Dry Land and Dry Wit: Reflections Upon Leaving Kirksville

The summer before I was a sophomore was when I really started living in Kirksville, beginning the Truman Week that two freshman dropped out due to heat-related dissatisfaction. That summer I spent a week in Scotland, three months at Taco Bell flirting with a manager two years older than I was, and one humbling night drunk off my ass for the first time. I moved in my off-campus apartment on one of the more sweltering days, watching the highway evolve into town as I drove in along 63, the convenience stores and billboards springing from the cement like ruins from the desert. I referred to that stretch of road as the Path of Despair because I'd frequently returned home to St. Louis every few weeks and every Sunday I would inevitably take my place in a long line of cars savoring every last second that they were not in Kirksville. I had less than twenty dollars in my bank account and spent most of it that afternoon on a fan and Pop-Ice from Wal-Mart.

Come December, I was typing my papers in gloves, a sweatshirt, my robe, socks and slippers, with a blanket around my shoulders because the cold was so fierce and I had no thermostat, only a musty heating grate that ran for five minutes and shut off for thirty. I left my window open over winter break to air out my apartment and made $400 working at Taco Bell that month. At the end of the break, my landlady informed me in broken English that my pipes had frozen and created $400 worth of damage.

The memory of Kirksville is shaped by two forces: the weather and the dust. They are the constants, and everyone and everything I have experienced since that first sweaty day have been variables victim to their command. The dust on the side of the road, the dust that makes up the unpaved roads, the dust unearthed by ceaseless construction and costly attempts at improvement, the dust that forms a fine film on the windowsill and bookshelf, the dust that forms soft gray balls; so soft it made me gag to have to touch them and throw them away. The dust that clung to my sweat when I walked along the uneven and potholed sidewalks in July and formed a different fine film on my flesh: a glutinous one I tried to wipe away but only suceeded in redistributing, one that traps in the heat and reappeared an hour after showering. One I shared with others, through contact of arms, legs, hands, and lips. It's salty. It makes you thirsty. It makes you weary. It makes you lonely and lascivious; and come the cooler blue-gray twilight, this intoxicating sultry dust-paste is a double-edged aprodisiac, gluing you drunkenly to another as stickily passionate.

The population of Kirksville, a town touched by farms on all four sides, is less than the sudent body of Mizzou, a college campus in Columbia, the nearest legitimate metropolis. It's a town that consists of Townies, who have been and will be in Kirksville forever, and Students, whose two largest fears are running out of money and getting stuck in Kirksville, the first of which inevitably exacerbate the chances of the second. Its motto is "Where the People Make the Difference," and the unintentional truth of that is in order to achieve anything, whether it be goals, creature comforts, basic human need, or even fun, you had to be intelligent and ingenious enough to make it happen yourself. You got by with a little help from your friends. I've met and spent time with some of the greatest people in the world in Kirksville, MO, whether they were born there or just passing through for four-plus years. I've learned as much from them as I have from my college education and loved them as only a twentysomething girl with few responsibilities can love. Every once in awhile a townie would give you a huge break or help you out. I got a job at JavaCo and hundreds of dollars worth of painting sold when Jan Collins found out I was a nice girl with an artsy streak. The lady at For the Fun of It conducted last-minute business with me for green hair dye without even meeting me face-to-face, leaving the products I needed by the back door when we discovered our schedules didn't match up for me to peruse the store. The lady at Hidden Treasures offered me her house to stay at when she learned that I'd be staying at friends' houses a month before leaving town. And then there were the rat bastards who made your life miserable. My first boss at Travelers Inn was a drunk who regularly passed out in various places around the building and who was recently indicted on multiple drug felony charges. The schizophrenic lady on the first floor of my apartment tried to beg change off me when she was sober, and when she was drunk she would gibber at the walls, blast her music, and call me a whore. The human experience was what made your life unique, because you sure as hell weren't going to get your kicks from clubs or museums. There weren't any.

Such a microcosm doesn't teem with activity or have regular bursts of energy. Rather, it breathes. It sighs with the seasons shifting, pants during party weekends, gasps during finals week, and occasionally holds its breath and lets it out in a whoosh like a mischievous child who is learning the meaning of tension and release. The dust shifts with the flow to other places and other forms. It stays in the air with the October gusts just enough to keep it warm and remind you of summer's irresponsible rascalous freedom. Kirksville exhales, the weather changes; it inhales, the weather changes back. It's the most dynamic time of the year. Ambition is still fresh, I could comfortably walk everywhere I needed, I could wear a jacket if I wanted but could get away without it, and I had all the time in the world. My birthday was in September. October was the most fun. I started dating almost all of my boyfriends in early November. My best semesters were the firsts.

