Little House in the Big Woods

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a weakness for falling in love with places. Perhaps it was the excessive amount of time I spent being carted around in the front seat of a Chrysler to sibling’s parades, and sporting events. Or maybe it was the interminable summer vacations to Florida in un-air conditioned automobiles with AM radio. Whatever the reason, I have always had a weakness for day dreaming about life in places seen out the window of a car. Each town we passed, each farm, each house on a hillside, I would lose myself in daydreams of what it would be like to live there. This affliction continued when I left Western New York behind and took to the road. Criss-crossing the country I would search for that one perfect place that would demand I stop and call it home. Of course, no place was ever alluring enough to overcome my desire to see what was over the next hill, or around the next bend. Life is like that.

Thankfully, in Mrs. 20 Prospect I found a reason to stop circling the country and plant roots. If not for her I’d still be wandering. And yet, even though I have lived in one place for 17 years now, I still can’t help but daydream when I’m traveling. As much as Minnesota is my home, there’s nothing about our little inner ring suburb, or 50’s Rambler that convinces me that this is the place where I want to grow old and die. If only I had a million lives to try out a million different places. I like to imagine that when you are dead your soul gets to go around and hang out in all the places you never got to when you were alive.

Last weekend we visited my In Laws in Eau Claire, a small city in a big landscape. One of those places that I can’t help but be drawn to. I brought along Isabella Cuevas, as I like to do when the weather is nice, and slipped out of town for a 3 hour ride through the hills and valleys of Eau Claire, and Trempeleau counties. Without a doubt, this is one of my favorite places in all the earth to ride a bicycle. Perhaps it reminds me of Western New York, or maybe East Flanders. The rolling hills, and farmlands, interspersed with remnants of the real “Big Woods” of Laura Ingalls Wilder fame, are covered with small two lane farm roads, and dairy farms. Each ridge promises a view, each valley a twisting descent. The farm roads don’t adhere to any modern road building standard, and the grades can be short, steep, and leg snapping. Perfect for cycling.

I rode for 3 hours, and had I not been exhausted, I could have rode for another 3. Each crossroad called for exploration, and it hurt to have to adhere to a schedule, and route. Every time I spend a weekend doing this, I end up going online and looking at homes and property in the area, which only serves to torture me more. Some people dream of retiring to malarial swamps in Florida, or sun blasted desert in Arizona. I dream of retiring to a little house on a ridge-top looking out over a big river., with enough land around me to make neighbors a theoretical concept. It’s the hermit in me that dreams of a life of walking the dogs in the woods, riding my bike in the hills, and watching the sunset from my porch.

I don’t know why I do this to myself. I have no intention of moving until the kids are out of high school, and I am less dependent on the financial benevolence of my dark corporate overlords. Yet I find myself continually searching jobs listings and property listings in the hope that I find that one perfect place that was made for me, where I can eek out a living teaching at a small college, and spend my days reading and writing. Whenever I get caught in that funk, the only thing I can do is tell myself, “10 more years. Keep cashing those checks and squirreling money away.” And keep on riding. Always keep on riding.

Dreaming in color

I present to you a collection of color photographs from the Library of Congress that I came across (and posted) a few years back. These photographs have an un-earthly, ethereal quality to them that I cannot describe. The subjects seem to glow, or radiate light. The appearance of a world caught between the medieval and the industrial revolution, is amazing enough. To see that world in such vivid color is astounding. The pictures possess a dreamlike quality that makes them seem at once familiar, and entirely foreign to our eyes.

These photographs were taken between 1909 and 1915 in pre-Soviet Russia. They are the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a Russian photographer who developed a unique process for creating color photographs. The Prokudin-Gorskii process was an ingenious photographic technique that captured images in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii. He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter. The images were then presented in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.

In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii presented an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire to Tsar Nicholas II. His plan was to use the emerging technological advancements that had been made in color photography to systematically document the Russian Empire. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his “optical color projections” of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. Winning the support of the Tsar, he was provided with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom, and two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he traveled through eleven different regions of the Russian Empire, recording daily life among the Empire’s diverse ethnic groups, Medieval Orthodox Monasteries, and the railroads and factories of an emerging Industrial society.

Prokudin-Gorski would leave Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually settled in Paris. His work remained with his family until the U.S. Government purchased his slides from his heirs in 1948. The Library of Congress recently undertook a program to digitize these slides and present them in an online exhibition. All of the following photographs are copyright the Library of Congress, and Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I hope you find them as fascinating as I do. For more info visit the Library of Congress exhibit here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html

This photographic collection preserves a past that no person alive today can recall witnessing with their own eyes. They are snapshots of a colonial Empire stretching from the wild edges of Eastern Europe all the way to the Pacific and the borderlands of China and Mongolia. They are a reminder of the astounding size, and diversity of the Russian, and Soviet Empires, and how pre-modern they truly were at the beginning of the 20th Century.

This amazing monastery looks like an Alien Spacecraft landed in the countryside

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

The Emir of Bukhara (present day Kyrgyzstan)

This one gives me goosebumps, and I'm not sure why

If these factories look jarring and out of place to our eyes, imagine how they appeared to the Russian peasants that saw them for the first time

How I would love to know the life stories of these three girls

The shining city on the hill from Revelations

Another haunting photo from the Brothers Grimm

The ferryman at the River Styx

This could have been taken in my backyard, and may be the the most achingly beautiful portrait ever taken of the untamed, wild beauty of lilacs

The Powers Hotel, 1883

As Jennie started down the stairs into the lobby, she could see Johnson seated upon the round sofa at the center of the room, his hat in his hands, resting upon his walking stick, a white flower in the button hold of his lapel. He stood as soon as he saw her, walking across the room to meet her at the bottom of the steps. Taking her hand her kissed it, and asked, “How is it possible that you are even more beautiful now than the day I met you?”

