40 parting thoughts from the Midwest
Observations from seven weeks in America's heartland
This fall, I spent 50 days journeying through small towns and rural areas in the Midwest, talking to strangers everywhere I went. You can read my write-ups of Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa here.
So what did I see and learn? This is my attempt to sum it all up. Here we go:
1. The Rust Belt is a distinct archetype
I didn’t realize just how different the Midwest’s peaceful farming towns are from its hollowed-out erstwhile manufacturing hubs.
Within minutes of strolling the starkly decayed downtowns of Youngstown and Duluth, I sensed sadness. Vacant surface lots strewn with debris; skyscrapers that are shells of themselves; gas stations and parking garages lost to entropy. In lieu of nostalgia — which would feel naïve — an unsettling aimlessness prevails. It’s heavy to bear witness to, and the locals have developed unceremonious grit in response.
The agricultural communities with three-digit populations in Iowa and Nebraska are merely sleepy. Sure, the businesses lining their dormant main streets close at random hours and their consolidated school district fields an eight-man football team. But they aren’t visibly marked by devastation; most were never large to begin with. Residents are generally content with their lot in life. The undercurrent of resentment is fainter. That’s why it’s not surprising that…
2. Most teenagers don’t plan to leave the small farming towns.
These places feel languid, in stasis. Simple math (more deaths than births) means they’re gradually graying. Yet I didn’t sense a worry that things had gone awry; in fact, it was by passing through these communities that I accessed an emotion at the core of conservatism: why would I change anything?
These towns have good land, good people, and good local institutions. They’ve fully adapted to their lifestyle. Why change? Accordingly, when I asked locals about this year’s high school graduating class, most had confidence that few would permanently leave the area. A twentysomething might explore a regional city for a couple years, but they’ll more likely than not end up back at home, raising a family. Yes, there’s “brain drain,” but that phrase connotes a lifeblood-sucking outflow of people, which just isn’t the reality. It may be true that most four-year degree holders end up leaving, but when nine out of 10 adults don’t have four-year degrees, that doesn’t mean much.
3. Bars are still king…
The rural Midwestern bar is less a bar the way I previously understood it and more like a community center that happens to serve alcohol.
Going into the trip, I’d readied myself for bars, knowing they’d be the only option for conversation in many of the remote areas I planned to visit. But I didn’t fully appreciate how different a social dynamic they produce from what I’ve seen in big cities.
As great as bingo and fish fries are, they don’t happen every day. The bar is where you can go any evening, weeknight or weekend, summer or winter, and expect to find someone you recognize. There’s something really reassuring about that. You don’t have to plan your visit or coordinate with friends. You don’t care about making an impression, because everybody already knows you. You simply show up and enjoy the company.
That the bars serve as de facto community centers yields all sorts of positive knock-on effects. The biggest is that there’s no constant pressure to consume — many patrons would arrive, buy one bottle, then close out and stay for hours.
4. …but you don’t have to drink.
I’ve never sipped alcohol in my life. Crossing the Wisconsin border, I’d mentally prepared myself to take shit from the locals for not partaking in their sacred tradition, but the blowback never materialized. Bartenders were unfazed by the query I memorized: “what kind of pop do you have?” I never saw any side-eye while I sipped on my cans of root beer and Fanta. In fact, many locals confided their admiration of my abstention, having seen the ugliness of addiction up close.
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. If you ran a community center, would you force people to buy beverages? Can you get kicked out of a public library for not reading enough books?
5. I never got carded.
For the rural folk reading this: lots of urban bars place stonefaced bouncers, intimidating and prone to power trips, at their entrances. In fashionable districts, they may even arbitrarily control the flow of people inside to manage their image. It lends these places a distinctly unwelcoming vibe.
Not only was I not ID’d at the doors of any of the 40 bars I visited, I actively offered to show my ID once when I sat at the bar to eat, thinking it’d be common courtesy, and the bartender waved me off.
This again makes sense by reframing the rural Midwestern bar as a community center. Your first instinct upon seeing someone arrive at a bingo hall wouldn’t be to scrutinize — it’d be to get them set up and give them a warm welcome.
