1. I would never be able to read all the books.
2. If I wanted to be a writer, I was already dreadfully far behind.
* * *
The idea of choices was complicated in the industrial Midwest.
It wasn’t just that this was a land of plenty. It specifically was a land of plenty for a newly mature and uniquely American set of consumers, a deeply nuanced middle class that begged for equally nuanced ways to indulge its proud discretionary income. The suburban shopping mall had almost completely replaced the urban downtown department store, and its concoursed nooks and honeycombs catered to increasingly concise stratifications of patronage. (Think a Chess King man would be caught dead in a Frye boots outlet? Think again, hombre.) Mail order found its sweet spot in the era between the Sears Wish Book and the Internet. We received catalogs in our mailbox by the rubber-banded bundle: Lands’ End, Sharper Image, Renovator’s Supply, Best Products, and on and on.
K-Mart, meanwhile, as the proletarian standard-bearer, was deepening its sensitivity to its own micro-demographics and would soon, depending on the locale, evolve into Super K, Big K, K-Mart Super Center.
The first two K-Mart Super Centers were built in suburbs of Akron. We were the national test market, and we embraced that like an honor. In the same way that Ohio seems invisible and irrelevant to the rest of the country until it comes time to elect a president, so too is it the kind of place whose clientele might seem nondescript until it comes time to put a mainstream, middle-class, mass-market shopping concept through its paces. Then a little eureka-bulb lights up.
Ohio!
As a rookie small-town newspaper reporter in 1991, I covered the opening of the very first K-Mart Super Center in the suburban town of Medina, Ohio. It was a huge event locally, with a ribbon cutting and throngs of curiosity seekers, and it also drew national media coverage. The news of the day included a woman’s wandering through the parking lot, crying and lost, unable to find her car in the vast acreage of automobiles. The police finally got involved, and after an extensive search the two were reunited.
My dad, a civil engineer, designed the parking lot for the second location, and I’d like to think that my Sunday-dinner consultations with him helped stave off another such misfortune.
I’m sure the K-Mart corporation chose industrial Ohio to launch this concept based on the area’s public perception as quintessentially working class. But in places such as Akron and Cleveland and Detroit and Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, we understood that term with a different nuance than its usual usage, in which working class implies the next tier down from middle class, and probably a couple of tiers down from white collar. Here, the working class had for decades been the most stable, most prosperous, most highly regarded local demographic. In Akron, tire builders referred to themselves as the “kings” of the rubber industry, without irony. They were highly paid, backed by an extraordinarily powerful labor union, and thanks to years and years of hard-nosed contract negotiations, they enjoyed exceptional job security and benefits. In Akron, the working-class families were the ones with the Cadillacs and the vacation homes and the high-end kitchen makeovers. My dad had a college degree and was a partner in a small engineering firm. Yet people like him—small-business owners, nonunion professionals—were far more susceptible to the swings of the economy and didn’t have the same clout as the factory workers. My dad wore a suit to work, but he’d never owned a new car.
Before K-Mart’s cultural revolution, smaller regional chains were more likely to cater to that middle class of consumers with a sort of midsize mom-and-pop style. In the region around Ohio, the Gold Circle discount stores established themselves as a dominant consumer force in the 1970s and ’80s. Gold Circle could be compared to K-Mart on something like a three-quarters scale, but it carried itself with the distinctly bourgeois personality that comes from marketing mass culture to a willing middle class, an up/downscale suggestion that quality is necessary, but only so much and then it becomes a liability; this same philosophy was employed to great effect by Timex watches and the Steve Miller Band.
Gold Circle was the first chain of stores to use bar codes on all its merchandise, a mark of facelessness in the name of efficiency that seemed particularly well tuned to people who worked on assembly lines. It seems no coincidence that the very first commercial scan of a UPC label took place here, in an Ohio grocery store, in 1974, just about exactly the moment our identity was spiraling into oblivion.
