My Towns
Cleveland winters are a rolling damnation, leaving a heaviness on the soul in their wake like stones left behind in a glacial moraine. Spending three weeks in the midst of one was all the reminder that I needed or ever would need as to why I left that sad, dying place so many years ago.
It isn’t just the weather, mind you, or exclusively the frigidity of it. This December of ’05 was unseasonably warm, rain being the precipitation of choice, interspersed with cold grey bouts of sleet. One’s hands and face froze, to be sure, but the bone chilling ache of Cleveland’s coldest vintages was a year behind or ahead. Old Man Winter had been lazy, and stayed in Canada for the holidays. Without question, weeks of unbroken overcast skies drain the spirit from without, but Cleveland’s decay sprawls well outside the bounds of the merely natural: the death of heavy industry in the Great Lakes has blighted the place (as it has in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Buffalo) in a way no mere brush, or many brushes, with hard weather ever could. There was salt and there were slow plows and there was an abundance of that unquantifiable commodity, human perseverance, once, enough to survive the coldest night of a power outage or the heaviest blanket of snow. The rust just complemented the character of the place, served as a backdrop for the cacophony of labor that gave the city life.
To be fair, there are certainly plenty of livable, functioning neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts, and I grew up in one of those. But the plows and the salt and all the will in the world can’t seem to fight endemic poverty and population drain that consumes my hometown from the center outward. Blocks upon blocks of abandoned factories and warehouses, closed schools, condemned strip malls and the occasional oddly placed local business (hair and nail salon? pet kennel?) are the telling features of too many once-thriving industrial blocks of Cleveland. Like most manufacturing port cities in the North, Cleveland really wasn’t prepared for the feeding hand of Big Steel to be abruptly pulled away from it; it had no fallback plan and has never really recovered. It is fighting proudly, with warehouses being converted into hip artist’s lofts, old ethnic enclaves becoming neo-boheme collegiate haunts, and exotic immigrant culture spawning ethnic eateries that a few New Yorkers might envy. The inner city has hitched its future to the religion of Urban Renovation, and I wish it and its denizens all the good fortune in the world in their struggle to resuscitate this once-stalwart town. But at this point, the sweet spots are parts of a fruit otherwise overtaken with rot, and it is not a place I could yet see being my home again. I visited and left a town that is harbor to my memories and my formative years, but might never again house my personage and belongings. Cleveland doesn’t miss me, of course. Too many souls have fled the area for it to take note of one with so little accomplishment defecting. But I miss the idea of that place, the smokestacks poking fun at the sky, the salt telling the elements exactly what it thinks of them, and would that for all the world I could revive it from its fallen state. It was a town of unadulterated defiance once, dirty and ugly like a mean old codger, vivacious and spirited and too tough to die.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
I am taking a walk in my new town, now, where very different things happen. Wilmington, North Carolina, is a place where Old Man Winter is frightened to even visit. Just north of Myrtle Beach, it is a place where he makes exploratory expeditions, only to be repulsed by a sunny thaw when he believes he has established a beachhead. As I trek from my apartment down to the bicycle shop that is my destination, I notice the shoots of green wild grass poking up through the dead brown of the previous, brief freeze. This place never sleeps long in winter, yet is just far north enough to give winter the illusion of momentary advantage. It’s got to confuse the hell out of the migratory birds, who just can’t be sure whether to set up camp or keep moving. The smells of the resilient shrubs and damp earth on a warm January day are the irrefutable rhetoric of nature that Old Man Winter will occasionally vie with this seaside town, but cannot really hope to win. I’ve worn a pull-over sweatshirt out today, stupidly forgetting, as I begin to sweat, that the direct sunlight would quickly compensate for the tiny chill in the air. Wilmington is, in many ways, the small-scale opposite of Cleveland, a rapidly growing burg in the new South, assiduously bursting its bounds and sprawling everywhere in an attempt to contain the burgeoning film industry and expanding population that are its charges. I know already, five miles from the ocean and a world away from whence I came, that in my perfunctory tour of the Atlantic coast and the South, that I have already taken them both in my heart as my own. A walk down the street on a bright, gentle winter day does things for my temperament that the shores of Lake Erie could never provide, try as they may.
And yet I feel guilt and loss in this enjoyment, being just another industrial Yankee having jumped ship for fairer climes and better seafood. It’s ridiculous, I know, to feel a loyalty to a region as if I had, Genesis-like, been raised forth from the earth there. But human identity is in no small part corralled from our earliest surroundings. As much as I love this new home that I’ve found, I cannot divorce myself arbitrarily from the place that I came, from its gritty resilience and its symbols of rejection of all that is coastal and trendy and fashionable, from the Cleveland Browns and bars that serve Polish sausage and POC beer. So as I arrive at the bike shop and realize that it’s gone out of business a week earlier, and that I can’t possibly be disappointed because it’s such an incredibly beautiful day, I feel that preternaturally Catholic guilt telling me that life shouldn’t be so happy and that I should pack up and move back to a place with so much more fitting levels of adversity and strife. I have no intention at all of doing that, but that some part of me will forever nag me to do so tells me that my mind will never be but a house divided, an entity that struck out on its own to find a place better suited to it, that will never cease to pine for things familiar, and all that it has left behind.
