Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  Some say that these were once migratory Canada geese that, as a result of habitat shifts, or climate change, or perhaps sheer laziness, decided to split the difference between Canada and Mexico and just hang out all year on the banks of the St. Joe. Whether that’s true or not, they are certainly abundant. With goslings around, they are warier and meaner than usual, flapping their wings at us as we cut through a group of them dominating the bank and the sidewalk. Mayors in South Bend and Mishawaka have tried to abate the goose situation over the years, but none has solved it yet. Efforts to scare them off have been ineffective; the occasional move to cull them met fierce opposition from animal rights activists, even a “vigil to honor slain geese” organized on Facebook in response to a particularly aggressive effort in Mishawaka once. With all respect for those who care for animals, the response to that situation displayed a loss of perspective worthy of TV satire, or beyond it: even the writers of Parks and Recreation would probably have stopped short of dreaming up the sign someone held up that day, reading QUACK LIVES MATTER. In any case, leaving the geese alone has proved to be the least bad option so far, and so joggers and geese will have to coexist.

  Back across the footbridge to the north side of the river and running back the way we came, light gathers around us and brings the trees along the banks into relief. Across the water from us is the Crooked Ewe, once a VFW hall and now one of the best restaurants and breweries in town. Where Vietnam veterans once hosted fish fries, the Ewe now offers nitro coffee and ramen with smoke shiitake, glace au poulet, kombu, scallion, and one-hour sous vide egg, with your choice of brisket, pork belly, shrimp, turkey, or andouille.

  On this side of the river it’s a little more old-fashioned, as you pick up the scent of bacon from the diner in the middle of the Farmer’s Market, whose red walls have stood on this ground for nearly a hundred years. As farm-fresh food has come in and out of fashion, the place has hosted its butcher, Polish baker, fruit and veggie offerings, cheese shop, knickknack dealer, and lunch counter as always. Now you can also find coffee roasted by a start-up in an old factory nearby and arugula from a community garden network, but the place has never lost its heartland style. Its feel is still homey, and jars of pickled eggs and strawberry preserves outnumber those of salsa and kombucha. Under its roof on a Saturday morning, it is as if American society never fractured after World War II. Korea vets in flannel shirts down from Michigan, accompanied by ruddy grandsons in Under Armour camo jackets, coexist peacefully with Montessori moms navigating strollers between clumps of grandparents eyeing big baskets of apples and small ones of plums. Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.

  We pass under the Grand Trunk Western railroad bridge, and hear the rumble of a train advancing overhead. There is no horn, thank God. I think of the painful summer that once followed a miscommunication involving a letter sent by the Federal Rail Administration. The letter went to a city attorney, who never opened it, for the understandable reason that he had passed away six years earlier, and the consequence was a suspension of this neighborhood’s designation as a Quiet Zone. Horns from a hundred trains a day blared at all hours, and an entire side of town began to lose its mind and told me so, one email and phone call at a time. My public works staff worked aggressively to make sure all of our railroad crossings met the guidelines to be safe enough that passing trains don’t have to sound their horns, then waited powerlessly for the FRA to respond—all while my inbox filled with messages, and sometimes recordings, from frazzled neighbors desperate for a good night’s sleep. They were not interested in hearing that this was out of our hands and with the federal government, or that the railroad companies were deciding on their own how long they would take to comply with the reinstated Quiet Zone. I was the one they knew how to reach, and I had better explain what we were doing to fix it. It took months, but at last the horns were silenced.

  We pass under a bridge, part of a structure that I’ve begun calling the On-Ramp to Nowhere. A highway-style cloverleaf here governs an intersection that could easily be handled by a stoplight or a roundabout. It was completed in the 1960s after years of planning, designed to handle the flow of tens of thousands of workers leaving the Studebaker zone at the same time every day—and finished shortly after the plants went quiet forever. Someday it could be redeveloped into a small park, a residential block, or, who knows, maybe a flying garden after the fashion of the High Line in New York or an on-ramp-to-park project now in the works in Buenos Aires. But that’s not in the budget just yet.

