I often read in wonder Charles Dickens’ descriptive paragraphs. He has many where he sits idly looking at London, its streets and its people, and gives an impressionist painting of words to fit the scene:
The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer’s morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive. The Streets of London, 1836.
But that was just the beginning. Dickens would take his rather journalistic observations, and from there create the metaphors and descriptions for which he became so famous. His most common creation was that of fog in the city. From A Christmas Carol to Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens created the use of fog for the ambivalence of mankind’s indifference through London’s byzantine legal system, its treatment of the poor and its cruelty to living things.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. Bleak House, 1852
As usual, Dickens creates scenes and metaphors that still apply today. Cities haven’t changed, and their rise and fall and rebirth is often so arbitrary, so painstaking, that we who live through their degradation, fear they’ll never rise again.
In early 1977, my dad took my brother, Jerry and me along with my mom to New York City. My older brother was not along on this trip and looking back on it now, New York City of the 70’s was a haunted place. The Bronx’s nickname was ‘Fort Apache,’ owing to the siege-like violence prevalent there on a constant basis, and I remember dad, who knew the city fairly well, walking us through the cold and saying, “turn right at this light coming up.” Our hotel was straight ahead, but the sidewalk between where we were and where the hotel was could not be trusted. He kept us away from the uglier sights and sounds of the city, and I remember in him a kind of confidence that he could do that.
Earlier in the 70’s, I’ve already written about our family’s time in Chicago, a time I’ve somehow idealized and made into a monument of memory that stands out as a quality of light that I have miraculously and with God’s grace been able to somehow duplicate here in the Northwest. Those two memories, the opposite sides of a coin of cities in decline, and cities as the granite hard anchor of American life, are the ebb and flow of what happens in human history. We treat each other horrifically, and then somewhere along the way, a mass of people say, “enough.” And things begin to change…
Now though, there is a rocky edge of permanence that slipped away during the cold dark night. I remember a trip to Hollywood in the late summer of 2019, before the world turned completely upside-down.
We were taking our daughter to her first Hollywood Bowl experience before she left for college. We rode a bus down from highway 118 through east Ventura County to the 170, and as we turned off the freeway, the entire sidewalk on both sides beneath the underpass was a dilapidated and putrid tent city. Excrement was visible in multiple places, and hollowed out people seemed like ghosts, wandering with no direction. Stray dogs rooted about the carnage; a vignette of the aftermath of refugees in battle—only there was no battle here, not on the exterior anyway.
The bus turned into the parking lot of the Bowl, and the grotesque scene faded from view, and we were met with bustling crowds heading in for the show. Money changed hands across vendors’ tables and smiling crowds of people, all of whom had seen what we had, put it out of mind, as did we.
But this is not self-condemnation. We weren’t blind to the suffering of what was lurking just around the corner, an apocalypse of humanity, drug addled, and self-immolated into hapless, helpless beings who were beyond victim-hood. Choices were made here. Certain there were people among the throng who marched like prisoners into that dark cellar, captive not just to their own appetites, but to each other for the solace of familiarity, as ugly as it was. For the most part, the sidewalk “clean-up” that occurred later that summer uncovered a den of thieves, drug-addicts, drug-dealers and their hangers-on, all of whom appear to have given up.
Nor is this judgment. I’m not ignorant enough, nor faithless enough to condemn lost souls. Pitiable is the word that used to describe helpless people, but that’s not in fashion anymore. And the cries of “we must do something,” seem to slam into walls of “what should we do, then?” and go unanswered. How do you stop someone from wanting to suppress themselves under waves of ether brought about by drug-abuse? How do you care for someone who doesn’t want the care?
A year ago, my wife and I drove into Seattle and I was at the wheel. On a narrow street as I headed down toward the Westin Hotel where my brother worked at the time, I came to a stop behind three other cars at a traffic light. Outside my left window, was a disheveled young man wrapped in a sleeping bag, framed by the doorway of a building. He was sitting in the porch before the door, and I was close enough to see him roll his eyes, then close them as he folded over on top of himself, drifting into the twilight of oblivion. Only when the car behind me honked as the light turned green and I took my foot off the brake, did I see the needle protruding from his arm.
At Christmas-time in 1986, I’d just turned 21. My older brother, Doug and I drove to San Francisco one Friday night and spent the weekend with dad and Joanne on Union Square. Christmas in the City was ebullient and graceful. You could walk all over, with just a little caution, and breathe in the smells of a city on the edge of the Continent, making headway for the Holidays to come. There is always a homeless population in most cities, but San Francisco of the late 80’s and into the early 2000’s, was not overwhelmed.
Now, it’s just a city on edge. Like all the other cities, it’s haunted by ghosts of our own making. The fiery fury of self-righteous and hyperbolic politics, the constant flow, like flooded rivers, of illegal and illicit drugs, media coverage that chooses angles to keep feeding those fears and petty fiefdoms and a population constantly changing by the outflow of those who can leave, and the inflow of those who cannot. Most of us shake our heads and want better, pray for better, and we wait.
In large metropolis’s, the voting has already begun, though not at the ballot box. The exodus of cities is well documented at this point, and who can blame the leavers? After all, if one has the means not to be there, the choice is broad and clear—move away, and find some vestige of a place where one feels belonging. It will continue of course, and many more will eventually pull up stakes and, like Ursula Leguin’s characters who walk away from Omelas, simply pack their things and quietly walk away, knowing that something better is out there somewhere. The rest, however, will manage what they can with their lanterns to light only their space around them, and wait for the fog to lift.
Excellent article, Mark. And so sadly true. ❤️