Four Muncies: The Reluctant Transplant

As a relatively small city that houses a relatively large university and a regional hospital, Muncie has a sizable population of transplants–people not born in the immediate vicinity who moved here for work, or with a spouse. Some Muncie transplants come to embrace the town wholly. Some make do for the long haul while never fully seeing Muncie as home. Others live here while keeping one eye focused on a different future in a different place.

Such is the case with the writer of this week’s featured directive. This writer, whom we’re calling “The Reluctant Transplant,” moved here five years ago with his spouse, a Muncie native. They have planned all along to move somewhere nearer the writer’s hometown, in the South. But “the holding pattern has been holding longer than anticipated,” and the writer now finds himself looking somewhat impatiently to a future elsewhere, and viewing Muncie with complex, ambivalent feelings–rendered all the more ambivalent by his non-commitment to the town. “While I do not feel disdain for Muncie, it just isn’t mine,” he writes. “If anything I pity it. I suppose I am pulling for it, by I don’t have a dog in this race.”

But, as the directive reveals, this lack of rootedness in Muncie also allows for a distinctive and critical viewpoint. He sees a Muncie profoundly and multiply divided: by class, race, and social status, and geographically, by the White River. This division shows up in the small details of everyday life: an acquaintance describes him as “snooty” when he says he is going to the Fickle Peach, which his interlocutor has tarred as a “containment area for BSU professors.” While our writer admires the civic boosters of the town, he questions their rosy view; at the same time, he laments what he sees as a preponderance of economically distressed and disheartened citizens who “have completely shut themselves off from any positivity that might come here.”

It’s impossible to be objective about the place where you live, which is one of the reasons why we’re highlighting four dramatically different takes on the city in this Four Muncies series. As this installment shows, being from elsewhere and uncommitted to Muncie makes certain things visible. No doubt it obscures others.

Enjoy, and feel free to respond using the comments box below.

–Patrick Collier

How long have you lived here? If you were not born here, indicate where you came from and why.

My husband and I moved here in July of 2014. He is from here, and I am from a small city in the South. We moved here after we both finished grad school. Our options were to move here, or to move to my hometown. I didn’t want to subject him to some of the unaccepting culture there, so we decided on Muncie. His mom very generously let us stay with her until we got our own place after a few months. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to find a job (my husband knew the right people to introduce me to, and within 3 weeks of arriving, I was working in my field). This worked out as far as my career goes; my original home state is a popular destination for transplants, and for every job opening, there are easily 200 qualified candidates. Not that many people are willingly moving TO Muncie, and I waltzed right into a position rather easily. The plan was to only use Muncie as a staging area to mount a job relocation effort down to the South, into a larger city. As it turns out, we have now been here for 5 years. The holding pattern has been holding longer than anticipated. It is taking a while to save up for a down payment on a house once we move. Muncie reminds me a lot of my hometown…it’s a medium-sized city whose glory days are behind it. My old town’s main industry (tobacco agriculture) abandoned it as well. Now, the old warehouses there are gentrified into various things: an art museum, a community theatre, and a couple of new beer gardens. My old hometown, like Muncie, has been in the 2010s something of a blank slate for hipsters to mold.

Are you happy with where you live? Do you feel like you belong?

Ideas of my personal happiness with Muncie are a bit irrelevant. This is not my town, and in my 5 years of residence here, I have realized that I cannot develop a sense of connection with it. My identity and allegiance is with my home state. Anything I do here, any positive work for this community, is done with a sense of my preparation for eventual service to my home. Muncie is a big practice round for me. If I am happy with anything, it is with the progress of my plans to one day be where I belong. An ex-coworker of mine kept trying to recruit me into Muncie Young Professionals, and I could never bring myself to join. I told her “If I were back home, I’d be doing more good for the community than the entire MYP currently does here.” She eventually stopped asking. I absolutely do not feel like I belong here. I am a tourist, making do for now. I’ve been on the road since I last left my old home state in 2007. This is not to say I have a disdain for Muncie…it just isn’t mine. If anything I pity it. I suppose I am pulling for it, but I don’t have a dog in this race.

Do you expect to stay here for long? What are or will be some of the considerations in deciding how long you stay here?

My next big life goal is to own a home by the time I hit 45. I’m currently 41, so I have just shy of 4 years to pull that off. Any home I own definitely will not be in Muncie. I would first need to find my “forever town” before I make that kind of a purchase. There really is no form of consideration or argument to be made for ever staying here. It’s a foregone conclusion that we will go at some point by the end of 2022. Where I am indifferent to Muncie, my husband can’t stand it here, and is a bit depressed that we are still here now in 2019. Our continued presence here is starting to negatively-affect my marriage.

