The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, January 17th. It is the 27th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On D.C., Long Distance, and Saying Goodbye
It was a Saturday night, nine years ago next weekend, when my brother’s roommate, full of gin and wading past the football practice fields on our return from some small, impromptu party, yelled a thing along the lines of, “I mean, if God wanted to tell us to not live in a place, wouldn’t he do it by dumping a shit-ton of snow on it!?”
South Bend was sitting up from one of its customary lake effect snowfalls, white drifts piled upon the prior weekend’s white drifts, snowplowed towers still rising in the corners of parking lots, as they would for another two months. Will’s roommate, Andy, was from Los Angeles, and while I didn’t spend a ton of time around Andy that winter—I was still in high school, only on campus for a long weekend, in part to watch Notre Dame’s basketball team play (and upset, as it turned out) an undefeated Syracuse—I gathered he was finding a good bit of joy in lamenting his third of four lifetime South Bend winters.
But joyous as the lamentation was, the point had some merit. South Bend is rather uninhabitable in the winter.
The relationship with South Bend is a curious aspect of Notre Dame. South Bend is not a quintessential college town. Notre Dame is not a quintessential college. It’s a big brand, but a medium-sized school, only about a third or a quarter the size of the University of Michigan or Indiana. So while the city counts a comparable population to Ann Arbor and Bloomington, and while Notre Dame certainly has its own cash-happy ecosystem which, at all times, feels like that which we assign to colleges, the town and the school are not as intertwined as those other iconic midwestern college environments. Couple in the city’s Rust Belt nature and the accompanying tragic effects of the last sixty years, and couple in the lake effect climate, and for as picturesque and timeless and thriving the scene is that accompanies football weekends and therefore much of fall semester, winter and spring are comparably barren. Minute fractions of the number of fall visitors come to campus. It’s snowy. It’s cold. While the university dominates the fall, soaking up the oxygen in student’s lives, the city sits more prominent in the winter and spring, at least to my eyes. Even on those rapturous first warm days, and even around graduation, some combination of emptiness and stir-craziness and the rollicking grasps by seniors to wring out the last bits of college revelry serve, to a degree, to pump the city into sharper focus, while the university, though often charming and sometimes charged and still technically the same school it is in the fall, feels like a different place, and not as encapsulating a place as it is from August through December.
When I think of my senior year of college, I picture dark and quiet moments. I picture myself kicking the snow from my boots on the entry mats to my off-campus townhouse (the one where the oven was set to close to the wall, with a nasty gouge beside it deepening every rare time we opened the oven). I picture my totaled car, still drivable enough to get to and from campus, sitting all diagonal and warped, not just by the driver who rear-ended it but by the piles of ice-hardened snow upon which it had to park. I picture muffled nights at the kitchen table in there, sitting eating with Emma, my roommate Joel stopping to talk while passing through.
I was on my way out of Notre Dame that year, especially that winter/spring semester, and I was pulling away from the university’s orbit. Moving off campus was a piece of it, but so was the reality of how immediate the future was. There were aspects of the Notre Dame orbit that tired me, and with an end in sight, I was more happy than usual to not subject myself to that fatigue, instead choosing to just cut those particular aspects out. My Notre Dame was smaller. My South Bend was larger.
It was in this broader relationship with South Bend—shopping for groceries at Martin’s, going to the liquor store rather than using a fake ID at Meijer, going to parties not in dorms but in the house of friends somewhere by Hill Street or St. Louis—that the place became a comforting totem.
South Bend in the winter, spring, and summer is isolated. Even in the fall, the isolation peeks through if the football team’s out of town long enough. There is little reason to come to town. There are plenty of reasons to pass right by. Interstates 80 and 90 rocket past, carrying people and goods from Chicago to the Rust Belt’s eastern termini and beyond, to the great cities of the East. Trips to Chicago, when I would take them, would be taken by train—the South Shore Line, an old electric thing that makes you pass not only physically through Michigan City and Gary but through some time warp of the mind before emerging into the present, and into rest of the world. Even the biggest city can feel isolating on a winter night, with snowfall hushing the pulse of commerce in its wet, clumpy flakes. But a dead city, a Rust Belt city, a passed-over industrial place set apart from the worlds of the skyscrapers, can feel isolating even on a spring day.
For reasons I’ll eventually have to explain in one of these essays, I spent a lot of that spring semester running and riding my bike. The bike rides took me out of South Bend, often northwest, up through the city’s northwestern neighborhoods to across (and sometimes well past) the Michigan line. The runs took me through the city.
I’d run along the St. Joseph River. I’d run atop the asphalt sandpits left behind by the snowplows, in gutters and parking lot corners. I’d run through muddy woods. I’d run across rundown neighborhoods. The city would feel untouchable, set apart like a courtyard with walls built of economic decline rather than stone or brick or steel. And I, in its midst, would feel untouchable myself, liberatingly alone, vanished from the university’s orbit, sucked into the city’s absence of any gravity of its own.
I miss South Bend. I miss the river. I miss the asphalt sandpits, and the rundown neighborhoods, and the muddy woods. But most of all, I miss that isolation. That joyous liberation of being in a place no one would objectively choose to inhabit. I miss the power in that. The power of the city, standing firm and continuing to exist in the face of all the reasons why it should not exist. The power of the city, one of Indiana’s largest, but like Gary, closer to Chicago and Detroit in nature than to Indianapolis, making it technically a Hoosier town and yet simultaneously defiantly not a Hoosier town. The power of the city, having little place in the world, and yet carving one out in an oft-uninhabitable corner of this vast, vast country. And the power the city gave me, to choose its zero-gravity world now and then over the orbital forces of the university world with which my relationship was equal parts love, disappointment, and fatigue, and by choosing it—by choosing South Bend, even just now and then—to break myself from the orbit, and make moments in the orbit therefore chosen themselves, and therefore self-evidently worthy of my choice.
There was a line one of the romantic poets said, or was attributed to have said, if I remember correctly from a senior-year class. I don’t think it came in a poem. But whether it was in or out of poetry, and whether it came from Byron or Keats or my own misinterpretation of something that professor said, the gist of it was that we all know the feeling of watching snow fall upon black water.
I don’t know if that line is true for you, reading this. But I believe I know that feeling of which the poet spoke. I think this was the feeling South Bend gave me in those winter and spring months, and I think the feeling was this: an awareness, from the swallowing black, of the fleetingness of everything; a consciousness of how little anything, then, mattered; and a comfort, at last, in how beautiful it all still is, anyway.
Next week’s essay: On Alumni Hall, and on the Grace of Allegiance
