Dreaming back the years
The American novelist Laird Hunt finds himself hallucinating in an MRI machine. He has visions of football, Nebraska, and spent political possibilities
Forgive a man in his mid-fifties, stuck in an MRI tube, his recourse into nostalgia. I was in there hoping to get answers to questions lately posed by a knee badly damaged while playing American football long ago. The MRI machine roared and jackhammered every bit as loudly as I’d been told it would, but the tube was open at the bottom and if I lifted my head a little I could see out the window to an ash tree with leaves the shade of my high-school jersey’s green. I liked wearing that jersey. I even did a few noteworthy things in it – for all I played exactly one game my senior year before the crutches came for me. The Indianapolis surgeon who did the demo and rebuild said I’d be lucky not to walk without some limp for the rest of my life and would probably need follow-up surgery in a decade or so. We’re coming up on 40, mostly limp-free years since he said that, so I suppose it was due.
We had a terrible team. Matter of fact, before a retroactive forfeit by a school we’d lost badly to handed us a win, we were in the running for the longest active losing streak in the state, which made me an okay player on an awful team. A depressing reality that didn’t stop me, during last summer’s Democratic National Convention, from experiencing something like an out of body experience when members of the 1999 State Championship Winning, the Mankato West Scarlets, who were coached by Governor Tim Walz — fist-pumped their way out onto the stage.
Likely I wasn’t the only member of the ex-athlete club feeling like he’d been plopped down amongst the champions, in the midst of Walz’s campaign trail, to join in the celebratory whooping and grinning and lumbering around. Good buddy of mine used that term, lumbering, not too long ago when he saw me huffing down the path on Black Stone Boulevard here in Providence, Rhode Island, where the locals jam in their earbuds and go out evenings and on the weekend to sweat. Lumbering is most certainly what I do in the dreams I still have of being called, much older as I am, back to the gridiron in my own ill-fitting jersey to try for one more touchdown, and it is most definitely what I would do, I thought there in the MRI tube in a burst of euphoric certainty — cue the iconic ‘O Captain! my Captain!’ scene in Dead Poet’s Society — if Coach Walz called on me tomorrow to suit up outside a dream.
I was saved from possibly announcing this aloud and alarming the technicians monitoring my state of mind in the next room by the reemergence, as the machine got ready for another cycle of the classical music being piped through the magnet proof noise-cancelling headphones I’d been given to protect my ears. I want to say the bright tangle of notes that came through during that beat of quiet was Scarlatti, but it was broken so quickly to bits by the resurgent hammering that I wouldn’t swear on it. What I am sure of is that the sample’s modest size, combined with the intricacy of its arrangement and my thoughts of gridirons of yore, brought to mind the non-urban Midwest of my youth, a multi-state region whose tiny towns, woods, ponds, gravel pits, prairies and corn fields fired the imaginations of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of Little House on the Prairie, Jessamyn West the Quaker novelist, the man of letters William Maxwell Jnr. and Willa Cather.
The Midwest: ‘Oh, you mean where they all hate women?’/ ‘Oh, you mean where everybody’s addicted to Oxycontin?’/ ‘Oh, you mean where everyone’s got a gun and talks funny like Frances McDormand in Fargo?’ etc). The coastal condescension of my country I had no doubt whatsoever would bear (and oh it did) on the outcome of the election and the fate of the Little-Free-Library-loving Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz.
As the exam entered its final phase with a reassuringly midwestern word from one of the technicians (‘We still doing okay in there?’) and what was possibly a blip of Brahms, I was able to turn to past-present palimpsests of brighter note. In particular, the inspiring efforts of an Indiana poet named Kevin McKelvey, who, influenced by Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, has for some years now worked to preserve the prairie peninsula that once flourished throughout the central part of the state where he and I both attended school. McKelvey’s search for what’s left of what has been largely lost takes him to cemeteries and railroad lines, including to a stretch of track that runs one mile north of the green-roofed farm house where I was largely raised and, a little farther along, one mile south of the field where I once put on pads and helmet and galloped (not lumbered) across the playing field. In a gesture worthy of a Willa Cather character — maybe Godfrey St. Peter in her great novel of Michigan and New Mexico, The Professor’s House — McKelvey’s quite literal grass roots pursuit led him some years ago to plant a miniature prairie where his grandmother’s now burned-down farm house once stood.
This is how he described it to me: ‘I laid out the walls with little bluestem and bottlebrush grass, and the doors are marked with different sedges like wood or palm. I marked the fire areas with royal catchfly, cardinal flower, and columbine. For the porches, I used milkweeds and Joe Pye weed. I tried to plant the rooms in the same color, so I have a couple different kinds of coreopsis, a few different goldenrods, plus bergamot, rattlesnake master, blue vervain, and over forty more.’
My own grandmother, a former Latin teacher of fiery mind and diminutive stature, reposes now under a stone bench inscribed with ‘Carpe Diem’ in a small cemetery bordered by day lilies and surrounded by corn and soy-bean fields not far from the farm, which is not far from McKelvey’s prairie, on which she was born. Interestingly, both my grandmother’s farm and McKelvey’s are located just a few miles away from the old Dunham House on the outskirts of nearby Kempton, where ancestors of Barack Obama once lived. Since it was made locally famous by its connection to the 44th president, that homestead, which stands on land long home to the Miami peoples, has seemed to me the perfect symbol of a region where understated surfaces mask uncommon depths. Not least because Tim Walz wasn’t the only vice-presidential candidate this cycle to come from the Midwest, it might not be a bad idea going forward to better engage with its varied complexities in our books, shows, memes and films. Bach was playing when the machine went quiet and the MRI bed began sliding backward, and I was sorry to have to relinquish my headphones. ‘That it?’ I asked. ‘We did awesome,’ the technician replied.
Laird Hunt’s novels include Neverhome and Zorrie, a finalist for the National Book Award. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow in fiction, his most recent book is Float Up, Sing Down, a collection of stories set across a single day in Indiana, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.