How would you describe Muncie to someone who has never been here? What are its most distinctive characteristics?

When I free-associate the word “Muncie”, the first three words that spring up are “fractured”, “bitter”, and “exhausted”. I can’t believe the Othering that I have observed in this place. Townies hate Ball State, Ball State people often ignore or even look down their nose at townies. For instance, I was openly ridiculed as being “snooty” and “too good for normal folks”, at the mere suggestion that I would be going to the Fickle Peach later that evening. (Apparently to some, the Fickle Peach is seen as a containment area for BSU professors, and as such, is a space where the holier-than-thou congregate). It goes the other way as well; I have heard BSU faculty openly admit “I don’t like going into the town proper; those people and their anti-intellectualism would have me burned at the stake”. Then there is the Northside/Southside thing. I’m sorry, this is just absurd. This city is not big enough to have sides. The “bitter” part comes when you think about the folks that used to have factory jobs up until the ‘90s or so. Now, with no hope of getting that kind of job back, they have completely shut themselves off from any positivity that might come here. In their minds, nothing is good. Everything is a waste of taxpayer money, except for fixing the roads! How do people hang on so fervently to this kind of anger and resentment? I can see how exerting that much effort to remain grumpy can result in a city full of exhausted people. This anger and exhaustion is the bedrock of Muncie…the Astroturf laying on top of that base layer is the small circle of “Muncie Do-gooders” (my term) that are all very well-meaning civic-minded professionals, but ultimately can be just as judgmental as anyone else here. They spout love, teamwork, equality, or community, but balk when they learned that you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (who is every bit as right-leaning as 45). These folks had rather spend all of the city’s money attracting young, capable professionals, than taking care of people that are already here. It’s this idea of scrapping what’s already here to start over with outsiders that really bugs me.

…also, you have to drive an hour to Indianapolis, or further, if you want to watch a decent movie. Mostly the only thing that plays here are superhero movies.

Do you think the ways other people think about Muncie are the same ways you think about it? How do you your thoughts and feelings about Muncie differ from its public image (from media or word-of-mouth around the state and beyond)?

I think when many people hear the word “Muncie”, it immediately conjures certain stereotypes. I have asked people this….”What do you think of when you hear the word “Muncie”? The answers are generally in the same neighborhood…”meth”, “corruption”, “poor”, “sad”, “dead-end”, “hopeless”. If you ask one of the Do-gooders, you will get “thriving”, “full of opportunity”, “upward-moving”, “full of things to do”. These people live in 2 different Muncies. I have asked friends of mine, friends who live nowhere near here, what they think of when they hear the name of this town. They see Muncie, and Indiana in general, as wholesomely-Midwestern. “About as interesting or edgy as a bowl of oatmeal”.

I personally feel that a town is its people, and is only as good as those people. Largely bitter, tired, petty people make for a largely bitter, tired, petty town…with a veneer of civic pride from a very few people walking around with their eyes down at their feet. No place is perfect, so I don’t claim all of the above from a position of superiority…but I am glad that this town isn’t now, nor can it ever be, mine to fret over.

All of this may sound harsh, but I can say with complete honesty that some of the nicest, smartest, best people I know are ones I’ve met here. They are trying their best in the situation they were given.

What are your feelings about Muncie’s future? What are your hopes for Muncie? How do you expect Muncie will fare in the years ahead? What changes do you expect? 

Sometimes, the best thing for a forest is seasonal wildfire. Sometimes, in order for the trees and other plants to regrow strong, it needs to first burn down. I don’t think Muncie is quite done burning down, and it needs to finish that process. It needs fundamental cleansing of its power structure. It needs to raze the used car dealership drug fronts on the Southside. Northside folks need to get over themselves. People fleeing for Yorktown need to realize they are cowards, and they need to come back and work to fix it, instead of abandoning their town. Natives need to realize this is the only place they can call theirs, and they really should start taking some pride in it; it’s no one’s job to fix this place but theirs. Ball State people should roll up their sleeves and help out, or else find another university to teach. Will it bounce back? Who can say. I personally would bet on it being absorbed by the Indianapolis exurban area. Perhaps the best hope for it is for the sprawl to its southwest to ingest it. Imagine a lava flow reclaiming/renewing highways and buildings in Hawai’i. In either scenario, I will not be around to get caught in the collision. I have my own fight to fight elsewhere.