6. You don’t have to force yourself into conversations.
This was a very foreign concept, and so refreshing. Go to a public place in Boston by yourself, and even if you’re fully present, you could go hours without someone engaging you.
In large cities, the onus is increasingly on individuals to initiate conversation. That’s a feeling lots of people are inexperienced with, and understandably so; for years, structured activities (high school, team sports, college clubs) organically brought conversation to them. Showing up is far more important than sticking your neck out once you’re there. Now, all of a sudden, interactions require calculation. You need to consciously make a move when you’re out, lest you blend into the background.
Not in the rural Midwest, where all you have to do is make eye contact and put your phone away. Occasional interjections into a conversation are more than enough to break the ice. At one Nebraskan bar, I went the first 20 minutes without talking before a guy started showing everyone an embarrassing image of another patron. Once I got shown the photo, I was in! Soon, he’d walked me down the block to give me an impromptu tour of his manufacturing shop.
As a staunch defender of New Englanders’ kindness, I don’t believe Boston’s more atomized public spaces result from hostility, but from a mixture of apathy and busyness. In a city filled with transplants, the average person has less of a subconscious urge to regard their seat neighbor as a fellow community member. What’s more, most people going out in the city do so with friends,1 and no one wants an occasion disrupted. And there’s less loitering; soon, they’ll be off to the next trendy boutique, French bakery, or stop on their bar crawl.
Toward the trip’s end, I grew extremely relaxed even in the most unfamiliar barrooms. Why? I was just so certain that conversation would come to me.
7. Midwesterners are remarkably earnest.
The Midwesterners I met are kind not because they feel they have to be, nor because they care about appearing that way, but because that’s just how they are. As the trip rolled on, I settled on “earnest” as the most accurate descriptor of the people I kept encountering. Nowhere I’ve been better embodies “come as you are.”
The famous Midwestern conflict avoidance feels real, and I think it’s more generously phrased as a pervasive take-it-or-leave-it attitude. If you don’t like my personality, that’s fine — I won’t make a scene out of things, and neither should you. This aligns closely with the worldview I’ve embraced since starting the strangers project, so I found myself sympathetic.
I think everyone has the capacity to be as earnest as the Midwesterners I met. Sometimes, distractions like networking culture or social media’s influence hinder earnestness; in other cases, I think it stems from a lack of trust. The people I met trusted me to respond in kind with earnestness of their own; I felt honored to be given the benefit of the doubt. The Midwest is where pretentiousness goes to die.
8. Ohio State-Michigan is the most acrimonious Midwestern rivalry.
I detected bits of anti-Iowa sentiment in Nebraska, but it’s really not close.
9. Businesses are genuinely thankful for your patronage.
As someone who tries to be very purposeful about expressing gratitude, this touched me. At more than half of the places I went, I heard some variation of “I can’t believe you’re here! I’m gonna dredge up old pictures for you, tell you all our town’s lore, and give you free samples!” I’ve never felt so valued as a customer in my life.
While performing the notoriously lengthy Midwestern goodbye, I was invariably struck by the appreciation business owners showed me. I was told — earnestly, of course — to come back and bring friends and family, that I’d never be a stranger there again. These exclamations came from the heart.
Again, the city is another story. And I get it. If you’re a service-sector employee working merely to survive, with little emotional attachment to your workplace, and the neighborhood you’re in might end up a way station in your life, and it matters little if a specific person drops by because 100 others will anyway, is it really fair to expect you to feel that same visceral affection for your customers?
10. Outside of Wisconsin, there is a frozen cheese curd monopoly.
If you order clam chowder in New England, it’s a near-certainty your chowder will come with a bag of Westminster oyster crackers. They’ve cornered the market so effectively that thickening your chowder with any other brand’s crackers feels incorrect.
Remember that fried cheese curds are unobtainable where I’m from. So when I saw them on a bar menu in Michigan, I got greedy. I received golden-brown cubes with a semi-sweet batter and smooth cheese inside. They tasted fine, and I didn’t think much of it. But a few days later the scenario repeated itself; same weirdly square curds, same taste. Investigative reporting revealed that Water’s Edge, a Wisconsin-based company, appears to have a chokehold on the wholesale cheese curd market, and finding freshly fried curds beyond the Badger State is a tall task. Lesson learned.
