The Rust Belt

Suppose its true that when you are living a great narrative, you don’t have the strength to write about it. And yet its so hard to think up stories out of thin air. Suppose it only takes time, years maybe, when it becomes only flashes of memories eating me on a snowy mountain top, driving into the sunset over the State Line, waking saturated with contentment in Holiday Inns and Motor Hotels and perhaps making it to the Canadian border – not memories even but memories of photos and other forget-me-nots. Suppose this is better than relating every stinging second of the damned affair. There is no joy in this; its all description, no plot.

Many of the roads in Upstate New York don’t go anywhere at all, just wind through hills from one muddy burg to another, connecting one far-off, unimportant town with another, somewhere else. Somewhere at one time, some of these routes were strategically important: Route 209 follows the footprint of the old D&H Canal, dug in the 19th century to haul coal from Pennsylvania to New York City, building our great Empire State one boatload at a time. The Canal had been an engineering marvel in its day, boasting at least one stone aqueduct designed by Roebling to carry coalboats over a the majestic Rondout Valley (in the 1970s, the local power company had tried to destroy the crossing but the wrecking ball just bounced off – they ended up dynamiting it – no one’s really sure why).

The towns along this route had at least once been filled with hotels, whores and ginmills, all the accoutrements of life thriving, which is more they can boast now (if they are lucky now, they might have recently been livened by antique-frenzied city-slickers who’ve escaped the hustle). In other cases, one can’t imagine why a road would have been drilled though in the first place. There is Route 30, I think, making its way improbably and fruitlessly from the Delaware Reservoir at the Pennsylvania border up through the foothills of the Catskills, through nowheresville, more reservoirs, deserts of flat, windswept snow with mailboxes poking out, meandering in no particular direction through towns with names like Harrietstown, Speculator and Paul Smiths, dozens of places like this each with a single flashing yellow light and brown slushy snowbanks dribbling into the road, connecting the dots between Stewarts Shoppes and Food Lion Supermarkets with their infinite rows of florescent bulbs, ending up in the Adirondaks: in nameless places like Tupper Lake and Long Lake. Perhaps this was not the best weekend for you to quit smoking. Perhaps this was not the best weekend for to quit your anti-psychotic medication.

I don’t know how we made it to that hilltop off the main road; were we in New York or Pennsylvania – it all looked the same – all brown-white and dirty snow, mobile homes and wooden post offices displaying random zip codes – 12983, 12025, 12474 so that you couldn’t remember where you were. We chose our routes like placing bets on a roulette wheel, 29, 11, 28N stopping for coffee at identical little aluminium neon diners full of smoky old men and pathetic smiling waitresses filling our bottomless cups. We talked and jittered, chattering at ourselves and others til they noticed and stared our way. Then you told me we had to drive on, the roads were getting bad, the snowbanks encroaching further into the road and melting-freezing-melting becoming the road itself. I submitted because, frankly, I was just happy to be out there with you far from fools, and because I was in love and somehow it made me trust that you wouldn’t slip, or if you did, I wouldn’t mind going down with you behind the wheel.

Anyway, you used to live in Michigan, so that’s enough. The road had become impassable or nearly so; we were up on some rounded snowpeak, gray and full of bare branches and surely hibernating reptiles; happily devoid of any association to anything in my life. We’d reached a barrier actually – the end of the road – all bright orange reflecting in the low sun, harsh against this organic backdrop of earthtones. On it was affixed a sign: BRIDGE OUT. But the bridge was there, spanning and expansive gully – the typical iron truss bridge found all over this part of the country: built to last, reflecting the industrialists’ great dreams of an American future. Trains. Factories. Iron. Built to serve generations for hundreds of years in the spirit of the great Roman aqueducts – still standing, still bringing water to a thriving city.

In reality, these proud structures had outlasted America’s greatness, outlived her immense industrial might and now mostly held vacant railroad tracks spattered with weeds or abandoned roads leading to nowhere like the shadowy remnants of the D&H Canal, like old Lock 19 in High Falls, perpetually sleeping, its chambers masterpieces of cut stone haunted by muskrats and ghosts of muleboys slain in the line of duty.

Our old iron bridge had clung to the valley in perpetuity. The mighty road to progress had given way to nature, as it always does eventually. But iron too is part of nature. It had held, integrated itself into its surroundings, and what had once proudly led sooty men and boys across to an important centre mining or milling was now populated by fully grown trees – remarkable the way those trees had sprouted right on the bridge, spreading their branches, rooting there, extending their trunks from one of man’s greatest dreams of the future right up into the sky. A cantilevered bridge filled with nothing but trees – there was no further to go.

It seems that we had unknowingly reached our destination. I wanted you right there alone in our newfound wilderness with Hank Willians Jr on the radio but you said no. I begged, but you refused. You seemed to enjoy this power over me, You had literally dragged me to the end of the earth (or perhaps I’d dragged you), but either way I’d escaped – with you – from a life of grief and fog, and I’d had it in my mind that once we stopped, this was what was supposed to come next. I assumed that you saw things the same way, which was why it was all the more surprising when you deflected my advances, which in turn made me feel hideous, guilty and lower than anything I had ever felt myself to be. In your mind, clearly we had not reached our end point; having me would only be an empty victory because I would inevitably return to my peaked roof, my Marxist intellectuals and my university classes – my cold bourgeois existence with its empty promises of fulfillment – smiling as I related self-effacing anecdotes of my ‘lost weekend’ in emails or chats. It wasn’t true.

But why should I let myself be possessed when you had nothing at all to bring to the table? Other than the utter feeling of satisfaction and completeness, other than brain-twisting sensations of physical desire – mere perceptions, illusions that would surely melt into dust with time. So we sat in silence (except for the crackling twang on the radio), contemplating the bridge and its healthy trees. Symbiosis.

In the very act of refusal, one is able to gain a new sense of strength and mastery; control as perfect and white as the pristine ice crystals refracting light off the delicate branches above our heads that winter afternoon in the fading light when I lost it all.