Notes on a Great American, Postindustrial, Midlife Crisis Tour

Lori Soderlind | The Change: My Great American, Postindustrial, Midlife Crisis Tour | University of Wisconsin Press | June 2020 | 272 Pages

In The Change, professor, essayist, and journalist Lori Soderlind describes a series of adventures in and explorations of America’s Rust Belt. As Soderlind opens the book, “I had been thinking for a long time of driving out into the middle of the country with my dog.” When a teaching sabbatical finally presents an opportunity, Soderlind jumps and brings her dog, Colby, as a companion on a journey through the Midwest.

Published as part of the “Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies” series at the University of Wisconsin Press, Soderlind’s book is also a significant contribution to a new wave of midwestern autobiographical writings that challenge and displace the centrality of straight narratives, typified by memoirs of farm and small-town life, so common in the region’s literature. In this way,

In what follows, Soderlind’s candid and life-affirming accounts capture the region’s cultural complexities in a range of chapters covering cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Louisville, and many smaller locales. For these reasons, the Cleveland Review of Books is delighted to offer you this except from Soderlind’s new book.

— Jacob Bruggeman

On football night, boats ranging in stature from runabouts to yachts with dining rooms were moored on the rivers around Pittsburgh and fans were partying and all the grief could be erased; there were no oil skiffs around, no tugboats. I wanted to watch the Steelers game, by which I mean football and not some kind of war between striking workers and armed guards. I dreamed of finding the quintessential football-watching spot in or around rugged, honest, blue-collar Pittsburgh, but that dreamed-of spot must be in some basement man cave because Colby and I drove around looking but we did not find a watering hole in a mill town where neighbors gather in the dim, warm light and quaff tulip pints of lager, and where, when something good happens on the field (which always would happen because this vision is of the great world, the perfect world, the world in which the Steelers always win) the whole room erupts into cheers. I had this image of American working towns, and of steel workers especially: muscled men in plaid work shirts, sleeves rolled up to their triceps, telephone pole legs slathered in blue jeans. I was thinking of a mural by Diego Rivera; I was thinking of Bruce Springsteen. And why wouldn’t I? Who doesn’t want their old, run-down industrial city streets to be lined with bars all full of Bruce Springsteen? It’s our collective myth; it is the northern industrial city version of a rural country music fantasy. Cowboy towns and steel towns are places, we are given to believe, where hunky man-singers work very hard and hold their liquor and love women with pure hearts. The world is tough but these men can take it and they deserve your sweet love, lady, so jump on up into that enormous twin-cab pickup truck and give your love up. Or Else.

This fantasy appreciates nothing of how dire things had become for that working-class dude, how badly the myth had failed him by the second decade of the twenty-first century, when he didn’t even have a fighting chance in a labor war because there was hardly any labor anymore; whatever working-class nirvana I imagined was out there waiting for me in Pittsburgh I had missed by at least a generation, and I ended up watching the Steelers game at a chain restaurant bar next to a motel in a fast-food zone in Monroeville.

If Monroeville wasn’t my ideal industrial city football neighborhood, it was the model early twenty-first-century American town. It is a first-ring suburb of a big old city cluttered up with strip malls and a few University of Pittsburgh medical buildings. It is full of people in cars, waiting for the light to change. The original downtown Monroeville is just one block long and buried in sprawl, and I never saw it.

Inside the chain restaurant, a drunken man stood near me at the bar, where I had parked myself across from the TV. He saw that I was writing in a notebook during commercials and he asked me about it. He was a sullen, unhappy drunken man; the Steelers were losing to the Bears, which he observed with an occasional grimace and a goddamnit look, then drowned his pain in long slurps of beer. Steelers losing? Yep, they suck, Ben Roethlisberger sucks, coach sucks. Watching the game at a chain restaurant on a motel strip outside Pittsburgh? Yeah well, the situation sucks. Had more to drink than you just told your wife on your phone? Yeah well, she sucks, and by the way, mind your own business, you suck.