My parents loved Gold Circle because it carried a broad range of merchandise that approximated the A-list offerings of suburban-shopping-mall department stores, but at a considerably lower price. As a result, I had a pair of sneakers that looked to my parents exactly like the supercool Adidas Country running shoes (white leather; green stripes, suede yokes on the heel and the toe) that I not only coveted, but needed if I was ever going to achieve any level of cultural relevancy. My Gold Circle sneakers were indeed white running shoes, and unabashed knockoffs of the Adidas Country, but they were made not of leather but of a substandard polyvinyl that cracked prematurely, and worse, they had not three, but four stripes down the side. I may as well have shown up to gym class with an extra leg.
In an era when a down-filled ski jacket was a very particular status symbol (pretty people skied), I had a Gold Circle coat that was clearly a cheap approximation—not puffy and robust as in the resort photographs, but instead insulated with stitched rows of flimsy polyester batting. I was therefore marked by my garment as the industrial-Midwest version of an upper-subcaste dalit.
The winters were long and harsh, and I actively avoided going outside in that coat. So I holed up with my books instead. Even this attempt at dignity and freedom was complicated by my parents’ having found, at Gold Circle, sets of Bancroft Classics, abridged versions of the Western canon. These books came in boxed literary six-packs, like those beers of the world, where you like four of them very much and tolerate the rest simply because they’re beer. So I’d get a set that included Around the World in 80 Days and Kidnapped and Robinson Crusoe and The Man in the Iron Mask, but also included Heidi and Great Expectations.
I read them all and then others too. I read The Lone Ranger and the Mystery Ranch lying on my bed inside a sleeping bag one Christmas break. I have never been more comfortable. I read Where the Red Fern Grows propped in the limbs of a backyard apple tree. I have never been more uncomfortable.
I read in sunbeams and in a hammock and stretched out under the dining room table and in an old, exceedingly ugly swivel chair that smelled like dog.
I’ll never know if I was a natural introvert, or if I had simply found something preferable and contrary to public life: the secret confidence of Grosset & Dunlap.
* * *
The bookstore was on fire.
I suppose I smelled it first, though that’s hard to say. The fire’s announcement came whispering to almost every sense before it revealed itself whole. It got to my nose before I’d stepped into my car, nearly a mile away, but I thought little of that, preoccupied as I was with the end of the first day of my first serious job, writing for the local newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal. Even if I’d taken greater notice, it likely wouldn’t have raised concern. Even then, 1994, long after the factories had closed, the smell of smoke remained part of the olfactory personality of the central city.
Starting toward home, I felt the splash of one of the narrow rivers winnowing downhill as it sprayed up into my wheel wells, but paid it little heed. I heard the cavalry of sirens and the heavy engines urging through their gears. Then, as I crested the old canalway and climbed the hill up from downtown, I saw a wreck of smoke twisting into the sky. The closer I got, the more it drew me from my preoccupation with the day’s events. The question grew: What’s burning? And soon, with quickly decreasing possibilities, the answer.
By the time I reached the makeshift detour, I knew. In ugly orange flames drenched in black, the qu
estion fell away. The Bookseller was raging, full on. The bookstore where I’d spent all those childhood Sunday afternoons was burning down. On the first day of my real writing life, the place that had made me want to be a writer was disintegrating before my eyes. If it weren’t so tragic and true, the irony would have been too cheap even for a Jerry Todd melodrama.
There were firefighters everywhere, dozens of them, and trucks parked this way and that. The sidewalks were packed with onlookers. A water cannon was blasting at the building, and spray came from two aerial ladders angled above the roof. Water was gushing out the front door.
But nothing could stop it. I knew that, even as I idled in the slowed traffic, the line of us gawking as we waited for our turn into the detour. Some of them might have thought, with all those trucks and all those hoses, that the firefighters had a chance. Not me. Because I knew what fueled the flames: cottony, ink-drinking pages nestled in dried bindings, duck and string, bonded by old glue that cracked against its reopening. Volumes upon volumes upon volumes, tens of thousands of them, their infinite letters the tinder of a conflagration that nothing could extinguish.
