* * *
Late in our first Indianapolis year, Sarah and I became friends with our neighbors Marina and Chris Waters. Chris was a former Peace Corps volunteer, and Marina a human rights lawyer. Like us, they’d just gotten married, and like us, they were living in their first home.
But unlike us, Chris and Marina loved Indianapolis. We’d often go to lunch together at Smee’s, a little family-owned restaurant in one of the 86th and Ditch mini-malls, and I would complain about lawn care and the lack of sidewalks. Once, Chris said to me, “You know this is one of the most economically and racially diverse zip codes in the United States?”
And I said, “What?”
And he said, “It is. You can google it.”
So I did google it, and he was right. The median home price near 86th and Ditch is $237,000, but there are also million-dollar houses and $700-a-month apartments. At that corner, there are Thai and Chinese and Greek and Mexican restaurants, all independently owned. There’s a bookstore, a fair-trade gift shop, two pharmacies, a bank, a Salvation Army, and a liquor store named after the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition.
Yes, the architecture is an unmitigated nightmare, but the people of Indianapolis have gone and made something beautiful anyway. Sit outside of Smee’s for an afternoon and you’ll hear English and Spanish, Karin and Burmese, Russian and Italian. The problem was never 86th and Ditch, which turns out to be a great American intersection. The problem was me. And after Chris called my assumptions into question, I began to think differently about the city. I began to see it as a place where big moments in human lives take place. The climactic scenes in my two most recent novels, The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, both take place at the corner of 86th and Ditch. And I think what people like about those books is Indianapolis.
* * *
As with all the best sci-fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut was really good at seeing into the future. Way back in 1974, he wrote, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
That seems to me an even more important, and more daring, endeavor than it was forty-seven years ago. When people ask me why I live in Indianapolis when I could live anywhere, that’s what I want to tell them. I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. And you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after.
But home is also what you are building and maintaining today, and I feel rather lucky in the end to be making my home just off of Ditch Road.
I give Indianapolis four stars.
KENTUCKY BLUEGRASS
SOMETIMES I LIKE TO IMAGINE benevolent aliens visiting Earth. In my daydreams, these aliens are galactic anthropologists, seeking to understand the cultures, rituals, preoccupations, and divinities of various sentient species. They would conduct careful field research, observing us. They would ask open-ended, nonjudgmental questions, like “What, or whom, is in your view worthy of sacrifice?” and “What should be the collective goals of humanity?” I hope that these alien anthropologists would like us. We are, in spite of it all, a charismatic species.
In time, the aliens would come to understand almost everything about us—our ceaseless yearning, our habit of wandering, how we love the feeling of the sun’s light on our skin. At last, they would have only one question remaining: “We have noted that there is a green god that you keep in front of and behind your houses, and we have seen how you are devoted to the care of this ornamental plant god. You call it Kentucky bluegrass, although it is neither blue nor from Kentucky. Here is what we are wondering: Why do you worship this species? Why do you value it over all the other plants?”
Poa pratensis, as it is known to the scientific community, is ubiquitous the world over. Much of the time when you see a soft, green expanse of lawn, you’re looking at least in part at Kentucky bluegrass. The plant is native to Europe, northern Asia, and parts of North Africa, but according to the Invasive Species Compendium, it is now present on every continent, including Antarctica.
The typical shoot of Poa pratensis has three to four leaves, shaped like little canoes, and if left unmown, it can grow to three feet tall and sprout blue flower heads. But it is rarely left unmown, at least not in my neighborhood, where it is illegal to allow your grass to grow more than six inches long.
If you’ve ever driven through my home state of Indiana, you’ve seen mile after mile of cornfields. Amber waves of grain are enshrined in the song “America the Beautiful.” But more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio, or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer and pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.*
The word “lawn” didn’t even exist until the 1500s. Back then, “lawns” referred to expanses of grass shared by communities to feed grazing livestock, as opposed to “fields,” which denoted land used to grow plants for human consumption. But by the eighteenth century in England, ornamental lawns similar to the ones we know now had emerged—back then, lawns were maintained by handheld scythes and shears, and so keeping a lawn without the help of grazing animals was a sign you were rich enough to hire lots of gardeners, and also to own land that did nothing but look good.
The ornamental lawn fad spread throughout Europe, and also to the United States, where people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson maintained a closely mown lawn at Jefferson’s estate, Monticello.
Over time, the quality of lawns in a neighborhood began to be seen as a proxy for the quality of the neighborhood itself. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby pays for his gardeners to mow his neighbor’s lawn before Daisy Buchanan visits. Or, to cite an example closer to home, when I first moved to Indianapolis in 2007, I suddenly found myself the owner of a lawn, which I struggled mightily to maintain. Although we lived on only a third of an acre, it took my little electric lawn mower and me two hours to cut all the grass. One Sunday afternoon, my next-door neighbor interrupted me mid-mow and offered me a beer. As we stood in my half-mown yard, he said, “You know, when the Kaufmanns lived here, this was the nicest lawn in the neighborhood.”
“Well,” I answered after a while, “the Kaufmanns don’t live here anymore.”
It is truly staggering how much of our shared resources we devote to Kentucky bluegrass and its cousins. To minimize weeds and make our lawns as thickly monocultured as possible, Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields. To keep all the lawns in the U.S. green year-round requires, according to a NASA study, around two hundred gallons of water per person per day, and almost all of the water shooting from sprinklers is treated drinking water. Grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills. And then there is the direct financial outlay: We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on lawn maintenance.