“Well Mr. Lynch, I see you are as good a liar as you have always been, and I thank you for it,” she said as she smiled.

“My God, but it is good to see you again,” he said, as he looked into her blue eyes, and Jennie could see that he meant it.

“I can’t believe it has been so long,” she told him, “Seeing you now I feel as if you have been with me all the time.”

Indeed, she thought, he had been there within her heart throughout the long months of separation. How else could she explain his presence in her room those nights when the bed was so cold and empty?

“I trust that you have found the accommodations to your liking?” he asked, knowing full well how the cosmopolitan surroundings excited her.

“Of course! What is not to love?” she said, “There cannot be a finer hotel in all the country. Although I should find even a barn agreeable if you were to be in it.”

Extending his arm, he said, “Come, let me show you the rest of the city”

Jennie took his arm and they stepped out into the bright sunlight of the street. Arm in arm they strolled through the crowds on the sidewalk, fully absorbed in their conversation. Lynch seldom took his eyes off of her, and seemed to be hanging upon her every word. Stopping for dinner in a restaurant full with the business crowd, she felt as if she were the center of attention. The eyes of all the men seemed as if they were upon her as they talked and laughed.

Leaning across the table he whispered, “You have no idea how difficult it is to be this close to you, and not be able to hold you in my arms.”

Jennie blushed, and felt a tingle of excitement as she glanced around to see if any of the people sitting near them had heard.

“Let me take you back to the hotel,” He said, “where I can kiss you without worrying about prying eyes.”

“Why Mr. Lynch,” she responded, “you will have to wait until after dinner before you can have your desert.” Feeling the thrill of the power she had over him.

Climbing the stairs to her room, she glanced behind to make sure that they were not being followed. Even now, in a city where they were both strangers, she couldn’t help but feel as if she was being watched, and the feeling only made the moment more exciting.

As soon as they entered the room, Johnson turned her to him, and bending down kissed her full upon the lips. She put her hands around the bulk of his shoulders, and he lifted her feet from the floor with his strong embrace. Kissing passionately, they pulled and tugged at each other’s clothes until nothing more stood between their embrace. Carrying her to the bed, he lay her down upon it.

The breeze from the window stirred the drapes, and light shone in shafts across the floor. Outside the noise of the streets echoed between the buildings, but all Jennie could hear now was the sound of their breathing, as they rolled about on the sheets, Johnson’s strong hands upon the small of her back, as he rolled her on top of him. Her hair fell in a wild tangle about his face, and still they kissed, heedless of the world around them.

The made love, again, and again, stopping only when the sunlight faded, and the darkness crept from the corners of the room. She spent the night sleeping with his arm draped across her shoulders like a blanket, the sheets pulled down, and the evening air cool against her skin.

When morning came, she woke to the feel of his soft kisses upon her neck. They made love again, then lay in each others’ arms, looking up at the ceiling.

“My dear, the thought of leaving is like a knife blade in my heart” she told him, tears welling in her eyes.

“Shh…” he consoled her, “we may be parting for the moment, but it will not be forever.”

“I wish we could be together like this every night,” she told him, “I feel as if I am only alive when we are together, and all the rest is just a dream.”

He said nothing, but turned her face towards him, and kissed her on the lips.

“Jennie, as much as we want it, it cannot be,” he told her, “You must get back to your life, and your home. In the mean time, I will carry you with me in my heart until we see each other again.”

She closed her eyes and wept quietly against his chest.

The Artist

Sleep recedes like waves washing down a beach, and slowly I begin to wake from the deep fathoms of slumber. 3am. I rise in my nightly ritual of stumbling to the bathroom, arms extended like curb feelers, and make my way through the obstacle course that is our bedroom. I worry that I’ll wake the dogs, but they snore on. It’s even too early for them to want to patrol their yard. Returning to bed, I roll over and sigh. My mind is playing back the scenes of my dreams like a flickering home movie reel and I know there will be no more going back to sleep…

Limbs outstretched like arms, the maples reach into the velvet darkness. It is late on a summer evening, and all of Prospect Avenue is dark. People murmur quietly on the front porches in the late summer swelter. In this pre air conditioned world, the only sound is the quiet breath of the wind and the whirr of window fans. I walk my bike down the gravel driveway towards the yawning mouth of the old barn, wondering as always what might be lurking inside its musty bulk. That’s when I hear it. A sound as natural to our street, as a mother’s heartbeat is to an infant. From 3 houses down, Mr. Carmichael clears his throat.

I look across the back yard and see a single square of yellow burning in the shadow; the light from his den.  In all the known world of my 10 year old experience, the Carmichael’s is the only house with a den. The exoticness of a room dedicated only to a father always intrigues me. A haven from floral prints, and doilies, it is a world of hard carved decoys, and cast metal soldiers; books line the shelves, and a walnut stained writing desk holds the tools of his trade. We know that the den is off limits when we play at Peter and Danny’s, but the gravity of the room always pulls us into it.

While most Dad’s carry lunch boxes to work, and wear work clothes when they leave in the morning, Mr. Carmichael wear a coat and tie. He is older than the other Dad’s, and has lived here all his life. His history on our street is measured not in years but in geologic time. The resident historian of Prospect Ave., he knew the little old ladies when they were still young.

