Morgantown, West Virginia. It's a small city. Quiet city. Lots of elderly folks come here to live out their last days in peace. Across the hall, from my small apartment room, there's an elderly lady who lives by herself. Sometimes I see her on the balcony, overlooking the Monongahela river, and the tugboats that push rusty brown barges all the way across Pennsylvania, then down to the heart of America through the Mississippi.
It's a tiny capillary, this Morgantown, this sleepy waterfront on a muddy river. Scores of elderly people sleeping in their apartments, and scores of young students from the rural fringes of West Virginia. For many of them, Morgantown is a metropolis of frightening proportions. I once struck up a conversation with a college student who had come from a town with a population of 80. He had never been outside the borders of West Virginia. He asked me to describe New York City for him.
Well, it looks like-- I stop and scratch my head because I've lived in New Haven for four years and boarded the Metro-North station to Grand Central at least twenty times but it's never occurred to me to describe NYC to anyone in America. It's like trying to describe an elephant to a mouse, or a galaxy to an astronomer without a telescope.
Some of these folks are content to stay in the town, shielded by the broad mountains encircling the valley. But many young people want to break out, break out of the farms and break out of the one major street in Morgantown and see beyond the mountains. Ya see, the sun sets exactly the same here every day. It's always the same color, purple shades mixed with a Van Gogh yellow.
There are two ways out. The first is to hitch a ride out on the river barge Huckleberry Finn style. But that route is only open in novels. The other way, as you might suspect, is the Army way. In my apartment, there is thus a split demographic of wizened old men with canes and walkers and tall men, in their twenties, who know how to fire machine guns and drive tanks.
Today as I was opening the door to the apartment lobby, this young man came out, carrying a mattress under each arm. I was struck by his prodigious strength. Are you moving out, I asked. He gave me a wry grin. Yeah, he said. They're sending me back to Iraq, so I don't need my bed anymore.
I didn't know what to say. I thought that I should say, "thank you," perhaps, but I didn't want to sound contrived. And I wanted to know what was happening in Iraq from somebody who had already been there, but I shut my mouth because it sounded like an idiotically colloquial thing to say to a soldier who might get his head blown off in the next seventy-two hours.
I felt pretty shitty. I supported the war for my own reasons, but even if I had marched against it I think I'd feel shitty anyway. Implicitly I realized why politics is so poisonous today: no matter which side you're on, you feel like an asshole.
So I just wished him good luck (and I meant it), because what else can you say to a guy that's getting rid of his own bed?