11. Midwesterners know how to make pie crust.
New Englanders generally don’t. It tends to be bland, dry, not worth filling a stomach with. The Midwestern pie crusts had actual flavor and no unpleasant bready taste.
It’s a subtle thing (I’m certainly no pie crust aficionado), but I found it notable that I wasn’t throwing the crusts out.
12. Football breaks the ice.
It’s easy to find numbers showing how much bigger football is than any other sport. The Super Bowl averages 100 million viewers; clinching NBA Finals, World Series, and Stanley Cup contests are lucky to garner even a fifth of that. But I didn’t fully appreciate this cultural dominance until, in mid-Michigan, I took a seat next to two septuagenarian ladies gossiping about their fantasy football teams, or when I listened in amusement as a Mahoning Valley top 40 station abruptly cut its music to switch over to the high school pregame show. Whether you’re young and tough or old and frail, you can talk football. Obviously, not everyone follows players with a statistician’s devotion, but even casual fans are emotionally invested across the board.
I made banter in western Ohio by asking about the distribution of Browns and Bengals fans; at a Quad Cities Oktoberfest, I spotted a University of Iowa cap and sparked a conversation that ended up barely touching on the Hawkeyes. Almost everyone over 60 has a nephew or grandson involved in Pee Wee or high school football, so asking about how their kid is doing usually proves fruitful.
Coming from a place with a transplant majority, this was striking: back home, it feels increasingly like there’s no monocultural thread we can latch onto. How does this affect conversations? People continually reach for lowest-common-denominator topics like weather, people’s jobs, or how you ended up in Boston. These conversational crutches produce banal, easily forgettable interactions.
13. In Ohio and southern Michigan, a convenience store selling alcohol is a party store.
I liked this, as it added a dash of whimsy to the roadsides. I regret not going inside one and asking about the term.
14. Midwestern bars feature much more gambling than their New England counterparts.
Between cash drawings, slot machines, Yahtzee-like games, and pull tabs, it feels like a majority of people who go to a bar in the rural Midwest will gamble that night.2
Cash drawings are what they sound like. You pay a nominal fee to enter for a chance to win a weekly jackpot, usually around $1,000. If your name is drawn, you must be physically present at the bar to claim your prize (therefore incentivizing weeknight attendance). I witnessed cash drawings on successive nights in southwestern Wisconsin, and it was pretty clear some people had shown up just for the result.
Casino-style slot machines are ubiquitous in these bars’ back corners, usually occupied by a few devoted players over the course of an evening.
Most places also have a Yahtzee-style cup and dice handy behind the bar. Sliding the bartender a dollar bill gets you three attempts to roll five-of-a-kind for either a modest cash prize or a free shot.
Pull tabs are scratch-off style tickets sold in bulk by machines.
15. Busch Light rules the roost.
I asked nearly every bartender I interacted with what their establishment’s most popular drink was. Busch Light was the unequivocal winner. This may be merely a rural phenomenon rather than a Midwestern one; at the single wealthy, suburban dive bar I went to,3 Tito’s vodka is all the rage.
16. In Iowa, top 40 radio stations include commodity market updates alongside the weather.
You’re never more than an hour from getting the latest on live cattle and Minneapolis wheat. Another fun quirk is that when the promos come on (“whether you’re at home or at work, Kiss 108 is Boston’s best hit music!”) they say “whether you’re in the field, at home, or at work…”
Subtle things like that hit different. I’d prepared myself for viewing vast cornfields and saying “pop,” but it was oddly satisfying to experience that little tweak that catches you off guard and makes you go “oh yeah, I am in Iowa right now.”
17. Midwestern culture is cohesive — regional differences emerge at the cultural-enclave level, not the state level…
This is why it’s hard to answer what my favorite state for conversations was. Across the Midwest, the personality traits and conversational styles didn’t vary much, that easygoing earnestness being detectable anywhere. However, many of the region’s small-scale cultural enclaves have extremely intact cultures evident in their food, religious practices, and labor heritage. Someone from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula would be a fish out of water in northwest Iowa.
