My dad was a connoisseur of ruins. He befriended the guy who had the contract to demolish buildings for the city, and so these excursions grew into elaborate, exotic outings, sometimes requiring whole weekends and skid loaders. When I was in my early twenties, my dad asked me if I could round up half a dozen friends because he’d scored scavenging rights to the foundation of a demolished barn and had bartered to borrow a flatbed truck for a Sunday. So I showed up with a carload of sleepy-eyed, hungover, self-taught musicians and an itinerant stand-up comic, the lot of them dressed in canvas sneakers and Hüsker Dü T-shirts and jelly bracelets, not altogether prepared for this sort of work, lured chiefly by the promise of twenty-five bucks apiece. (My father, fully expecting such a scenario, had brought along a bucket full of work gloves.)
Down the hillside behind the barn site, I found a junked washing machine, scrambled down to it, pulled off the chunky, silver plastic knobs and instantly recognized the size and shape of the control stems. Sure enough, when I got home that night and tried them on the volume and tone controls of my Fender Mustang, they fit perfectly, and I played it that way for years, looking as if I were adjusting for temperature and rinse cycle.
Was I drawn to these things because I was following my father’s instincts? Did their elemental nature appeal to me naturally as a child, a real-life version of LEGOS? Was it because of the male appetite for destruction? Was it because of the architecture of my place? Would I have the same attraction if I’d grown up in, you know, Phoenix, where the bricks are all new and synthetic?
I can’t say for sure. What I do know is that for as long as I can remember, I have been far more attracted in every way to things that are worn and used than to clean, new things. I find reclaimed bricks superior to new in every way, in their quality of craft, their appearance, their weight. And I find them even more desirable in dumped piles, or lying at random near the bottom of their tumbled walls, or peeking up from the hard dirt, leached from a Pittsburgh hillside. I like them when they’re hard to get.
* * *
Recognizing the value of forgotten and broken things seems, at least in my part of the country, to be the story of America in the twenty-first century. The 1900s were all about making things. The new millennium has been all about remaking things.
My father sits now most summer afternoons in a little porch he built next to his garage. To visit him there, I first pass a hand-built stone column into which he set the sculpted-in-the-round face of a girl, saved from the demolition of a local public school. Then, underfoot, a precious lifelong collection, laid into a brick path.
FULTONHAM
STEEL PAVER
NEWBURGH
IRON ROCK
PORTER
20th CENTURY
And now, off to the side, PENNA, awaiting its place.
UNREAL ESTATES
I used to know these places from their insides out. I knew them before their synthetic skins were applied and the prefabricated bluegrass was rolled between driveways and before the plastic mullions were pressed onto the safety glass to give the illusion of panes. I knew them before their gardens were delivered in plastic buckets, their varnish sprayed on like a news anchor’s Aqua Net. I worked at residential construction sites in college doing shit work with a lot of that time spent not doing anything, just exploring, noodling around the lives of people who were spending fantastic amounts of money—the kind measured in percentages of a million—for houses made of extruded foam and synthesized brick and bar-code-stamped green lumber from force-fed firs.
I had a whole ring of keys, like a watchman. I went from house to house, often in the off-hours, at twilight and dawn, usually tending to the tedium: the add-ons, the do-overs, the cleanups after the big crews had packed up their caravans and moved on to the next little castle. I snooped through the half-unpacked lives, the soft-core pornography and the unpaid bills and the ceramic Precious Moments. In the shadowy musk of fresh-laid carpet, I stared at unhung portraits of people who didn’t match the tired-looking, well-dressed new-owners-but-not-yet-occupiers who stopped in on the fly to see how much longer it would be until they could call this home. Their Bimmers idled on the unsealed concrete, impatient. I stole a beer or two from their refrigerators—always, always Miller Lite—and peered into the shadows of a lifestyle that I, more green than the studs behind the Sheetrock, could only decipher as foreign, hard to plumb.
These people had money. They had a lot of money. And there were a lot of them. Whole new developments full. There’s this impression that when the industrial collapse happened, it devastated entire regions of the country. But it was much more nuanced than that. Some demographics (for lack of a more human word) were crushed, yes—driven away, or down into a lower standard of living. Yet others thrived. And some weren’t much affected one way or the other.
(Conversely, I specifically remember cutting brush on one of those building lots the afternoon of October 19, 1987, listening to radio news of the stock market crash that would label that day Black Monday, and wondering how it would affect this group of people who seemed so intertwined with high finance. And also wondering if I, with a few hundred dollars to my name, had any reason to be personally concerned.)
Most of the houses I worked on were in a wealthy suburban township called Bath, a place that had always been wealthy, and suburban, and township-ish. There’s probably a version of this place in the outer ring of every industrial center in America, the civic equivalent of the restaurant most people would only go to for prom or a landmark anniversary, but also has a small, rarefied core of regulars.
The developer I worked for was once quoted in the local newspaper about his emphasis on building stately homes on large, gracious plots of land.
“We want to keep Bath, Bath,” he said, implying a semantic exclusivity: the proper noun was its own modifier.
