Downriver with Receipts

I should tell you about the three towns because people have been getting the story wrong and I’d like to set the record straight. I have receipts. I have literal receipts, because I keep excellent records, and also because the Saab’s glove compartment broke open somewhere outside Decatur, Illinois, and now everything I own that’s paper lives in the passenger seat like a nest, and among the paper are the receipts that prove what I’m about to tell you, which is that last October I drove from St. Louis to Memphis and revitalized three rural communities, and not a single one of them thanked me.

The Saab is a 2004 9-3 in what the previous owner called Arctic Silver and what I call the color of a filing cabinet that’s been left in the rain. It burns oil. Not the way some cars burn oil, discreetly, the way a person at a dinner party might have a second drink. My Saab burns oil the way a refinery burns oil. There is a plume. I’ve been told by mechanics in four states that the car should not be driven, and I’ve driven it in all four states, because a 2004 Saab 9-3 is, if you understand anything about automotive design, which most mechanics don’t, one of the last cars made by people who gave a damn. The Swedes gave a damn. That’s the whole Swedish reputation. Giving a damn and making furniture. My Saab is held together by the ghost of Swedish engineering and a quart of 10W-40 every ninety miles, and I love it the way you love anything that requires more of you than it gives back, which is to say, with a commitment that other people find clinically interesting.

My name is Jolene Taft and I am a brand consultant. I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. Brand consulting is not — as my sister Wendy has said on more than one occasion, usually at Thanksgiving, usually after wine — “made-up.” It is a discipline. I help businesses identify and communicate their core value proposition to their target demographic through strategic narrative alignment. If that sounds like jargon, that’s because you’re not the target demographic. Wendy sells insurance in Peoria and thinks that makes her more legitimate than me, and I would argue that insurance is the original made-up profession — you are selling people the idea that bad things will happen and then charging them money for the privilege of worrying about it formally — but I don’t argue this at Thanksgiving because I am a professional.

The first town was called Hartwick, and I arrived there because the Saab’s temperature gauge had entered what I consider its creative range — past the red line, into a territory that the gauge designers clearly never anticipated anyone reaching, a thermal frontier. I pulled off Highway 3 and into a gas station and the attendant, a boy of maybe nineteen with a complexion that suggested he subsisted entirely on gas station burritos, looked at my car and said, “Ma’am, your car is smoking.”

“It does that,” I said.

“It’s smoking a LOT.”

“It’s a Saab.”

He looked at me as though this was not the explanation I thought it was.

Hartwick had a Main Street. They all had Main Streets. This one featured a hardware store, a diner called Rosie’s that had not been owned by anyone named Rosie since 1974, a barbershop with a non-rotating barber pole that appeared to have been manufactured during the Eisenhower administration, and a storefront with a sign that said HARTWICK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE in letters that had been hand-painted by someone who had run out of either space or confidence around the O.

I went into the Chamber of Commerce because I was thirsty and it looked air-conditioned, and because I am a brand consultant, and a town with a hand-painted Chamber of Commerce sign is a town that needs a brand consultant the way a man in a burning building needs someone to mention the fire.

There were two women inside. The older one, who introduced herself as Deirdre, was approximately sixty and dressed in the way that women in small towns dress when they are the person who runs things — a blazer over a turtleneck, reading glasses on a chain, the blazer saying “authority” and the turtleneck saying “but approachable.” The younger one was named Liz and was typing on a computer that I’m fairly sure was running Windows Vista.

“I’m a brand consultant,” I told them.

“We don’t need a brand consultant,” Deirdre said.

“That’s what everyone says. That’s actually a symptom.”

I explained — and I was good, I was very good, I’d been rehearsing this kind of thing in the car, I’d been having these conversations with myself between Saab oil additions — that Hartwick’s problem was legibility. “You’re invisible,” I said. “Fifteen thousand cars a day pass on Highway 3 and not one of them knows you exist. You have no narrative. You have no brand story. You have a barbershop with a dead pole.”

Deirdre looked at Liz. Liz looked at Deirdre. This was not, I realize now, the look of two people being persuaded. But at the time I read it as the look of two people recognizing that a transformative intelligence had walked through their door, which, if I’m being honest, is how I read most looks.

