Staring into the Heart of the Supercell

The heat built tall columns into the afternoon
broiling the ground under the heavy air,
lowering curtains of sweat and syrupy sun.

The highway baked under glassy hours
and the air hummed thickly with flying bugs.

Suddenly
the cables
snapped.

A sharp breeze cut shivers,
whipping the sweat from our brows,
tearing the sleeves from our wrists.
Butterflies ripped from tree limbs
were flung darts, torn tickets.

The tall grasses jittered, then blew
then flattened under the palm of the storm.
The trees writhed, a roiling sea of green leaves
whipping frantically, pleading mightily.

We stood and watched the black clouds
sweep across the sky and gather
in an angry curl,
a eyeless behemoth,
the heartless destroyer.

I wondered for a moment if I could get involved in defending or otherwise helping something along the lines of S&G, if Carrie and I end up back in Pittsburgh at some point in the future…But I quickly rebutted myself: It’s doubtful that an initiative so deeply rooted in its community would want assistance from someone from without. In fact, in some sense, that is exactly what this organization seeks not to do.

Which brings me to the thing I’ve been mulling over much of today: What is it about the quality of being from a place that legitimizes your activities there?

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. When I was living in Poughkeepsie, I frequently wanted to integrate and assist the community but often felt that my effort (the effort of an outsider) was resented by those with a genuine, longstanding stake in the place. And I understand that feeling (especially since I was not particularly good at what I was doing there).

I understand that feeling because I have felt a good deal of resentment toward outsiders from time to time myself. A notable example would be the time I worked as co-captain of my neighborhood (Lawrenceville, at the time) for the Obama campaign…In looking over a map of areas that had been canvassed, I noticed that no one had registered voters anywhere in the South Hilltop area above 18th Street – an area that is traditionally deeply Democratic. I mentioned this to an employee of the campaign, and volunteered to take care of this area of the city myself. The campaign worker called over to another: “Hey, can I get a map of registered voters in the Lawrenceville/Mount Oliver area?”

I looked quizzically at the worker and mentioned that Lawrenceville and Mount Oliver are very much noncontiguous – in fact, they are about five miles and one river away from each other. She shrugged and mentioned that she was from Iowa.

My intention is not to belittle the efforts of my Iowan friends on the campaign – obviously they were hired for a reason and, as you will notice if you surf over to whitehouse.gov, they did their jobs exceptionally well. Still, to go into a city attempting to win hearts and minds without some feel for its complex socioeconomic dynamics…it struck me as naïve.

Maybe my attitude is borne of the fact that I grew up in one of the most insular neighborhoods of a famously insular city. Pittsburgh is frequently cited as an almost anachronistic collection of ethnic enclaves…When I was born, Mt. Oliver was allegedly home to the country’s highest concentration of German Catholics – second only to Troy Hill (where my dad is from). This is a city where communities of fewer than 5,000 people further subdivide themselves based on geography (I’m looking at you, Bottoms of Hazelwood/Observatory Hill/etc). And each of these places has a distinct feel and its own code of conduct – even if the gradations are barely perceptible, I assure you that there is a palpable difference between Lincoln Place and Hays.

Urban areas might be the extreme case of this phenomenon, since they are so dense, but this can be extended to suburban or rural areas. I’ve got to imagine that Evans City and Zelionople probably have a rivalry of some sort – presumably mitigated only be their common hatred of Cranberry. God only knows the depth of the fear and resentment citizens of Wilmerding harbor against the alien town of Wall.

It’s tough to bridge those gaps in practice. The middle school population of Poughkeepsie let me know daily that I was not one of them. I’m sure that my sarcastic smirk made the Iowan feel the same way. And yet, somehow exceptions continue to be made: John Fetterman in Braddock…Ed Rendell (a native New Yorker) in Philly for that matter. What makes them different?

This is a particularly pertinent issue for me right now, a relative newbie in the context of Nashville. I want to get involved in Legal Aid and other community programs, but I don’t want to be seen as some out-of-touch bleeding heart or gentrifier. I don’t want to be seen the same way as I saw the kids from Mt. Lebanon who repainted Transverse Park when I was a kid. I resented the insinuation that our neighborhood was some charity case that needed their enlightened assistance to help itself. (Apparently others in the ‘hood saw it the same way, since everything was covered in graffiti again two days afterward.)

I’ve gone on too long as usual, so I’ll leave the rest of my rant for some other time. The important thing to remember is: yeah, you’re going to be an outsider in an unfamiliar environment. That’s always where you start. Where you end is up to you…Establishing trust, respect, and familiarity takes time.

Our first stop was indeed, Grimey’s, a charmingly unstuffy record shop shoehorned into a gutted house. While they also offered a substantial selection of new and used cds, we came for the vinyl. Records, new, “preloved” and everywhere in between, accumulated along every wall and perfumed the rooms with dusty cardboard and wax (ah! Heaven.) I found myself crawling under plywood crates to get at “the good stuff”: the $4.99 bin, the $1.99 bin, the (gasp!) $.99 bin! You heard it here folks – fine, well-cared for vinyl at half the price of goodwill.

