a state crisscrossed and tattooed by highways gleaming with the deep blue vivacity of veins and concrete. You have to go through Indiana to get to almost anywhere else, yet it is rarely a destination, making it one of our nation’s “flyover states.” Long after the sun sets on the middle of nowhere, the humidity reminds us of its warmth. Crickets chant in ascending and descending choruses, and stars appear out of the purple sky to blink in unison with the golden pulsing of lightning bugs. The air itself vibrates with life in this space they call “the crossroads of America,” a place where timelessness meets modernity in a thumb-wrestling match that leaves us all scrambling for position.
When I visit home, it takes a moment to digest the limits imposed on such a boundless place. My backyard is squared in by a chain-link fence that exists within an endless series of intersections: rows of fences, corn, interstate, railways, and houses separate other rows of corn that separate other interstates. As a child, I’d lay awake at night bound inside all these intersections and listen to the hum of semis rolling by. Following the blinking lights of airplanes and listening to the roar of trains passing, I found evidence of a larger world. Already, my hometown seemed too small.
On our back porch, my brother Richard and I sit on lawn chairs facing south. In the distance, semis still hum past on I-70, their roar the Midwest’s equivalent to the ocean’s calming tides. When we were young, our mother carefully planted flowers around the patio, but now, overgrown grass crowds its edges. The mini-barn sits in the southwest corner of the yard in miserable disrepair, seemingly held up by the vines that have grown ceaselessly since our youth. Giant oak trees grow between us and the highway, their lofty branches separating us from the sky.
The neighborhood is drenched in a silence that makes us whisper involuntarily. Sitting across from me, Richard takes a drink of beer and sits back, sighing heavily. I watch his movements and note how closely his mannerisms mirror my own, the way he half-smiles at uncomfortable moments, and how his face turns red underneath a cool exterior when he is seething inside. His curly hair is more unkempt than mine and facial hair bristles on his chin and cheeks, but otherwise, we are each other’s incarnation in the opposite sex. His red cheeks betray discomfort as he begins a question. “So… how old do you think a girl would have to be for you to say that she’s too young for me?”
I puzzle through his age, count my years and subtract five…and still can’t decide. “18 maybe,” I hear myself say. “I mean, I guess it depends on the girl and what you are looking for in a relationship.”
Of course he knows what he is looking for and we both burst into laughter. As the evening progresses, the conversation turns from girls to common acquaintances and onwards to inevitable changes. The little farming community that we grew up in has become something I no longer recognize.
As if reading my mind, Richard asks, “Did you hear the drive-in’s closing?”
My first response is immediate: “That’s impossible.”
The Clermont Deluxe drive-in, located at the edge of our neighborhood, is a seemingly permanent fixture, its large stone screens as familiar as neighbors’ faces. By day, the drive-in is a huge concrete structure that looms along Main Street, its flat screen simply a wall supported by a sloped buttress that faces the road. By night, the drive-in is a secret society to which the outside world is denied access. Surrounded alternately by aluminum-siding walls, oak trees, wooden fences, and barbed wire, the drive-in remains open to all but closed to most. Though passer-bys catch a glimpse of a film, they never know what is truly happening inside. Entering the drive-in, one enters a romance; a passionate escape from the humdrum of 9-5. While drama dances across the screen, we forget the tragedies of daily life, our working class morose and rat race gloom evaporating into the multi-chromatic horizontal lines shining above our cars onto the screen. In the open air of a drive-in community, we can breathe and let go, talk to our neighbors, watch children play, listen to the ebb and flow of time.
***
My mother’s experience of a small town in America contrasts sharply with mine: she came of age at the precise moment in American history when small town America was at its height. On the other hand, I came of age at the precise moment when small town America began to disappear completely.
When my mom was growing up, Brownsburg was still the quintessential American town. Following the American small town model, the entire town was Main Street. The high school was so small that there was no cafeteria: students went to Burger Chef and Dairy Queen for lunch. In the evenings, young people would go to Hollet and Harmon’s Drugstore for fountain sodas and root beer floats and then migrate across the street where they could play pool at the local pool hall.
There was Bernice’s Sewing Shop where people bought fabric to make their clothes, and Brook’s Bakery where people bought their bread. Just down the street, Brownsburg Christian Church and St. Malachy Church provided the town’s religious instruction (to Protestants and Catholics, respectively). Above all the buildings near Main Street, small apartments served as homes to community members, all of whom could literally walk to their life necessities. Though residents of my mother’s hometown didn’t realize it at the time, Brownsburg reflected a dying worldview: the belief in a public realm. Where towns like Brownsburg once included downtown shops, town squares, public gardens, saloons and churches, they now have strip malls, gas stations and suburbs.