He said, “I’m not trying to be a total dick or anything, I just want to know what you’re writing.” It is a funny thing about drunken men who insist they are not being total dicks; saying this almost automatically proves they are, in fact, being total dicks and they know it but on some level they wish it weren’t true.

I told him I was keeping a journal of my travels. He asked me why I had “traveled” to Pittsburgh (and the quotation marks here indicate his emphasis, suggesting that no one “travels” to Pittsburgh if they can help it). I looked into his red-ringed eyes as he faced me, weaving, and I told him I was interested in cities that were struggling to remake themselves. That’s a simple way I had found to explain what I was doing. I had not understood, before I looked, how much loss was around us—but loss of what? Did Pittsburgh really mourn for its mills and slums? The sorrow seemed to me to be more abstract, like a loss of faith in ourselves, or maybe even a sick, sad revelation that we had never really been happy at all. Or was I imagining my own life again? I worked this puzzle in my notebook.

I should have just told the drunken man that I was attending a really boring conference on medical appliances. But I didn’t. I said “cities,” “struggling,” “remaking themselves,” and “me interested.” The drunken man let out a snort before I finished the word “struggling.” Possibly his snort would have been a laugh but he had caught it in time, choked it, avoided all signs of joy—even the unparalleled joy of mocking something someone else was into. He squelched this dangerous mirth with beer. I plugged my yap with pinot noir. He said I should come see the cesspool where he lived, which I learned was Harrisburg. He was in Pittsburgh because he worked for the railroad, a job that seemed to piss him off. He told me that the way the steel mills and freight trains have gone all to hell is criminal and mainly the fault of liberal ignorance and government incompetence that has destroyed the whole country.

Of course, nothing screams “liberal ignorance” louder than a lone woman at a restaurant bar drinking wine and writing in a notebook. But I was determined to reach across this divide. So I told him that I had gone to college in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, back in the 1980s not long before the steel mills there closed. I told him that one of the only things I missed about my time in college was the way every night around three in the morning, if I happened to step outside—and for whatever reason in those days I often did step outside at three in the morning—I could hear the trains going in and out of the steel mills, and from that hillside campus, I could see below me in the darkness all the hundreds of small lights that always burned at the mill; they looked like stars scattered down there, hanging in air scented thick with sulfur and burnt rubber. Bethlehem had been a mighty city, an engine of empire, the very place that had milled the steel that made the Golden Gate Bridge, but all I knew of it at eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, was that its steel mills were curiously beautiful and I took comfort in their presence late at night. The industrial hum soothed me when I was lonely. There was life down there. Even the acrid smell, which at first seemed offensive, became something I loved because it revealed a depth to life I had been sheltered from.

“It was the smell of people working,” I said.

Well, that did it. Even I knew that I had gone too far when I said the thing about the work smell. Really, I had hoped to say things the trainman might enjoy. He was such a sourpuss. But I knew there was no pleasing angry drunks, generally, and my words showed no genuine appreciation of rough, tough American guys like him with almost nowhere left to use their brawn these days. Those guys didn’t fit into the modern economy of strip malls and medical billing centers; their hands were too thick to make lattes at Starbucks and even if they could, they would only make ten bucks an hour, so fuck it.

The trainman focused on the middle space just above the rim of his glass and sucked down some beer and then he said that if I wanted to understand what had happened to America, I should start by learning this: there is so much coal in this country, so goddamn much coal. If we could mine and haul and burn the stuff it would be like the good old days, when people worked, but our government is too goddamn stupid. We can’t burn the coal because of the EPA’s fucked up antipollution rules. And what we do dig up we sell to China and then they burn it to power their own generators and then they make stuff and they rise to glory. See that? They burn the coal, the air is just as fouled as if we had burned it, but we don’t get to make steel and our power plants get shut down. And some guy in Asia has a job that we don’t. We get it coming and going, right up the ass. Pardon the French. He sipped his beer.

