For the New Year, Jenny, Orion and I took a trip to Washington Square Mall. This marks the first time I’d been to an indoor-style mall since, I dunno, months? Years perhaps? The last time I can definitely remember visiting a mall with a roof was when Jenny and I bought matching cel phones at the Verizon in Lloyd Center the day after we returned from China. So: July 5, 2007?

I’ve made more than a few visits to Bridgeport Mall however, which despite not having a roof is definitely a mall. I’m not on some anti-consumer high horse here. I like consumer goods.

Washington Square was sufficiently crowded. But not crazy-crowded. It seemed like shops were doing pretty good business. But I couldn’t help playing a mental guessing game: which of these stores is gonna go outta business first? As much as I love the Lego store it might be hard to argue for its continued existence after another year of economic carnage. I hope Build A Bear dies before Orion learns of its existence.

Weird to imagine, also, that this particular economic activity undergirds America. And, by extension, the whole damn planet. I can’t help but wonder if the dismal performance of our retirement funds doesn’t actually reflect a realignment of fantasy to reality. Everyone talks about how many more “points” a particular market will slide — what “percentage” of pain will we endure before housing prices, stock prices, commodity prices, wages, etc. etc. resume their expected trajectory of up, up, UP!

Over the last eighteen months I have come to wonder whether the “correction” to the American economy won’t so much be fractional as geometric. As in, maybe we’re not overvalued by n percent, (where n < 100); maybe we’re overvalued by a factor of n (where n > 1).

Seeing first hand how “middle class” people live (happily and prosperously!) in places like Malaysia or China, and thinking a little bit about peak oil and other probably-not-unrelated scarcities, I wonder how much fat we can actually cut here in America.

Answer: a lot. I once knew a person who lost half her weight: she went from 300lb to 150lb. She was an entire person overweight. We might be talking about that kind of financial weight loss. If our standard of living declines by a whole magnitude, we’ll have whole different conversation about wealth and money and possessions and jobs and time and priorities. Our household budget can withstand a pay cut of, I dunno, 30% maybe. But what if we had to live on a third of what we have? Not just a third of the money but a third of the stuff: a third of the house, a third of the car, eight hours of electricity a day, a hot shower every third day.

That’s still a pretty luxurious lifestyle in most of the world.

Despite all of which, Orion really loves the mall. (He has a little more experience than I, because Jenny has an occasional Mommy Boot Camp at Lloyd Center.) Lights and people and that huge huge cathedral ceiling, perfect for games of airplane, much to the horror of onlookers (including Jenny). We didn’t spend any money on Orion at all and he had the time of his life. I hope I get to take this memory to heaven: holding my six-month-old son face-forward against my shoulder, zooming through the crowd at Nordstrom, while he shrieks for joy at the top of his lungs.

What if Americans aren’t buying American cars because they aren’t buying any cars?

What if no one else on Earth is buying cars either?

What if this has nothing to do with gas prices?

What if mortgages are failing because the houses are mainly vinyl shacks built fifty miles from economically-productive cities?

What if the cost of owning a car was too great for most families, even if gas were free? (And what if gas prices went up again?) What would happen to the value of those vinyl shacks then? (And why haven’t all the mortgage-company bailouts fixed that problem yet?)

What if cars are a fantastically stupid thing around which to organize America’s productive activity? What if we talked about organizing it around something else?

Two of my most surprising favorite songs are Jonathan Richman’s “New England:”

I have been out west to Californ’
But I miss the land where I was born

...and Neko Case’s “Thrice All American:”

Well I don’t make it home much, I sadly neglect you
But that’s how you like it away from the world
God bless California, make way for the Wal-Mart
I hope they don’t find you Tacoma

It’s no mystery why I love these songs. I’ve had to explain Nebraska to everyone I’ve met on either coast and in most foreign countries. No one in these places knows the first thing about Nebraska — which is OK — but everyone has tons of notions what it must be like — which is not OK. The thing of it is, Nebraska has a deep beauty, but it doesn’t come easy. More to the point, it was made beautiful by people who loved it. As Neko sings: “People who built it, they loved it like I do.”

People in the Pretty Places (like California) have every right to love their home state, but the state itself makes it easy. The weather is good and so is the food, and California has scenery in spades. No one has trouble loving a cute, well-behaved child. It takes a special kind of person to love the kid with the lopsided face who can’t stop biting the other kids.