  Off to the right rises the stately facade of Jefferson Intermediate Center, the finest piece of architecture in the South Bend public school system. It seems too big to be a middle school. Chasten taught here, as a long-term sub while he was in graduate school, after he moved in with me. The kids here range from middle-class families in the well-off neighborhood nearby, to residents of the homeless center downtown.

  Back through Howard Park, we stay low along the water and come to the East Race, the best symbol of our city’s knack for finding new value in what is already ours. The East Race began life as a canal for powering sawmills, typical of the 1840s, when canal-building became such a craze that it led to the bankruptcy of the entire state of Indiana and a provision in the state Constitution to prohibit the state from going into debt. This canal seemed to have worked out fairly well in its day, but by the 1970s it had fallen out of use and was filled in, a sort of industrial scar across the east side of the downtown. Mayor Roger Parent saw value in it and, controversially, invested heavily in restoring it until it was opened in 1987 as America’s first man-made whitewater rapids. Today it’s part of our parks system, and for a few bucks you can raft or kayak down its thousand-foot run. We can raise or lower the speed of the water through three large gates at the top, adjusting the difficulty level of the rapids.

  The East Race embodies our community’s style of development: a healthy city can take things that seem like liabilities and turn them into treasure. Looking across to the left as we run, I can see Stephenson Mills, a once-shuttered underwear factory now back to life as trendy lofts overlooking the East Race; one adaptive reuse supporting another. Behind it sits the Commerce Center, once a coal-fired power plant and now an office space slated for further development. One summer, the owner allowed eleven artists to set up installations in its basement, which includes an abandoned pool that once served as the central amenity of a fitness center there after a prior repurposing in the 1980s.

  That’s not even the most creative use of an old swimming pool in the city. Farther downtown, the former Central High School, where John Wooden once coached basketball, is full of people even though its bell rang for the last time in 1968. It, too, was reopened as apartments in the 1990s. Around the time I became mayor, a Navy lieutenant named Gus Bennett took up residence in an apartment made out of what used to be the school swimming pool. Though it was potentially the least usable space in the building, Gus and his roommate, Dena Woods, saw a way to give it new life, hosting bands that would play in the deep end and filling the rest of the former pool with sofas where people could take in the concerts while others watched from around the railings above. Good local acts and traveling bands played there, a testament to the fact that a good eye can see future value where others see disuse. In many ways, that’s the story of the city itself.

  To our right is the headquarters of AM General, the company best known for making Humvees used by the military, a continuation of the tradition of military vehicle–making in our city that dates back through World War II trucks to Civil War–era Studebaker wagons. It’s about 6:45, but we already see one person sitting at a desk in the office, probably servicing a Middle Eastern or European account. In Mishawaka, the day shift has been under way since five a.m. On the commercial side of the plant, workers have been assembling Mercedes-Benz R-Class sport-utility vehicles for sale to the Asian market. Now that that contract has ended, the facility is being retooled to make electric v
ehicles for SF Motors, a Silicon Valley–based firm backed by Chinese investors.

  We come to where the East Race is reunited with the main course of the St. Joseph River. Here, the river is a rebellious churn of swirls and eddies, in a hurry to get somewhere. Trotting up a flight of concrete stairs, we pick up the East Bank Trail, which incorporates a former railway and will take us all the way up to the edge of the Notre Dame campus. The asphalt is smooth and wide, and the daylight is now peeking through between leaves under a canopy of trees that arches over us, as if the city were nowhere near. From my office on the fourteenth floor, most of the city looks like a forest, and in the summertime you would never guess that whole neighborhoods sit below the dark green carpet of treetops.

  We cross over U.S. 933, the north-south spine of the city, on a footbridge adapted from its original use as a railroad. I used to hate that bridge. Walking under it every day to get to school, I remember dreading the approach. Cars rushed by with nothing to buffer the sidewalk, which was then barely above street level, and the concrete support of the bridge held up an ugly green iron mass, while an inch-high ridge of pigeon droppings marked the beginning and the end of the passage under. A few years ago, a local artist decided the bridge could be a lot more. With city support, he recruited volunteers—over nine hundred of them, from local grade school kids to me and my mother—to paint the concrete and the bridge itself in a sort of giant paint-by-numbers project.

