"It's a Springsteen song"
Ravenna is a city in Ohio with a beautiful name, miles of space, and more horses than I’m used to seeing on an hourlong drive. It has its own Wikipedia page, which reads a little bit like the first time I tried to write an author biography for myself in that it (the biography) was a catalog of facts that didn’t have much meaning to me but that somebody else might find useful. There are at least 24 notable people from Ravenna, according to that page, though there seems to be some dispute about the latest entry on the list, a “local rapper/break dancer and cannabis rights activist.”
Dylan and I were in Ravenna last week because that’s where Sirna and Sons — a wholesale produce distributor that started offering no-contact pickup options in March, when people really started panic-buying in supermarkets — is located. Last time we were there was in March, when we passed this empty drive-in, which bills itself as east of Kent and west of Ravenna, like an off-brand Steinbeck sequel. (Kent, it turns out, is actually named after one of the alleged two dozen notable people born in Ravenna.)
These two geese were the only people at the drive-in when we used it as a turn-around. It was startling, almost apocalyptic, to pull into such an empty lot under the sign “STAYCATION FOR NOW, VACATION LATER, STAY HEALTHY AND CARE FOR EACH OTHER.”
Ohio can turn on a dime like that. Between one street and the next, or just around the corner, you can watch the income bracket drop off precipitously. Last summer, I used to walk from the salon to my therapist’s office, and I could either take Mars Avenue, where the sidewalk was uneven and the houses cramped and close to the street, Arthur Avenue, where the houses could have been pulled directly from Norman Rockwell’s id — complete with enormous front lawns, high school pride signs, and old-growth trees. They were just one block apart, but it was easy enough to tell that the people who lived on the latter street had money to spend on landscapers and renovations and time, because what money buys you is the ability to spend time making sure that your house shows everyone that you have money. And it was equally obvious that the people who lived on Mars Avenue did not.
When I first moved to Cleveland, I couldn’t figure out how to think of the city as a cohesive whole. Part of that was a matter of design; the city proper is divided up into smaller cities — Tremont, Rocky River, Lakewood, Beachwood, Shaker Heights — which each have their own tax codes. Part of it was because each of those cities has a personality unto itself, a particular set of social mores and implications for the people who live there, with few democratizing elements. In Lakewood, a vegan restaurant shares a street corner with a witch shop. Downtown, law firms jostle shoulders with steakhouses. In Elyria, which is not strictly part of Cleveland — Dylan and I drove out to Lorain County on a rainy day for something to do — the local GOP office is next door to a gospel church.
Last Wednesday, we drove to Huron to buy kitchen herbs. The route we took led us along the lakeshore for fifty miles, past signs advertising “new and pre-enjoyed boats,” past enormous houses, one with its own lookout tower, many with sculpture gardens and multiple SUVs, all with mile-long driveways and fiercely manicured lawns, and then within a minute — between one block and the next — the space and money dwindled until we were driving past smaller single-family ranch houses with faded siding. All waterfront property takes on a similar quality, it seems, regardless of the city or the body of water in question. I kept thinking about beachfront properties in New York City, the way the porches are littered with tattered folding chairs and floats retired for the season, and I also kept thinking about a line from the 2014 Veronica Mars movie: “When the class war comes, Neptune will be ground zero.”
Speaking of class warfare and fiction, it is quite difficult in general to write about Ohio without giving in to the urge to make a reference or eighty — as I already have — to John Steinbeck, whose oeuvre is also largely set on the West Coast. (While the fictional town of Neptune is located, more or less, in nonfictional Orange County in south California, Steinbeck had truck largely with central California and the Salinas Valley.) In the 1960s, Steinbeck wrote glowingly of the Midwest’s “fantastic hugeness and energy of production,” not yet blighted:
Almost on crossing the Ohio line it seemed to me that people were more open and more outgoing. The waitress in a roadside stand said good morning before I had a chance to, discussed breakfast as though she liked the idea, spoke with enthusiasm about the weather, sometimes even offered some information about herself without my delving. Strangers talked freely to one another without caution. I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside—the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.
Not too long ago, I saw somebody on the street wearing a t-shirt that said, “CLEVELAND: A VERY AFFORDABLE, DECENT PLACE TO LIVE.” In the process of trying to find it just now, I found another one that says, “WORK HARD AND BE NICE: THE CLEVELAND WAY.”
Cleveland is a very affordable and decent place to live. It’s also a place where you can live like a person for much less money than anybody should be paid to do any job — and if you happen to make more than that, it’s a very affordable and decent place to be very rich. The disparity is mind-boggling in a way it was not for me in New York, for example, where you can hire as many drivers as you want but you still can’t pay to clear the streets of taxis. And because it’s so easy to be comfortable in Cleveland, to stay in your neighborhood, to stay in your car if you do have to venture beyond its borders, to talk only to your neighbors and coworkers, to pay attention only to the matters that directly concern you, to put what is out of sight out of mind, it is easy, I suspect, to become complacent — to moralize about bootstraps and valorize the undeserving, to forget that it is a privilege to not think constantly about making rent, about affording groceries. The most precious commodity of all is the ability to spend time not thinking about money.
There are places in Ohio that survive because, as the joke runs, everyone is just sending the same $20 back and forth; residents spend their money at the local businesses which employ them, and those businesses put the same money back into residents’ pockets, and on and on. It’s a specific kind of crab bucket — you can make just enough to get by, but not enough to get out — coupled with classic Midwestern guilt about the people and businesses you’d be hurting by moving away and taking your business, your labor, your income elsewhere. And now almost everyone is out of work anyway. We’re here to “WORK HARD AND BE NICE” but there is no work to be had, and niceness, at the end of the day, is one of the least productive, least sincere ways to help other people. What is the “CLEVELAND WAY” when everybody is dug into their own insular communities, confined to their own homes, less able than ever before to get muddy footprints all over those city limits?
When we got to Mulberry Creek Herb Farm last Wednesday, it was easy to feel like we had driven into another, greener plane of reality, where Steinbeck’s handsome, jeweled countryside had not changed in 60 years. Not five minutes earlier, we had been in the center of town, all gas stations and tiny tree lawns and cramped sidewalk, and then we turned one corner and found ourselves surrounded by farmland. When we visited last year, it was a riot of sun and blooms and birdsong under the endless, all-leveling span of a common sky. The season was still a little too early for flowers when we visited this time, but the people there were kind to us during our last visit and they were again last week, and there was an enclosure full of young egg-laying chickens for sale in the middle of the greenhouse, scratching and peeping and moving as one anxious feathered mass. At any moment in Ohio you might find yourself in a completely different world than the one you left behind without realizing.
—R.