While we run and play through their yard like any other, we somehow know that his property is different. A tall man, with a deep voice, and a stern look, fear is the wrong word to describe how the little kids feel about him. It is more like respect and deference we would give to someone from another world.

He sits beneath the light of his desk lamp in his den working through the dark hours of a summer night. Pen and pencil in his hand, he is drawing. A newspaperman by trade, his real profession is that of an artist. Stand in the red, sandstone edifice of the Richmond Library, and you will see his drawings on the walls. They record the history that urban renewal has worked so hard to erase.

In my mind’s eye he is always drawing in his den, pausing to clear his throat, a reassuring sound, like the chirping of crickets in the night. Families have come and gone from Prospect Avenue, our own clan arriving in the late 60’s, and leaving by the early 00’s, but I cannot imagine the street without his presence. The last tie to the original residents, once he was gone, the oral history of the neighborhood was gone with him. If only I had had the courage, and the foresight to sit with him, and ask him to share his stories.

A barn owl hoots in the darkness, and I drop my bike inside the door of the barn, and run back to the safety of the porch. It seems like the world I know is solid, and permanent, but in only a few years it will all begin to fade away. Piece by piece, and person by person, the neighborhood will be renewed. The stately maples will slowly succumb to age, and the City’s chain saws, until what is left is a shadow of the place I knew. The houses still stand, and a new history is being written with each passing day, but the world that I knew lives only in the quiet of the night. The images flicker across the canvas of my mind, and are recorded here like drawings of a city that is all but forgotten.

Autumn is like that

The low gray clouds come rolling in from the north, like the sails of Spanish galleons billowing in the wind. Overnight our Indian Summer has fled from the onslaught of the cold Canadian air. The trees bow their heads and shake their leaves in the wind like sirens drying their hair upon the seashore. Living here along the roof of America, we get used to such swings in the weather. On armistice day in 40` a blizzard struck so quickly that duck hunters froze to death in their waders. This is why we wear our weather like a purple heart.

Autumn is a cacophony of voices, a swirl of emotions, a tempestuous mistress, and the all time motherload of overwrought prose.

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. What I meant to say was this, “it’s getting colder and the autumn colors and swirling wind are carrying my memories away like a falling leaf…”

OK, sorry. I’ll stop now. I promise.

Fall in Minnesota reminds me of my college years in Northern New York. There is just something incredibly romantic, and exciting about the change of the seasons at this latitude that makes my heart sing out, and inspires me to extremes of verbosity. Whenever summer ended, and I set off for another interminable winter in the North Country, I couldn’t help but feel bittersweet about it. With a male to female ratio of about 5 to 1, Clarkson was a cold, lonely place for a guy. I may as well have been joining a monastery. All I was missing was a hairshirt, and a pair of sandals. Leaving behind my best friends, and all the women in my life for another year of calculus, and thermodynamics always brought on a depression. If not for the stunning beauty of the season, I would have surely tied a cinderblock around my neck and gone swimming in the Racquette River.

My autumns in Potsdam were among the most beautiful ones I have ever experienced. The maple trees just glowed like hot coals on those windy afternoons. Even the coming permaclouds of October couldn’t dampen the season. Pumpkins and corn stalks always look more poignant when covered with the early morning frost. The days would shrink away until it seemed that half the day was either sunrise or sunset, and the scraps of clouds blowing in front of the moon at night sent delightful chills down my spine. This is why it only seems natural that Wes Craven had been inspired to write Nightmare on Elm Street while living and teaching in Potsdam.

The place is alive with ghosts.
While I never actually saw one, I could feel them moving through the town. Whether walking the streets, or climbing the hill for class, I ached with the pain and longing of those wandering souls. During senior year, we left town behind and rented the upstairs of an old farmhouse in the countryside. Even there the ghosts moved through the walls as easily as the winter wind. Was it any wonder that I nearly went mad?

The story of young men coming of age at Eastern Colleges is almost as much of a cliché as poems about foliage, so I will spare you a book length effort. Hell, I’ve blogged on about my trials and tribulations at great length already, so I will try to keep this short.

Leaves fell.

I loved.

I lost.

It snowed.

I cried.

Spring came.

I cried again.

In the end, I survived.

My heart is wounded still.

Autumn is like that.

The whisper

The late September sun is painting the leaves with a golden light as it sinks beneath the rim of the world. Already the shadows of the sunset have begun to climb the hill, and work their way slowly up towards our house. In ten minutes it will all be dark, but for this brief moment I stand on the front porch and watch as the sunlight sets the treetops ablaze with color. Fall can be the most beautiful of all seasons, and the one that makes our heart ache more than any other.

The long slow death march of late winter is still too far away to worry about, and the sweltering cicada filled afternoons of summer have finally passed. Now is the season of color, and light. The season of crisp apples, and cold cheeks, of seeing your breath billow before you for the first time.

As evening descends upon the front porch I feel the cold fingers of the night tickle my arms, and neck. Chills never feel so good as they do at the start of autumn. This is the time to pull on a favorite sweatshirt, or snuggle deep in a warm, and comfy bed. Even Maggie the Wonderdog, and the Indomitable Moxie are pleased to find a warm lap to snuggle in.

When the sun has set, and I have begun to shiver, it will be time to sit beneath the golden cone of lamp light, and open up a book. The windows closed against the chill, the house still warmed by the afternoon sun, this is my fortress of solitude. This is the one place I can come to again, and again to forget the petty distractions of such important words as “work” and “responsibility.”