So I was given intimate insight into the distinctions of what I would call the wealthy working class. I saw that, for whatever opportunities and advantages they had, they also did work hard, leaving early in the morning and getting home late in the day, and often traveling long distances, often under high stress, to the work that would continue to provide the lifestyle they had achieved.
By this comparison, I was given insight into the distinctions of my own life as a student at the local public university, a son of the slightly-upper-middle working class. My mom was a grade-school teacher and my dad was an engineer. With their help and the money I saved from my summer jobs, I made it through college without loans. I recognize now that, as I finished my university courses in 1990, I was among the last Americans for whom college was affordable in this way. The cost of a year’s tuition at my alma mater, the University of Akron, has nearly quadrupled since then.
The conspicuousness of the lifestyle these homes represented allowed me to wonder, as I began planning my own life, what I wanted from it. And it allowed me, as I returned to a different kind of home, an old place, built in a much different way, to wonder what it meant. My parents’ house, where I lived, was constructed in the 1930s, during the boom years of the automobile era, which was when the Rubber City matured, civically and architecturally. The house took on the physical demeanor it maintains, albeit under much different conditions, to this day. My dad was constantly working on our house, and so I came to understand tangibly how it was built: the weight of a well-forged hinge, the thickness of a prewar baseboard, the density of an old stud, the tenacity of plaster. These were standard materials in their day. They represented the way Americans did things then, the way we thought things ought to be done.
* * *
These places where I worked were the best that money could buy. I knew the carpenters and plumbers and electricians and roofers. I knew the men who installed the foam-filled garage doors and the ones who screwed on the drywall and the ones who glued down the veneers. They were craftsmen, the best at their trades, true to the American Rustic. (Som
e of them were gypsies, plying their skills cross-country, rooming in Days Inns, jobbing from subdivision to subdivision, free as a taxpayer can be in the modern age.) They were earnest and hardworking and took genuine pride in the process and the product. No question about that. So too were the people who commissioned these places: themselves earnest and hardworking, though I never understood what they did exactly—something to do with annuities and trusts. They always had file boxes of that inscrutable green-and-white-striped paper with the perforated edges, and I could reckon all day and never get to the bottom of it. But, yes, I recognized that they viewed the newness of these houses as a marker of personal and cultural achievement. They seemed to recognize the verb roots of development and housing as a gerund. Everything in the active tense, the desperate yearning of progress.
But I began to understand, from the inside out, that these places had a falseness, that they were inorganic, that they would not age gracefully, that the advanced chemistry of their paint would simply chalk and fade, would never alligator into the wizened shell of old clapboards. I knew that their aluminum fencework would never rust, that posts made of advanced metals would simply stick up there, simple-headed, never gaining the mantle of oxidation. Their shells were so slick. There was nothing for patina to cling to. There would never be anything wrong with them that a good power washing couldn’t fix.
And I came to see that they couldn’t last. That they wouldn’t stand up to the onslaughts of nature, the advances of age. The old farmland and woods from which these new parcels arose extended from what once was a country highway, itself now lined with new construction, a fast-growing commercial strip of boxes and prefabrication. All of it overtaken by a construction that seemed oblivious of the past and ignorant of the future, implying a cynical fabrication of disposable income.
Yet I also knew that this was the best America had to offer. These were the best carpenters and masons, and these were the best materials currently being produced, and these were the best buyers, and that this was the best our upwardly mobile imagination could fashion.
The American century was ending. We had built it ourselves.
* * *
The state of Ohio is shaped like a heart. The reason it is shaped this way is because of the south-and-east-border-defining Ohio River and the Great Lake to the north—the unbuilt landscape. On a hill near the developments described above, I can stand during a rainstorm and watch the water drain in two directions: north, to Lake Erie, and south, to the Ohio River. This is the watershed. It goes right through the heart of the heart-shaped state. There seems to be something decisive about that, comfortingly simple. It is either this way, or that. We call it the Ohio Divide.
Ohio, and places like it, are most often viewed from the outside as simple in this way, as the part of the country where the contents of the pot actually melted into some sort of consistent American stew that can be sampled whenever there’s a need to know the true flavor.
Few people ever ask what we think about anything until they have some need, and then they come here for answers, to observe Middle Americans in the wild. Except the “wild” has been domesticated into these imitation neighborhoods and little commercial blocks that look like minitowns of full-grown Department 56 collectibles. This fabrication is supposed to represent the real America.
Here we are, nestled alongside the Breadbasket, established as the soft potbelly above the Bible Belt. But that notion of settlement, of docility, of completion, belies the strong influence of our borders and our sense of “beyond.” The Ohio River, the thing that defines our eastern and southern boundary, feeds right into the mighty Mississippi, urging us toward our wild American theme. The northern border is the coastline of a Great Lake, a vista to the vast beyond.
Over several years, inspired by the contentious presidential election of 2004 in which Ohio (as always) played a pivotal role, my friend Andrew Borowiec traveled the state, taking photographs of this newly built landscape, of the false fronts and synthetic veneers and factory-grown landscaping. He compiled them into a collection called The New Heartland. The pictures contain no people, just the environments, deeply, often wryly considered.
