800 Words: Pissing in The American Prairie

It’s somewhere in the 100 miles between Urbana and Chicago. I’m driving alone in my rental car. And I really have to pee. My GPS tells me that the next road is 10 miles in either direction. The thought inevitably occurs, “Find a bush off the road and go behind it.”

But there is no bush for a couple thousand feet in any direction. There’s plenty of corn, but the idea of pissing into corn seems awful. What if I eat this corn in a few months? What if I serve that ear of corn to someone else? I ponder the ethical dilemmas of peeing on corn for roughly a minute. Eventually, an exasperated part of my brain shouts at me, “...Just go on the side of the road!”

So I pull over, get out of the car and walk to the other side. There is a car passing me every few seconds. The thought of exposing myself to them does not seem nearly as appealing as it did in the car.

So rather than whip it out for the edification of random motorists in the Land of Lincoln, I wait ten miles for the next road. Seven minutes pass...eight....nine...and as I near the next road, I see one of those giant signs on a fifty-foot pole for a Walmart and with it the promise of an antiseptic bathroom.

I pull into a strangely empty Walmart parking lot. I have to go so badly I can barely walk. From my car, I see a dumpster behind the Walmart. Rather than enduring the indignity of looking for a Walmart bathroom while limping around with a gimp bladder, I opt for the relative dignity of pissing on a dumpster.

After relieving a malaise which the genius possess and the insane lament, I turn around and see before me an open space limited only by my line of vision - as vast as the desert or sea. And just as those other expanses do, the colors of the prairie seem to merge into the colors of the sky as though an invisible point were sucking them in like a black hole.

The ground is green and brown, grass, crops and weed, looking fat and fallow simultaneously. The sky is blue and white - as many hues of blue as there are in Picasso, punctured by clouds with all the texture of a Van Gogh blotch.

This is the land that makes America America. Once upon a time, privately going to the bathroom was never a problem in rural Illinois. You were the only person for ten miles in any direction. You didn’t go from Urbana to Illinois in two hours. If you had a good horse, you’d be lucky to get there in a day. Traveling by wagon might take a week. It was a land so hostile that odds were with the eventuality that nature itself would kill you. And only those crazy enough to want more out of life than hardship would endure the hardship of trying to create something out of it.

And that promise was so enticing that millions of crazy poor people streamed into the prairie land from all across America and Europe to endure the starvation wages, the three-wall houses of sediment and clay, the swindlers who sold them barren land and broken equipment, the lethal heat and the deadly cold, the lawless towns, the cattle stampedes, the cowboy hoodlums; all for a chance at a better life - if not for them, then their children; if not for their children, then perhaps their grandchildren; if not all their grandchildren, then hopefully for one or two of them. As with all great monuments, the Midwest was built on the backs of slave labor. Even if by no means was it slavery as existed in the Deep South, it was a lifelong, Sisyphean servitude in the hope of a future that never came for most who tried.

Believe it or not (if you care), this was the first time I’ve ever seen the Prairie. In all honesty, the American Prairie seems less impressive when you have to go to the bathroom. It’s like the rest of America, only moreso - an endless supply of space which people never figured out how to use. Earlier this summer, an friend from London came to visit me. And as we drove he was positively overwhelmed by the vastness of America’s rural environs. “How can any country have so much undeveloped land?!” he asked me, seemingly in a state of shock....We were driving from Baltimore to DC.



