Notes from a Last Man Barrett Swanson (bio) It was a belated wedding present. Early last January my wife and I were offered the chance to spend three months in Fort Lauderdale, a touristic city on Florida's southeastern edge, one that in the 1950s served as the nativity scene for the American Spring Break. Around that time, her grandfather bought an apartment four blocks from the ocean, and her family has been vacationing there ever since. The building is a squat midcentury complex with a stucco-white exterior, and in the shared courtyard out back there is a kidney-shaped pool cordoned off from onlookers with a hem of clacking palm trees. Most of the amenities inside the apartment haven't been updated since the Kennedy administration. There are turquoise couches and sun-faded curtains, terrazzo floors and senile kitchen appliances. My wife's grandfather would let us stay there in balmy reprieve from the bleak winter months of Wisconsin, where we'd been living for the past five years. Since both of us were teaching online that semester and thus had no fixed geographical commitments, we decided the trip might have a salutary effect and embarked on the cross-country trek at dawn on New Year's Day. I suppose the date carried some symbolic importance, a version of that old chestnut: a new year, a new you. Perhaps the tropical climate would render us porous to sunny influences and slacken our sense of self. Over the next forty-eight hours, we watched the tundra of the Midwest gradually defrost into the profligate greenery of Kentucky, noting the steady accretion of drawl among gas station attendants anytime we stopped to fuel up. Doing our best to scrimp, we spent our nights in budget motels with glowing marquees that whirred electrically near the roadside, advertising their amenities with an oddly poetic phrase: king beds openvacant hbo After two days, we finally crossed the Florida state line, entering a corridor of sugarcane and everglades where we were made to endure an endless parade of weather-battered billboards, signs that spoke of surf shops and alligator wrestling, but the promises seemed dubious with their bubbled fluorescent fonts. Somewhere south of Gainesville, we came across a billboard that offered a mortal riddle: texting while driving kills. for more driving tips text 'safety' to 79171. We reached the ocean by nightfall. The sky was rinsed with sherbet colors, the edges of distant clouds rimmed with a vulgar pink. I suppose I thought I'd feel relieved, that confronting the edge of the country might offer a bolt of fresh [End Page 72] enlightenment, some timely mitigation of mood. But I was worried because we had just crossed the entire continent and I didn't feel a thing. We parked along the boardwalk and piled out of the car, with chip wrappers and empty soda cans spilling from the open doors, to which we pretended to give chase. The shoreline was dimpled and forlorn, and as we watched the silver mulch of crashing waves, the moment soon acquired the breathy impressionism of a Terrence Malick film. For a few minutes, I gazed contemplatively at the horizon and felt my wife turn to me, her expression bright with anticipation. "How do you feel?" she said. "Good," I said. She raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. "Really good." ________ We needed a break from the Midwest. That was our public reason. Whenever friends or family members asked about our abrupt change of plans, we responded with stock answers, a litany of complaints—Wisconsin was too cold; we felt too isolated in our insular college town; plus, we hadn't taken a vacation in years. You have to understand that this kind of preemptive apology is necessary in the Midwest, where the dominant aesthetic is utilitarian, where suffering often takes on a Schopenhauerian inevitability. There, even the slightest indulgence will be interrogated if it's left unexplained. We were, in fact, due for a holiday. For the last five years I had been teaching English at a small Midwestern college, grading stacks of student papers riddled with bad logic and woeful syntax. On campus, I...
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Jan 1, 2019
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