Now that I have time to take walks every morning, I’m reminded of something I knew as a kid, but kind of forgot someplace in the drudgery of adult existence.
Indiana is rather magical.
When I was in college, the vogue thing was to talk about how much Indiana sucked. Central Indiana was an even more particular target, because we have neither the lakes of the northern part of the state nor the rolling hills of the southern region to ameliorate our vast expanses of Hoosier flatness. I attended college right smack in the middle of Central Indiana—central Central Indiana, if you will—and there was much bleating from the itinerant scholars that all was ugly and boring and they missed the exoticism of, say, Ohio.
I always found this attitude a little irritating.
Look, I get that we don’t have anything you would immediately recognize on a postcard. I know there are no landforms that make for major tourist attractions (the very recent addition of a beautiful and perhaps insanely overcrowded national park notwithstanding). Interminable corn and soybean fields are your companions for most Indiana interstate drives, and the suburbs are architecturally underwhelming, to say the least. Yes, there are parts of Indiana that are not pretty.
There are a lot of parts of Indiana that are pretty, though. You just have to work a little harder to find them.
I like that about Indiana. Any idiot can find some wonder of the natural world in the western states. You can locate a mountain without even leaving the comfort of your cramped and germ-filled commercial flight, for Pete’s sake; just look out the window anywhere past, like, Nebraska. And the coastal states! Please. Could the ocean BE any more obvious?
Indiana, on the other hand, is a wily minx. She only looks like endless stretches of cornfields to keep the players away (I apologize; my slang was permanently imprinted in 1999. Please substitute an appropriate word from the modern parlance). And if you don’t wanna be a player no more (sorry again) and you’re ready to commit to her, just a small amount of Googling and a medium amount of driving reveals prairies, forests, lakes, waterfalls, caves, creek beds and river bends that look as much like the face of God as anything they’re hocking at the National Parks Service. In my opinion.
Here’s some proof from my walks lately, through public parks so teeming with natural beauty that even someone with nothing but an iPhone and a super-charged poison ivy allergy can still take pretty pictures. In CENTRAL Indiana, I’ll have you know.
It’s like our old, grumpy pal Thoreau wrote in his journal: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” This could apply to pretty much everything we consume with our eyes (or don’t consume, since we’re mostly looking at our phones one hundred percent of the time), but it especially goes for nature. We don’t slow down our minds enough to really see the beauty in what surrounds us, especially if we’re surrounded by the same stuff every day.
I think that’s exactly how it is for our poor Hoosier state. Often looked at, rarely seen.
Let me put it another way: In the collective American aesthetic, states like Colorado are Chris Evans, while Indiana is, of course, Benedict Cumberbatch. We all understand that Colorado is beautiful, and you don’t need a particularly discerning eye to see that. Indiana, on other hand, is for the connoisseur. Appreciating it requires a more cultivated sense of beauty, a certain level of aesthetic sophistication, several hours looking at now-defunct Tumblr fan sites, perhaps. A little effort, a little imagination. The end result is something just as charming as its more symmetrical brethren, or maybe even a little more charming, since you had to go searching for it.
Indiana is pretty, you guys, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Go find your own Sherlock.
P.S. This is all part of a bigger life tenet: there is no there, really. All places and all moments are a delicious cocktail of joy and suffering, beauty and monotony, oatmeal scotchies and oatmeal raisins. If you’re currently sitting in Muncie, Indiana or Scranton, Pennsylvania or wherever and thinking, “This place sucks,” you’re right. It is filled with equal parts suckitude and beauty, just like everywhere else. Look for the pretty parts; they are out there, I promise.
