The notion of postindustry had no negative connotation for me. I had no referent for the prefix. It seemed cool and groundbreaking and uniquely relevant to my surroundings in ways I was just beginning to recognize. I didn’t then understand the losses encompassed by the post part, nor the sense of pride and security once encompassed by industry. I was aware of a void, of all the empty buildings and the general diaspora of people my age, the recent graduates and emergent climbers who’d hightailed it to more promising lands. But to me that void just felt like something to be filled. It felt like opportunity. And it felt as if it were exclusively my own.
* * *
In the 1980s and ’90s, a mass exodus took place from the Rust Belt. This included alarming percentages of the region’s native-born young people. In the 2010 census, a psychological threshold was passed, as Akron’s census count fell to 199,000, meaning the population had recoiled all the way back to its 1910 level, a hundred-year low. Proportionally, this figure exactly mirrors Detroit’s latest census revelation: in both cities, all the growth of the twentieth-century industrial boom has been erased.
Having never left, I often wonder two things.
First: why does everyone always talk about the 30 percent who have departed, instead of the 70 percent who have stayed?
And second: where did they all go?
I don’t know the first answer. I do know the second.
Phoenix.
* * *
The same census-takers that haunt the industrial Midwest like decennial locusts report that the population of Phoenix has grown from 439,170 in 1960 to 1,445,632 in 2010. Metaphorically speaking, all 1 million of those new residents came directly from Ohio. I know many of them personally. They post Facebook photos of sunsets and the labels of craft beers I’ve never heard of, and they send obliquely condescending meteorological updates, leading me to wonder if “It’s a dry heat” is truly a favorable replacement for “It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity.”
Phoenix: where the sports team is called the Suns, not the Browns; where there seems to be an entirely safe and logical set of career opportunities; where golf, not bowling, is the measure of a man’s leisure; and where people from here go to die as though dying in a place with winter would simply be too much to bear.
The Rust Belt is the burden of America, and I don’t mean in the sense that the rest of the country has to shoulder us. I mean in the sense that the 70 percent of us who have stayed have endured and tested and defined the burden in a way that might provide insight for a country that, lately, might welcome our lessons. We know the weight. We understand hard times. We’ve been called “dying” but haven’t died. We know a few things.
* * *
If you want to nutshell the story of the American Industrial Belt, it’s an ongoing narrative of arrival and departure. We understand America by virtue of living in melting pots that never completely gelled, and we understand America by virtue of living in places people had to leave.
I have spent my whole life watching people leave, but that’s only a matter of timing. In another era, Ohio was the first safe stop on the Underground Railroad, a promised land of sorts, as escaping slaves crossed the Ohio River at the state’s southern border. Prior to that, it was the farthest edge of the western frontier, a final destination until it was tamed enough for America to continue its expansion. Later, it was the destination of hopeful Europeans, countless scores of them, arriving by ship to work in the factories of Cleveland and Akron and Toledo and Youngstown and, more broadly, Detroit and Buffalo and Bethlehem and Duluth. And of poor Appalachians, who made their way up the pre-interstates, leaving dead farmlands and tapped-out mines behind. And African-Americans from the deeper South, seeking the same opportunity.
Many of them settled and acquired newspaper subscriptions and self-propelled lawn mowers and street-improvement tax bills. Others took the quick cash of a season in the mills and moved on. In a good healthy lapse in the middle, a stability, the culture matured. The culture of hard work and bowling trophies and Blatz and Pontiacs became a linchpin of Americana. But the notion of this new middle-class lifestyle as “having arrived” was a falsehood.
Sometimes I wonder if some of these cities were too big for their own good, often cramped and underplanned and overreaching and configured in such a way that the smell was the defining characteristic only because there was no logistical way to avoid it. A few years ago, Youngstown mayor Jay Williams launched a campaign called “Youngstown 2010,” a systematic plan to “right-size” his city, whose population plummeted from 167,000 in 1960 to 67,000 in 2010. The idea was to eliminate vacant houses and neighborhoods to compress the city’s physical size and scope to reflect its current state. Not to be ashamed of the reduction, but to resolve it.
* * *
When the men finished their work that day, they’d left a massive visual pun. I doubt they did this on purpose, but I like to imagine they did. The smokestack was halfway down.
F
I
R
E
was gone. What remained was
S
T
O
N
E
I have one of those blocks now from that very chimney. It is impressively crafted, heavy firebrick, with a honeycomb of holes, seven and a half inches wide, with a slight curve to its glazed outer surface, the color of a dirty Labrador retriever. It is tapered, so that when one block was fitted to the next to the next, they would form the curvature that eventually became the giant cylinder.
Someone gave it to me, one of those men who’d put in decades at what old-timers call “the Firestone,” the definite article implying a sort of deification. He’d scavenged a few of those man-made stones, and he offered one as a gift.
