Grinnell

We were having a conversation about the precise definition of “hipster” at the cross country table the other day, and I started to make the point that, by definition, no one at Grinnell was really a hipster, since what could be less hipstery than living in the middle of Iowa? But I cut that idea off mid-sentence when I realized that going to Grinnell might just be the most hipstery thing one can do. I’m sure students at other schools ask each other “So why did you decide to come here?” but I really doubt that anyone but Grinnellians say it as “So why did you decide to come here?” As if they’d made it to the pearly gates, been offered a prime spot in heaven by St. Peter, and said, “Nah, I think hell is a better fit for me, you know?”

And Grinnell matches my idea of hell a little better than I’d like to admit. It has nearly the same bitter cold of Minnesota without the picturesque snow, and the wind gets vicious once you get outside of town. Sometimes everything smells like manure for days on end. The train cutting through campus is pretty cool, I guess, until you hear the wheels grinding and the whistle blowing outside your dorm at three in the morning. And, even if everything in Grinnell were absolutely perfect, you can’t deny that there really isn’t all that much to it. From three years as a cross country runner, I know all too well that you can’t go more than ten minutes in any direction before you’re looking at an endless straight road with rows of corn on either side.

So yes, Grinnell totally seems like the kind of place that a hard-core hipster would go to college ironically. But I think the connection between Grinnell and hipsters is wrong, because every supposedly sarcastic enjoyment that defines that outdated cliché is ultimately shallow: no one gets unnecessary surgery for ironic enjoyment or joins a cult because religious deviance isn’t mainstream. No one can live four years in a place that they really hate, and I think, under all that sarcasm, everyone here really finds something meaningful about living in this tiny, smelly, rusting town.

I thought I had a non-ironic reason for going to Grinnell when I came here. At that time I had about as many theories about how the world works as you’d expect from a nineteen-year-old aspiring writer, and none of which were particularly accurate. I’d read The Great Gatsby the year before, claimed to love it because it’s the sort of book that an aspiring writer is supposed to love, and found a common thread through the text (or, actually, through my mom’s old notes in the margins) that portrayed New York as an ethically blighted place, while the Midwest still held some sort of moral purity. Being a guy from Minnesota and Texas, I’d take any snobbery over the coastal states that I could get, but I took an extra strong hold on that theory when every East Coast school I applied to turned me down. Since the Midwest was the only place left to go, I doubled down and went to the most Midwestern school I could think of in hopes that I was making it seem like some kind of big plan.

The town and school were charming at first, but it was charming in the way that a joke is funny: spend long having it repeated over and over and over again, and any enjoyment you used to get from it drains away. Living my life on the one square mile patch of campus got old quick, and before long I’d seen all I thought there was to see in the rest of the town from wandering aimless running and wandering. Within my first few months, I’m pretty sure I had gone down every street the town had to offer, and couldn’t find very much worth looking at in any of it.

There was never a single moment when some light switched on in my head and Grinnell started looking brighter. But, even if I don’t know why or how, it looked brighter all the same. The way the rooms inside a house seem to expand once you’ve lived in them for a while, little scraps of the town that I hadn’t noticed before emerged from the blurred landscape. In the second semester of my first year I discovered a tiny game store in the basement of a law firm. A little while later I found out that a building I’d taken as just another old house was actually the Grinnell History Museum. Not everything I discovered was quite so positive: despite all the clean, new, college subsidized buildings, it doesn’t take much searching to find real poverty in Grinnell. In a town this small, you can’t shuffle it off into another neighborhood.

Yesterday, my art history class took a minor field trip to the town bank. I’d noticed the unusually elaborate front facade before, but until then I’d never really paid much attention to it or even acknowledge its beauty. Smooth, vegetal patterns weave together into the town’s logo of interlocking squares, centering on a green-yellow stained glass window that makes the shades of corn into a celestial glow. It was designed by Louis Sullivan, the first architect who tried to make skyscrapers into something of unique aesthetic virtue. After his style went out of fashion in the big cities he bummed around small towns for the rest of his life, making little jewel box banks like these. I wonder if he pretended like he was retreating from the corrupt costal elites into the land of unspoiled virtue. I wonder if he thought of himself as something of a hipster.

Whatever his story was, I’m glad he came here, and I’m glad I did too. Maybe if I’d gone to school in New York or Chicago I could’ve found pieces of art and history around every corner. But I’d probably never have had the time to pay them any attention. After all, it took me three years to give Grinnell its due.