SWITCHBACKS // RETURNING TO DUST
image by Jeremy Blakeslee
New Rust For the Old World
by Miles Coulahan
VOLUME 5 // ISSUE 2 // FALL 2023 // RUST
New rust grows on the old craft. Forgotten frames and wheel spokes are broken down and offered back to the earth from which they came. Hydrogen and oxygen prove our lust for control is futile, limited at best. Even the most durable of our creations will be swallowed up in fragments and taken back to the soil. To dust we shall return. Humans seem to have had some level of fixation on infinity since we looked up at night and were able to think, “Where did we come from?” Still we dwell in finite bodies on a finite planet in a solar system set to expire sooner or later. What is it then that makes us stubbornly polish the old chrome handlebars and spend our time here building? More importantly, how do we restore and preserve the communities, establishments, and ideas we care about most?
I grew up in the already declined industrial city of Rockford, Illinois. When I was a kid, the town rallied behind its ranking of second-worst city to live in the United States. It’s the kind of town that loves to hate itself, but people there are quick to defend its virtues to outsiders. In that way, it is reminiscent of Philadelphia, where I live now. (I think of the distasteful rally behind Trump’s quote, “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”) Sometimes people don’t want good things to happen in their town. Or perhaps they walk through the creaky swinging door and decide they would rather live with the broken fixtures of their town than trade it in for a newer, more sterile model. Sometimes I felt that way growing up, too. But for all its faults, I have a lot of love for that region and the people out there. There’s a sort of no-nonsense stubbornness. And after seeing how Philadelphia has changed in only the four years I’ve been here, I have a new appreciation for the aversion to new things, even though I think change is good most of the time.
Rockford was the last stop off Chicago’s first westward-reaching railroad (G&CURR) and hit its industrial stride in the early 1860s. The first notable wave of immigration there was due in no small part to the cholera outbreaks in Chicago from 1852 through 1854. A group of Swedes headed for Chicago in 1852 were met on the train platform by a reverend named Erland Carrison who warned them of the outbreak and advised them to take the G&CURR to the end of the line, which at the time was Rockford, or “Midway” (midway between Chicago and Galena).
After the American Civil War, Swedes came in large numbers to the region to be near extended family who came earlier and to seek new opportunities. My mother’s side of the family arrived here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The economy in southern Sweden was mostly agricultural. Most who left for America wanted to build better lives for themselves, and many did. One of my ancestors, Erick Johnson, born in 1868 in Malmö, Sweden, was among those who chose this path. Here’s an excerpt from my Grandma Jordis’ family history on him:
“Erick was sent, by his parents, to live with and work for another farmer. His parents, in return, were paid a certain sum of money in return for his labor. Erick was employed as a sheep herder. He could later recall his experience tending the sheep, himself a child of about nine, alone at night on a dark hillside. He would recall how he shivered with the cold, his bare feet sometimes blue, while the wolves howled all around him in the dark.”
I’m sure experiences like that change a person forever. And it reminds me of the fact that we are not merely where we came from but who we came from. We are more the descendants of our ancestors than merely the children of our parents. There’s a reason we feel so much more alert in the cold, dark night. Another one of my ancestors, John Larson, was killed by a dagger intended for another man while he stood outside a bar in Östergötland, Sweden, in 1879. I mean to say, with all the love you should have for where you came from, people leave for a reason. They fear death, they grow up in the same setting as these traumatic events in their past, and that visceral feeling sometimes makes them uproot their entire lives.
From the 1880s through the first half of the 20th century, Rockford was the second-largest furniture manufacturing center in the U.S. and shifted into industrial manufacturing from there. It became known as the “Screw Capital of the World” in the first half of the 20th century.
Most people I know from this area still have held onto some sort of lasting ideology from this industrial boom: things like pride in their work ethic, the importance of supporting institutions they believe in, and the preservation of self in solidarity with the greater good. There’s a huge emphasis on self-sufficiency and capability. When I explained to some of my family that I work for a moving company, most of them seemed sort of confused. People pay to have their own stuff moved? Don’t they just have some family to help them? The even more complicated thing to explain was that our company often packs customers’ belongings for them. Most people there don’t understand why someone would give you money to go through their stuff and put it into a box for them. I do feel that on the East Coast there are so many more people who will just pay to have something they are capable of doing themselves done by someone else. To the type of Midwesterner I grew up around (to the smaller city, “salt of the earth” types), moving probably seems like something you do a few times in your life and somehow you make it work. But labor was supposed to be about craft or trade.
For example, in my family history that my Grandma Jordis wrote about, you don’t see titles like “line worker.” They typically include details like “highly skilled spray painter” to emphasize the reverence that craftsmen had for their jobs—all things we see being bred out of us by conglomeration and separation of workers from the means of production. Now we mostly just deliver food to each other through the Divine Grace of Technology. Thank you so much Big Tech, we couldn’t have done it without you.
