One way folks make their way, since they closed all the factories down
I grew up hearing the roaring sounds of the blast furnaces and the thunderous Valhalla-hammering of the rolling mills in the distance. From our backyard, we were able to see the weird orange flare ups from the molten steel pours at the Bethlehem Steel mills along the Lehigh River, along the southern horizon, about 5 miles due south. My father worked on the management side in labor relations for "The Steel" for 32 years. In fact, it was so integral to his identity that he sometimes introduced himself thusly: "Phil Hades, Bethlehem Steel." When I was a kid I thought all people introduced themselves by adding where they worked. I wanted to introduce myself as "Percy Hades, Governor Wolf Elementary School," but I never got the opportunity.
In 1969, my oldest brother was 14, my sister 12, my other brother 10 and I was 8. Of course, this means that, by 1979, just in that single perilous decade, we were 24, 22, 20 and 18. So wouldn't that whole story make an interesting middle class suburban white people coming of age story? It might. It's been told. In some ways. But, in the way that these things go, as above so below. The overwhelming changes in US culture over that ten year period were definitely reflected in our family in a multitude of ways.
Consider this: what used to be the cauldron from which originated 70% of the structural steel in the entire world is now a casino.
What the hell happened?
That's the key question for me when I look back at my childhood into adulthood. I'm not saying the metaphor is perfect-- my own steel mill didn't morph into a casino, maybe. But.
I used to wonder why I felt increasing unease, anxiety and slowly burgeoning sorrow and grief whenever I visited the Lehigh Valley, and I chalked it up, for years, to my personal history in the place. There's enough evidence to support that analysis. But on a meta level, damn, it's a sad ass place.
It's also a beautiful and weirdly inspiring place. In smaller moments, I have trouble sustaining extremes, wanting to sort and organize and come to final conclusions. But all of the intersections of people, places, echoes and layers of narrative within narrative when I go "back home" just do not fit together into any kind of whole. I have ever been a weirdling. "Too sensitive," I was often told. Hyper-vigilant for sure. Idealistic, stubbornly. When I finally encountered Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, I latched onto it with all my hooks. But even her highly persuasive schema, that likely story of the root causes of my alienation and suffering, is only partial.
My first AA sponsor summarized steps 1-3 in this way: "Finally getting honest enough to admit you don't know the whole story and you don't have to." This succinct formulation carries me with more ease and comfort through a lot of confusing situations than just about anything. And it's essential when going "back home," encountering past selves and present family members. Because in the face of vulnerability and the possibility of re-experience very old, gross and moldy pain, my self-centered fear will kick in and convince me I do know the whole story, or, if I don't, that I damn well better. It's the way that I try to stay safe. But there's (ironically?) nothing safe at all about going "back home."
Monongahela
ReplyDeleteLooking back now, forty years gone,
my lack of curiosity about the river
I lived with daily disappoints me.
Maybe that’s the way of youth,
to be fixated on origins and ends –
things far off, the cold mountain spring,
the distant sea, not the everyday.
The river itself, a slow brown ox,
harnessed to the yoke of industry,
was as common as my neighbors
and as of as little interest.
I carried with me in those days, before life touched me with failure
and some sympathy, the hard stone of intolerance that the young may bear
for the familiar, to mask their fear and uncertainty.
From the bluffs above Lock and Dam #2
I watched the tugs push their coal barges downriver,
imagined the days and nights of their long journeys,
past Pittsburgh, down the Ohio to the soft-banked Mississippi,
past all the towns with their wonderful sounding names —
Gallipolis, Oceola, Tallulah —
Dreamed of the bayous and salt-washed rivers,
sea-tangled with life —
ibises and spoonbills startling
the cypress swamps —
and the hot green cities –
Baton Rouge, New Orleans —
copper-haired women, skin sheened with sweat,
and the ice-hot wail of a saxophone
calling down heaven.
--Mike Adams
Thus writes Michael Adams in his poetry and short prose collection, Steel Valley. The collection is diverse, but most of it dwells with the historicity of Pennsylvania’s steel industry, one that had dominated the world up until the 1980s. It was known as the largest steel producing region in the world, one that supplied materials, iron, and armor to Union soldiers in the Civil War, and through the 60s and Vietnam (source: www.riversofsteel.com).
ReplyDelete“Iron ran an endless river – to railroad cars, rolling mills, tanks, Camaros, refrigerators, machine guns. It was a river that ran while King and Kennedy were killed. A river that ran through the guns of the soldiers-kids like me….A river that ran in a bloody stream stretched halfway round the world to sear the flesh of men and women I would never know, but start another river running, redder and hotter than molten steel.” (from “Steel”, p. 17)
Besides providing work for generations, the industry made its own mark on the region. The valley likely imagined its steel domination as permanent, not foreseeing the devastation left in its decline. Adams similarly addresses human nature’s tendency to assume what is in place will always remain, allowing it to be taken for granted, instead of understanding that there’s always an end.
Ugh... my memoir is congealing around this same realization, which you had long ago: I never knew the whole story, but I based my decisions and took actions as if I did. When the story was expanded I felt cheated. When it was flipped, unmoored.
ReplyDelete