My earliest memories all take place in the country. Our family lived in a mobile home on a rural county road in Ohio, TR-15, surrounded in every direction by flat farmland. During the day, the only sounds were the occasional passing car, and on summer nights the vast sky was freckled with stars and the shimmering pulse of fireflies. Everything, at least in my memory, smelled like dirt and grass.



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We had only a handful of neighbors; at the nearest intersection sat a United Methodist church, the closest thing to a business for miles. Our small plot of land was purchased, with help from my grandparents, after my mother and father were evicted from a trailer park for refusing to pay rent (they were, I have since learned, protesting against the management company for not paving the roads). My mother sold cosmetics for Mary Kay, among other odd jobs. My father, a passionate young socialist with literary ambitions, worked at a bottling factory and delivered pizzas, writing angry letters to the local papers in his free time expressing his outrage at Reagan and Bush and members of what he called “the elite class making America’s decisions”.

We were by any standard very poor, but so was everyone around us, which is to say that I never thought about our poverty as something that needed to be explained. My sister and I spent most of our time outside, running around or swimming in a nearby pond, and on the nights my father didn’t work second-shift, we could sometimes gather as a family in front of an old box television. We drank well water that stunk of sulfur, and the only meals I can remember eating are pizza, macaroni and cheese, and bologna sandwiches. This was our world; aside from a few road trips, we rarely left that corner of Ohio.

Of course, such simplicity only lasted for so long. Like my father, and perhaps because of him, I grew up restless and political. I became critical of the conservatism that seemed to define much of the area, and stopped recognizing my place within the midwest’s simple, humdrum ethos.

After my father’s death in 2007, I moved to New York City with the vague and idealistic goal of “becoming a writer”, embracing the image of the cultured intellectual as proof that I had transcended by rural upbringing. I had crossed that invisible divide between rural white trash and urban bourgeois elite.

Things, I quickly learned, were not so simple. It might sound strange that I would find in my rural upbringing a source of shame, but as I navigated the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, I was reminded of how impoverished the “middle of nowhere” often is. There are no art museums, at least not where I grew up, no places to see live music, nowhere even to get coffee that isn’t a fast food chain or a gas station. You can drive to cities like Toledo or Columbus and find these things, of course, but this assumes that you own a car that works properly, that you have the time to take off work, that you have the money necessary to afford any of this. It assumes, perhaps most importantly, that you were ever taught to care about art, or artisanal coffee and exotic foods, or entertainment outside of alcohol and local sports.

As I write this, I am torn between acknowledging such disparity and wanting somehow to defend it, just as I was then. Those around me typically dismissed rural America, and as often happened during the recent election, openly mocked it. “You’re from Ohio?” they’d say with a smirk, and then add, in some variation: “I flew over Ohio once.” I’d get questions about racism, about hunting, about corn. As though anyone should be surprised that lacking access to things like liberal education and the arts might produce, over many generations, a population of individuals who see the world quite differently. As though this were something not to change or understand, but simply reduce to a punchline.

I remember one night, not long before I moved away in 2010, passing a bar in my neighborhood advertising “Ohio night”, where anyone from Ohio was encouraged to come and celebrate. Despite how much this bothered me, it felt oddly appropriate. For those of us from Ohio, it was a place where one could perhaps reminisce and complain; we could talk about our racist relatives, whose views we find deplorable but whose love we nevertheless appreciate; we could talk about eating deer meat at family gatherings, about driving around the country in the twilight to get high in the back seat of a friend’s car.

For everyone else, it was something kitschy and marketable, a vaguely exotic thing to quickly forget.

Much has been written about the rural/urban divide in the last year, with any number of political pundits parading it about as an explanation for the popularity of figures like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. I have spent the last decade between big cities like Chicago, where I live now, and the smaller towns and suburbs of Ohio where most of my family still lives, and I can say that this divide is real and powerful.

I am torn between these two ways of life, always at once repelled by the poverty of my home and drawn back by its promise of comfort. This division is not one of class, although class plays a crucial role. It is a division primarily of culture, and for this reason it is easy to use as an indicator of who one is, as a shorthand for who one might become. It is also, for this reason, a problematic division, for it overlooks inequality and the conditions that cause real suffering.

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Returning home, recently, I drove past our old mobile home, which still sits on the same plot of land. It is dilapidated now, the land around it cluttered with old cars and heaps of what I can describe as junk. I have often wondered who lives there, who sleeps in the room I once did. Who did they vote for? Were they Trump supporters, as the stereotype might suggest? Or did they, like my mother, recognize him as an elitist, chauvinistic politician? What do they do, as a family, in the yawning summer heat? I will probably never know them, and even if I did I might have nothing to say. I might not, now that I have been away for so long, be able to bridge that divide.

And yet, even though the flat horizon behind that mobile home does not belong to me any more than it belongs to them, this is my home. This is where I grew up. So, maybe that’s all I would need to say to them: I lived here once.