I spent forty minutes telling them how to revitalize their Main Street. I drew diagrams on a napkin. I used phrases like “experiential destination corridor” and “artisanal throughline.” I explained the concept of a brand anchor — a single, memorable feature around which the entire town identity could coalesce. “What’s your thing?” I asked. “Every town has a thing.”

“We had a grain elevator,” Liz said. “It fell down.”

“When?”

“Nineteen ninety-one.”

“Perfect. A fallen grain elevator. That’s a story. That’s a BRAND. Hartwick: Where We Picked Ourselves Up. Hartwick: Built on What Fell. You could do a whole heritage trail.”

“A heritage trail,” Deirdre said. “Of what?”

“Of the grain elevator.”

“Which fell down.”

“Which fell down and which could be — narratively, emotionally — rebuilt as a story of resilience. The physical structure is gone but the NARRATIVE structure—”

“I think maybe you should go,” Deirdre said.

I went. On my way out I left a business card on the counter — Jolene Taft, Strategic Brand Architecture, with a logo I’d designed myself in a free version of Photoshop. The card stock was from a Kinko’s in Belleville and had a slight curl to it that I prefer to think of as character. Liz picked it up and looked at it the way you’d look at a fortune cookie fortune that didn’t apply to you.

“She left a card,” I heard Liz say as the door closed behind me.

“Put it with the others,” Deirdre said.

I don’t know what that means — what others? — but I choose to interpret it as evidence that brand consultants pass through Hartwick regularly, which only proves my point about the town’s untapped potential. If the supply of vision is that robust, the demand must be there too, latent, waiting to be activated.

I was not asked to leave because my ideas were bad. I was asked to leave because Deirdre was afraid of change. I’ve gotten that look before — at a co-working space in Clayton, at a farmer’s market in Alton. The look says: we were fine before you walked in. I’ve never once believed it.

I got back in the Saab — it had cooled to its normal operating temperature, which is to say “alarming” rather than “actively dangerous” — and pointed it south. The road followed the general direction of rivers and rail lines, the old logic of moving things from one place to another, and I was one of the things being moved, along with a quart of fresh 10W-40 and the beginnings of what I would later title “Mississippi of the Mind.”

The second town was called Marfa. Not the one in Texas. A different Marfa, in southern Illinois, which existed in a relationship to the Texas Marfa that was roughly the relationship between a tribute band and the actual band. Someone had apparently heard that Marfa, Texas, had become an art destination, and had decided that Marfa, Illinois, could do the same thing. There was a mural on the side of a feed store that appeared to depict either a sunrise or an explosion, and a gallery in a converted grain silo that was, when I arrived, showing an exhibit of photographs of other grain silos.

The gallery was run by a man named Todd who had the beard of an artisan and the eyes of someone who has made a series of financial decisions that he is only now beginning to understand. He told me he’d moved from Chicago two years ago to “build something real,” which is what people from Chicago say when they mean they ran out of money in Chicago.

“I’m a brand consultant,” I said, because I’d found that if you say it quickly enough, before anyone can object, you’ve established a conversational foothold.

“Oh, great,” Todd said, and this was the problem with Todd. Todd was open. Todd was receptive. Todd had come to Marfa, Illinois, to build something real, and now a woman in a smoking Saab had arrived offering to brand it, and Todd’s defenses, which had apparently never been robust, collapsed like a grain elevator in 1991.

I spent two hours with Todd. I redesigned his gallery concept on the back of a soy milk carton. I explained that grain silo photographs were fine but that what he needed was a throughline — something that connected the art to the place. “Location-specific experiential narrative,” I said, and Todd nodded as though this meant something, which it does, just not what he thought it meant.

I told him to rename the gallery. He’d called it “New Perspectives,” which is the name you give something when you haven’t thought of a name. I suggested “Silo.” Just “Silo.” One word. Clean. Modern. Evocative.

“But it’s literally in a silo,” Todd said.

“Exactly. You’re not hiding from it. You’re CLAIMING it. You’re saying: we know where we are, and where we are is interesting. That’s confidence. That’s brand identity.”

Todd got excited. Todd made coffee. Todd’s coffee was terrible — French press, under-extracted, with a sediment layer that recalled the Illinois River after heavy rain — but I drank it because professionals drink bad coffee without comment, and also because I’d been driving for five hours and the Saab’s heater had broken outside Vandalia, so I was very cold.