He kept trying to excuse himself for being a dickhead but I understood. The trainman was unhappy, and he had a point about the air getting fouled regardless of who burned the coal. But I couldn’t really see why it was necessary for anyone to burn it, when solar and wind power is abundant and practically free. I would take that question down to West Virginia in November. I went back to watching the ballgame and making notes.

“What is that, Arabic? Are you writing in like, fucking, Arabic?”

“No,” I said. “I just write small.”

“So that’s English?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s English. Seriously? Jesus. I don’t mean to be a dick.”

My notebook was part travel log and part diary, and in it I wondered why I was so unhappy in the middle of my life when on the surface it seemed fine. I could make a list of unhappy people I knew, of failed marriages and lost jobs, of addicts, of worse. And then I began to make notes about the angry train man, and about Pittsburgh, which had pulled itself out of darkness and should have been a happier place to visit. Mr. Mencken ought to come back from the dead to take a look today, the way the universities have grown up and have great art museums and theater schools, the way the light shines on those glass towers and reflects off three rivers. People water ski there. All of this, and yet so many are still so unhappy. In the nineteenth century, rivers meant work; immigrants settled in the slums of Pittsburgh and they all went to work, even the children, in terrible conditions and for little in return. That’s how great we once were: jobs for everyone, even your kids. Was that better? Was going backward ever a very good idea?

Andrew Carnegie’s first job was as a bobbin boy at a Pittsburgh knitting mill, twelve-hour days, six days a week, earning less than five dollars a month. He hustled his way into a train job, invested in all the hot commodities of the day: first the railroads, then the ironworks that were building the railroads. He had a lock on the iron right at the moment when the world learned to turn iron into steel. He made a fortune in the Pennsylvania oil fields when he was only twenty-nine years old; he pumped that fortune into steel technology. In 1888 he bought the Homestead Steel Works, on the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, and created Carnegie Steel.

Meanwhile, Henry Clay Frick was getting rich making coke—a condensed, intensely hot-burning form of the coal dug from the nearby mountains. Burning coke releases the smell of sulfur that I found so touching in college, and it makes furnaces hotter than hell, and that heat is what turns iron ore into steel. Frick and Carnegie got together and made an empire.

What I love about these stories is understanding how it’s all connected. One line connects Rockefeller to oil and oil to Carnegie, and the rivers and lakes connect all the cities and all of it grew up nearly at once, not so long ago. To know of this and see Pittsburgh makes sense of Pittsburgh. To know about Cleveland and Rockefeller, and then visit the refineries in New Jersey, where I grew up, and to know that Rockefeller built those too, is like reaching through space-time to refocus the picture, discovering my own life inside the web. I went not long ago to see the refineries in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the shadows of the Goethals Bridge; I wandered through a neighborhood beneath the bridge at the edges of a modern industrial badland, an incomprehensible jungle of tanks and ducts and many-storied stacks that grew from a seed John Rockefeller planted. I had never thought of the mess of New Jersey as part of a grand story; it always very simply seemed to me, passing in a car up on the Turnpike viaduct, that New Jersey was an ugly place, and required no further explanation. I was wrong. Down below the web of elevated roadways there was a little world, and in that world are stories, and in one story, in a neighborhood known to locals as “down under,” the old houses and bars had been marked for demolition because the Goethals Bridge was soon to be expanded. There was a cul de sac in that near-abandoned maw called Rockefeller Street. It had a strip club on the corner, also empty when I saw it and marked to be destroyed. That a street in this place had ever been meant to honor Rockefeller is itself a strange idea, connecting him to that space in a way I’m sure few imagine anymore, and perhaps few but me have lately considered that Rockefeller, a staunch Baptist, would have been sickened by the dance club on the corner of his street. Whether the oil workers at that club drinking beer after their shift was over ever thought of this or not, they were there because of John D. Rockefeller, because of Titusville. To know this connects me to a kind of secret life, the story of how what we see arrived as it did, and how it was lost, and how this fate awaits everything.

Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie. Great men, yes, but it was so much easier to make a fortune when all this land’s resources were up for grabs. The land itself was up for grabs. It was free to take. We would call that welfare now. We would despise the homesteaders and call them freeloaders. Andrew Carnegie was a truly impressive rags-to-riches guy, and I’m sure he would be a hero to the drunken trainman at the bar, in theory. But a hundred years or more ago, the trainman would have found himself on the business end of Carnegie’s union-busting guns and would not have liked him. Guys like Frick and Carnegie started as poor urchins and became self-made men. True. Also true: they had opportunities that Mr. Trainman never had, and never will. Whatever comes next in this country, we can’t just grab land and resources anymore, and the future can’t possibly look like the past, so it’s pointless to want to go back there.

My drunken dickhead friend and I watched the Steelers lose. The Packers and the Bills also lost that day. It was a massacre for the Rust Belt

but the Sun Belt did okay. Miami won, the bastards. Fucking Florida. So goddamn unfair. So goddamn disrespectful. The drunken man had a look in his eye like he wanted to kill something. I thought of De Niro, and I thought of my old favorite movie, The Deer Hunter, I thought about that group of young men from steel country, and the movie’s golden rule: kill clean. Don’t add to any creature’s misery. “One shot,” De Niro said. “Two is pussy.” Drunken Dick’s lip curled a little, and he slowly slid to the side of his bar stool, then straightened up. His dinner arrived in a to-go bag, and he left.

The Deer Hunter is set in the Pennsylvania steel city of Clairton, a few miles south of Pittsburgh. Clairton was once home to the world’s largest steel mill, built by the behemoth U.S. Steel Corporation. J. P. Morgan made U.S. Steel after buying out Andrew Carnegie. Mills and mines and coke plants spawned for miles along Pittsburgh’s rivers, and small steel-making cities grew around them: McKeesport and Braddock and Rankin and Monessen, Homestead, Duquesne. All cities built by steel. All distressed cities now.

Monday morning, Colby and I headed down into the Monongahela Valley on narrow roads spotted with dollar stores and pharmacies; here and there were bars and liquor stores, though a fair amount of those were boarded up like most everything else. That’s always the last thing to go, I’ve noticed. We raced along a narrow road into the valley and crossed at last beneath a low concrete underpass, then into its long shadow angled over the road. When we emerged from that darkness, we were facing a sign that said, “Welcome to Clairton, City of Prayer.” I took Colby’s picture in front of the sign and then pushed on like a touring fan into the heart of the Deer Hunter’s hometown.

Perhaps it seems I chose to visit this place because I loved a movie about it. It didn’t happen exactly that way. I was following a call, but not quite deliberately, and in hindsight I’m not surprised that I kept arriving at places I needed to see, just as I was carrying Ida Tarbell’s book about Standard Oil. Rolling into Clairton, I had a sense of finally arriving in a hidden world I had imagined as a child was some empathetic, kindred spirit home of mine. I had stared into the hills as my family drove by and had longed to see what was hidden back there, and now at last I had arrived. But I had not deliberately gone off to find The Deer Hunter. I understood what I had done only as I moved through it, and knew it was exactly right.

The movie, of course, is about loss and sorrow, so I couldn’t have expected to find anything uplifting in Clairton, except that it was, in my mind, a good place, one that nurtured those young men—those steel workers, beer drinkers, deer hunters; those certain Americans who grew up in a hard-working hometown that they loved. Clairton was home to those friends, thus in my mind it harbored values I perhaps romanticized, but also, I expected something much deeper from it; this place as I understood it had survived a deep trauma. I imagined it to be a wise and strong place as a result. I must have imagined someone there knew how to navigate fear and sorrow and the crisis at the center of a life, and surely someone did. But the only person I would meet or even see in Clairton was a homeless man on a lonely street who asked me for money. I see now the mistake of my imaginings; no longed-for cinematic resolution had arrived. The trauma had come, and then the wound deepened, but the place had not yet survived.