18. …but the Midwestern accent is unevenly distributed.
Close your eyes while someone from Minnesota’s Iron Range talks, and you’d be forgiven for second-guessing whether they’re American. Their o sounds are so rounded, their r’s so nasal, their sentences so chipper and melodic you might spontaneously develop a craving for maple syrup.
In central Minnesota, Wisconsin, and mid-Michigan, the accents were obvious to my ear (people still said “baeg” instead of “bag”), but not eyebrow-raising.
Once I crossed into Nebraska, any trace of the long a sound had well and truly disappeared. Then, in Kansas, I started hearing the occasional drawl. It literally sounded like I was bumping up on the border with the South.
19. People show up to bars in their work clothes.
Frequently I chatted with men covered in dirt and dust, wearing their personal aprons from the shop they just got off their shift at. I felt positively dressed up if I wore pants, a collared shirt, and a belt.
20. Most resentment I detected was directed toward abstract notions, not specific people.
To the extent that rural Midwesterners feel wronged and forgotten, their emotions are generally not trained on the politicians you might suspect are loathed. Go out of your way to mention Nancy Pelosi and you’ll likely get some eye rolls, but “the government” and “the media” are much more common targets for ire.4
21. The amount of road work on highways is insane.
You can pretty much pencil in two or three fairly lengthy stretches of a 55 speed limit for every 90-minute drive. Is it really just all the 18-wheelers constantly damaging the roads?
22. Seniors were generally warmer and more open to conversation.
In somewhat of a reversal from my experiences in large cities, the gray-haired folks I met typically gave me more vigorous conversation. They were jollier, more animated, and likelier to appear at ease. Younger people tended to be a little stonefaced and guarded, not as ready to go off on a 20-minute tangent about their second cousin. One night in east-central Kansas, I ate at a bar a few stools away from three underage boys. We exchanged a few stiffly uttered sentences throughout our meals, and as they got up to leave, I suppressed my reflex to say goodbye out of curiosity to see if they would; they didn’t. In contrast, the older people always sent me off with firm handshakes and friendly admonitions to call my parents and drive safely.
A little speculation, if you’ll allow: perhaps the youth have much more media from the outside world to compare their existence to, or they feel directionless career-wise in a way the seniors don’t, but that being said…
23. The trades are alive and well.
Far from being antiquated and undesirable, work in the trades is reliable and well-regarded. Most people I met studying for a career in electrical work or automotive repair were excited to get started.
One welding billboard I saw advertised $40/hour starting wages. Demand for truckers is through the roof. Although automation has taken its toll on the amount of workers mines can hire, they’re still major sources of jobs. Foreman is among the most desirable titles any 27-year-old can have.
While I don’t expect the folks I met to build their identities around their careers, they do take pride in the type of honest, committed work that the trades incentivize. I didn’t see much “I’m a trucker and never want to be anything else but a trucker,” but I certainly saw “I’m a hard worker and trucking is where I display that.”
Because there will always be demand for plumbers and electricians, I suspect the trades’ prominence makes the tech-heavy urban world seem comparatively full of fads. The rural Midwest is hardly sold on electric vehicles; don’t even think about pitching AI.
24. Outsider status is far more dependent on language than appearance.
I went to numerous places where a supermajority of people are either German or Scandinavian. I am neither German nor Scandinavian, a fact obvious to anyone with working retinas. Yet I never got a suspicious “where are you from?” or “what are you doing here?” I suspect a big part of this is simply speaking unaccented American English.
This was really interesting, and made sense looking back; not being able to communicate feels like a bigger barrier than being unfamiliar with someone’s appearance. A few older women I met in central Minnesota, supportive of their new Somali neighbors, told me they think backlash against recent migration will subside once native English-speaking Somali kids become the norm.
25. Tavern pizza is the default.
If you order a pizza in the Midwest and it’s not specifically made in a distinct style, it will be tavern pizza. This paper-thin pie is sliced into miniature squares; toppings go all the way to the edge. It’s cute the first few times, but I found myself missing New York-style slices badly by the trip’s end.