The dogs will curl beside me, and I will peer down at the little words of black ink, stamped upon the creamy texture of the pages, and let my imagination wander unshackled through the meadows of my mind.

There was a time when I feared the silence. A time when I sought noise, and music, to hold back the fear and doubts that solitude coaxed out of the shadows. Not anymore. Now I embrace the stillness, and let it fill the empty spaces of my day until all of life is sunken beneath its amniotic warmth.

Sitting in my chair, the only sound is the audible ringing in my ears, so constant and unchanging I forget it is there. The world shrinks to the edge of the lamplight, and though the pages turn, and the times passes, I don’t recall having read a word. Stories flicker across the room like the light of a magic lantern.

As Elijah found, God comes not with a roar, but a whisper.

The American Chestnut

 

American Chestnut Tree

I’ve never seen a chestnut tree
two times eternity
- Big Barn Burning

Even as a kid, there was something about the story of the American Chestnut tree that made me yearn for a past I never knew. The blight first appeared in Brooklyn in 1904, and within 50 years they were gone. Millions of trees stretching from New England to Georgia, along the spine of the Appalachians, spilling across the Great Lakes into Ontario, and along the Ohio Valley, gone. Mere ghost trees, whose trunks still exist, stumps ten foot in diameter, slowly succumbing to rot over generations.

There must be some melancholy deep within to make me sad for an event that had little to do with my life. The death of millions of trees could not have been the cause of such longing, just a symptom, like the rust colored rings around the trunks of the doomed chestnuts. No, I was born with this blight for nostalgia. This yearning for things that could never be known or experienced, because somewhere deep within I knew there was a better place, one that I would never know.

This strain is not confined to me alone. I was musing on it the other day reading the comments over at Front Porch Republic. A hang out for many such blighted souls that long for a past they never knew, and will never know. FPR is about more than mourning a past lost to us, if it indeed ever existed. Like the stumps of long dead chestnuts in the Appalachian woods, the remnants of our agrarian republic exist merely as ruins around us. Scraps of community, bits of human scaled economy, and the old regionalisms that make a Kentuckian long for the rolling limestone hills covered in blue grass, and a Vermonter to get misty like the fog hanging over the Green Mountains. Slowly, but with a quickening pace, these regional differences, these local identities, fade beneath the omnipresent monoculture.

And like the folks at the American Chestnut Foundation, the folks over at FPR refuse to give up on the past. They spend their time thinking, and writing, and arguing about the way to create a disease resistant seedling from the old republic, that can grow and flourish despite the blight around us.

Alas, the analogy does not stop there. The work that they are doing cannot yield fruit in their lifetimes.

So why do it? Why struggle to try to retrieve something we never knew except in books? Something that is so irretrievably lost, we still argue about whether it even existed. Why bother? Because they suffer the same melancholy that I do. They believe in an Eden that was lost through our own doing. One that surely can be restored if only we retrace our steps, and find the places where we took the wrong turns.

It is true stewardship work. Something that consumes the self with a guarantee to pay dividends to future generations only. It is work that by its nature will always be filled with self doubt, and self righteousness. It has to be worth it, because if it isn’t then how can we face that emptiness inside?

So keep on grafting the seedlings boys and girls. Keep grafting. We’ll go to our graves without seeing the ridge tops covered in the white flowering chestnuts, but that doesn’t mean they won’t someday stretch across this old republic of front porches again.

The rise and fall (and rise?) of Batavia, New York

After reading Cheri Register’s wonderful memoir / history / creative non-fiction “Packinghouse Daughter”, an examination of her personal experiences, and those of her town of Albert Lea MN during the societal and economic changes of the late 50′s and 60′s, I have been thinking a lot about Batavia. I covered a lot of the same topics in this post from 2009, so I thought I would put it out there again, because if anything, her book reinforced a lot of my opinions on the past, present and future of small town America. I apologize for the post being a bit long and windy, but it’s worth the read (I hope).

After the physical hollowing of downtown

I’m currently reading “Hollowing out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America” by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, two sociologists who spent a few years studying the path to adulthood for young residents of an anonymous small Iowa town. As books on social research go, it is wonderfully accessible and clearly written, making it a very easy and compelling read. For two people who did not grow up in a small town, and are obviously highly educated professionals, I am finding that their portrayal of small town America is remarkably clear eyed, and not prone to the polemic images of rural American’s typically presented by the media. Most stories you read portray rural people as either gun toting, small mined, bigots, or patriotic, “motherhood and apple pie”, pillars of the American dream. Having grown up in Batavia, I find their book to be very sensitive, and deftly written, allowing the residents of “Ellis”, Iowa to reveal themselves as the complex, thoughtful human beings they truly are. It is a much more reserved, and non-committal representation than I could ever produce, having lived the kind of life they studied, and being far too emotionally involved in the subject.

If you are one of the small town Diaspora who left never to return, or someone who left but boomeranged back, it is a very revealing read. Not only do they highlight the demographic, and economic trends effecting rural America, they also catch the subtle undercurrents of class that play a large role in determining the opportunities and futures of the young inhabitants.  At times it is also a painful book, pointing out the paradoxes that exist, and how small towns have hastened their own demise, by investing so much of their limited resources in developing their “best and brightest” and encouraging them to leave the community behind. The result is what Patrick Deneen has called the “strip mining” of young adults from rural areas, to feed the coastal, and Midwestern, urban population centers.