I drove up the hill into the center of Clairton and began searching for a place to park. By searching for a place to park, I don’t mean to suggest there was competition for a few open spaces. Cars had raced me on the rain-slick streets down by the river, but up in the old center of Clairton there were exactly zero cars besides mine; the wide streets on the hilltop and the sidewalks along them were empty. Everything was empty but for one tiny bar, lit by a red beer sign, its door a thin crack in a long, hard wall of abandonment. No one actually “needs” to park on a street where buildings are boarded up and gutted, so parking spaces were abundant. What I was searching for, then, was not a parking place so much as a safe place to park the car with my beloved old Colby inside.

Colby, a sensitive and highly emotional dog, must have had his nerves stretched already by the dark mood we had entered. The space around us was overcast and misty and generally unfriendly. In his old age my dog, who once shattered records for speed laps at his dog run, preferred standing and sniffing things to walking, mostly; he could not be counted on to run from danger if he had to. It is hard to actually run away from persistent, generalized anxiety under any conditions, but running from it while literally dragging an old dog is a special kind of foolishness, so in the end, for lack of a safer option, I parked on the street and kept moving the car to keep him near me. It was not people I feared, but more the lack of them, as if some malevolent force had left this place not quite alive, but not dead either. A creosote plant remains in Clairton, turning coal tar into wood preservative and other chemicals; the sharp smell of sulfur and tar, and a soft mechanical hum underneath it, hinted at a menacing force that was toying with that place and might toy with our lives if we let it. I conjured a vision of Satan disguised as my Buffalo friend Bob the Builder, in his blue jeans and work shirt, a contractor of doom taking measurements on the sidewalk. “Almost finished,” he says. “Won’t be long.” I see the expression on his face, a wary smile behind a clipboard.

The city was still. It felt as if a plague had swept through. Houses climb steep hillsides in Clairton and there must have been people in some of them, but their curtains were drawn and because of the rain as much as any underlying sadness, the people were not coming out that day. Plague is an accurate analogy, actually, because in the fourteenth century when the Black Death arrived in Europe, something like a third to one-half of the population of that entire continent died; imagine sitting with your two best friends and one or both disappearing in a blink. The Deer Hunter on patrol in Vietnam, his buddies snuffed by sniper fire. Dead. Between 1960 and 1990 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, half the population disappeared. By 2013, four out of five bodies were gone.

Meanwhile, consider the ones left behind: nearly every kid at Clairton High School qualifies as economically disadvantaged. Only about 64 percent will graduate. The proficiency rate for high school science hovers around 5 percent. One year not long before my visit, the number of eleventh-grade Clairton girls who reached science proficiency was exactly zero. Not one of them could grasp it; not one of their minds could hold a thought as critical as, say, evolution. How would they survive in a world they couldn’t even understand?

I don’t mean to pick on Clairton. It just happens to be the town a movie I love was set in. The Pennsylvania Distressed Cities Act was passed in 1987 to turn the ruined steel economies around. Clairton joined the distressed cities list in 1988. Twenty-seven Pennsylvania cities have been designated distressed over the life of the program; only six ever “recovered.” Legislators fixed this problem in 2014. The solution, simply put, was to limit the time cities are allowed to remain distressed. Set a deadline. After that, you can’t be poor anymore. You’re off the list. You’ve graduated.

I returned to my car, where Colby lifted his head to sniff the fear, and we rolled through Clairton as if it were a Hollywood soundstage whose last scene was shot a long time before then. “One shot,” De Niro tells his friend. “Two is pussy.” A shot deer who isn’t killed is suffering, and if you let that happen, the grief belongs to you.

From The Change by Lori Soderlind. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.