In 1950, five years before my mother was born, the Clermont Deluxe Drive-in opened—and it was not alone. Between 1948 and 1958, the number of drive-ins in the United States went from 1000 to 5000. In 1956, at approximately the same historic moment, Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act which funded the construction of 41,000 miles of new expressways in the United States. It was the largest public works project in the history of the world.
The automobile, from its birth with the Model-T to its boom with the Maverick, became a status symbol, an acquisition that reflected optimism and innocence. Old family pictures show people posing proudly, four at a time, in the automobile. When a family purchased a new car, neighbors and relatives poured in immediately to witness the spectacle. The invention of the car inspired the American people. With the highway just outside the front door, middle-Americans could go anywhere. They could move to the country and drive to work. They could drive farther away to a chain grocery store. They could take vacations to places like California and Florida. They could turn 18 and go anywhere they wanted. In the 50s, the American identity, its heart and soul, became inseparable from the automobile. The idea of watching a film from a car is nostalgically, helplessly American; the drive-in was the love child of a brief affair between the automobile age and the era of optimism.
In the 50s and 60s, my grandfather made a living by selling cars at the local dealership, Carson Ford. When Ford produced the first Maverick, my grandmother was the first housewife of Brownsburg to own one—it cost $1,995. With six kids, Grandpa Bob had to buy the largest Ford car on the market for his family: the Country Squire. The Squire was a station wagon with a name that seemed to ascribe elegance and royalty to the everyday people of the small American town; it was the American Folk-Wagon, a Volkswagon with swagger.
Packed into the Country Squire, Grandpa Bob would head out to the drive-in with his wife and six kids in tow. After arriving to the Clermont Deluxe, the family would wait for night to fall and for the movie to begin. As the sun dropped, it exuded melancholy in the deep maroons of summer skies. When the first star appeared above the Country Squire, an American flag appeared onscreen accompanied by the national anthem. Then, dancing french fries and singing sodas took the stage to encourage visits to the concession stand. Children made shadow puppets in front of the projector, occasionally obscuring the popping popcorn and smiling M&Ms. On those long summer nights, history was slowly passing without anyone noticing. Actresses like Doris Day and Katherine Hepburn embodied the innocent beauty of the late 50s and early 60s, falling into the embrace and dry kisses of dark, handsome men again and again. Doris Day danced and sang in front of the Country Squire, telling Brownsburg, Indiana: “Que Sera, Sera, Whatever will be, will be.” Sauntering through a Moroccan Marketplace in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Day epitomized the chaste simplicity of romance and intrigue for an entire generation.
When a comedy was in order, my mother’s family would see a Don Knotts film, humor that relied upon the resonance of the everyman. Knotts was best known for his role as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. The scrawny Knotts was larger than life in his oversized policeman’s cap, providing comic relief with his Napoleon complex and self-importance. The Museum of Broadcast Communications described Fife as “too small for the delusional ideas he had of himself,” yet “viewers got the sense that he couldn’t have survived anywhere else.” Knotts drew from the high strung persona of Barney Fife in all his big screen films from It’s a Mad, Mad World (1963) to How to Frame a Figg (1971).
From the Clermont Deluxe Drive-in, audiences in the 50s and 60s received glimpses of distant worlds and familiar faces while the world kept moving inevitably forward. By the time my mother began taking me to the drive-in in the early 80s, the craze was declining. From the beginning of the decade to the end, the number of drive-ins in the U.S. went from around 3500 to less than 1000. For drive-in owners, the change seemed to come almost overnight. One year, 500 cars came on a Friday night; the next, 50.
Nonetheless, we were one of those fifty cars filing in on the weekends, and with no basis of comparison, those fifty cars seemed to contain the entire world. I saw my very first movie at the drive-in and got my first lesson in love from Bambi. A few years later, E.T. went sailing across the darkened horizon at Clermont Deluxe. Dressed up as a ghost on Halloween night, E.T. used his extraterrestrial powers to make Elliot and his friends fly across the sky; mesmerized, my most prized possession became an E.T. doll.
As the 80s marched onwards, E.T. gave way to a feathered space alien known as Howard the Duck (1986) and Bambi’s animation morphed into Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). As Howard the Duck attempted to save earth from an evil space invader, he shocked audiences with his all-too-human attraction to earthling Beverly Switzer. Two years later, Roger Rabbit also had to rescue a portion of earth: Toontown, Hollywood. A nefarious henchman named Judge Doom threatened to destroy Toontown; ironically, he planned to build a superhighway in place of the town. Somehow, neither Howard nor Roger showed up to save the drive-in from superhighways or suburbanization.