There was a time when you could go over to a friend’s house and notice a piece of furniture, realizing that you had worked on it and recognizing its subtle intricacies. You could tell them about the project and feel the satisfaction of knowing that someone finds joy in owning something you carefully helped craft. Something about that gives us meaning, and that is good for the soul. So much of what we do for work now lacks the space and material for this sense of meaning. If you work for a corporation doing whatever it is they do, you likely don’t have a thing to point to at the end of the day and say, “I worked on that.” That is something that makes us human, gives us meaning, makes us feel awake. I think about the first time I restored a motorcycle that had sat in its tomb for 20 years. It wasn’t anything special, just a small 250cc engine Yamaha with no title and two flat tires. But the feeling I had the first time I heard fire in the cylinders when I kicked the engine over is something I’ve pursued a long time since. It can be anything. It should be everything. Often times it’s both.
Unfortunately, Rockford is another one of many Rust Belt towns being left in the past, grappling to adjust to a globalized market and facing all the problems that come with underemployment and wage stagnation. Growing up here could feel isolating at times. Sometimes you told yourself, “It’s just like any other town,” and in a lot of ways it was, but it doesn’t compare to an East Coast city. When I reflect on leaving the Midwest four years ago, I think I underestimated the effect growing up there had on me. I love living in Philadelphia, but I don’t feel like an East Coaster, and it seems to me that most of the people around me can tell I’m from somewhere else. In a way somewhere newer, in another way much, much older—frozen. So much of me wanted to shed my past and be a new person, in a different world, one that was fast-paced and modern. I have adjusted to the differences here, but the values people hold—and in many ways how they connect with each other—are so different. I still get depressed when I go back home, the way I felt a lot of the time growing up, but I don’t see it as the bleak place I did when I wanted to leave. For all the things I found so abysmal about life there when I was young, my hometown has so much to its advantage. I think the greatest thing about it isn’t the Friday night city market with its electric guitars, or the plan to build a train to Chicago (though I think it’s a good thing, and I wish we had one when I was growing up), or the new casino that’s Really going to put us on the map! Maybe I just don’t like to see the changes I missed while I was gone. But it is an affordable city, and if you don’t have “fear of missing out” by not living in a major city, it’s a perfect place to build a life the way you want to.
There are a lot of questions all of us will have to address at some point or another. How will we preserve and support the people and institutions we care about? As corporate entities buy up homes and businesses, how do we react? In a late-stage capitalist world, the burden is put on us, the consumers, to choose where our personal capital is allocated.
It feels like most people in my life, vaguely my age (24 at the time of writing this) and living in the city, feel something missing from their lives. Something meaningful that brings a sense of responsibility. I feel this way myself all too often. I’m sure much of that comes with age. More so than that, I think what’s felt to be missing is an organic society, as some have talked about—this sense of community that we are leaving behind, like so many of these Rust Belt towns that cultivated this sentiment for a century. It’s important for us to focus on businesses and people we value and believe in so they can keep existing, and this way we can build our reality, one that has meaning. It will get harder to build something you believe in. So few of us will hold the sling when we face Goliath. But those of us who do can try to carve a path for ourselves and for the others we want to come along with us.
We are always being advertised to. Media is always stealing our attention. It’s no surprise so many young people feel disenchanted by the modern world, and so become disengaged. A lack of any sacredness in everyday life. No more symbolism, no more power of belief. It is this distraction that keeps us from realizing the greater problems caused by the very machine that deflects our vision, the same one we built ourselves. While most of the assets and resources in the world get consolidated by the ultra-rich and the climate crisis reaches a tipping point, it seems naive to talk about combatting anything for the sake of building community for us. But I still think it’s important. Really, why not?
My concern is no longer that Rockford is going to turn into some wild west ghost town with a poison well. Now I’m just concerned it’s going to end up like our city of Philadelphia. With the Midwest being located geographically to withstand the effects of climate change much better than so many other parts of the country, I’m sure people will flock there in the coming years. As major cities in the country become so unaffordable that even the corporate class looks elsewhere to live, I’m worried it’s going to homogenize that place and make it another coastal city. I don’t want to see it meet the gentrification fate that we’re watching unfold in so many other places, like our own city.
I, like so many people do in life, chose to leave. I feel okay with it. I miss my people a lot of the time. But sometimes you leave where you are from out of fear of death or failure. Maybe it was one of those two for me; who’s to say. But it’s important to remember where you’re from, and how you got to where you are. After all, where you’re going is bound to change, but there will never be another place you came from. //
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