With dusty knees I bought my selections to the counter, while Matt peeked at music magazines and rifled through the used cds. In the end I bought 4 records for the grand total of about 12 bucks, counting the absurd Tennessee sale tax. The final four?

The first two came out in 1971, and last two in 1973. God, I was born in the wrong decade.

On the way home we took a spin out to Charlotte Pike to McKay’s Books. Do you like used books stores? Well, this is the biggest used bookstore I’ve ever seen. Seriously:

I could have perused for hours, if we weren’t held back by my humblingly small bank account and Matt’s need to study. I availed myself of five thick novels, for the grand total of two bucks and two quarters. I bought an Anne Lamott novel for a buck, Song of Solomon for 50 cents, Cold Mountain for 15 cents! Heaven, heaven indeed. Thank god Orpah’s been getting into Cormac McCarthy; I can’t wait to pick up his full collection for pennies on the dime after the eventual discard by fickle book clubs.

We headed home, the car graced with books and records and two happy campers. I pleaded a bit for a quick Waffle House brunch, but we decided instead to throw ourselves at the mercy of our icebox. The rest of the afternoon was sound-tracked to Mother Earth and it felt, well, pretty groovy.

I misplaced the charger for my camera. I now have 40+ wonderful pictures of Nashville, 40+ pictures that explain the absolute weirdness of this alien place, which I cannot show you. But oh, the pictures I would post!

Nashville abounds with vintage neon signs. Car dealerships, liquor stores, laundromats and honky-tonks advertise their wares with humming tubes and blinking lights. Movie theaters glow technicolor. Fireworks climb a pole and explode. A jumping trout catches a fly in his mouth.   

Cowboy boots, everywhere you look. Cowboy boot shops are a distinctly Nashville tourist trap. As our landlord, a lifelong Nashvillian, drawled: “Nobody from Nashville wears cowboy boots.” But the myth persists and boot shops appear in clusters downtown like mushrooms after rain.

The insects here are enormous and exotic to those of us accustomed to black ants and houseflies. Flying cockroaches crash headfirst into walls and mill about on the sidewalks at night. Wooly aphids resembling mobile knots of dryer lint accumulate on decks and bare arms. Bees reach unimagined dimensions. Coworkers warn me about fire ants and invasive millipedes, while Matt is perpetually covered with mosquito bites.

I have found the people here to be very kind, slow-moving and sweet. They advise us on where to go for a meat and three, a concept we roughly understand. They tell us where tornadoes have hit, and how many more days of rain are coming. They sometimes tell us things we don’t understand, because we have trouble with the accent. Endings disappear and pins turn into pens. This is Southern magic. 

Someday I will find my charger, and show you all this and more.

But in a sense, hard tasks have been the order of the day — academically, socially, and emotionally — since we got here. We left stable employment and irreplaceable friends in a deeply familiar and beloved city for an adventure in the rhinestone-studded Buckle of the Bible Belt. We came here friendless, virtually penniless, and, for our first week, literally bed-less. It’s been a Rialto-steep uphill battle to gain some footing and familiarity in a truly bizarre environment.

The first few weeks — maybe the first entire month — was rough. I am an optimist arguably to the point of stupidity, but it was hard to see how anything good would end up materializing here. We were meeting absolutely no one. The only person other than Carrie who I talked to for more than two minutes over the course of the first 3-4 weeks was a homeless man outside of the laundromat. The major street bordering our house is a giant, ugly vein of cars and trucks at all hours, devoid of pedestrians to the point that you feel like the last person on earth as you walk down the sidewalk at noon on a weekday. Our area of the city was largely built during America’s Ugly Mirrored High-Rise period and seemingly the only areas with actual foot traffic, architectural charm, and commercial density are in the hideous tourist trap that is Broadway, Downtown. And to make matters worse, the bizarre anti-bike harassment dished out by the nighttime denizens of Broadway makes Strip District club-goers sound like Emily Post.

Obviously, I could go on. A month longer here and a healthy dose of self-reflection stops me from doing so. How many times have I heard similar tales of woe from recent, jaded transplants to Pittsburgh? It’s so provincial; it’s dirty; Mark Madden keeps eating my children; there’s nothing to do; I can’t understand what Sophie Masloff is saying. It’s so frustrating to hear these things as a native because you know that they could so easily be disproved if the person uttering them would just step out, meet the right people, and throw themselves willingly into the spirit of the place.

And you can find someone who loves anywhere. At the risk of offending the 12 remaining people of Centralia…12 people still choose to live atop a burning mine in central Pennsylvania. I am in one of America’s most celebrated and fascinating cities. A lot of people love this place. One day it struck me: It’s time to step out, meet the right people, and throw myself willingly into the spirit of this place.

So that’s been the story of the last few weeks: exploration, friends, and fun. Bike rides down the Cumberland; racing pigs at the Tennessee State Fair; Mexican food in East Nashville; Mexican food in South Nashville; Mexican food at the Tennessee State Fair; a hike in Warner Park; home-cooked lasagna and wine at a friend’s apartment; thrifting on Charlotte Ave; Michael Jackson dance parties at the Collective. This weekend things truly began to crystallize, and I realized that I was comfortable here for the first time.

(P.S. The same has largely happened for my work and study habits, but that’s a story for another time.)