As one of the “Achievers” who was groomed to leave, I find myself emotionally conflicted about where I have ended up, and where I began. In some ways that was the main impetus for this blog, and was clearly the thought process behind the title I gave it. I grieve the loss of connection to community and the sense of place, while simultaneously realizing that I could never be happy going back again.  As much as I miss the connection to the community, I also revel in the anonymity, and freedom that Urban / Suburban life offers me. I can re-invent myself here, and maintain a privacy that would never be possible in a place where everyone knows my name.

As a parent of two small children, I also look ahead to the future and wonder what inheritance they are receiving as they grow into young adulthood, and look to someday leave for a life of their own. Will they have the same connection to our faceless suburban home, or will they be another rootless generation following the jobs somewhere else. It is when I think beyond my own experience, and look forward and backward at the histories of place, that I begin to see how the issues raised in “Hollowing out the Middle” are both new, and as old as time itself.

Batavia started life as a farming community, founded on a cross roads of Indian trails, where travelers would camp, and take advantage of the (once) clear water flowing down out of the hills. During the 1800’s, it became the local center of government and retail, supporting the surrounding countryside of small family farms. It developed it’s own professional class, and with the coming of the railroads in the later part of the 19^th Century, began to experience Industrial growth  as factories sprung up to supply agricultural implements like harvesters, and plows to a rapidly growing country.

It was this dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Batavia that first began to change the character of the town, and introduce new demographics, and challenges. First came the Irish immigrants, and later the Sicilian, and Polish, to work the factories. This changed the dynamic of the city, and brought a diversity that does not exist in many small towns in the Midwest, like “Ellis”, Iowa, where German and Scandinavian roots still predominate. For this reason, Batavia developed many little quirks, that came to define the town, as Kauffman points out in his memoir. It is these little quirks that endear the place to me, and make me long for the odd mixture of solidity, and insanity of it’s inhabitants.

Batavia Carriage Wheel Company

As the 19^th Century gave way to the 20^th, Batavia, and most of Western New York, boomed. These were the years when Massey-Harris (formerly Johnston Harvester), Dohler-Jarvis, and other companies expanded, and the population grew with working class immigrant families. The years before, and after the Second World War were the high water mark for the town. As the 20^th Century progressed, the town began to age. A colossally bad decision on the part of the City, to “renew” it’s core by tearing down the 19^th Century buildings in downtown, and redeveloping the area into a less dense, suburban landscape of parking lots, and shopping malls changed the look of the place. A literal “hollowing out of the middle”. The disaster that ensued is well documented in Kauffman’s book, but what is often overlooked, is that this Urban Renewal coincided with larger economic trends that were relocating Industrial jobs from places like Batavia, to the Sun Belt, and which would ultimately have a far more lasting effect on the town.

The Johnston Harvester Company - 1896

That process began in 1953 when the Canadian company Ferguson, merged with Massey-Harris (also Canadian). By 1958, production had moved out of the 1883 built factory on Harvester Avenue. In retrospect, that was a harbinger of what was to come as smaller, locally owned Industrial companies combined, and merged into large multinational stock holder corporations all over North America. As the 20^th century progressed, other manufacturers opened factories in Batavia, such as Sylvania, and Trojan Industries, and this helped slow the decline. However, during the 70’s and 80’s the same story was to repeat itself with industries consolidating, and the manufacturing plants closing and relocating in lower labor cost regions.

Dohler

Batavia was not alone, these trends hit hard all over the “Rust Belt”, and 1970’s stagflation, and the Oil crisis further exacerbated the problems in an already shaky industrial base. For all the pain that Batavia went through, it was better positioned than many towns in Upstate New York, and across the Northeast. Being 30 miles distant from both Buffalo and Rochester, Batavia took on a new life as a bedroom community, which at least allowed it to support a lower paying service industry. Many towns, like Schenectady, that lived and died on the fortunes of one large employer, saw their tax base collapse, and residents abandoning homes and moving away.

Main Street before it's "renewal"

What these larger trends meant for the young in Batavia, was that good paying blue collar work like their parents had raised their families on, were disappearing. What was left was a shrinking job pool of lower paying service sector jobs, and tougher competition for the fewer professional jobs. A high school graduate intent on pursuing a college education found that they had priced themselves out of the labor market, and had the choice of relocating to an urban area, or being under-employed in Batavia. These conditions were not the result of poor planning, or disastrous urban renewal at the local level. They were the result of much larger forces at work in the global economy.

Destroying the town to save it

So where does that leave places like Batavia and “Ellis”, Iowa? Have the last 100 years of economic history cast their fate in stone? Are they just passing boomtowns that have seen history render them irrelevant? Or have they already reached the bottom, after their 30 year long depression, and sit poised to reinvent themselves?

What the future looked like in the 1970's - Same location as previous 2 photos

Perhaps Batavia history can shed some light on the future. As I have described above, the Johnston Harvester Company was a bellwether for Batavia’s economy in the 19^th and 20^th Century. In many ways the events that played out on Harvester Avenue were indicative of where the national economy was headed. From it’s opening in 1868 after the Civil War, to takeover by a foreign company (Massey-Harris of Canada) in 1910, to it’s merger with Ferguson and closing of the plant in 1958, the factory on Harvester foreshadowed the future of American Industry. So it is interesting to consider what happened when the building fell vacant.

In the late 50’s and early 60’s the Chamber of Commerce sought out new tenants for the building. When they were unable to find a large manufacturing firm willing to relocate to Batavia the property was sold to city resident Joseph Mancuso.  Mancuso came up with the idea to rent portions of the building to smaller manufacturing firms until they were large enough to strike out on their own. He hoped that this type of arrangement would allow startup businesses to save money and resources until they grew enough to move out on their own.