It isn’t just the weather, mind you, or exclusively the frigidity of it. This December of ’05 was unseasonably warm, rain being the precipitation of choice, interspersed with cold grey bouts of sleet. One’s hands and face froze, to be sure, but the bone chilling ache of Cleveland’s coldest vintages was a year behind or ahead. Old Man Winter had been lazy, and stayed in Canada for the holidays. Without question, weeks of unbroken overcast skies drain the spirit from without, but Cleveland’s decay sprawls well outside the bounds of the merely natural: the death of heavy industry in the Great Lakes has blighted the place (as it has in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Buffalo) in a way no mere brush, or many brushes, with hard weather ever could. There was salt and there were slow plows and there was an abundance of that unquantifiable commodity, human perseverance, once, enough to survive the coldest night of a power outage or the heaviest blanket of snow. The rust just complemented the character of the place, served as a backdrop for the cacophony of labor that gave the city life.
To be fair, there are certainly plenty of livable, functioning neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts, and I grew up in one of those. But the plows and the salt and all the will in the world can’t seem to fight endemic poverty and population drain that consumes my hometown from the center outward. Blocks upon blocks of abandoned factories and warehouses, closed schools, condemned strip malls and the occasional oddly placed local business (hair and nail salon? pet kennel?) are the telling features of too many once-thriving industrial blocks of Cleveland. Like most manufacturing port cities in the North, Cleveland really wasn’t prepared for the feeding hand of Big Steel to be abruptly pulled away from it; it had no fallback plan and has never really recovered. It is fighting proudly, with warehouses being converted into hip artist’s lofts, old ethnic enclaves becoming neo-boheme collegiate haunts, and exotic immigrant culture spawning ethnic eateries that a few New Yorkers might envy. The inner city has hitched its future to the religion of Urban Renovation, and I wish it and its denizens all the good fortune in the world in their struggle to resuscitate this once-stalwart town. But at this point, the sweet spots are parts of a fruit otherwise overtaken with rot, and it is not a place I could yet see being my home again. I visited and left a town that is harbor to my memories and my formative years, but might never again house my personage and belongings. Cleveland doesn’t miss me, of course. Too many souls have fled the area for it to take note of one with so little accomplishment defecting. But I miss the idea of that place, the smokestacks poking fun at the sky, the salt telling the elements exactly what it thinks of them, and would that for all the world I could revive it from its fallen state. It was a town of unadulterated defiance once, dirty and ugly like a mean old codger, vivacious and spirited and too tough to die.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
I am taking a walk in my new town, now, where very different things happen. Wilmington, North Carolina, is a place where Old Man Winter is frightened to even visit. Just north of Myrtle Beach, it is a place where he makes exploratory expeditions, only to be repulsed by a sunny thaw when he believes he has established a beachhead. As I trek from my apartment down to the bicycle shop that is my destination, I notice the shoots of green wild grass poking up through the dead brown of the previous, brief freeze. This place never sleeps long in winter, yet is just far north enough to give winter the illusion of momentary advantage. It’s got to confuse the hell out of the migratory birds, who just can’t be sure whether to set up camp or keep moving. The smells of the resilient shrubs and damp earth on a warm January day are the irrefutable rhetoric of nature that Old Man Winter will occasionally vie with this seaside town, but cannot really hope to win. I’ve worn a pull-over sweatshirt out today, stupidly forgetting, as I begin to sweat, that the direct sunlight would quickly compensate for the tiny chill in the air. Wilmington is, in many ways, the small-scale opposite of Cleveland, a rapidly growing burg in the new South, assiduously bursting its bounds and sprawling everywhere in an attempt to contain the burgeoning film industry and expanding population that are its charges. I know already, five miles from the ocean and a world away from whence I came, that in my perfunctory tour of the Atlantic coast and the South, that I have already taken them both in my heart as my own. A walk down the street on a bright, gentle winter day does things for my temperament that the shores of Lake Erie could never provide, try as they may.
And yet I feel guilt and loss in this enjoyment, being just another industrial Yankee having jumped ship for fairer climes and better seafood. It’s ridiculous, I know, to feel a loyalty to a region as if I had, Genesis-like, been raised forth from the earth there. But human identity is in no small part corralled from our earliest surroundings. As much as I love this new home that I’ve found, I cannot divorce myself arbitrarily from the place that I came, from its gritty resilience and its symbols of rejection of all that is coastal and trendy and fashionable, from the Cleveland Browns and bars that serve Polish sausage and POC beer. So as I arrive at the bike shop and realize that it’s gone out of business a week earlier, and that I can’t possibly be disappointed because it’s such an incredibly beautiful day, I feel that preternaturally Catholic guilt telling me that life shouldn’t be so happy and that I should pack up and move back to a place with so much more fitting levels of adversity and strife. I have no intention at all of doing that, but that some part of me will forever nag me to do so tells me that my mind will never be but a house divided, an entity that struck out on its own to find a place better suited to it, that will never cease to pine for things familiar, and all that it has left behind.
posted by JPS at 1/15/2006 06:00:00 PM
2 Comments:
We are in the same New South boat, my friend. I too feel that I am undeserving of such lovely weather, particularly on days in January where it gets to be 65 and balmy.
I went home to C-land briefly,(as you will recall, you saw me) and the thing that struck me was the lack of maintenance of the city. Even the normally well-upkept houses in my parent's neighborhood suddenly had peeling paint and broken gutters and sheds with fallen roofs.
That may be the difference between old and new -- where i live, all is new or if not new, restored. Maintenance is a big issue, keeping things looking nice, planting crepe myrtles all over the damn place.
It is heartening and it helps you get your daily things done. Perhaps in places like Cleveland, the effort needed to get daily things done prevents any additional effort from being expended on the unessential during the winter. After all, the gutter will still be there in the spring.
It's been a warm winter so far. Something like 12 degress above average. Looks like the Farmers was right.
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