By the time I left, Todd had a new gallery name, a new mission statement (I wrote it on the soy milk carton: “Silo: Art Rises Where Things Were Stored”), a new pricing strategy for his work (I suggested he triple his prices, because people who drive to an art gallery in rural Illinois are either lost or rich, and the rich ones won’t buy anything priced like it was made by someone who doesn’t believe in himself), and a plan to host a monthly “Silo Sessions” event that would combine art, local food, and what I called “curated conversation” and what was, in practice, people standing in a grain silo drinking wine.

I drove south feeling exactly the way you feel when you’ve done something that matters. Which is to say, slightly hungry and very certain. I added a quart of oil at the Casey’s General Store on the edge of town and the teenage cashier asked if the Saab was mine and I said yes and she said, “Cool car,” and I said, “Thank you,” and she said, “My grandpa had one,” and the past tense there contained, I felt, a warning I was not prepared to receive.

I did not learn until much later — Wendy told me at Thanksgiving, with a kind of pleasure that she tried and failed to disguise as concern — that Todd had followed my advice to the letter. He’d tripled his prices. Nobody bought anything for four months. He’d renamed the gallery. The locals, who had been coming to “New Perspectives” out of a mixture of kindness and curiosity, did not come to “Silo,” because calling a gallery in a silo “Silo” struck them not as confident but as the kind of thing a person from Chicago would do. He’d hosted Silo Sessions. Seven people came to the first one. Three came to the second. The third was just Todd, standing alone in a silo, surrounded by overpriced photographs of silos.

Todd closed the gallery in January.

For the record: my advice was sound. The market wasn’t ready. There’s a difference, and if you can’t see the difference, you probably sell insurance in Peoria.

The third town didn’t have a name. I mean, it had a name — Doniphan — but nobody I met there used it. They called it “the river town,” because it sat on the Ohio River at a point where the river did something that I, not being a hydrologist, would describe as giving up. The current slowed. Sediment gathered. Barges that passed seemed to be moving through something thicker than water, some medium between liquid and resignation.

I arrived in Doniphan because the Saab had developed a new sound, a rhythmic knocking from the engine compartment that I chose to interpret as the car’s heartbeat rather than its death rattle, and because the temperature gauge had once again entered the creative range, and because there was a sign on the highway that said DONIPHAN — CATFISH CAPITAL OF THE LOWER OHIO, and I thought: now here is a town that already has a brand, and it’s the wrong one.

The diner was called Earl’s. Earl was alive, present, and working the grill, which in my experience of American diners is practically miraculous — like finding that the saint the church is named for is actually in the building. Earl was seventy or so and had the body type of a man who has been taste-testing his own product for forty years: substantial, gravitational, planted.

“Catfish Capital,” I said, sitting at the counter. “Who decided that?”

“I did,” Earl said. “Nineteen eighty-eight.”

“And has it been effective? As a brand?”

“As a what?”

“As a positioning statement. Has ‘Catfish Capital’ driven tourism, commerce, civic identity?”

Earl poured me coffee without asking if I wanted any, which is the diner equivalent of a handshake. “Lady, we sell catfish. People come and eat it. Some of them come back. That’s the business.”

“That’s not a business, that’s an accident. You’re leaving money on the table. You’re leaving NARRATIVE on the table. Catfish Capital is fine, it’s serviceable, but it’s not — it’s not aspirational. Nobody drives two hours to eat catfish because catfish is aspirational. But they might drive two hours to eat catfish if the catfish is part of a STORY. If the catfish is connected to the river and the river is connected to the town and the town is connected to an identity that makes people feel like they’re participating in something when they eat your catfish. Not just eating. EXPERIENCING.”

Earl flipped a burger. The burger hissed. Earl’s relationship with language was not, I was beginning to realize, the same as mine.

“What I’m suggesting,” I continued, because I do not stop, because stopping is what happens when you let other people’s silence become your problem, “is that you rebrand. Not the catfish. The catfish is the catfish. The TOWN. Doniphan doesn’t need a new product. Doniphan needs a new story.”

“Doniphan’s story,” Earl said, “is that the factory closed in oh-four and the school closed in twelve and the bridge has been out since last spring and the only reason anybody comes here is the catfish and the bait shop, and Dale’s bait shop burned down in August, so it’s the catfish.”

