I have spent my entire life in northern Indiana. I think I have expressed that several times before on this website. The larger area of South Bend, Mishawaka, Elkhart, Dunlap, and Goshen makes up my locality. For a lot of people, I doubt much would be of any significance about a place like this, or for it to be at all differentiable from the spattering of similar regions spread throughout middle-America.

It might just be raw familiarity which attracts me to it, but that seems contested by what exactly interests me about this place. It's not so much the square, barren soy fields in the middle of February, wind blowing parallel with the land, lacking curvature; it's more the ability to look at this banality and place some hard interpretations of its meaning just like I've done. I don't have to understand it that way. It can just be a soy field.

The landscape is just what it is except for being interacted with by a brutalizing industriousness: RV factories, web-like highways, pseudo-urban sprawls, desolate condominiums and presumptuous apartment complexes. All together is a ghastly, fungal skyline, contorted steel grabbed by weeds and crabgrass and pulled into the earth, showing in the landscape what is hidden, but implicitly recognized in the stacks of motels on Cassopolis Street or another storage unit just off the interstate. There is a hoarded, discrete, internalized ill.

I don't even dislike this place.