POPULAR STORIES FOR BOYS
Lord, I lived inside those books. And they were not books that, conventionally speaking, you would choose to live inside, were you choosing to live inside some books. You would choose smart, new volumes: coffee-table books on hibiscus or vintage Vespas, I think, or you would choose something well glossed and shrink-wrapped, written by someone unthreateningly attractive and slightly more clever than you, someone like, say, Elizabeth Gilbert or Calvin Trillin, with whom you could put up for a while, like a hiking partner on the Appalachian Trail. (Yes: you would choose Bill Bryson.) You would not choose those books I chose on rainy Sunday afternoons when my parents took us to the used-book store near downtown, a place with rows and rows of faded spines organized by arcane, sometimes confounding principles of subject. “Paperback Fiction” covered the entire canon of, well, fiction published in paperback. But certain themes were diced and distilled to microscopic specifics such as “Aviation/WWII History/Allies/Lighter-Than-Air” and “Jewish Studies/Akron & Area.” There were tantalizing subcategories of antique firearms but no hint anywhere of the corresponding violence and death that is the platonic craving of the American boy.
The store was in an old building one ring from the center of town, and during the drive there—tucked with two brothers and a sister into the backseat of a gray AMC Pacer—covering the four miles from our house near the edge of the city, I could sense the gentle downhill slope toward downtown. If you ran out of gas and were in no hurry, you could roll there.
Industrial cities almost invariably evolved outward from their lakes and rivers, guided by liquid muses. Akron originally evolved as a canal town—the main drag once made of water—and later as a factory town, and so its development was based more on the principles of gravity and flow than the engineered order of lines and grids. The center of town was low, where the canal found its easiest course, and the neighborhoods evolved up the gentle slopes according to the prevailing winds. The poorest people lived in the places that smelled the worst and where settled the highest concentrations of soot, and the ascending classes followed in order, so that the castles (and some we
re actual castles) built by the wealthy founders and company presidents were just beyond reach of their own by-products of smoke and ash. Don’t shit where you eat, the saying goes.
From where we parked for the bookstore, I could see the tall, round smokestacks of the B.F. Goodrich complex just yonder, and beyond that the tall, round smokestacks of Firestone. Viewed from this vantage, the spiked architecture of the smokestacks collectively formed a sort of bar code against the sky, as if they composed the imprint of our true self. Even on a Sunday, the air hung with a burnt pungency of sulfur, which I inhaled with equal shares of attraction and repulsion. It was like that glass jar of gumdrops on your grandmother’s table: maybe sweet and maybe spice.
Inside the store was a cat that lay across the counter, obvious as a stage prop, watching us wander into our places. The owner, Frank Klein, was built with the sturdy earthiness of a russet potato—thick fingers and brawny shoulders and rocky facial features studded with sharp blue eyes. He looked like a relief map of Maine. His hair and beard were of the same shape and consistency as that on my Kung-Fu Grip G.I. Joe, whose follicles were described in the packaging as “lifelike.” Mr. Klein was highly social and often engaged my parents, and sometimes me, as we moved past the cat and into the store.
The store was called the Bookseller, the pun of whose name I had figured out myself at an earlier age when entendre represents revelation—seller . . . cellar!—and which I still appreciated as I headed toward the downstairs. The basement, underlit, musty, and damp, was devoted to books that a book dealer wouldn’t feel uncomfortable storing in such a place, and that’s where I always headed because that’s where I had previously discovered a green volume whose glue had turned to the prediluvian dust of saints’ bones, a book whose title—Popular Stories for Boys—was rendered entirely ironic by time, as it was published in—well, I don’t know what year because the unhinged spine had released the title pages and the first two pages of text. Suffice to say that the “boys” with whom this book may originally have been “popular” had likely read it by gaslight, in shirtsleeves and suspenders. Because of the missing pages, I started on page three, halfway through a word that soldiered on without the aid of its lost prefix:
. . . truding from the body. But there was no sign of this—only a tiny hole through the center of its forehead, from which blood was oozing.
I was hooked.
Popular Stories for Boys compiled four complete books: Bomba the Jungle Boy; Sky Riders of the Atlantic; Bob Dexter, Club House Mystery; and Wrecked on Cannibal Island. It ran on close to nine hundred pages and I read them all. This book, and those that followed, did many things for me in terms of imagination and aesthetic and the rituals of reading and so on. But first, mostly, and most profoundly, they took me down with their smell.
As if in response to the olfactory challenge of the factory-town air, the books in that basement were pungent and complex—dust, pulp, ink, cotton duck, binding strings—and when I found myself alone, I pulled down a volume and buried my nose into the center crease, pulling the sage up into my nostrils until I needed to exhale and inhale again. Sometimes (first looking this way and that) I touched my tongue to the page for a taste.
Here was an invocation: however deeply I could draw the scent into myself—literal inspiration—I could then exhale my wish for the answers to all these sacred mysteries.