26. Midwesterners talk up their cinnamon rolls, but they’re not mindblowing.
At numerous coffee shops and bakeries, both patrons and employees recommended I try a homemade cinnamon roll. But there always seemed to be something slightly off, like icing that was too cloying or outer layers that were a tad tough.5 Despite that, cinnamon rolls seem to be very popular, and in parts of the Midwest they also serve caramel rolls, which are cinnamon rolls dipped in caramel and sometimes served in a pool of caramel.6 A miscellaneous note: lots of places’ rolls are mega-sized, which I found a little offputting.
27. Public expression of religion more closely resembles the Northeast than the South.
In Mississippi, Bible study groups are impossible to avoid at coffee shops; you could learn a bunch of verses just by perusing Instagram bios; worship music plays in lunch spots; cashiers and receptionists end interactions with “have a blessed day.”
There’s no doubt most people in the Midwest are religious. But it’s nowhere near as in-your-face as the South. No one denomination dominates — there’s a relatively even split between Lutherans, Catholics, Methodists, and evangelicals. In the South, evangelicals — in particular, Southern Baptists — set the cultural tone, and religious expression is generally evaluated implicitly by how much it agrees or disagrees with Baptist thought. No such singular force exists in the Midwest.
Still, I saw many more overtly religious billboards and hand-painted signs than in New England (as you’d expect), their messages often intertwining religion with politics.
28. Store owners and employees are not only fair game for conversations, but useful resources.
I’ve conditioned myself to focus on making conversation with patrons, not workers. In large cities, chatting up a barista or hotel receptionist is nearly impossible. The flow of customers simply doesn’t ebb enough for a conversation to start and for the worker to have the mental energy for a chat. But in the rural Midwest, it’s a different story. Stroll into a clothing or hardware store, and whoever’s keeping the lights on is often more than happy to oblige, even if you have no interest in buying anything. On my initial walk through downtown Bay City, Michigan, I popped into an antique store and spent a half-hour absorbing insights about the area from the cashier. That’s when I realized I didn’t have to rely on the internet at all to find locals’ haunts; I could literally head inside any open establishment and start inquiring.
29. Three sets of rumble strips before a stop sign?
The rural roads are that long, that straight, that sleep-inducing. The first time they jarred my car, I thought I’d done something wrong — but nope, just gotta get ready for the stop.
30. The rock-country music popularity shift is in Michigan.
In Ohio, rock felt like the most popular music genre. But once I got to the Upper Peninsula — a much sparser region — country started to predominate. By the time I arrived in Minnesota and Wisconsin, I was firmly in country territory.
One radio jockey in Kansas introduced Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help” by proclaiming it “obviously” the song of the summer, which made me chuckle to myself. While it was indisputably a big hit, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan would probably come to mind first if you asked a Cambridge resident.
31. Willingness to talk is through the roof in the Midwest.
Everywhere I’ve been, people have been more willing to talk than I expected. But the Midwest was another level. I was essentially guaranteed a conversation with anyone I approached, as out of almost 300 people I can’t recall a single hard-and-fast “no.” Even people who were busy, which typically yields a polite refusal, lent me a few minutes and were genuinely apologetic about not being able to talk longer. I try to resist making a big deal out of anecdata, but it was remarkable.
32. Men get more drunk than women.
More than a few times, I watched with equal amounts of amusement and pity as wives reined their husbands in — one who emitted a jarringly loud bout of laughter after every sentence, another who’d consistently ignored entreaties to pack it up and head home. It certainly could’ve been worse (the only man I watched pass out was the owner of Royal Oaks in Youngstown).
33. Apple Maps gets the speed limit wrong a lot.
The standard rural road speed limit is 55. But every settlement, no matter how small, imposes a limit, some as low as 25 (yes, I’ve heard of speed traps, and I’m very proud that I went this entire trip without getting a ticket). Apple Maps often doesn’t recognize when you’ve departed the small town and continues to erroneously display the limit as 25. Occasionally, it showed no limit at all.
34. Sometimes, businesses that don’t serve Coke have Coke sponsor signs the way bars do.
I haven’t figured this one out yet.
35. Very few people enjoy talking about politics.
This may seem obvious, but if you were raised in an activist hotbed like me, it may be a change of pace. Around here, I often encounter people whose personalities are heavily molded by their politics. It goes well beyond the workplace; their strong convictions influence their friendships, free time (advocacy/volunteer work), and creative expression (art, writing, etc.).
