The Hard Way on Purpose (4 page)

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 question 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 family 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:

Apparently Rodgers had these printed some time in the past. They are sent with the compliments of his son Dick.

*  *  *

On September 4, 1918, just as the war was nearing its end, fifty-five hundred befuddled American soldiers found themselves crunching their mittened hands under their armpits for warmth and stamping their feet against the frozen ground of Archangel, a little town in northern Russia. The air was frigid and a cold sun lay low on the horizon. The goddamned army had issued them boots with slick, treadless soles, footwear better suited to a fight-or-flight-can't-get-any-traction nightmare than battle maneuvers in the snow and ice. Most of the soldiers, including my grandfather, were from Michigan, men in their twenties who'd received penny postcards instructing them to report to Fort Custer in Battle Creek. In the fruitless poetry of operations, they were called the American North Russian Expeditionary Forces. Around carefully shielded campfires, they renamed themselves the Polar Bears.

My grandfather, an army engineer, lived in a boxcar where he and his fellow infantrymen puzzled over how to face an enemy that wasn't exactly an enemy in a battle that wasn't part of a war. Even if that question had an answer, it wouldn't have done any good. Illogic was the only certainty to their time in the far north. On Armistice Day, November 11, as the rest of the human race recognized the end of the Great War, the Polar Bears—the 339th US Infantry—were in a battle with thousands of raging Bolsheviks, a fight that was as gruesome as it was ambiguous. The war was over, yet the close combat went on for four days, with twenty-eight Polar Bears killed and seventy wounded, and more than five hundred Russian casualties.

So isolated were the soldiers that they could only guess at why they were fighting or what might be happening back home, so far away. They were caught in the middle of another nation's revolution, dispatched to fight the
idea
of something, which always makes for a difficult motivation, especially where homicide is concerned. They didn't know that a letter-writing campaign was under way, calling for the nation's leaders to bring them home. They didn't know that President Woodrow Wilson was harboring private regret for his decision to send them there, admitting later, “I have at no time felt confident in my own judgment about it.” They were sick and freezing, ill equipped, wondering if they'd been chosen only because they were natives of the snowy upper Midwest, and whether anyone had any idea that it was
never
this cold back home. They pulled boots off dead Bolsheviks and put them on their own feet, throwing away the useless ones issued by their own military.

The Creation of Russia
is mostly about two things: cold and the question why. It opens with a poem called “Memorial Day Prayer,” filled with a particular kind of hurt, first for “thy children who have died,” but more for the injustice of being sent to kill and die without a mission, its final line pleading, “Oh, make our duty plain.”

By midwinter, the issue of whether they should be transported home was irrelevant. The Russian ports were frozen and there was no way out. So the fighting went on, the Americans firing unreliable, Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifles and Lewis machine guns into relentless waves of Russian soldiers, whose attacks continued through the winter and into the spring.

One soldier wrote of their plight in a letter home: “We had to fight to save our necks and that's what we did. We didn't know why we were fighting the Bolsheviks. We fought to stay alive.”

I found my grandfather's brown overcoat in his attic, a heavy garment so long it draped behind me like a sad monarch's cape. It never occurred to me then what he might have felt as he lived inside this coat, inside a boxcar inside a land that not even a Great Lakes winter could have prepared him for, and the Great Lakes winter is not to be trifled with. I took, or was given, I don't remember which, a leather belt with a strap that went up and over the shoulder. For some reason, boys are always drawn to things that strap over the shoulder—guitars, rifles, backpacks—and by these things they are allowed to test the weight of whom they might someday become—musicians, soldiers, wanderers.

My grandfather never talked about it, or not to me anyway. He was an engineer first, a man of utility and order and who gave no truck to sadness or complaint. He was also a man of cold, frozen places, of the Great Lakes, which in winter offer something more pure even than the deepest meditation: infinite, white, terrible ice. These lakes aren't flat when they freeze. Their edges are frozen images of turmoil, waves and swells and garbage-flecked foam, clenched, caught unawares by the hard freeze. To gaze upon this is to set the mind first to flatness then to practicality then invention. Men from the Great Lakes region do not seek therapy, and not because doing so would bring them discomfort or shame, but because it is unnecessary. The winters here isolate everything but our troubles and allow the time and emptiness to solve them or find a place to hide them forever.

So my grandfather lived his life. When he needed a table saw to build his workshop, he worked out the puzzle in his head: build the saw first. He wrote a little booklet of his own—
Home Workshop Handbook—
and copied it and offered it “to anyone foolish enough to send name and address and one dollar to cover cost of prints.” The pages are filled with uncanny practicality, handwritten in the precise block script common to engineers and draftsmen, detailing the properties of glues and adhesives; recommended drilling speeds for various materials; maximum spans for joists and rafters; lumber grades, nail sizes, wire gauges, and so on and so on.