* * *
From the time I learned to read I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and I knew exactly what that meant: I had committed myself to an insoluble mystery. I had no idea how books were made, nor any manifestation of who made them. Half the time, the name of the person on the cover turned out to be a pseudonym, fictions within fictions—Samuel Clemens mingling with Poor Richard and Theodor Geisel and for God’s sake Theo. LeSieg—all of them pouring stories through their funnels of deception.
Following the direction of Popular Stories for Boys, I took particular interest in books on the subjects of the American past, but more specifically, I sought books written in the American past, so that my childhood library and the vocabulary I absorbed by osmosis was markedly anachronistic, with titles such as Arthur M. Winfield’s Rover Boys Out West from the “Rover Boys Series for Young Americans,” published in 1900 by the Mershon Company (a used book, inscribed “For Byron in the hope he may enjoy reading about the Rover Boys Out West,” and signed “Uncle Bob, May 14, 1932,” an inscription that seemed oddly redundant).
I also read Winfield’s Poor but Plucky from the “Bright and Bold” series and some of the Jerry Todd books he wrote: Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg, Jerry Todd and the Whispering Cave, etc. (The prolific Arthur M. Winfield turned out to be the pen name of a man known to the civilian world as Edward Stratemeyer. Mysteries within mysteries.)
I read The X Bar X Boys at Nugget Camp (1928) and The X Bar X Boys in Thunder Canyon (1926), installments in a series by James Cody Ferris, which if that was his real name is awesome.
All these books had certain elements in common. They began with fanciful frontispieces, black-and-white illustrations captioned with a snippet of text:
In her hand the woman held a long barreled rifle.
Walter sprang in to save the lives of the horses.
Bomba brought the paddle down with all his force.
Nearly every chapter ended with a cliff-hanger, which often literally included someone hanging off a cliff.
Yes, sir, the Cap’n had been knocked out by a loaded catchup bottle. And the mysterious humpback who had committed the deed had escaped into the night.
Eventually, I recognized that many of these books were published by Grosset & Dunlap. I can’t say that I went specifically looking for that imprint on the spine, but by early adolescence, I could be best described as a “G&D man.” I carried the belief that “pluck” was among the most desirable personality traits a young man could possess, and also that it was not unusual for boys to drink black coffee nor to whittle as a pastime, nor to have friends named Red and Stumpy and Slim and High Hat Frank (a tramp, an actual tramp!) nor also to be heroic orphans. I called skunks polecats and knew that when the time came to put my acquired knowledge into practice, I would be able to identify fool’s gold by pressing it between my teeth.
I also believed that normal human conversation was conducted in highly expository back-and-forth exchanges of quick wit and hyperbolic dialect:
“And what do you think about it, Pop?” Roy asked at length. “Any pronounced opinions on the subject?”
“You mean about goin’?”
“I mean about the chances of striking gold at Nugget Camp.”
“Oh!” The old puncher rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, if you really want to know, Roy—I think the chances are pretty blame good!”
These books led to an interest in fanciful history (The Life of Kit Carson, The Oregon Trail, With Crockett and Bowie: Fighting for the Lone Star Flag), and then led sort of accidentally to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, and then by calculated chance to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I may be the only heterosexual boy in Ohio history who not only read all the Little House books, but also as a result took up sewing because the skill seemed absolutely necessary to my survival here on the lone prairie. (Which was actually the twin bed in the room I shared with my late-twentieth-century, middle-class brother.)
These books, most of them, shared one other common trait. In their opening pages, on that thick cottony paper, were lists of other titles. By 1927, for instance, Arthur M. Winfield had written a “first” Rover Boys series consisting of twenty titles, and a “second” series of ten more, and also, apparently in his downtime, six titles of a Putnam Hall series, which I’d never even seen. This list wasn’t complete. It didn’t mention Winfield’s Bright and Bold series, published in the late nineteenth century, a series at whose scope and breadth I could only guess, because the list on the Poor but Plucky title page indexed a few titles fo
llowed by “etc., etc.,” suggesting that Mr. Winfield’s prolificness was best not expressed in finite terms.
Leo Edwards, meanwhile, had already published eleven books in the Jerry Todd series, plus eight Poppy Ott books, three Trigger Berg books, and four Tuffy Beans. (A previous owner of this copy of Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg had penciled marks next to the titles—check marks and little circles, apparently to indicate those read and those yet to be read, an accounting of desire whose echo carries into the Amazon Wish List.)
The bit of copy that preceded the list indicated a body of work filled with “Pirates! Mystery! Detectives! Adventure! Ghosts! Buried Treasure! Achievement!”
The list of books in the X Bar X Boys series ended with a preemptive strike: “Other volumes in preparation.”
Books were being written everywhere, at every hour of the day and night, in the mystery of creation, but with such speed and efficiency that they could not be accounted for by anything but the promise that they would come, they would come, they would come. Mystery! Adventure! Buried Treasure! Achievement! Etc.!
All of this combined to make two things quite clear, both of which were ultimately depressing.
The Hard Way on Purpose Page 3