It was a monstrous thing to see, savage and insurgent. Although the old bookstore was the first place to teach me the existence of every possibility, of every hope, I knew nothing could stop this. And it was true. The building was a complete loss. Countless books, most of them rare and collectible, were destroyed. Frank Klein, still running the business, was sixty-eight years old. It seemed as if it had to be the end.
But it wasn’t.
Mr. Klein salvaged what he could, found another old building, and set up shop again. As I write this nearly twenty years later, he’s still running the business, still going into his shop every day, still tending to something he understands better than anyone else could. I go to see him from time to time, and he always greets me warmly, asks about my parents, remembers something I was interested in years before. Every once in a while, he sets something aside for me, thinking I might be interested.
I doubt he knows how much he and his store meant to me as a child, and I doubt he knows what it means to me now as an example of something that seems so true about this place, the part of working class that says maybe the struggle is the only true freedom.
DELTA LOWS
This was not the world that had put us to bed. This was not a world we’d seen anywhere, not in the moon shots nor the Scholastic News, not in the downtown department-store-window wonderlands nor the collected works of Rankin/Bass. This was snow, yes, and January snow along the Great Lakes was as obvious as the nipple in Farrah Fawcett’s swimsuit. But not like this.
We’d gone to bed, my brother, Ralph, and I, in our shared attic bedroom, with the temperature mild, above freezing, and no expectation of a storm. And now we’d awoken to the sound of a winter hurricane, a sound that reached down our throats and gripped hard on our hearts, the other hand grabbing us by the nutsacks, a sound running its outlaw flag up our spines, and we peered out the frosted windows at our known universe, and we could not recognize a thing. The snow had not just fallen deep—twelve new inches on top of the sixteen inches already on the ground—but was being driven asunder by a terrifying anarchic wind, whipped into peaks where flatness should be, scooping out its own road in defiance of the taxpayers’ pavement, piling a sharp, white dune against the neighbor’s parked car, shaping shrubs into rain barrels and rag mops and hippopotami.
We leaned obliquely over the radiator, side by side, looking out the twin set of windows, their panes frosted with the difference between the escaped steam and the irrational weather outside.
We gazed into the predawn at something terrifying and beautiful, neither of which adjective applied well to the city we knew. Akron was many things, most of them good (though fewer by the year), but drama was not its forte. It was steady and safe, a place where every twentieth-century generation until our own could bank on a lifetime job with one of the rubber companies. What we saw was everything we knew suddenly turned completely foreign, and it did not feel good. We didn’t then know the meteorology of what was happening—that the temperature had just dropped from thirty-four to thirteen between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m.—twenty-one degrees in less than an hour—that the barometer had plummeted to 28.28 inches, the lowest reading ever recorded in the United States outside the tropics; that the winds were gusting over one hundred miles an hour, that the windchill was sixty below. We did not know we were in a winter hurricane. We did not know a trucker had become buried in a giant snowdrift on the highway and would survive the next six days eating snow, a long tube stuck out the window for air. We did not know of roofs torn off and windows imploded, of trees toppled and a helicopter bouncing across the airport grounds like a paper crane. We just knew what we heard: a high, freakish howling like nothing we’d ever before heard. And it was that—not the wind itself, but the sound of the wind—that drove through the thin gaps of the inefficient, old sashes and touched us like a bad fiction of the undead.
In the predawn, we saw plummeting flakes big as Communion hosts. The snow in the air and on the ground turned in drunken, violent swirls. Everything familiar was obliterated.
I loved to read stories about scenes like this, about homesteaders on the prairie tunneling their way from the kitchen to the barn, snow piled to the second-story windows, and the harrowing dialogue of escape that unfolded over harsh, hot coffee back safe at the kitchen stove. Joe. They called their coffee joe. About soldiers on the Western Front tracking red trails across cold, nihilistic snowscapes that would darken the rest of their lives. About cowboys stranded on the high plains melting snow to keep them alive, capable men of the land who knew that eating it cold would spell their end.