  At the bottom of the hill we turn left at Stink Corner. It smells fine now, but for years I knew it as Stink Corner because of the sewer outfall there. Fixing the sewer so that it doesn’t overflow into the river as often is the goal of a twenty-year, near-billion-dollar project I have inherited known as the Long-Term Control Plan. Judging by the fresh air at this corner, the project has been helpful.

  Our house comes into view, hard to miss with the white, blue, and yellow of the South Bend flag hanging over the reconstructed porch. The Michigan Street Bridge that I crossed alone in my Jeep an hour earlier is now full of rush-hour traffic. Crossing the street and back up the hill toward the East Bank Trail again, we are mostly silent on mile eight, falling into the runner’s trance. I become aware of feeling a little cold and a little hungry. The trail leads us downhill, back toward downtown. We return to the East Race, on the other side now, and come to Seitz Park.

  As we cross back over the Jefferson Bridge, I glance at the contagion of potholes and make a mental note to check whether it’s still on the list for repaving this year. Across MLK, we look to the right through the windows of the Chicory Café, where lawyers are fetching coffee and a couple graduate students are settling in for a long morning. A couple years ago the owner knocked out a wall and doubled the size of the café, partly because of revenue from selling beer after we used a state law to allow any business within a thousand feet of the river to get a deeply discounted three-way liquor license, helping the number of restaurants downtown double. One beer at a time, downtown has come back to life.

  We kick it up for the last couple blocks, a sprint to mark the end of the run. Everything hurts, and I lose my breath for a beat, but now the hardest part of the day is over, at least physically. I suddenly realize how cold it is, covered in sweat on the street corner. Joe peels off to go home, while Tim and I walk up the stairs of the parking garage to get to the gym. I shower and shave in the locker room, and make small talk with the others, mostly downtown professionals and retirees my parents’ age. One of them asks how much longer it will take to get those potholes on Jefferson taken care of, and as I stand there with a razor in my hand and a towel around my waist, I share my official views on the progress of the road-funding bill in Indianapolis while fighting the urge to insist on a rule that I believe should be understood implicitly: anyone not wearing pants should not have to talk about work.

  Soon I’m in my mayor’s uniform; dress slacks and a tie, or a suit if I’m doing something formal later. No breakfast meeting today, so I can head to the South Bend Chocolate Café and take my customary booth in the back. I shovel in scrambled eggs and ham, fruit on the side, washed down with coffee while I check the Tribune for surprises, examine the emails on my phone, and thumb through Twitter. Fed, hydrated, and caffeinated, I am ready to get to work. On the way out, I pass by the triceratops skull in the back room—the eccentric owner of the Chocolate Café is also a dinosaur enthusiast with a sort of ad hoc museum on the premises of the shop—and head back out into the cold air and toward the County-City Building.

  THE COUNTY-CITY BUILDING IS NOT a beautiful structure. It is fourteen stories of steel and glass, with mostly tile floor and drab walls that proclaim its 1960s origins, yet it has its a certain appeal. I pass the concrete pylons toward the glass doors, walk up to the metal detector, empty my pockets, and lay my briefcase on the belt of the X-ray machine. Under Indiana law, the only reason you can be prevented from bringing a gun into the building—or even into my office—is because the building is connected by tunnel to a courthouse complex.

  Curtis is working security today. In his brown county police uniform, sitting in his usual spot beside the X-ray and glancing at the monitor, he reaches out for our customary handshake.

  “What do you know, Curtis?”

  “Not much,” he replies.

  False modesty. He’s retired from the city police, and seems to know half the city. His annual August birthday party brings hundreds of people to the yard of his ranch house on the West Side’s curving Lombardy Street a stone’s throw from Washington High School. Every year he stays up the night before, slow-cooking his celebrated ribs.