In my estimation, perhaps the main problem with America is that Americans don’t love the places they come from. We keep moving west looking for something better, but we ran out of West a while ago. This is it, there is no more West. If we don’t resume building our places with love we won’t have any places worth loving.

After the painful slog through Cup of Gold, I despaired a little for what might await me in Pastures of Heaven. Although I’m reading it in the Library of America collection Steinbeck: Novels and Stories: 1932–1937 which should have been a tip-off that Pastures… is on a higher shelf than Cup of Gold.

And it is. Pastures… is a collection of related stories on a scale similar to Tortilla Flat or the Long Valley. It sort of reads like a less-depressing version of Winesburg, Ohio: small-town vignettes, each focused on a single character who has a remarkable adventure. Each story follows a predictable arc (which I won’t spoil), but delivers a satisfying read altogether.

Steinbeck, like most early-to-mid–twentieth century writers, doesn’t make small town life seem particularly nice. And Steinbeck clearly had a great love of rural lifeways and landscapes ... and still makes the Pastures of Heaven valley seem like a social straightjacket. If this accurately reflects the contemporaneous feeling toward rural life, it goes a long way toward explaining the great urbanization of the early 20th century, and the allure of the suburbs in the last half of the century. Steinbeck underlines the particular haze through which American view country life; the final chapter is a sharp coda that eerily presages the exurban developments of the the early 21st century.

The fictional Pastures of Heaven seems to be based largely on the real-world valley of Corral de Tierra. A quick trip to Google Maps makes that coda seem especially eerie.

Next: 1933’s The Red Pony, the Steinbeck book (other than Grapes of Wrath that it seems everyone has read. Except, apparently, me.

I remember an ad for outdoorsy-type shoes (by Nike?) from some years ago (1995?) that claimed “Americans spend 1% of their lives outdoors.” I’m also pretty sure Nike (or whoever) omitted time spent travelling in cars, or going to and from cars, from that 1% figure. My memory is pretty hazy here, and Google is surprisingly unhelpful. So I might be misremembering.

However! At the time (1995?) it certainly didn’t seem unlikely that Americans really did spend 1% of their lives outdoors. And remember, this was before the Internet was actually interesting so the number may have declined in the interim. At the time (1995?), I was practicing archaeology, which occasionally meant spending as much as 100% of my time outdoors, if you consider sleeping in a tent to be “outdoors.” So on the subject of this particular (hazily remembered) Nike (or whoever) shoe (or whatever) campaign, I could feel a certain sense of moral superiority.

Which leads me to wonder, how much of my life now do I spend outside? Here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (do I make any other kind?)

In every 24 hour weekday, I always:

• Walk the dog for 30 to 60 minutes (total)
• Ride my bike at least 60 minutes (total)
• Walk to the coffeeshop in the morning and afternoon (15 minutes)

On a “typical” weekday in weather that isn’t pouring down rain I’m also likely to:

• Ride my bike an extra 10 miles or so (+45 minutes)
• Walk or ride my bike to the grocery (+15 minutes)
• Take a lunchtime bike ride downtown (+30 minutes)

So for my usual weekday activities, in pretty good weather (10 months of the year in Portland), I probably spend about 210 minutes outdoors, which is about 14% of a 1440-minute day.

My weekends — especially since Orion’s arrival — are seldom “typical” in any sense, so I’m going to try to pin down a minimum here. This will involve a lot of handwaving I’m sure. But on any weekend I’m pretty likely to do the following:

• About 90 minutes of yard work
• 120 minutes of dog-walking
• Perhaps 60 minutes (as a rough average)¹ of bike-riding

So in a 2880-minute weekend, I’m spending at least 270 minutes, or 9% of my time, outdoors.

I don’t think I lead an excessively outdoorsy life, but it looks like I’m al fresco 9 to 14 times more often than Nike’s putative average American. That seems fishy. If the average American spends 1% of their time outdoors (omitting time spent going from car to door and vice versa), that pencils out to just 14 minutes a day.

Do you think most Americans spend less than 14 minutes/day outside?

And does anyone else remember that ad campaign?

Notes

¹ This is a really rough average, especially now that Orion is here. Pre-Orion, I might have gone two or three weeks without a significant ride, with a four to eight hour monster in the middle.