Another good friend once asked me, “Why does Aaron Copland’s music sound so American?” It’s a question I honestly have pondered since I was a three-year-old who insisted on my parents help me celebrate Aaron Copland’s 85th birthday with a cake and candles. Even at that age, I knew that there was something different about his music. Today, it seems as obvious to me as it does to any music lover who loves Copland (and what true music lover wouldn’t?). Copland’s music is built as much on open intervals - fourths, fifths, octaves - as it is on the thirds. These open chords give the music a more ambiguous feeling. The music of Old Europe required something more concrete. a tonal hierarchy which showed the natural harmony of the world through an aristocrat’s eyes. During the twentieth century, when Europe was overwhelmed by Communism, composers began to write ‘serial’ or ‘twelve-tone’ music in which no note could be repeated until every other note had also been sounded. But in the America of democracy and possibility, only a system based upon open chords could do. And just as you find those open chords in Copland, you can find them just as easily in Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Woody Guthrie, Elvis, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye and thousands of others. Perhaps all this means nothing, perhaps music is just notes on a page or ‘aural cheesecake.’ Or maybe music is a language no less communicative than words. Nobody knows, but whether it’s explained through the pseudo-science of music theory or the pseudo-philosophy of music criticism, music clearly feeds on something that can explain our minds as well, if not better, than any other art.

A surplus of space seems to define our country in everything from our landscape to our credit line. But the prairie isn’t just physical space, it’s spiritual space. Seeing the Prairie is one of the few experiences that can make you think back to High School American Lit. Suddenly you remember words you hadn’t thought of in fifteen years like transcendentalism and individualism. You start remembering something Emerson said about self-reliance. You think of what Whitman wrote about the Prairie (and whatever it was, it was boring). And for the first time ever, you begin to think that your junior year English teacher, Mr. R-----, might have taught you something valuable.

Nothing can kill a love of reading faster than High School English. University English departments have long since failed to accept that teaching a love of reading is their principle job. So the only exposure most of my generation gets to the glories of reading is in High School English. But most high school English teachers have no better idea why reading is important than their students. In a sense, I was quite lucky. In five years of high school, I had three fantastic English teachers. I might have failed pre-calc, and chemistry, and French, and art (in my defense, I only got a D- in art...) but I had some spectacular English teachers. In 10th grade, I had Mr. Hiles, who laid bare the structure, characters and history of The Great Gatsby in ways I remember to this day. In 12th grade, I had Mr. Cox who taught us everything from Mrs. Dalloway to Annie Hall to Czeslaw Milosz to John Coltrane to Gabriel Faure in class. But most importantly of all was the teacher of my 2nd stab at 11th grade. It was then that I had the great fortune of studying under Mr. Spaeth.

For reasons I still don’t understand, Mr. Spaeth realized that through the colossal academic failure that was my school record laid a promising literature student. And so at the age of 17, I got an individual tutorial every day from a master English teacher. In many ways, I still view it as the best piece of good luck I’ve ever received. Together, we spent the third period of every day in the library. We poured over every Canto of Dante’s Inferno, and every tale from the Canterbury Tales. Thanks to Mr. Spaeth, I can still recite the first twenty-odd lines of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from memory, I can still recall lines of Beowulf in Old English, I can tell the difference between iambic pentameter and trochaic tetrameter and acquired a love of Robert Frost from which I’ve never strayed. When it came time to decide whether to make a life-long commitment to living in Israel, it was only memories of Mr. Spaeth that helped me make the decision. I recalled his lesson about Dante’s relationship to Virgil, and how he demonstrated that Dante required, as all good pilgrims do, a guide through the travails of perdition in order to ascend to heaven. It made me realize that regardless of the romance of a life devoted to backpack travel seemed, I couldn’t stay so far apart from family and friends. For all I derived from his tutelage, I might as well tell you that my English teacher was Samuel Johnson.

But Mr. Spaeth is one of those rarities - a real English teacher - an instructor whose love of his subject can be communicated in spite of a bureaucracy that does everything within its power to make sure that such love can never be communicated. In its place, we get an assortment of buzzwords from teacher’s editions, we learn for the purpose of test scores, and people can graduate from Yale and Princeton without once thinking of why they’ve learned what they’ve learned. Such is the price of success that it goes to those who can never appreciate what it means to have it.

And so it’s difficult to think about anything but pissing. All that aspiration to create, all that effort to build a society, all that primal desire to live. All that desire for a better life led pioneers, immigrants and slaves to build a country like ours. Only to then be inhabited by people like you and me who screw up everything they've built. However unlikely it may be, we have to wonder if those pioneers lived better than we ever could. And honestly, that makes me a little jealous.