As the legend goes, one of the first tenants to the Industrial Center was a chicken company. Mancuso was traveling around the U.S. looking for other potential tenants and, using the chicken company as an example, he started calling it an incubator. Some people credit Mancuso with inventing the world’s first business incubator, a concept that is often touted in post-industrial towns as one way to revive their economy.

But did it work? The last 30 years of Batavia history has shown that despite some promising tenants through the years, no company was able to sustain that economic growth and provide the type of jobs that the depression of the later 20^th century took away. Some companies had success, but were unable to parlay that into longevity.

In my own family, my Mom went to work as the first U.S. employee of German heating and valve component manufacturer Braukmann Controls. I can still remember her picking me up at St. Joe’s, and taking me over to the Industrial Center on Harvester on her bicycle. The “office” where she worked was a cavernous warehouse space in the old Johnston Harvester factory, and one heck of a fascinating place for a 5 year old kid. To entertain me she let me play with the little company labels and stick them all over the bike. I can remember the excitement of watching the teletype machine rumbling to life with messages from Germany, and the dusty smell, and echoing emptiness of the place.

Braukmann expanded throughout the 70’s and relocated to the newly vacated Sylvania plant out on Ellicott Street. By the mid 80’s they had been sold to Honeywell, and had over 100 people working for them. Then history repeated itself, and during one of the late 80’s recessions, Honeywell closed the Batavia plant and moved the production to a plant in Ontario.

Damn Canadians! Why is it always Canadians that are the bane of Batavia? Since the day when Butler’s Rangers camped at the Great Bend of the Tonawanda during their raid into New York, those damn Canucks have been killing us. Is it any wonder they built a Tim Horton’s a mere 100 yards from their campsite? I think not! But I digress…

I am not sure what the answer is to the dilemma of towns like Batavia and “Ellis”. Surely the efforts of people like Mancuso, to re-establish a homegrown, entrepreneurial economic recovery are valiant attempts to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs. However, I think we need to be honest about the likelihood, and scale of such success. Lightning is unlikely to strike Batavia, and make it the birthplace of the “next Microsoft”, but building a diverse, human scaled economy is a worthy goal. Chasing the next Federal Penitentiary, Shiny New Industrial Plant, or Call Center, is merely running from one economic bubble to another.

What does any of this mean for the future of middle American youth in towns like Batavia and Ellis? Is there anything that will turn the tide of the rural “brain drain”, and convince the high achievers to stay behind in their hometowns?I see no current economic trend that gives me any hope that things will change. And as Carr and Kefalas point out in “Hollowing out the Middle” it will also take a fundemental change in the current education system, to stop encouraging so much investment of the educational resources into kids who are the least likely to live in the community. I can hear the educators howling already, should anyone suggest they focus on the underperforming students to better maximize the return on their investment, at the expense of the achievers.

In my opinion, until there are legitimate economic incentives to stay behind, those that can, will continue to leave. Who can fault them? Towns like Batavia and Ellis were founded less than 200 years ago by folks that also left behind their homes to seek out better lives.

Maybe the answer is to be found somewhere in our past. I just wonder how far back we will have to look to see the future.

Main Street Batavia - 1896

The Prodigal Returns

An old post. One that probably explains a lot about me.

Photo copyright @ http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/06/adem/pictures/hickory/images/campfire%203.jpg

The first awakening began with a discussion. Well, a drunken argument really. I was 19 years old, sitting in the woods with a circle of friends and acquaintances when Michelle spoke up with a declaration that we were all working class really, not middle class. I have no idea where she came up with a statement like that. She was always trying to impress us with her intellect, and intimidate us with her 6-2 blondness, and she bugged the hell out of me. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies either. We just happened to run in the same circle of kids that got together to drink and complain about spending another summer stuck in Batavia. So it was no surprise really when I took the bait and argued back that she didn’t know what the hell was she talking about. We were middle class. We were college kids, with parents that had jobs, and houses, and cars, and took vacations. Sure, maybe a generation or so earlier our grand parents had eaten ethnic foods, spoken foreign languages, and worked in factories, but it was the 1980’s now, and we were middle class.

I forget how the argument ended. With more beer probably, and with me losing interest, and instead focusing on whichever unattainable preppy girl happened to be sitting around the fire, and Michelle having a few more beers and becoming aggressively amorous to some poor unsuspecting male, as she was wont to do. But needless to say I did not forget the argument. Her assertion that we were working class bugged me in a way I couldn’t articulate. Mostly because I began to realize, slowly at first, that she might have a point.

It was many more years before I could accept the fact that she was indeed right, and understand why it had upset me. But before I get to that I have to explain the background of who it was seated around the fire that night, drinking in the woods at the end of a dirt road, in the countryside outside of Batavia.

Photo Copyright Blondieyooper @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/blondieyooper/3505262361/

I grew up on Prospect Avenue, the 4th child of a family that had only moved to town a few years before I was born. We were new to Batavia, having moved there from Tonawanda when Dad’s job with Niagara Mohawk gave him a chance to transfer for more money. I grew up as the tag along child, 6 years younger than my nearest sibling, and I was spoiled for it. The family took its first real vacations when I was 5, and began to have the money to spend on extravagances like Color Television, and new cars, when I was so young that I took such things for granted. When I went off to school Mom took a job doing secretarial work, and my ailing Grandmother moved in with us. I went to St. Joe’s, and came to develop a circle of friends that are still with me today, almost 40 years later. We were Catholic, and all came from big families. But even then, I knew that something set us apart from the other kids on the street. They went to public school, and didn’t wear the uniforms that we did, or leave for church on Sunday mornings dressed in their itchiest clothes.