My conversational strategy is to identify what someone enjoys talking about, then hone in on that. Quickly, it was clear politics wasn’t that thing for 99% of the Midwesterners I met. This makes sense to me. If you’re working a physically demanding job all day, your bandwidth to care about politics is limited. If you’re not used to thinking in academic or philosophical terms, like most non-liberal arts school graduates, lots of political discourse feels foreign.
36. Religious enclaves are a Rorschach test.
The most culturally conservative pockets of Michigan and Iowa reminded me of the Deep South — if I were to pack up and restart my life there, I’d need to adapt culturally to reap the full benefits of community. Many people from the cities would likely feel uncomfortable expressing every side of themselves, and I think the locals would acknowledge that. Do their communities do more to stifle individuality than they do to protect shared values? That’s for you to decide.
37. Agriculture is not just another field — it’s a world of its own.
A quarter of land. Bushels per acre. Kill weight. The language that farmers and those adjacent to them speak in was totally foreign to me. When I heard these terms thrown around, I figured quizzing friends from home about ag-related things would be like asking Bill Gates what the price of milk is. They simply wouldn’t have any intuition for it.
If you’re someone who didn’t grow up exposed to farming, let’s test your knowledge now. How much do you think this combine costs? (Answer is in the footnote.)7
38. Even without attending one, it’s easy to tell county fairs matter a lot.
Special highway signs point out county fairgrounds, and when I happened to drive by them I passed ginormous parking lots.
Fairs bring people together, and the aspect that’d be foreign to a New Englander is how every county has one — if I’d visited in August, I’d be attending fairs weekend after weekend, and that doesn’t even cover the state fairs. All the high schoolers who do 4-H or FFA8 have showings and presentations there, so it’s massive for them.
39. Culver’s is very good.
The hype is real. It’s above-average fast-food fare, plus Midwestern specialties (custard, pork loin) that I can understand the nostalgic love for, and a few randomly excellent items (that cod sandwich!). The restaurants, which all boast large and well-cleaned sit-down areas, are impressive, professional operations with efficiency resembling Chick-fil-A more than McDonald’s.
40. Outdoorsy activities are popular across age, gender, and geography.
It’s a lifestyle, not a hobby. If you told someone in Cambridge that you hunt or fish, they’d probably make some cultural assumptions about you. But that would be silly in the Midwest. Everyone either hunts themselves or has relatives who do — it feels completely uncorrelated with ideology or even cultural identity.
Of course it’s elk season now; of course your family’s on their annual hunting trip. The equivalent phenomenon in Cambridge is reading. Cambridge is such an erudite place that it’s assumed you’re reading something at all times; “what have you been reading?” is a very normal question to ask a stranger. Meanwhile, in the Midwest I met multiple people who rode their first ATVs at 6 years old. The takeaway: liking outdoorsy things tells you very little about a person there.
If you couldn’t tell, I really enjoyed my time in the Midwest. The people I met deeply touched and inspired me. If you’re one of those people, thank you again for your incredible kindness and hospitality! I think there are some very hard-hitting, timely lessons we can all learn from Midwestern culture. I promise I’ll be back!
In my opinion, this is a consequence of urban public spaces being increasingly designed for occasions, as opposed to being places you can go four times a week.
I left unsure if the gambling is a consequence of people staying at bars longer, or the cause of that...
This was in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.
The general narrative that institutions wielding the most cultural influence don’t pay attention to them seems uncontroversially true — after all, how many New York Times writers were reared in the rural Midwest?
My favorite cinnamon roll of all time is Cinnabon, so make of that what you will.
I couldn’t figure out whether this was exclusive to Minnesota and South Dakota, the two places I saw it.
$519,000.
4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) are two agriculture-focused high school extracurriculars that are extremely popular in the rural Midwest.
Hey! Have you ever heard of Aidan Fitzsimmons at Harvard? https://beatinpaths.substack.com/ His adventures traveling the US (and trying to write the great american novel) remind me of you! [and he also grew up a New England'er)
This was so good