Where the Wind Dreams of Staying by Dieterle Eric;

Author:Dieterle, Eric; [Dieterle, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oregon State University Press

Peninsula

OF ALL THE REACTIONS TO MY NEWS, delivered in the hallways, offices, and cubicles of the corporate office, one stood out as the most common.

“You’re doing what?” he asked with the quizzical look I’d been getting all day.

“Going back to school,” I said. “I just know that I need to write, and the best thing I can think of is to go to grad school. Become a master of the craft. I want to know what it’s like to dedicate all my attention to writing.”

I’d rehearsed those lines, or something like them, revising as I spoke them to new audiences.

“I really admire you,” he said. “That takes a lot of courage. I wish I had the nerve to try something like that.”

I smiled and thanked him. A glow of satisfaction and confidence lasted about five seconds. Then I considered the backstory. Inspired by successful therapy—for my doctor had declared it so—I meditated, contemplated, maybe even prayed, and a destination emerged from the noisy scrum of possibilities.

Lucidity? Enlightenment? Delusion?

No. Just Iowa.

My research had consisted of reading that Jane Smiley worked in the English department at Iowa State University. I hadn’t read any of her work but she seemed famous. And I visited campus once. On a corporate trip to Denison, birthplace of fifties TV mom Donna Reed, I took a day to drive due east on Highway 30 to visit one of my sisters, who lived in Ames. While there, I passed through the campus.

The vast lawn of central campus, bordered by tall pines and heritage oaks, adjacent to small but compelling Lake Laverne, captured my imagination the way it has captivated prospective students for decades. The place was beautiful. “This,” I said to myself, “is a university campus.” I felt so with all deference to Pullman, with its hills and trees, an alpine island in the wheat fields, with the Moscow Mountains to the east. I had feasted visually on the Washington State campus for five years and always felt at home there. But something about Iowa State’s open layout, the rolling park of central campus, the old architecture mixed with new—the sense of ease engendered by a landscape that did not feel flat but instead spacious—brought me peace. The moment gently nestled into my being.

Now I was drawn back to that pleasant memory. A move to the center motivated by my need to be centered. Untangling the snag of my life—a rat’s nest of five-pound test filament sprawling out of a flip-bail fishing reel—would be as simple as snipping the line and starting over with what was left on the spool. I quit my corporate job, we sold our five-year-old house, and we headed to the Midwest. I had not the slightest concept of what I would write about, or in what genre, or to what end. Remarkably, I was supported in this venture. Conditionally.

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