The Comfort Zone

It is not easy to walk along Bethel Avenue. It is a four lane road, sometimes six when there’s a turn lane. There are no sidewalks, just a grassy median that could be sidewalk, if anyone bothered to walk here.

I count the walkers that buck tradition. Three black teenagers, boys, crossing the street at the McDonald’s.  On another day, there are four brown guys that appear from I’m not sure where. They navigate the v-shaped median and head across the vast parking lot of the movie theater (empty) to another vast parking lot (also empty).  I see one guy at the bus stop  and I wonder if he has been there for the duration of my stay because while I do see a bus once, maybe twice, it is going the wrong way.

Total number of walkers I see in four days? Nine.

One afternoon, a fellow visitor from Brooklyn walked with me. It was immediately clear to both of us that this was a bad idea.

I insisted on continuing to walk, anyways.

§

I went to Muncie for the Midwest Writers Conference. I was psyched. A paid teaching gig, a new place — I love going new places — and finally, I’d get to meet Kelsey, a long term online friend, in person. Before I flew out, we talked on the phone to prepare for the class we were teaching together. I asked Kelsey about how I’d get around while I was there.

“I looked at a map, it’s only a mile. I’ll just walk everywhere. That’s okay, right?”

Kelsey warned me off the idea. “You CAN walk, but I … wouldn’t. It’s… difficult. There’s no place TO walk.”

“Could I borrow a bike while I’m there?”

“That might be worse than walking,” he said. “There are no bike lanes and… look, it’s not a big deal, just call me anytime you need a ride. Really. I mean it.”

§

There’s a buzz phrase people like to use in conversations about travel: outside your comfort zone. Sometimes it’s about the physical — you go ziplining or white water rafting or overnight backpacking, knocking up against the borders of your abilities. Or you travel to a country where you don’t speak the language, where the food is challenging to your habituated palette. Maybe you go to a place where you’re clearly a minority, an outsider. I remember that moment I had on my first day in Nairobi when I thought, “Oh, look at that. You are so not passing here, no way, no how.” For some people, it’s about traveling alone when they’re used to having companions.

For me, it was Muncie, Indiana.

§

On the first day of the conference,  we went around the room and introduced ourselves. Four or five of the students mentioned their relationship with Jesus Christ.

I was sure I would inadvertently say something to offend them before the day was over.

One woman was off to Israel. For the first part of her trip, she would do missionary work, and the second part would be tourism. “I hope I will find something poignant there to write about.”

The Israelis had begun bombing the crap out of Gaza just a week or two before. I couldn’t help myself. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“Nope, I doubt it. Nothing happens there. Never does.”

I immediately felt guilty. She was nice, and also, a professional. A published writer and she’d served in the US military. I was just a West Coast smart ass, a new media brat, and the only thing I’d done for my country was work on a losing Democratic presidential campaign.

The people I met were nothing but gracious and I can not remember the last time I felt so much like an outsider.

§

My friend Larry burst out laughing when I told him where I was going. He did his undergraduate work at Ball State, the university where the conference took place. Larry’s an artist and he’s funny and weird and oh, yeah, he’s gay. I called him from my hotel room on my second day in town.

“Larry,” I asked, “how on earth did you manage?!”

“Well, we really never left the art department. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, it’s just… everyone is so nice. I feel like no one is going to express an opinion about anything, ever.”

“Did I mention we never left the art department?”

§

About an hour, maybe half an hour from the airport, the roads become lined with cornfields. The stalks were tall and green with gold tassels on top. I wanted to roll down the window and run my hands over them, they looked so soft and pretty.  Where it wasn’t corn, it was leafy soybean plants, slightly rolling fields, all lush monochromatic green. On one side of the road, there was a billboard showing a semi-truck with a single monster ear of corn on the extended trailer.

I remembered this while trying to teach my students how to write in details that help establish a sense of place. I told them about the drive from the airport.

“Oh, corn’s a big deal here. There’s a corn festival and everything. With a corn queen.”

“Of course there’s a corn queen. What does she wear?”