Somewhere between Bambi and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, change crept in without our noticing. We continued going to the drive-in long after its height, and for a while, we also went to Harlott and Harmon’s to drink fountain sodas and root beer floats on the way to the grocery store. Then, without notice, Harlott and Harmon’s closed.
Today, a drive through Brownsburg is a drive through a town that no longer exists, a place that has disguised itself in the anonymity of American monoculture. Where we once drank root beer floats on the way to the grocery store, a Walgreens now offers its wares under fluorescent lighting. For good measure, Rite-Aid has moved in across the street, sometimes offering a better 2-for-1 Coca-Cola special.
Further down Main Street, we once had Jessie’s, which was of course, owned and run by Jessie. Outside the big white building, a white-haired, red-faced old blind man would stand next to the automatic doors, and sell his handmade brooms to the people coming and going. His gaze looked outwards toward Main Street, never focusing on anything in particular. As kids, we were afraid of him because his gaze never lowered to our level. He was always looking beyond us at something we didn’t understand—and his voice boomed—shaking us to our cores.
“Buy a broom?” he asked as we made our way past, hiding beneath our mother’s legs. Sometimes, we’d try to sneak by, barely breathing as we scurried inside for a pack of gum, but our attempts were futile.
“Buy a broom?” The words bounced off Jessie’s concrete wall and continued.
Moments after we’d passed, someone would come in behind us and we’d hear it again.
“Buy a broom?”
Inside, the older lady clerks would greet my mom by name. As she walked down the aisles, we trailed behind waiting to slip toys or candy into the cart. Now and then, Jessie would be there stocking the shelves or chatting with customers who he knew by name, of course. A trip to the store was a social outing—our neighbors asked mom about her sisters or our summer plans, while we kids patrolled the toy aisle, deciding which item to take home with us.
Today, if you go to Jessie’s, you can no longer buy a handmade broom that will last all year. Instead, you can buy a piece of plastic made in China at the local dollar store. Next door, a chain grocery store is full of strangers who avoid eye contact as they roll down the aisles, coupon mailers in hand.
On the outskirts of Main Street, the fields and forests have all but disappeared. No longer can teenagers disappear into a wide open space following storms and waiting for funnel clouds to appear. The lofty joy we felt as teenagers when we’d drive through the middle of cornfields and suddenly find ourselves in Illinois or Ohio is gone. The young people of today drive through a wonderland of Lego houses; a left turn on Arrowhead Lane leads to a right on Riverstone Drive, and it keeps going and going down a rabbit hole of houses that look like every other house. The cornfields are either gone or on their way out. At their edge, signs offering homes from $150,000 on, linger like grave markers.
“Once,” my Mom says driving through the new suburbia, “people wanted to build houses near cornfields because of the privacy. Now they’re scared to build houses here because in five years, they’ll be surrounded by other houses.” Lego houses.
The cornfield between my old house and where Jessie’s Grocery Store once stood is one of the last in the area. In the winter, it lays barren. You can look out and see the traffic moving up and down Main Street. As kids, we’d watch from the window for the yellow of the school bus to inch its way across the horizon of the cornfield. We’d wait until the last possible moment to run out into the cold to the bus stop, procrastinating until the last second to go to school. In the spring, as the corn grew taller and we could no longer see the bus coming down Main Street, all bets were off.
Last year, a highway ramp was built near our house. Sooner or later, the view of Main Street will disappear altogether, blocked not by corn, but by houses. Rows and rows of little boxes.
***
When people began talking about ‘urban sprawl’ in the early 90s, the deceptiveness of the term fooled us all. We imagined the city swallowing every small town, our town, into its massive belly. The smoke stacks of power plants cast coal powder shadows over our towns. Urban ghettoes, crime, crack vials, and heroine needles infiltrated the wholesome goodness of corn-fed children on their way to another school day. The fear of dark-skinned masses descending upon the historically Anglo-Irish stronghold crept into the unconscious of Brownsburg. There was a sense of inevitable change.