“That’s not a story. That’s a list of things that happened.”

“That’s what stories are.”

This stumped me for a second, but only a second, because I am not a person who stays stumped. I am a person who reframes. “Earl, every piece of what you just told me is brand gold. A factory that closed. A school that closed. A bridge that’s out. These aren’t failures. These are authenticity markers. You can’t MANUFACTURE this kind of heritage narrative. Some towns would kill for a closed factory. It’s TEXTURE. It’s REAL.”

Earl looked at me over the grill. His spatula had stopped moving. The burger was forgotten.

“I’m thinking a festival,” I said. “An annual catfish festival. Not just eating catfish — a catfish EXPERIENCE. Live music on the riverbank. A catfish-themed 5K. And a mascot. Not a realistic catfish — nobody wants to look at a realistic catfish while they’re eating — but stylized. Whiskers, big smile, maybe a hat.”

“A hat,” Earl said.

“A little chef’s hat. Because he’s the catfish and he’s also the chef. There’s a double meaning. It’s playful.”

Earl turned the forgotten burger, which was now closer to charcoal than protein. Two other diners — a couple in their sixties eating club sandwiches — had been watching this exchange with the quiet attention of people at a zoo observing an animal whose behavior the placard didn’t cover.

“Your car’s on fire,” Earl said.

It was not on fire. It was smoking. There is a distinction. But the volunteer fire department came anyway — Doniphan still had a volunteer fire department, three men and a woman named Patty who drove the truck, which was a better truck than my car — and they hosed down the Saab, and afterward the Saab would not start, so I sat in Earl’s for four more hours waiting for the tow service from the next county, eating catfish — Earl fried it in a cornmeal batter seasoned with something he wouldn’t name, and I will say this: it was better than anything I’d eaten in months, possibly years, and I told him so, and he said “I know” — and I told Earl more about how to transform his business, and he listened, or at least he was present in the room while I talked, which is one form of listening.

The tow truck driver was a woman named Georgia who had forearms like a longshoreman and opinions about Saabs. “These cars,” she said, hooking my Saab to the flatbed with the competence of someone who has towed many cars whose owners loved them more than they deserved, “are a cult.”

“They’re a community,” I said.

“Same thing. Community’s just a cult with better PR.”

She drove me to a motel in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where I spent two nights waiting for a mechanic who specialized in European vehicles, which in rural Missouri means a mechanic who has seen a European vehicle, and during those two nights I wrote up my recommendations for all three towns — Hartwick, Marfa, Doniphan — in a document that I titled “Mississippi of the Mind: A Brand Revitalization Blueprint for the Rural Heartland” and emailed to all three. Deirdre did not respond. Todd responded with a single emoji, the prayer hands, which I took as gratitude. Earl responded: “Please do not email me again. The catfish is fine.”

Wendy tells this story at Thanksgiving as though it’s a comedy. She does the voices. She does MY voice, which she gets wrong. She makes me sound unhinged, when what I am is ahead of the curve. I was right about Hartwick. I was right about Marfa. I was right about Doniphan. The grain elevator IS a brand story. The silo gallery IS a good concept. The catfish IS being undersold. Wendy doesn’t have an answer for that. She just pours more wine and says “Oh, Jolene” in a way that I think she thinks sounds kind.

The Saab, in case you’re wondering, was repaired. The mechanic in Cape Girardeau replaced something he called the “everything” — I think he meant the head gasket, but he gestured at the entire engine with the exhaustion of a doctor describing a patient who has ignored medical advice for twenty years — and I drove home to St. Louis, and the Saab smoked only moderately on the highway, and I had the windows down because the heater was still broken, and the glove compartment was still open, and my paper nest had blown around some, and the road was gray and the sky was gray and the Saab was gray, and I was in motion, which is where I do my best work.

I’m going back in the spring. I’ve got a new pitch — not for those three towns, they had their chance — but for the towns past them, the ones farther south, the ones I haven’t gotten to yet. I’ve been refining the deck. Wendy says I should get a real job. Wendy says the insurance industry is hiring. I looked it up. The insurance industry is always hiring. That’s not the selling point Wendy thinks it is.