![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ghost Town
Nov. 25th, 2015 11:51 amI'm on the sixteenth floor of a glass cylinder by the side of I-240. It was the Hyatt when I moved to Memphis, and then the Omni, and then the Adam's Mark, and then by the time I had the money to stay here it was a Hilton. They're finally putting some money into refurbishing the place and have broken down and permitted free wi-fi, which is nice. The view from the 16th floor is mostly treetops in a mix of green and rusty brown, punctuated by the spire of a church where I briefly took Latin lessons as a child and the nearby landmarks of Clark Tower and what used to be the UP Bank. Memphis, the city, is lost in the trees, which my husband claims is what Mitt Romney meant when he talked about the trees all being "the right height" in Michigan. Two miles down the freeway is the large hospital complex where my father died, and then a patch of strip malls I used to frequent, and then Covington Pike with its auto dealerships and fast food restaurants, and then finally the exit to the desolate stretch of Raleigh where my parents unwisely bought a house in 1989, not knowing that the neighborhood was going to implode around them.
I can see none of these things from the sixteenth floor. The only landmark indicating Raleigh is the cluster of WMC radio towers, which I used to call the "Dinstuhl's Formation" because from my vantage point it was located just past the candy factory. The candy factory is still there; I bought a packet of my father's favorite Cashew Crunch there last month in hopes he'd recover enough to enjoy it. Since he didn't, we ate it. I bought another packet yesterday to be incinerated with him.
We took a ride yesterday to see that giant spiderweb at the north end of town, the one that made international news. We found the location, a vacant field in a neighborhood which resembled the place we used to live in Detroit (not a compliment), but didn't see the web. People probably already tore it up.
This is a strange city, sprawling and low-density. It has the population of Detroit in an area much larger than Detroit, which itself was designed to suit five times the current population. Memphis got to its size by gobbling up "toy towns" and unincorporated land in a way cities can't legally do in the Midwest. Driving along the north stretch of I-240 it feels like there's nothing there at all. What's off Warford Road? Dunno, never went there. No reason to go there.
Driving here is disorienting; I've always had problems with cardinal directions in Memphis, with its curious east-west alignment. The river flows south and the money flows east. My husband, a quick study in places as foreign as Vienna and Inverness, needs step-by-step guidance every place we drive, and he'd been visiting since 2001. No, you don't want Little Rock, you want Nashville. No, not THAT Nashville, keep going toward Jackson (Mississippi). You never want to head to Jackson, until you do.
It's a bad dream populated by every terrible driver that haunted Detroit in the mid-aughts.
I can see none of these things from the sixteenth floor. The only landmark indicating Raleigh is the cluster of WMC radio towers, which I used to call the "Dinstuhl's Formation" because from my vantage point it was located just past the candy factory. The candy factory is still there; I bought a packet of my father's favorite Cashew Crunch there last month in hopes he'd recover enough to enjoy it. Since he didn't, we ate it. I bought another packet yesterday to be incinerated with him.
We took a ride yesterday to see that giant spiderweb at the north end of town, the one that made international news. We found the location, a vacant field in a neighborhood which resembled the place we used to live in Detroit (not a compliment), but didn't see the web. People probably already tore it up.
This is a strange city, sprawling and low-density. It has the population of Detroit in an area much larger than Detroit, which itself was designed to suit five times the current population. Memphis got to its size by gobbling up "toy towns" and unincorporated land in a way cities can't legally do in the Midwest. Driving along the north stretch of I-240 it feels like there's nothing there at all. What's off Warford Road? Dunno, never went there. No reason to go there.
Driving here is disorienting; I've always had problems with cardinal directions in Memphis, with its curious east-west alignment. The river flows south and the money flows east. My husband, a quick study in places as foreign as Vienna and Inverness, needs step-by-step guidance every place we drive, and he'd been visiting since 2001. No, you don't want Little Rock, you want Nashville. No, not THAT Nashville, keep going toward Jackson (Mississippi). You never want to head to Jackson, until you do.
It's a bad dream populated by every terrible driver that haunted Detroit in the mid-aughts.