I didn’t know what set us apart, and wouldn’t for a long time still. Our names had funny combination’s of consonants, and vowels at the end that other kids lacked. Still, we got by alright in little league, and on the Pop Warner football teams. I began to be aware of other kids from different parts of town that went to other Catholic schools like St. Mary’s and St. Anthony’s and Sacred Heart. We had 4 of them, not bad for a city of only 16,000 souls. But that ethnic stuff didn’t exist at 20 Prospect. We had a German name, and our parish lacked the Irish, or Polish, or Italian identity that those other schools and parishes had. Heck, we used to tease the St. Anthony kids (mostly Italian and Sicilian) by calling them greasers. Still, we knew that we were all marked with an unmistakable sign of being different, our uniforms, that made us all targets for being picked on, or chased by kids from the Junior High. But these were just the accepted facts of life, and seemed incidental. My big brother and big sisters didn’t seem to have any problems with kids from the public schools. They were at Notre Dame H.S. by then, and in my eyes, surely the BHS kids were jealous of them. After all, to go to ND and play football was the pinnacle of my pre-teen aspirations.

When 8th grade ended, we split up. Most of my friends went to BHS for reasons that seemed entirely foreign to me. Arriving at ND, I had to build new friendships with the Irish, Sicilian, and Polish kids from Batavia, Leroy and farther points in WNY. I became exposed to “Pisano’s” for the first time, and oddly began to feel like an outsider within the walls of ND. So I kept close with my St. Joe’s friends at BHS, and became a kid with a foot in both worlds. That was the first step that led to that circle of firelight, and that argument. The second step, of course, was girls.

I was shy, still am really, and talking to girls was something that was excruciatingly painful for me in the boastful Pisano culture at ND. After 2 years of effort I had established a friendship with a girl from St. Mary’s who would go on to become the closest and dearest friend I would ever know, but I still couldn’t find a date. So when the summer before Junior year came around and I met a BHS girl during the summer soccer season, my two worlds began to come together. When my friend from ND also began to strike up a friendship with a girl from BHS, who ran in the circle of BHS soccer players frequented by one of my old St. Joe’s friends, the worlds became closer still. The final knot in rope was the access to beer, and booze, that this BHS crowd brought to the table.

At first these BHS kids seemed to be not much different from us. They weren’t at the center of their high school social scenes either. Just kids with marginal interest in extracurricular activities, who excelled in school and were on the college track like my ND friend and I. In fact, in many ways we felt more like them than our classmates at ND. We fancied ourselves “intellectuals” and went out of the way to act differently than the Pisano’s. But there was something that these BHS kids had in common that we didn’t. And it was clear the first time we went to their houses for a party. It was money. Real money.

They lived at the East end of town, in the Naramore Drive neighborhood, where the houses were newer, and bigger, and far nicer than the hundred year old homes on tiny lots we lived in. Their parents were Doctor’s, or business professionals, and didn’t work in a Union, or carry a lunch box. They didn’t make us feel unwelcome, though as “Damers” it was clear from early on that we would not be invited inside of their clique. It was a friendship of convenience, tied around some internecine hormonal attractions, and access to alcohol. But despite the underlying difference between our backgrounds, we all stood facing a path towards college, and that yellow brick road out of Batavia.

So that was how we came to sit around that campfire in the woods that summer evening, drinking cheap beer, and having pretentious conversations. When Michelle made her comment about being working class, it was like a cold glass of water being thrown in my face. It startled me, and woke me up to a fact that I had spent the previous 4 years trying to deny. There was a difference between us, and it ran deep. Michelle was wrong, most of the kids around that fire were Middle Class. But I wasn’t and neither were my Catholic friends. Try as I might to ignore that fact, it remained. We were different, and that made me question why I tried so hard to deny it. Was I ashamed? Was I jealous?

Photo copyright saxonfenken @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/saxonfenken/505450112/

It pains me to say it, but I was. I knew I didn’t belong around that circle, and I knew that the one I did belong in, I had run from. I felt like St. Peter, and half expected a cock to crow three times. Instead, I just buried it deep inside me as self loathing, and took it out on anyone and anything that reminded me of the truth. I would get out of Batavia, no matter what. I would get a job that paid better than them, and I would live in a better house, and be a bigger success, than they would. I didn’t walk away from them at first. It took time, but walk away I did. I began to despise them almost as much as I despised myself for trying to be like them. So I ran, and I ran. In some ways I am running still. Only now I collect my paycheck from my dark corporate overlords with the same self loathing, and contempt that I had when I drank their beer.

It has been over 20 years since that discussion, and I feel so much differently now. I embrace who I am, and who I was, and I am ashamed of the years I wasted trying to be someone, and something that I wasn’t. Regrets are a part of life, and nothing to be ashamed of. It’s all part of our road to redemption. There was an Eden once, and for reasons we cannot remember, we were kicked out of it. Now we wander, looking for a way back in. Some walk the path of the prodigal, spending their inheritance on things they wrongly assume will restore what they have lost. Others stay behind as the dutiful son, resenting the things they have given up to hang onto a paradise they could never keep. In the end, they both must surrender to the fact that the purgatories they live in were built with their own hands, and their redemption cannot be bought. It can only be given by the one whom we run from. The one who knew us, before we knew ourselves.You’d think I’d know that by now, yet I still return on my knees, again, and again.

The return of the prodigal - Rembrandt

Play ball!