The wide perspective of Borowiec’s photographs compels me to look toward their farther reaches, to see past the façades, to wonder about the possibilities, and whether we’ve built them right out of the picture. There, at the far edge of one image, is a terrible, stunning pun: The “beyond” follows “Bed Bath &.” The border is a Borders.
In another, a basketball hoop at the end of a lane between two new houses suggests completion, the end of exploration, that this place has satisfied some formula of the American Dream. Yet, in the near distance is a dense forest—a border and a beyond—but the photograph suggests that the child who practices foul shots at that basket would never think to venture into the woods.
A new swimming pool intrudes upon the bank of the Ohio River as though to nudge it out to pasture. Except there’s no pasture.
One of the ways I used to describe the heartland is to say that this is the place where we call things by what they used to be. In my own hometown, a university building occupies what once was one of the big downtown department stores. Students have taken to calling it Polsky, but I always correct them. “It’s Polsky’s,” I say, invoking the actual name of the store, then trying to fill the space between.
But these newly built places often strive overtly to disconnect from the past, clear-cutting mature trees, straightening and widening country lanes, elbowing out homegrown retail. When they do aspire to a history, they fumble for a past that never existed here. Their subdivision street names suggest half-assed delusions of classical grandeur, Anglophilic fetish, nostalgia for those olde tymes when one could shop for Levi’s in a Hobbit village. Nostalgia without pain.
Borowiec chose some for the titles of his pictures:
Gramercy Street.
Misty Lane.
Legacy Court.
The developers call their new malls “lifestyle centers,” and they offer strange, new lands of imagination, in which we can window-shop blouses at a J.Jill that looks like a mosque or worship at a church with a Walmart attitude.
Every four years, the politically inquisitive come back to probe Ohio, a state that still calls itself the “heart of it all.” They regard this as a place where they can test the nation’s pulse. They come here because they think we’re average. And we are, I suppose. As average as a watershed. Some of us have more, and some of us have less; some of us think this way, and some of us think that. If you add it all up and divide by two, you get something in the middle.
The question is, the middle of what?
ASCENT
I sit in the passenger seat, strapped neatly against the gray cloth upholstery. His little sister has spilled a cola sometime in the recent past and I can see the dried, dark amoeba of its aftermath between my knees. Whatever. It’s just a car. I’ve never had a very good one.
He adjusts his seat carefully, unsure of the levers, scooting it back with his long legs until the planks of his feet are situated to the pedals. He juts the key into the ignition and clicks it forward. The tape deck immediately blares, full volume. He recoils. I reach over and turn it off.
“Sorry,” I say. “My fault.”
(Really, it’s The Very Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ fault, but I’m trying to assume a mantle of responsibility here.)
He tilts his shaggy blond head slightly upward, reaches forward, and adjusts the mirror, clicks intently from P through R and N to D and eases onto the accelerator. We roll forward.
Fifteen years, six months, twenty-two days. I do not know how this has happened. I still cannot for the life of me calculate how he got from the clutch of my shoulder to this—my driver—and how I got from all my years of wondering to here.
The question occurs from time to time whether my own father ever wondered such
things, if maybe from across the room he looked at me and thought, My Lord, what in the hell is that?
Bewilderment has served me pretty well as a father. I seem to be able to teach better when I admit I don’t know the answer than when I pretend I do, and that’s good because I’m kind of an expert at not knowing the answer. Thank God my children can learn from my mistakes because sometimes it seems as if that’s all I have. But that gimmick only goes so far—especially when you realize your twelve-year-old daughter has become even better with irony than you—and lately I’ve been thinking harder about what I do understand and what I do have to teach them. I’ve realized that almost all of it comes from what I know about myself, and almost all of that comes from what I know about my place—my home, its nature, its people. The forces that have shaped my psychic geology.
He asks me if it’s safe to turn out of the driveway, and I tell him he’s going to have to figure out that for himself, but not to worry, that I will scream in holy terror if he’s wrong. So he looks again, this way, that way, this way once more, exhales, and makes the turn.
We ease from the road that follows the old Indian trail and turn left onto Market Street, the city’s main road, the same path I have used for my whole life. We aren’t really going anywhere. This is just practice, a way for him to start learning, to get comfortable. I know I’m supposed to be uptight, nervous, to be stamping against an imaginary brake pedal, but I don’t find that in me. If I have anxiety, it’s that my government is okay with me as the supervising adult.
We head east, under the pink-gold cast of an arriving winter dusk. The setting sun sometimes creates a sort of hyperillusion when you drive this route. Akron still doesn’t have much of a skyline, and its shape can be gathered from only a couple of vantage points. But here, beginning down the hill this way from the city’s highest point, you can see downtown in a way that seems compressed and also, in this early twilight, gilded, a glaze tilting across the old brick and new glass of the art museum, the Goodyear clock tower off in the far distance, the spires of Trinity Lutheran spiking through the center, the hospital building where the fancy, old hotel once stood, and occasionally, on a good day, the blimp up above. Sometimes it looks like a place I’ve never seen before.
The Hard Way on Purpose Page 22