One other thing we did not yet know: that sophisticated people consider talking about the weather code for boring conversation. We didn’t know this because in Ohio most days, the weather is the most dynamic and remarkable aspect of our existence. Daily, it lays waste to our plans, it depresses us, it makes us laugh and marvel. It has its own language and legend. We speak of the lake effect and the snowbelt and Delta lows and Alberta clippers, of a lascivious summer humidity and a winter cold that cracks us like eggs. We pass down legends of the 1913 Flood, the ’88 Drought, and, more than anything else, this: the Blizzard of ’78, for which the phrase storm of the century is statistical fact.
Weather, in places like this, is culture.
I fumbled for my glasses in the dark, finding them on top of my dad’s old footlocker at the end of my bed, a big metal trunk whose army-drab top I’d covered in Wacky Packages stickers. We went downstairs.
An empty juice glass with a bit of grapefruit pulp in its bottom indicated my father was already up and gone. Gone, despite the day. He’d left a note. He’d set off on foot with a shovel for his office a mile away. My dad was a partner in a small civil-engineering firm, the kind of place that in Akron in those years relied almost completely on work from the tire companies, as did virtually all of the city. That source was crumbling at every corner, and my dad must have felt that he couldn’t take a day off, even a day like this, for fear of losing more. So he was off shoveling snow that was being blown haphazard by fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, which is like trying to line up cocaine-injected lab rats single file for inspection. But that is the nature of this place—and it is the nature of my father, and, I think, of all the men of this place—to do, for the sake of doing. We are restless to begin with, and we are of a place that does not look kindly on rest. So my father shovels snow that will not stop moving and says he is doing it because it needs to be shoveled.
Thus we will do the same. Ralph and I will pull on every layer we can manage, tube socks covered by baseball stockings covered by our father’s old woolen army socks covered by plastic baggies covered by green, steel-shank rubber boots. Long johns and sweatshirts and flannel and tragic polyester ski jackets. And then we will take up shovels from the garage.
Every fa
mily in the American Midwest has a collection of shovels accumulated across generations and ranked by hierarchy. The term good shovel has the same meaning and relevance in this region as good shoes has in the Bible Belt. Ralph, being the alpha male, would lay claim to our grandfather’s wooden-handled, wide-bladed plow shovel—the “good shovel”; I would be relegated to a contemporary plastic thing with a flat blade—the “chump shovel.” And so we would begin.
* * *
I am descended from engineers. Tinkerers and builders and puzzlers; men who sometimes invented problems just to solve them. My grandfather, for instance, built his own table saw. It takes an Escher-like hybrid of pragmatism and imagination to build a table saw when you have no table saw with which to build it. You wonder where a mind gets to thinking that way.
I knew that my grandfather had served in World War I, but that’s about all I knew of the subject. I knew there were awards and medals, but not how they had been earned. I knew the clothing I’d secretly tried on in his attic—a woolen overcoat; a leather belt—while a half dozen uncles drank beer and howled downstairs, a laughter of sheer force. But I knew nothing of where or how or why these things had been worn. I didn’t know the things I really wanted to know: whether he had fired a real gun, if he had jumped into a dark foxhole only to find himself face-to-face with an enemy soldier; if he had gone through the pockets of a dead man to find the picture of his wife and child. Which is to say that I could only understand my grandfather’s service by imagining him through the prism of All Quiet on the Western Front, which I had found on my parents’ bookshelves and read one summer in the limbs of the backyard apple tree. Which is to say I knew nothing of life, not even the lives directly surrounding me.
Only many years later, long after his death, did I learn he had been part of a little-known mission that no one, not even those who took part, ever quite understood. I found, among the boxes that represent the luggage of my lifetime, a booklet of poems written by a man named R. S. Clark and titled The Creation of Russia. I’m not sure how it got in with the rest of my books, but it was tucked between volumes I’d kept as mementos of my grandpa: an indigo hardback titled Geologic Survey of Ohio and a brown one called Roofs and Bridges: Stresses. Inside the cover of the slim poetry collection was a handwritten note, dated 1958, from one of the men he’d served (and no doubt suffered) with. One would expect this sort of note of such men who came from a place and time when hardship was held inside until it passed, like a gallstone, ruggedly and without remark, men from the Corps of Engineers:
The Hard Way on Purpose Page 4