The United States is where the narrator spends a year abroad that becomes inseparable from the death of his second-oldest brother. He arrives hoping for California or a large city, but finds himself in Laramie, Wyoming, far from the life he imagined. There he adapts to a sharply different landscape and household, then receives devastating news while still abroad. The year ends with a return to Schleswig, marked by new skills and fluency in English, but also by a grief he has chosen not to face.

Laramie and its surroundings

The narrator’s exchange takes him not to California, New York, or Chicago, as he had hoped, but to Laramie, a small city in Wyoming. He describes the state as having only half a million residents across an area as large as Germany, with fewer people living there only in Alaska. Laramie’s nights are punctuated by wolves howling. Rather than alienating him, the sound recalls the howling and screaming of patients he knew at home, making this unfamiliar place resonate with his past.

The narrator’s host family lives outside Laramie, in what he characterizes as being beyond even the outskirts of town: a green oasis in the dusty prairie. Remote from the city, the house and garden offer a concentrated domestic setting. Remote-controlled sprinklers crawl through the garden from morning to evening, a repeated feature of the landscape that contrasts the irrigated greenery around the house with the surrounding dry prairie.

The local high school also gives the exchange year a distinctive setting. It has its own runway because some students fly in every morning. The narrator’s daily life there includes early school-bus departures for rock climbing in the Rocky Mountains: the group leaves at six in the morning and eats breakfast while waiting for the rocks to dry in the sun. In woodworking class, students build rustic birdhouses of intimidating size. The school and its surroundings make ordinary education unusually expansive, linking classes to flight, mountain excursions, and practical work.

The host household and daily life

Before leaving Schleswig, the narrator imagines that his host family might include a pretty daughter. Instead, it resembles his family at home: three brothers and a dog. His placement is partly shaped by an answer he gave casually on an exchange-program questionnaire. Asked whether he was nonreligious, religious, or strictly religious, he selected the strictest option. The consequence is church three times a week, not only for services but also to sweep the church and polish the altar. What began as a box marked on a form becomes an onerous part of his American routine.

The narrator likes his host parents, Stan and Hazel, whom he finds patient and kind. Don, the youngest of the three host brothers and the narrator’s own age, treats him differently. He corrects the narrator’s English minutely and pulls a face when he hears him speak; when his parents are absent, he calls him the German Robot. The household therefore provides both welcome and a daily reminder of the narrator’s foreignness. His adjustment is not a single, uncomplicated arrival: he finds friends and activities, but also has to endure correction and mockery at home.

At school he chooses subjects that genuinely interest him. In German class, he becomes the top student for the first time in his life. The experience reverses his usual position as the learner struggling with another language, while his outdoor and woodworking classes give him skills beyond the classroom. Elsewhere in the year, he plays basketball, learns to throw a football and carve a giant turkey, shovels large quantities of snow, rides for hours across the prairie, and takes long trips with his host parents. These activities accumulate into an active life in Wyoming, one whose ordinary demands continue even after his family’s circumstances have changed.

The year interrupted by bereavement

The narrator learns of his brother’s death shortly before a planned trip to Yellowstone National Park. His father tells him that the brother has been killed in a car accident. On returning to the room, the narrator tries to explain the news to Janet but finds that the English words will not come. He reaches for a dictionary and painstakingly assembles the message, looking up the words for his brother’s death and for a car accident. When Janet asks whether his brother was killed in an accident, he can only nod and answer in German. The loss interrupts not only his life abroad but also his access to the language he has been learning.

Because the narrator’s complicated return flight is still four days away, the family proceeds with the trip to Yellowstone. The resulting journey is remembered not as an escape into natural grandeur but as a grim interval: endless drives and prolonged staring at the landscape, with herds of buffalo and geysers passing before him. He says that no landscape had ever seemed more desolate. The setting’s vastness, which might ordinarily invite wonder, instead becomes the measure of his isolation while the news remains with him.

He flies back to Schleswig for the funeral. At the airport in Hamburg, his parents and remaining brother are waiting, still and staring toward the exit as other travelers run to greet and kiss their returning relatives. The narrator had pictured a very different homecoming: returning as a fit basketball star, speaking fluent English and carrying sparkling confidence. Instead, the family embraces amid the bustle of the airport. After the funeral, despite knowing how difficult his absence is for his parents, he chooses to fly back to Wyoming. His father asks tearfully whether he might stay home, but the narrator insists on returning.

Return, growth, and refusal to mourn

Fourteen days after coming home, the narrator is back in Laramie with his complete host family. At high school, no one except the host family knows about the accident, and he says that the absence of general pity does him good. He resumes the life he had been living before the death. In the months that follow, he plays basketball, learns new practical skills, clears snow, rides across the prairie, visits a prison, gains a correspondent there, and travels with his host parents. The ordinary activities are not evidence that the loss has been resolved: he explicitly describes himself as refusing to grieve and says he thinks of his brother mainly after the Sunday telephone calls with his parents.

When the narrator finally leaves the United States and returns to Schleswig, he weighs ninety-five kilograms, can do one hundred push-ups, and speaks fluent English. Those concrete measures register how much he has changed during the year. Yet the return does not bring an equivalent emotional reckoning. His parents, though working again and present together in meals, television, and walks, seem to him to be reenacting their former life, trying to rebuild its daily structure after their son’s death. The United States thus occupies two positions in the memoir: it is the place where the narrator acquires physical strength and linguistic confidence, and the distance to which he returns rather than remain beside his grieving family. The year’s development is real, but it does not make the bereavement speakable or settle it.