Final thoughts
Vanishing into the ether
Staff writer
When I moved to Marion a year ago, I thought I could uncover some fundamental truth.
The generality of in question — Marion? Kansas? America? — did not concern me. I simply thought if I wrote enough words and heard enough stories, I could figure out what made modern man tick.
That knowledge, in turn, would help me find meaning in my own life. Maybe I would write the great American novel for good measure.
You might laugh, but at times, I could have sworn I was getting somewhere.
There is beauty and absurdity down every road of Marion County, whether it be the crumbling buildings of Florence, Goessel’s Mennonite preservationists, or Pilsen’s devotion to its hometown saint.
One feels the weight of the human psyche out here and learns how humans persevere in the face of adversity.
As a reporter, I was lucky that getting to know people was part of my job. I am grateful to everyone who, in typical Kansas fashion, talked my ear off about their lives.
I learned that Kansas sunsets are like no other, that cops don’t patrol dirt roads, and that multi-level marketing and AI advertising are more popular than I ever imagined.
I sat with temperate Christians and alcoholics, with little kids and the elderly, with the alt-right and the center-left.
In my investigative work, I tried to relay information sensitively without downplaying the truth.
I learned that you will face criticism no matter how many puff pieces you write; that the fundamental paradox with small newspapers is that those that are the most aggressive in pursuing truth will upset the most residents, in part because there are so few such newspapers left.
It was difficult to receive angry phone calls and vitriol from those who were unhappy about their appearance in the newspaper.
At first, I would pace around the office after an issue came out, worried about word choices, praying I wouldn’t upset anyone.
In the end, though, the criticism was a good thing; I learned to tolerate it, learn from it, and be confident in my reporting.
I will greatly miss my co-workers who continue to fight the good fight at the Marion County Record.
They made sure I had a small but strong community in the office, and Wednesday mornings won’t be the same without them.
In the end, I failed in my mission to understand Marion.
Pip, the cabin-boy of the Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, saw God after he was thrown overboard and left floating in the holy depths of the Atlantic. I threw myself overboard last fall; I couldn’t see a damn thing.
My only epiphany was one that every permanent resident already knows: Rural Kansas is too desolate, battle-scarred, and vast to comprehend.
That’s not to say I took nothing away from Marion County. In fact, I learned more than I ever imagined I would.
Where else in the world can you discuss aliens with construction workers and Bernie Sanders with Anabaptists?
There is no shortage of fascinating subjects out here: lawsuits, festivals, crooked cops, blue-green algae, symphonies, ICE kidnappings, wind farms, and Tim McVeigh.
My time in Marion has made me a better listener, a more capable adult, and a more selfless writer.
To that end, I hope readers of the Record will forgive my use of “I” throughout this piece.
I’ve never liked using the first person much, even in creative writing. Perhaps my distaste for it is part of what drew me to journalism, where the use of “I” is begrudgingly accepted in magazines and flat-out forbidden in newswriting.
In my 250 or so bylined stories for this paper, just two have used “I”.
The first was my introduction to you all, and the second is this article, which will (likely) be my last.
While my goal in coming here was to discover something about the American self, my own self has been hidden from view in print.
You can certainly get a sense of my style of prose and the topics I am interested in. But there is little about me in the records I have left behind in this newspaper. Memories of what I was — whatever that means — will eventually fade.
In that sense, I have succeeded. For good journalists are not filters but windows. And the very best don’t even seem like they’re there.