Gallatin IV

The words sounded alien, like something out of Star Trek or a comic book. But Gallatin IV was the name of a voting district in North Kansas City only ten miles from where I lived. I stood in front of our next house. It was pale green and sat in the center of a cul-de-sac. All the houses around me were shades of olive or beige. The cloudy sky made the colors vivid. It looked like it should have rained hours ago. It was about three o'clock, and the neighborhood was almost deserted. There were no leaves on the young trees planted in the yards. I wore a black fall jacket. I was too cold without it, but too warm with it, and so I was sweating a little in the breeze.

It was election day, 2004. I had taken the day off to volunteer for an organization that targeted unreliable democratic voters and tried to get them to the polls. I had never volunteered before, but I couldn't stand the war. I felt that I already hadn't done enough, that I hadn't really protested, that I had been complicit in a horrible mistake. I didn't think I had any power, but the gesture needed to be made. I was like a kid throwing sand at the waves about to crush his sand castle.

Considering how little distance I'd traveled from home, I felt very out of place. I couldn't understand how anyone could live somewhere without trees or sidewalks. The subdivision must have been built in the 1980s. I'm from the northeast. I grew up in houses from the early part of the 20th century, in neighborhoods where no two houses were alike, where the streets all met at right angles with names that weren't variations on the same developer's theme. We had little town centers with shops that weren't in strip malls. I had sought out a neighborhood like that in Kansas City, too. I lived in Volker, a glorious mess of houses from the 10s adjacent to awful, horrid apartment buildings crammed in during the 1960s or 70s, when the zoning must have changed. The people who live where I live are as mottled as the streets.

The car idled behind me. A white civic. Bob and Elizabeth sat inside. Elizabeth, whose curly hair seemed to reflect the coiled drive within her, had instigated. She had polled our work group looking for volunteers. She sought out people she knew were like-minded. She knew all the right things to say. If you debated her, you didn't stand a chance. Bob was different. He could spot the downsides and upsides in anything. He believed in complexity and in the importance of not simplifying things. He sought well chosen words, and he encouraged debate. He wanted people to make their own, informed choices. When he spoke to the people of Gallatin IV, the people who for some reason weren't at work, maybe because it was too hard for them to face the world every day, or on this day, I felt like it was hard for him to connect. He was just too much for them. Elizabeth had no trouble making her pitch, though I think people agreed with her sometimes just to get her to go away. I was somewhere in the middle. I could see all of the complexity that Bob could, but I couldn't face it. I couldn't analyze it and come out with an answer I was comfortable with. And unlike Elizabeth, I couldn't really support Kerry. I couldn't see how he'd get us out of Iraq, and I didn't think it was right to withdraw before things stabilized. But Bush had started this mess, and I was frightened to see what he could do in four more years. So I came along, but I thanked my lucky stars when my houses said "Kerry," which they usually did, because I was off the hook.

I hopped up the flight of concrete steps to the front door of this olive house and rang the glowing doorbell. Nobody came. The place looked deserted. I waited a few minutes, then left a packet containing a map to the polling place and info on identity requirements, etc. I ran back down to the car, hopped in the back seat and shut the door, but I didn't bother putting on my seat belt. Bob already had the next place picked out. He held a map, a clipboard and a pen in his hands.

Even though we were going door-to-door, we had to drive. It seemed like we had about one target per five blocks. Did that mean that there weren't many democrats in this part of town, or were the rest of them just more reliable? Or was I just seeing the physical manifestation of the reality of American Elections, that only about a third of the people actually vote, with half of those going to either side? All I knew for sure was I was hungry and a little carsick. We left the subdivision and turned on to one of the main surface roads. After a few blocks, Elizabeth pulled up at our next stop.

This house was light blue. It had a white SUV in the drive, and a glass outer door covered with a grate. As I got out of the car, traffic continued to whiz behind me on the two lane road. I felt like a kid on Halloween approaching a house with an ambiguous number of lights on. Did that one porch bulb mean I was welcome, or was I about to get shouted at? I grabbed my pile of papers from the back seat, shut the car door, and started towards the steps. The glass door was closed, but the wooden door behind it was open: odd on a such a dreary day, especially since no breeze was getting through that glass.

I rang the bell. I could see a TV inside, but it was off. A woman came to the door, and I could immediately tell that she had been crying. Her cheeks were puffy, and her eyes were red. "I'm sorry," I said, as she opened the door. "Yes?" she said, wiping her eyes. "I was just here to see if you'd had the chance to vote," I replied, already backing away towards the stairs. "No, I don't think I'm going to do that," she said, her voice breaking, "it's been a bad day." "It's OK," I said, "just take care of yourself." She closed the door, and I went back to the waiting car.

We worked for a few more hours. It was strangely exhausting. I had spent the whole day in the car, climbing stairs here and there, mostly to arrive at empty homes. Finally, we went to a Panera to get some food. I sat down and ate two bagels: an everything with cream cheese, and a cinnamon raisin with nothing on it. I didn't have the stomach for anything more complicated. Elizabeth typed feverishly on her laptop, and Bob sat reading the paper, occasionally commenting on something that caught his eye. Apparently Bush had been leading in Missouri for some time. The Kerry campaign had abandoned the state two weeks earlier. I laid my head on the table and looked at the space under my arms. By my count, I had probably gotten three voters to the polls. I didn't understand how this was supposed to work.

That night, I sat in the Uptown Theater with the rest of the volunteers as we watched the election results come in. It didn't look good. Larry King was saying CNN would have called the election already if it hadn't been for the fiasco in 2000, when Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.

The Uptown was dark and cavernous. The only real light came from the TV projection. People's voices echoed upwards and bounced back down from the ceiling and alcoves. But as the night wore on, we stopped talking to one-another. We began to dissolve. Suddenly there were fewer people around me, then fewer still. Soon I was one of maybe twenty people in a theater built to seat 2,300. I decided to go home.

I drove down 39th street towards my house, stopping at the stark intersection at Southwest Trafficway to wait for a red light. I didn't have the radio on. I prayed, though I'm not religious.

The next day, at work, nothing was said. Bob was on a conference call. Elizabeth wasn't around. Maybe she called in sick. The sky was still gray, and it still hadn't rained. I sat in the break room by the windows and looked out at the tops of the trees. I sipped a cup of tea. The room was quiet and the air was still. People came and went to get coffee, to wash their hands. I heard the refrigerator kick on. Out the window, the green of the trees was vivid and bold, but I was still on the streets of Gallatin IV, wondering where I was.