With time, the dying summer breezes rest, the dust settles. The dust on the windowsill grows thicker before the dropping temperature forces you to close the window for the next several months, and the dust outside freezes with the ground or mixes with the snow when it falls, forming an insufferable sludge. With the arrival of January came also the realization that Hell was not fire and brimstone; Hell was a Kirksville winter. When we got hit with snow it was more like an artillery assault, and when there was no precipitation the north windchill made it unbearable to leave my apartment for any reason. It made any sort of movement desperate, and only as much as necessary. Winter is isolating. It is claustrophobic. Instead of bringing people together to salvage warmth, it drove us apart; almost any interaction chipped away at sacred personal space of which they had already been so robbed. My seasonal depression reached its zenith around mid-February. Most of my romances deteriorated around March.

I've often wondered if it is beacuse of, or in spite of the size of the town that its residents have the relationship with it that they do. The citizens are obsessed with themselves as a part of the town; there are endless Kirksville-pride events, homages to a near-nonexistant history, and activities designed for the betterment and enjoyment of "the community." It's also a town with an income gap larger than I think anyone could fathom. In the span of a few miles, I've walked from the two-story houses along Halliburton that most likely belong to the professors, dentists, doctors, and small business owners, to the housing projects by PC Mills park in the southwest corner of town where every child has a parent either in jail, dead, on welfare, or on drugs. There are self-supporting farmers who sell their apples and brownies on the square on Saturday mornings, Amish famillies with cell phones at Wal-Mart, and supposed meth labs in the woods. I think they all talk about "community" without really knowing or considering at the time what all that community consists of.

The townies love it, and the students hate it; they hate it for its lack of entertainment when the unforgiving winter locks them quickly inside; they hate it when the dependence on human interaction affects them negatively; they hate the noisy frat across the street and how the community theatre only does cheap-laugh comedies, and fucking Wal-Mart; and they hate the fear of being stuck there. And yet sometimes they grow to love the town too, when the warm breeze makes the rainbowed leaves tornado in the fall, or when the silly child finally lets his breath out and spring blows in with tepid, overdue gusts and warm spittle drizzling the yellowed grass to life.

Kirksville casts a strange spell over some. Once I lived there year-round, I realized the small things I found lacking in St. Louis, such as walking to work, or biking on dirt roads with Randy, or old bridges and railroad tracks and how fun it was to climb up to them and have a cigarette with Rachel, Christian, and Eric, or how the sky was so thick with stars on clear nights that I could finally understand why and how the Greeks invented constellations, and how beautiful those constellations looked when walking in the dark with Jared. I began to breathe with the town, inhaling the same dust as the grizzled barbers and groomed businessmen. The same dust that Kirksvillians have been breathing for decades, the dust that settled in the lungs of the Beards and Floyds and McClains and Goulds, rooting them inexorably to the ground that they were eventually buried beneath, and the dust they became part of themselves. The dust grounded me as well, weighing me down as I consumed and washed off years of deteriorated particles of iron ore, failed crops, and generations of corpses, and I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay in Kirksville because I lived there year-round; I'd known it in all its capricious seasons; I'd tasted its bitter monotonous savor mixed with my own sweat; I had a steady job and a role in the community theatre and all my friends still went to school there. Highway 63 had long since ceased being "the Path of Despair" because I rarely left town and I couldn't wait to get back when I did. I was happy, and my greatest fears were running out of money and not being happy.

I think the fact that my plans to leave superseded that contentment was due to understanding that the greatest portion of my happiness was tied to a facet of the town that did not wish to be a permanent part of it. My friends would eventually leave, and with every passing year I would be more entrenched within the town, both hating and adoring my cramped, repetitive universe in 365-day cycles until I was no more than another common name on another headstone.

So I left, right before the leaves started turning, before the temperatures plunged into oblivion, but after I had one more summer of sweat and dust and heady squalor. I miss my friends, and what they're doing that I'm not able to be a part of. I dream about them, and the stupid, fucking, self-obsessed town that I learned to love. I'm still coughing up dust from all the bike rides and bridge climbs, brushing it off myself after being yanked up from the ground but unable to find another place to set root. Though I know that years out of the Midwest, in sundry times and diverse places, I will still be shaking it out of my hair and clothes, and I'll remember those breathless October days in Northeast Missouri.