Had Indianapolis marched its way into Brownsburg and begun building skyscrapers and war monuments, perhaps there would have been some resistance to urban sprawl. Instead, we encountered the slow process of suburbanization. In 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau reported for the first time that more people lived in suburbs than in the city. What that meant for Brownsburg was more neighborhoods. Around 1959, the first major neighborhood was built: Sunny Meadows. Clermont Heights, where I grew up, went in soon after. In the 60s and 70s, neighborhoods sprung up periodically, but by the time the 90s rolled around, the pace took on a fervor only the Bible Belt can truly appreciate. When my mother graduated from high school in 1973, there were 162 people in her graduating class. In 1996 when I graduated, around 250 people accompanied me—a moderate growth of 35% in 23 years. In 2006, the graduating class of Brownsburg High School was 500, doubling in only ten years.
As houses give birth to more houses in an endless, passionless, sexless self-reproduction, the identity of my hometown has been lost. The contractors seem to name the subdivisions after the very things that they destroy without any sense of irony. Deer Valley, Mallard Crossing, Rolling Timber: The names of our subdivisions began with Sunny Meadows and ended with empty postcard images. Yet, the implanting of suburbia has been so subtle that, year after year, I would visit home for Christmas or summer vacation, and find myself completely unable to identify the source of my uneasiness. Things were being built, but perhaps because nothing had been destroyed, I assumed that I hadn’t lost anything.
The closing of the drive-in was a sign-post, a signal that something had been lost forever.
Gone is the Brownsburg of the drive-in, of handcrafted goods, of Burger Chef and sewing stores, of pool halls and soda shops, of farmlands and crossroads. In its place, Starbucks and Quick-marts, strip malls and gas stations, big boxes and plastic homes that have been constructed with astonishing speed. The momentum of these artificial constructions seems too strong for anyone to stop, so everyone sits and watches, powerless against a nearly invisible force.
And yet, my generation scooted out of Middle America in our beloved automobiles the first chance we got. We moved to far away coasts or nearby havens like Chicago. We ran to intellectual centers like Boston or New York and artist enclaves in San Francisco or Los Angeles. We disappeared into backpacking adventures in Europe and Australia or joined Peace Corps in Africa or South America.
What right do we have to ask for a home that doesn’t look like every other town in America? Is it archaic and overly-sentimental to hold a special place in your heart for a place called Brownsburg, Indiana? Can we expect home to be a place that stays the same while we change; a place that we can come back to and see ourselves reflected?
Did we sell our homes for a strip mall?
The night the drive-in closed, cars crept out of their garages over a cement jungle, and sleepily moved into spaces next to one another, row after row, facing the screens. It was the busiest I’d seen the Clermont Deluxe since my childhood. The metal speakers hanging on the poles were placed gingerly on windshields as people tuned their radios to hear the previews. People crawled onto the tops of minivans and SUVs and covered themselves with blankets to keep warm as night fell. Strangers passed one another and made small talk around lawn chairs and coolers. An impromptu community was born in the night, and for a brief moment, it seemed that people realized what they were losing with the drive-in’s closing. More than a place to watch a movie, it was a place for people to gather—a public space. People came as individuals and realized that they knew other individuals, that we are all connected by two degrees, that the isolation of modern life is simply an illusion—if we let it be.
The Simpsons Movie was the drive-in’s final feature. While Bart Simpson attempted to save Springfield from toxic waste, children crowded onto the merry-go-round in such numbers that it seemed impossible that the thing could move. While the Simpsons found themselves quarantined by a giant bubble meant to hold in Springfield’s toxicity, classic ‘57 Chevys and Mustangs rolled up next to speakers bathing their surroundings in a nostalgic glow. The crisp whoosh of beer cans opening could be heard over Marge’s concerned diatribes and car engines’ warming hums. Neighbors walked by one another giving shy waves and asking, “Can you believe it is closing? What a shame!” Were they mulling over the same questions that hung in my mind? Were they as disappointed as I was to see the death of the drive-in? Did they lose a piece of themselves with its closing?
Driving away from the drive-in that night, I felt the weight of an era descend upon me: the Clermont Deluxe was gone after 57 years of operation. I watched the glowing beacons of white for the last time as I turned the corner. I was strangely comforted by the permanence of the structures. Certainly, the stone white screens could never fade into oblivion—even if vines and grasses grow from their crevices. Perhaps when future civilizations unearth the remains of this site, they too will be left with unanswered questions. Just like Easter Island’s giant stone faces peering into unforeseeable distances, the drive-in’s blank screens will reveal nothing, simply gazing at one another above a field of concrete. Perhaps they will be struck by the apathy of these blank faces, noting their anonymity and silence. Without context, these enigmatic monoliths could be anything: giant tombstones, pillars of worship, or as the case might be, abandoned pieces of the American Dream.
