THE BELL CURVE:

On next Tuesday, the state of Indiana will play a role in a presidential election it has never been asked to play before — and probably won’t again.

The way this red-and-blue mix of a state votes in Tuesday’s primary may provide the turning point for the next U.S. president. It may also provide a blueprint for winning support from the heartland of this country when the final campaign gets underway.

That’s why in the coming weeks, we will probably see Indiana on the couch of every political psychotherapist in the country. Win Indiana, I think we will hear, and you’ll unlock the secret to winning the Big One. So I’m prepared to offer deep insights into Indiana if the right candidate seeks my help.

By way of qualifying myself, my résumé would include nearly 40 years — with time out for a war and college — of living in and around Fort Wayne before immigrating to Southern California. On top of that are the 15 years we rented our house in Corona del Mar and drove across the United States to summer in a lake cottage we bought near the county seat town of Columbia City.

Getting there by car always set the table for the transition to Midwestern values and insights. The first and cardinal rule is to get off the freeway as dusk settles to increase your chances of finding and embracing the crossroads café where a meal of steak, homemade bread and bean soup can be bought for the price of a martini back home. Or the ma-and-pa motel with cut flowers on top of the toilet and a proprietor who wants to talk. Or the deserted, graceful campus of a small liberal arts college. Or watching truckers at a roadside stop efficiently put down one of their own who is baiting a confused and overworked elderly waitress.

Or my all-time favorite, the restaurant in Abilene, Kan., with a sign on the wall that reads: “Do not speak against Richard Nixon in this café. He will soon be pronounced innocent before all men and nations.” It was a small price for the splendid chicken-fried steak they served up.

All of this precedes the instant gratification of knowing that our patch in Indiana is still a rock of stability in a chaotic world. The stone courthouse nesting in its city block of lawns and what seems to be the same people sitting eternally on the surrounding benches. The broad tree-shaded streets with big old homes and front porches, bounded by alleys where every other garage has a basketball hoop. The street fair that makes its annual appearance for a week in August, and the small, impeccably efficient library where I spent so many days.

Rolling these old friends on my emotional taste buds, it occurs that my need for this place reflects the stirrings of a national reaction to rootlessness, a growing longing for something substantial around which to structure a life.

But I’m not unaware of the bigotry that keeps out minorities in some of these almost mythical small Midwestern towns. (I once saw the Ku Klux Klan march in Decatur protesting not blacks but Roman Catholics.) Or the insularity that resists social progress and rejects outsiders. Or the fear of change that makes many Hoosiers easy targets for religious and political extremists.

They exist, but they need to be seen not in isolation but rather as part of a fabric, interwoven with values that merit effort at understanding because our society grew from such values. And so did I.

If I were to select a place where the pollsters might get a firm reading, it would be the barber shops. I spent the final hours of my last visit to my Indiana lake getting my hair cut, and I found it instructive. While I was in the chair, a large man with a raw wind-burned complexion and muddy boots arrived with a petition opposing a projected law — then before the state legislature — that would require the licensing of certain types of guns and would restrict the sale of hand guns. The other customers signed it approvingly, then it was offered to me.

I could have told them that I voted in another state, and let it go at that. But I didn’t. Foolishly, I told them instead that I supported such a law and hoped it would pass. So for the next half-hour — while the barber led the chorus with lethal scissors in his hand — I was educated on the importance of unlicensed private ownership of guns. These men considered the possession of firearms a Constitutional liberty and worried about protecting their families, citing changes in the moral and social climate of the country that unsettled and threatened them.

Like the men in that barber shop, the people of the United States seem to be looking rather desperately in this election year for some sort of stable reference point and some wisp of grace. They aren’t getting much of either. Those longings can be weighed and responded to, or they can just be exploited. Hopefully the former will carry the day in Indiana next Tuesday. But whatever the verdict, those same people will still be filling the benches around the court house in Columbia City the next time I visit.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.