First Diary. Written 6/18/06
"I'm gonna make
me a good sharp axe
shining steel
tempered in the fire
I'll chop you down
Like an old dead tree...
I met my love
by the gasworks wall
dreamed a dream
by the old canal
I kissed my girl
By the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town"
"Dirty Old Town", Ewan MacColl
I've had this recurring dream for the last twenty years or so, maybe five or six times a year. I'm in this green-blue pool of paper mill factory waste water, the Westvaco paper mill just on the edge of town. I'm in this large pool of waste water, maybe half a mile by half a mile, surrounded on all sides by faded red brick factory buildings. Sunny day, late afternoon, the middle of summer, an hour or two from dusk . I'm swimming furiously in this vile pool of industrial waste, freaked out at the size of the buildings around me and a little freaked out about my prospects for swimming to safety. There's no one around to help me.
Then I wake up. Twenty years of dreaming that dream, I've never once dreamed it through long enough to see if I make it out.
Thought of that dream tonight as I strolled the streets of this, my dirty old hometown, a place I've unexpectedly returned to for a stay of indeterminate length. For years, even long, long after the mill shut down, when you walked up the hill of the Saratoga Avenue overpass, you could see the mill's smokestacks, one white, one khaki, jutting up into the sky.
Not anymore, though. The white one came down in the '98 tornado, and the khaki one they blew up a couple of years later.
Knowing this, it still struck me as odd, walking up the overpass tonight, looking east at the mighty Hudson River a couple of hundred yards away, to not see those stacks up there. Never thought they'd last forever, but for whatever reason I thought they'd outlast me.
I'll bet three or four generations of people thought similar things in hometowns a lot like this one, one of the dozens of used up, forgotten, dirty old upstate New York mill towns sitting along the river, towns put to what a lot of folks seemed like good use for a few decades of the twentieth century, towns now so useless here in the opening decades of the twenty first. The mill's long gone and so are the fat jobs at the railyards, the biggest freight yard on the East Coast once upon a time, or so my father claims.
Nothing much left now except a Price Chopper and a coupla chain drugstores and a coupla Stewarts'. You can count the locally owned and operated business on the fingers of your hands. The little corner stores run mostly by Italians, almost one to a block, long gone. The pizza joints, kaput, yeah, it was actually within my lifetime that within this small town you could find at least a half dozen places to get top-notch, thin-crusted Neapolitan pizza that I'd put up against anything (and yeah, I've been down to Neptune Avenue for some Totonno's a few times in my day), but then, at least half the town had Old Country roots in the small towns outside of Naples, where many learned the gift of turning next to nothing into something exquisitely good.
I took another walk this morning, but not here. For whatever reason around seven this morning I decided to hop in the car and take the fifteen minute ride west out Rt. 67 and north up Rt. 9, to an entirely different town, old, yes, but not dirty or forgotten or useless: Saratoga Springs. Sure, they hit something of a rough patch, maybe in the 60's and 70's, back when the Race Course there was viewed as a relic not long for the world, what with the tracks in NYC drawing crowds four times as large on the weekends.
But they came out the other side, used their advantages instead of pissing them away, and now, they're in a golden age of tourism and soaring real estate values, with an actual, honest-to-goodness thriving downtown, named by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the Dozen Distinctive Destinations in the country.
Anyway, I drove over to the state park, picked a spot in the empty lot over near the Hall of Springs entrance to the Performing Arts Center, shut the engine, got out with my coffee, and proceeded to walk around for a bit. Saw about sixteen eighteen wheelers in the lot, the road crew for the band who'd played to probably 30,000 there the night before.
Walked by The Hall of Springs and then over to the Administrative buildings. Gorgeous brick buildings, built in the 1930's. Built with government money, by a precursor of the WPA.
As I walk, I can't help but forlornly wonder what it must have been like to live in a country where the people would elect a president who actually had plans for dealing with national problems. In a country where, instead of telling millions of unemployed to go shit in their hats, as our current fucktard of a president does, the president sent to the congress a plan for the government to put those millions of people to work.
What the hell happened to us, anyway?
I try to take the long view sometimes; in the 1890's the gulf between rich and poor was somehow even wider than it is now. If you weren't a white male, you could pretty much forget about voting. We've lurched forward and regressed, progressed in fits and starts, but surely we're better off now than we were 120 years ago, aren't we?
But then I consider the massive and continuing disenfranchisement efforts in places like Ohio and Florida, I consider the growing efforts to clamp down on sexual freedom, I consider the gutting of the middle class and the demonizing of the poor, and I wonder if we're approaching an era when the 1890's will seem like some distant oasis of liberty and compassion.
Make no mistake, I consider all this from a perch of privilege unimaginable to millions here at home and billions around the world. I type these words on a $1,500 computer, after a day spent eating sopresseta and strawberry cheesecake, after a day spent swilling expensive beers from around the world and losing money betting on horse races. I type these words with an energy-guzzling air conditioner blowing a refreshing cool breeze across my back, while listening to music on some tiny music playing device that somehow stores thousands of songs. Perhaps I should just shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of the way.
But walking around this forsaken old town tonight, I felt the need to raise my voice, to say something, no matter how disjointed and ineffective my words may be.
Just seventy years ago my own grandfather walked these same streets on his way to work at the mill that still haunts my dreams every blue moon or two. I imagine him looking up at those smokestacks and thinking they'd be there for, well, maybe not forever, but for decades, long past his time and into the time of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I'll never know, of course, but I imagine he never would have believed his new American hometown could ever fall on the kind of hard times it's fallen on now. I imagine he never would have believed his new hometown would someday get chewed up and spit out by unseen and unstoppable forces. I never met the man, but through my mother I know enough about him to believe he believed in that Great American Narrative of Eternal Progress. You know - things would always get better in the long term. Work hard, do the right thing, pave an easier road for the ones coming up behind you. Milk and honey and all that.
But walking around this place tonight, listening to the Pogues' version of "Dirty Old Town" over and over and over, the melancholic majesty of that fiddle piece in the middle breaking my heart a little every last time, I couldn't help but think that maybe there's no more up left in us, in America; maybe there's no more forward, and we'll never make it to the promised land, ya know, peace, justice, liberty, equality for all, that place. Probably jingoistic of me to think we could have been the ones to make it to a place very few societies, if any, have arrived at.
Yes, I can and probably should rage against the proverbial dying of the light, and yes, I'll likely live to hope again, but tonight, at least, I got this sinking feeling that there's no stopping history, and why should we be any different. Every empire hits the skids and goes bust eventually. Tonight as I walked I got this sinking feeling that this town and its countless brethren scattered all over the land are like that old dead tree in this song; majestic in a way, with a rich past, roots still running deep into the ground, but dead nonetheless.