  Once, during one of these morning hellos, he signaled that he was going to share the secret to his ribs with me. For days, maybe weeks, he strung me along. It turned into a game. “I’m going to tell you the secret, but not yet.” What was it? I’d ask. Molasses? Beer? Some kind of pepper in the dry rub? I enjoyed the game but was also genuinely curious, because his ribs were just right—tender, sweet, and juicy. “I’ll tell you one day.”

  I assumed the game would go on forever, but the day really did come. “You want to know what the secret to my ribs is?” Smiling, mostly with his eyes, he disclosed the secret ingredient: “Patience.”

  AT THIS HOUR, THE ELEVATOR will be crowded, and usually I’ll know where someone is headed the moment they step in.

  Homeowner with a tax bill in hand: treasurer’s office on two.

  Slightly angrier-looking homeowner with a letter in hand: assessor’s office on three.

  Sweatpants plus neck tattoos plus nervousness equals a trip to the fourth floor for adult probation.

  A gentler anxiety, mixed with resignation, in the expression of a low-income male in his twenties usually signals a visit to child support on the sixth floor.

  A mom with a toddler is probably headed for immunizations at the county health department on nine—or, if she looks like she’s in the middle of a divorce, vital records on eight.

  Sherriff’s deputy with a red folder, probably a subpoena, is headed to the prosecutor’s office on ten.

  Those are the county floors. The top three floors are ours, the city’s—legal, admin and finance, public works. Code enforcement on thirteen has a soda fridge worth visiting from time to time; it’s also notable because it used to be impossible to see across the room because of the stacked files, before we maneuvered the department and its masses of paperwork into the digital age.

  I STEP OUT FROM THE ELEVATOR on fourteen and look to the right, where my name appears in black letters on the glass door to the Office of the Mayor. In this corner of the floor are six full-time staff and as many interns as we have room for, guiding an administration of up to thirteen hundred employees, serving a community of a hundred thousand.

  A narrow corridor leads me to the desk of Yesenia, my scheduler and the first one in today. After greeting her, I step into my own office, walk across the carpet, and take a seat behind the big desk angled to look out through the windows onto the west and north sides of
the city.

  At eye-level out the window, a peregrine falcon swoops into view, angles toward my corner of the building, spreads its wings, and slows to alight on the roof, like a fighter landing on an aircraft carrier. Part of a mating pair living in a box right above my office, she patrols the downtown constantly, sometimes pausing to survey the realm from a nearby radio tower or a building across the street. A dive-bombing falcon is the fastest-moving animal on earth, capable of moving at two hundred miles per hour. Occasionally she gets a pigeon, making it difficult for me to concentrate as I look past an unsuspecting visitor, over their shoulder, at the shower of pigeon feathers drifting past the window.

  In Egypt, falcons were considered to be symbols of the rising sun. Now, at last, the sun is up, shining on the American flag flying over the Tower Building across the way. I take a breath, pick up the phone, and begin to learn what kind of day this will be.

  2 For the purposes of this chapter, I have created a sort of composite Monday morning. Some of these features of my mornings change from month to month or year to year. The Jeep has given way to a Chevy, for example, and at one point over a year passed without us managing nine miles. Still, this is as representative and honest an account of our long runs as I can offer. This would be closest to a typical run in February or March of 2016.

  8

  The Celebrant and the Mourner

  Civic ceremony, to put it mildly, was not my forte at first. Shaped by my consulting background, I arrived in office wanting to get concrete, measurable things done. My intentions focused on erasing inefficiencies and producing results. I took office eager to redesign the organization of local government and guide the course of our local economy, to see collapsing houses removed and urban infill built. The more concrete and countable my work product, the better. As for what you might call the symbolic functions of a mayor—sitting on a dais at a charity lunch or standing smiling next to a congressman or governor amid an endless sequence of speeches prior to a ribbon-cutting—to me this was a cost of doing business, an irritation to be dealt with as quickly as possible so I could get back to work.