Day One - Out with the Old

Day One – April 1, 2024

Rain and flashes of lightning, petals from the cherry blossoms scattering in the wet, I’m leaving it all behind to head out west.  I have packed my clothes in bags labeled “Summer” “Winter” “Work”, not sure what conditions I’ll face. For now, it’s rain and more rain.

Driving out 1-270 to Frederick, leaving behind the data centers sprawling alongside the highway, the technology companies, defense contractors, and begin to climb into the Appalachians on I-70 and northwest into Pennsylvania’s steel and coal country. 

Slag heaps are grassing over and open-pit mines reclaimed by nature, but it takes longer for the rusting hulks of conveyor belts, girdings, punched-out brick buildings, old mills, old factories to collapse into the earth. There is the faintly acrid smell of coal dust in the air.  Over America’s First Super Highway, the Pennsylvania Turnpike built in 1940, through a tunnel crossing the Eastern Continental Divide, dense clouds, steady rain, the steady shwhoosh-whoosh of windshield wipers, and after Pittsburgh gradually the land flattens into the plains of Ohio.

But first a lunch stop in Koppen, Pa. I run Eiger on a sodden baseball field beside a rusting hulk of a steel mill, huge corrugated buildings, 10 chimneys in a row on top shaped like big black bottlecaps, tubular funnels connect buildings, all dirty and old.

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The road sign to the steel mill reads Dead End.  

The blond-haired woman with tattoos up her right arm at the coffee truck that no longer sells coffee in the afternoons says, “They make all sorts there. It’s a subsidiary of US Steel. Families that work there go back four generations. It’s like going back in time this town.  You can leave your front door open.”   I nod and think, nothing much left to steal.  Stores are boarded up, signs say "For Sale," "For Rent 2 Apts," smashed-in windows..  

 The one store that is open is the Thrift Shop spilling onto the sidewalk plastic drying racks for laundry and stacks of black chairs, the kind you might put out for the town hall meeting, if anyone came anymore.

Three hours north and west to I-80, past Cleveland and stop at Sandusky on Lake Erie. Once a port city shipping grain, iron, steel, sand and gravel, it was the terminus for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and a stopover for the Underground Railroad.  You can see Detroit and Canada across the water.  Today the warehouses are converted to lakeview apartments, the park features artworks and native plantings, and there’s a microbrewery beside the old-time music hall.  It’s remade for the new economy of leisure.

(Didn’t make it to Cedar Point, too rainy, though I could see along the lakeside its 18 world-class roller coasters, voted among the best in the world.)