One nice thing about ebooks is that you can keep them always handy.
I don’t have a temporary relationship with books. I think public libraries are very wonderful things, essential community assets, but I don’t often borrow books from them. If I read a book, and enjoy it or learn something from it or both, I don’t want to give it back. I want to have it handy to refer to, always.
This has led to a good bit of bookshelf-building on my part, but also a gradual turn toward downloading some of my favorite books to my iPad, using the Kindle and iBooks apps. This way, I always have a few of my favorites with me, because that’s where my iPad stays. This enables me to indulge, in quiet moments, my great weakness — rereading books I love. It’s something I can do for five or ten minutes, then move on to something else. And I almost always gain something that I didn’t fully get before.
This morning, at breakfast, it was one I’ve mentioned before — Rose, by Martin Cruz Smith. I’ve praised it before, said some of the same things before, but I promise I’m making my way to a different point today. Above is one of the passages I read this morning. It’s a good reminder of why I’m so into this book. Of course, this has been a forte of Smith’s work ever since Gorky Park. As I’ve said before, of both him and Patrick O’Brian, they are “capable, to an extent I’ve never seen anywhere else, to take their readers to an alien place and time and make them feel like they are really there.”
That passage above helps me to connect closely to Blair with a certain fondness (despite his extremely off-putting personality), because while I lack his skills as a mining engineer and explorer, I have always loved maps myself — even when studying one involved pulling it out of the glove compartment, and then enduring the challenge of trying to fold it back properly when I was done. Now, of course, Google Maps and Google Earth are always right there, the apps ready for reference as I read a book, or serving as a constant guide on my car’s dashboard. Blair would have loved interactive maps.
Today, though, I’m really focusing on something about entirely familiar places rather than exotic ones — although places I wish I knew as well as I know 19th-century Wigan from Smith, and Port Mahon circa 1800 from O’Brian. This is inspired by a paragraph that appears a bit after the one posted above:
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That immediately brings to mind a place where I have have actually been: Wichita, KS, which is where I lived and worked before returning to South Carolina. It’s a city like Columbia in some superficially impressive ways. For instance, it’s located at, and sprawls across, the confluence of two rivers, the Arkansas and Little Arkansas (pronounce “ar-KANSAS,” not “arkansaw”). The place where the rivers came together to form one had been an important gathering point for pow-wows between Indian tribes before the whites arrived. A cultural center sits on the joining delta today. (I’ve witnessed a pow-wow there.)
Wichita is nothing like Wigan, except in this one respect: It is historically sharply divided, by class and culture, by the river at and below the confluence. The West side was like Smith’s miner side: When the city developed in the 19th century, that was where the stockyards, saloons and brothels waited eagerly to welcome exhausted, filthy cowboys who had driven their herds hundreds of miles to get them to the railhead. They had a lot of steam built up when they got there, and Wyatt Earp was among those lawmen trying to keep them in line until they left.
Across the river to the east were the respectable folk — the people who owned those stockyards, saloons and brothels — where they lived comfortable, proper lives with their families, insulated by the river from their rowdy source of income.
An ironic thing about that… we all know that newspaper editors are, or at least do their best to emulate, “liberal elites,” right? Just full of politically correct values. Well, one of the first things I learned about my fellow editors at that paper was that they all lived on the proper, safe, smug East side of the river, largely in a Shandon-like area called College Hill.
All of them but one, a guy named Tom Suchan. I liked Tom, naturally enough. He was a Catholic like me, and had four kids, as I soon would (my fourth was born there, my fifth not until we got here). And he lived as far West as possible while remaining in the city. Across the street from his house there was a wheat field, and nothing else visible beyond it for miles and miles of prairie.
The other editors gave him constant grief for being such an outcast, a wild man beyond the pale. Oh, they did it kiddingly, but I felt the jokes covered something of a real difference between him and them, one that reflected to his credit, in my book.
When I moved to Columbia in 1987, I immediately perceived a similar dynamic. When we had our daily editors’ meetings, I looked around at the dozen or so crowded around the table, and knew that most of them lived in Shandon (while I lived over here on the West side). But a starker difference was that all of them were alumni of USC (I had never encountered such a uniformity at a newspaper). Well, all but one. Tom Priddy (who ironically had almost the same job as Suchan, being over the photographers and artists at the paper) had gone to Clemson. No one ever let him forget — joshingly, of course — what a pariah that made him.
I don’t know where he lived while he was here. But the similarity in the situations was striking.
But there was an important difference. Although I know South Carolina overall so much better than I do Kansas, I can’t sum up the central narrative of Columbia nearly as well as I can that of Wichita. There, it was simple: Cows, the railroad, cowboys and the townspeople who lived off of them. It was hard to forget, with historical reminders such as that Indian cultural center, and the “Cowtown” attraction that was located, of course, on the western side.
I know lots of things about Columbia. By the way, when I use that name, I’m referring to the overall metro area, which is stunningly fragmented, legally and politically — two counties, about 10 separate municipalies, five school districts, and so forth. Wichita has one advantage over that. Despite the historic split, it’s all one city (except from some odd little conclaves similar to, say, Arcadia Lakes. It’s all in one county. And there’s one public school district (although my kids attended a parish school in the large, separate, Catholic system).
Consequently, it’s a community that finds it easier to get its act together. For instance, its riverfront areas were completely and beautifully developed long before I there. Progress has been made here, but it’s been fitful.
Of course, there’s that huge similarity in the Big Split between East and West. And I can give you all sorts of reasons why that alienation exists here. And it’s very long-standing. It has to do with why the first editor of The State was shot and killed by the lieutenant governor in broad daylight, in front of a cop, across Gervais Street from the State House in 1903 — and his lawyers got him office by obtaining a change of venue to across the river, where folks reckoned he had it coming.
But this post is already too long for me to elaborate. I know the division exists, and you know it exists. The difference is that I can’t explain it as simply and starkly as I can the split in Wichita. The causes are more complicated here on the Eastern Seaboard. There are things we know and could explain if we were willing to talk about them, and other things we have trouble fully wrapping our heads around.
I’d like to be able to do that. I’d like to be able to explain it — to myself, to my neighbors, and to outsiders — as clearly as I can explain Wichita (or at least, how it formed).
Can anyone recommend a book that treats this entire community in a way that makes that manageable? The author doesn’t have to be a Patrick O’Brian or a Martin Cruz Smith. Just someone who explains us and the place we live clearly, coherently, accessibly, and most of all accurately.
If y’all don’t know, I’ll check with friends at the libraries on both sides of the river. I don’t check out their books much, but I know what a valuable resource they are…
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