Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a quest for the American summer, and right now, I’m on my way to the Greater Midwestern Rodeo, puttering across the interstate in search of Portage, Wisconsin. I also have non-rodeo-related reasons for venturing out to the heartland. A few weeks ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that, if left untreated, can result in the ossification of the spine, whereby all the spaces between one’s vertebrae slowly fuse together. For the last few months, I’d been waking up in the middle of the night with terrible zaps of pain surging across my sacrum, and things got so bad that I began to experience a limited range of motion. At thirty-four years old, I confess I’m terrified to write a sentence concerning my “limited range of motion.” Is it possible I’ll start describing myself with adjectives like “spry”? Thanks to the wonky health insurance offered by my state university, I hadn’t been able to find a doctor in my hometown, so I have to schlep out here, to the heart of the heart of the country, where a doctor will take stock of the disease’s advance.

The irony of combining a doctor’s visit with a rodeo didn’t hit me until I finally pulled off the exit. After all, I was about to watch a posse of cowboys and cowgirls have their spines whiplashed into oblivion, and not only did this seem like a mean parody of my new medical condition, but it also seemed like an apposite description of certain liberal voters. Indeed, over the last few years, as the very foundations of American democracy have writhed and shuddered beneath us, it’s often felt like the best we can do is simply to try and hold on.

The fair is located in a desolate sector of Portage where the dominant aesthetic might be best captured by Clevelander Joyce Brabner’s phrase, “rust belt chic,” a term she used to describe coastal appropriation of the heartland. Lawns have been mowed into board game rows, and American flags droop from gonfalons that have been bolted to screened-in porches. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I’m suddenly worried folks out here might think me an interloper if they catch a glimpse of my backseat, which is brimming with all the accouterments of my left-leaning disposition (sushi-rolled yoga mats, weatherworn New Yorkers). I might as well be wearing a Marianne Williamson button.

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Barrett Swanson attempts to relax and ends up interrogating summertime Americana in the Midwest.

Noah’s Ark Water Park

The vacation was a professional recommendation. After two years of pursuing academic tenure at a small university in Wisconsin, an interval during which I served on department committees, advised undergrads, composed new essays, and taught sixteen classes, I had finally reached a point in my life of near-catatonic exhaustion. Granted, I did my best to keep up appearances on campus. Each day I donned a happy pedagogical mask of good cheer and scholastic rectitude, enthusiastically responding to every last student email (Of course I’ll write you another rec letter! Of course I’ll read seventeen chapters of your unfinished fantasy novel!) My use of exclamation points in work emails became worryingly frequent and was perhaps the lone sign of my psychic unraveling. At home, however, I wore my darkness on my sleeve. Evenings I would brood stoically beside the fire, muttering to myself recombinant strings of my most frequent comments on student papers: wrong word, comma splice, fallacy, abstraction. Wrong word, comma splice, fallacy, abstraction. This eerie anthem, whispered under my breath, was enough for my spouse to ask, “Is everything okay?” It wasn’t. Not really.

At work, my mask started to slip. One student remarked on how I looked so dejected before class, but when the morning bell rang I seemed to “come remarkably to life.” And in my second-year review, one colleague noted that while I had been steadily publishing in Tier 1 journals and earning high marks on my student evaluations, his lone concern for me was one of stamina and endurance. Was it possible for me—for anyone, really—to keep up this pace across the duration of one’s career? Perhaps I would appreciate the unburdening of leisure, the more tranquil activity of apple-picking, say, or a recuperative binge of Netflix? What this colleague neglected to observe, however, was that his very injunction to relax was now a professional fiat, thereby making the prospect of leisure yet another requirement for securing tenure. It was maddening, this paradox, a dark dream. And yet maybe he was right. Maybe I needed to ease off the throttle and cool down a bit. Maybe I needed some good old psychic untethering.

Then, all at once, it hit me: I would summer. I would render the whole season into a verb. The pastimes of June and July—redolent of chlorine and sunshine—would become my sole preoccupation. Think tilt-a-whirls and funnel cakes. Think roadside attractions and state fairs. I would become a connoisseur of all this forgotten Americana, all this kitsch and treacle of the season.

Which was how I found myself standing in front of my wife one Saturday morning in May, talking very rapidly, with a Clark Griswold gleam in my eye. I was brandishing a Groupon for Noah’s Ark (“America’s Largest Water Park”), which was only a scant hour from where we lived. On my head was a jaunty Gilligan cap, and my nose was a sad white diamond of SPF cream. “Do they have a lazy river?” my wife asked. “They have two lazy rivers,” I said. “I’ll only go,” she said, “if I can read Hannah Arendt on my raft.”

Only upon approaching the entrance gate did my enthusiasm begin to wane. Only then did I remember some crucial facts about myself—namely, I hadn’t been to an amusement park since 1996. A friend had invited me to Six Flags with his family, and after going on what I was later told was a fairly tame ride called The Whizzer, I nevertheless erupted into tears and refused to go on any more coasters. This prompted my friend’s mother to ask, unkindly but not unfairly, “Well, why did you even come then?” To which I rather histrionically replied, “Because I wanted your son to like me.”

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