“A yellow dress. It’s like a prom dress. There’s a king too.”

“Does he wear yellow?”

“No, he just wears a tuxedo.”

They continued to describe the corn festival to me, the great vats of butter for dipping your corn in, the parades. They were disappointed for me when I said I would not be in Indiana long enough to attend a corn festival.

I’ve never been able to read a room less than during this oddball discussion. I didn’t want to talk about the corn festival, I wanted to talk about how corn and its prevalence in the region were a descriptor for me, something that were I to write about Indiana, would establish it as different from my home in Seattle.

What would they notice about my town? The bearded hipsters? The salt air? The unfunny-to-them ironic humor of the secular west?

I have heard that in spoken Chinese, it’s all about the tone. If you pronounce a word incorrectly, the meaning can change completely. Here I was getting the tone wrong in English, my native language, with native English speakers.

§

I called my husband. “It’s strange,” I said. “Everyone’s really lovely, but I just feel like I can’t…”

“You know you’re in the Bible Belt, right?”

“I know, but I didn’t think it would feel so different.”

“You know how I say you’re not actually a typical American?” This from my European husband.

“Okay, okay. Point taken.”

§

I spent my entire time in Muncie feeling slightly askew. The local people I met were perfectly lovely, hospitable, charming, generous, and they really wanted me to enjoy their home — which I did. But the wholesome lack of edginess was disconcerting. I laughed too loud, swore too much, had too many opinions. No one told me this, it was entirely in my head, but I felt a good deal to the left of everyone I met, not just politically, but in every other way.

Six weeks after I was in Muncie, I boarded a flight for Mexico. While trying to find the domestic gate, I ended up in a badly lit hall full of hundreds — I do not exaggerate — of uniformed police officers. “This is odd,” I thought, and headed the other direction, unfazed. I continued to Chiapas where I rappelled into a giant hole in the ground, hiked into a waterfall, shared a room with a stranger, and wandered the streets of a Mexican town alone at night.

I was uncomfortable twice. Once, inside a cave when there was not enough oxygen. I literally could not breathe and afterwards, I had a headache. And then, a few days later, when I ate something that was off. Sure, the outdoors stuff was physically exhausting, the language barrier was tricky, and there was that mistaken 5 am trip to the central bus station in San Cristobal. But I was never “outside my comfort zone.”

When I travel, I expect to be challenged. I am completely prepared to make the noise of a chicken if I want eggs for breakfast, to ask directions of people with whom I don’t share a language, to use inconvenient plumbing, and eat unfamiliar food. I even expect a little gut trouble, which is a nuisance but unsurprising. “Outside my comfort zone” is my comfort zone.

That’s why Muncie was so inscrutable. It never occurred to me that something as basic as getting around in a one mile radius would be an issue. I didn’t think that there would be a language barrier created by what people were not saying. A nice Midwestern town, so inoffensive as to be used as the model for Middletown, the pinnacle of American normalcy, should not be outside this traveler’s comfort zone.

§

Because I had such a delightful time on my last night in Indiana, I was not ready to leave. What I wanted, more than anything, was to drive around this part of the United States and experience it like I’d experience any foreign place. I wanted to stop at farm stands and eat sugar cream pie and to go to places that had live music, where pretty blonde girls stood in line waiting for the bathroom and talking about whether or not it was okay to say the word “shit” because it is or isn’t in the bible. (Yes, that really happened.)

The middle of the United States is more foreign to me than any other country I’ve been to because I expect to feel like I am part of it, like I speak the language, like I know the culture. I realized there is much of my own nation that I do not understand.

When I’m in a place where I don’t know how things are supposed to work, I’m right at home. But it took a trip to the Midwest to take me outside my comfort zone. The people are so polite and I speak the language and there’s little on the menu that I don’t recognize and it was more of an adventure than stepping backwards off a ledge in a harness with a Mexican guide.

If the mark of exceptional travel experiences is that it takes us outside of our comfort zone, than I don’t need a passport or a phrase book or a plane ticket. I’ve got everything I need right here in the United States.