“And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than, say, the smell of the wooden bleachers in a small town baseball park, that resinous, sultry, and exciting smell of old dry wood.” – Letter from Thomas Wolfe to Arthur Mann

link to letter here

Summer continues to be a fickle mistress here in Minnesota, placing hot steamy kisses on our lips one day, then disappearing for weeks without so much as a phone call. Following our 103 degree day, we’ve had nothing but sweatshirt weather. I like sweatshirts. In fact, about 30% of my wardrobe is composed of nothing but old sweatshirts, but it’s time for summer. It’s kinda sad seeing parents huddle under blankets at our little league games. Baseball is supposed to be a hot weather sport. A sport for fanning yourself with a program, and sipping a cold beer. A sport that is as much a part of summer, as the mosquito.

One of the most integral parts of childhood in Batavia was our minor league baseball team.  From age 3 to 20, no summer would have been complete without at least one trip to a baseball game. When I was growing up the team played in an old wooden stadium about a mile from my house. When I was little my Mom and Dad would walk to the games with me. I can remember being 5 years old, eating peanuts with my Dad, and watching the game from the old wood grandstand. I couldn’t crack the shells myself, so I would just eat them shell and all. The crowd would stamp their feet on the floor boards during a Batavia rally, the chicken wire backstop would shake, and dust would settle down from the rafters.

June bugs would  swarm the transformers on the light poles, drawn by the heat and glow of the mercury vapor lights, as the sun set over the left field fence. Dad would buy a program for 50 cents, and I would wait for the drawings to be announced between innings, hoping that I’d be the lucky kid to win a baseball, or free ice cream at the Dairy Queen. More often than not, it was a free car wash, or something of much less value to a 5 year old boy.

The homes on either side of 20 Prospect were owned by elderly women who belonged to a time of doilies and fringed lampshades. Born near the turn of the century they had raised their families, and buried their husbands long before we moved onto the street. Their large four square homes had more room than they needed, and in the summer they would lend out their spare rooms to the ball players.

Being just a short season Class A team, the players on the club were just kids of 19, 20, or 21, who were starting late after finishing up high school, or college ball, catching on to a minor league club after going late in the amateur draft. In the 70 year history of the club, there have been only a few big names to come through our little town. But growing up these kids were big leaguers to us. They were young, and muscular, and carried exotic names, accents, and skintones onto our little street. We’d see them in the early afternoon, walking down the street from the corner store with a Pepsi, and some chips on their way to the ball park for a game, and we’d pause from our games to watch them go by.

1981 Batavia Trojans

In those days before cable TV super-stations, professional baseball was something you either saw in person, or watched on Saturday afternoons. To little kids like us the distance between Dwyer Stadium, and Yankee Stadium was hard to understand. We knew that these players had a long way to go before they’d play in the major leagues, but we had no concept of what long odds they faced.

On the annual kids night, the stadium would be overrun with hordes of wild children. But except for a few nights when I went with my little league team, I always had to sit with my folks. I didn’t mind. They let me pick the seats in the last row of the grand stand where we could look back to watch foul balls hit the cars in the parking lot. Whenever a foul made it out of the park, which was almost every foul ball in Dwyer, a scrum of pre teens would go scrambling after it. Some nights the action in the parking lot was more entertaining than the game, as long haired “Jackie Earle Haley” types on ten speeds tried to impress the Farrah Fawcett haired girls in knee high tube socks and short-shorts.

The team rarely won during those year’s. They were the woeful Class A affiliate, of the woeful Cleveland Indians, and wins were few and far between. The stands and the field were in tough shape back then. Gaps in the plywood outfield fence would let balls through for ground rule doubles.

 

Old Dwyer Stadium – 1998

As I got older, the games became a regular hangout for me and my friends, as well as half the kids in town. (The other half were presumably hanging out in the Pizza Hut parking lot, or drinking at the end of a dirt road somewhere.)

 

 

The Old Wooden Grandstand

In the 80’s the team lost the Cleveland affiliation and came close to folding. They reverted back to an independent organization for a few years and struggled on. When the Trojan Manufacturing Company was sold to a German conglomerate the club dropped the “Trojans” nickname, to the chagrin of teenage boys. They resurrected the Clippers name from the early days when the team was sponsored by the Massey-Harris Company whose factory on Harvester Avenue was the city’s prime employer. By the 1990′s they landed the Philadelphia Phillies affiliation, and their prospects began to improve, both literally and figuratively.

But when Major League Baseball put strict new regulations into place regarding the dimensions and amenities that would be required to maintain minor league affiliation, the clubs days seemed numbered again. Miraculously, local government came through and secured state funding to tear down the old wooden stands, and replace them with a concrete and brick park, with a brand new field and clubhouse.

The new ball park

 

The New Dwyer Stadium

They changed their name to the Muckdogs for reasons that are still hotly debated around town, and the team survived. Not every New York Penn league town was so lucky. At some point in the last 20 years, the costs of running a minor league club, even a Class A one, have soared, and one by one the small upstate towns like Geneva, Elmira, Oneonta, and Olean have seen their clubs move on to bigger cities with deeper pockets.

Despite losing money for years the club has somehow managed to hang on. Who knows how much longer they will last, but for now the crack of wood bats will still be heard on the corner of Denio and Bank. Teenagers will still flit like sparrows through the parking lot in mating rituals as old as the game itself, and for the cronies on the First base line, the peanuts will taste as salty, and the Genny as cold as it always has. Blocks away on Prospect avenue, people will sit on their porches in the flickering light of citronella candles, while the far away sounds of the PA mixes with the soft buzz of mosquitoes.

Welcome home summer. Welcome home.