This past summer, I joined Bruce Urbschat – “Urb”, to me - my best friend from my childhood in Columbiana, Ohio - in a four-day stay at his family’s home. It is essentially untouched and intact from the day in 1966 when my family moved to California. The same family pictures, now faded, are on the walls. If the interior has been painted, I could not tell. The basement is moldier, but otherwise the same. The kitchen is intact, seemingly smaller now compared to how it appeared when I was smaller myself. A simulacrum of Urb’s father, Chet, moves through the rooms in the form of his son Bill. Bruce comes regularly from his home in Philadelphia to help his brother maintain the place.
There are new housing developments on Columbiana’s outskirts. Firestone, the outsized, handsome park given to the town by the native-son founder of the tire company, has undergone major upgrades: it remains the pride and joy of the community. But otherwise, like the Urbschat house, the town is nearly the same as I left it after spending most of my childhood there.
Right behind the house, and not far from the house where I grew up, all of a quarter-mile away, the Youngstown and Southern Railway line passes through. Bruce and I walked the tracks down to the woods where we used to look for fossils, build forts, catch minnows, and pick blackberries. The tracks are in bad shape now, sagging into rotting ties. Yet every so often, the train lumbers along slowly, carrying construction debris. A railroad that time forgot. And I was good with that, as Urb and I retraced our childhood exploits.
I finished seventh grade in Columbiana before our family left town. The school combined junior and senior high school in one dingy brick building. It has been replaced by a better facility at the edge of town. The grim old edifice, close to the center of town, is now occupied by an evangelical Christian school. Returning to the town after only a few short visits since my childhood, I realized that the geography of my subconscious mind is a mirror of the town’s layout and features.
There weren't a lot of compelling distractions in Columbiana. So regular visits to the town library were a big deal. Bruce and I read books and talked about them together. On the way home from school, before going our separate ways, we'd stop at a big rock sitting near a street corner, each of us putting a foot on it, continuing our speculative conversations about the nature of the universe. The muggy Midwestern air hovered over the town like a lid on a pot, simmering its contents. A great place to develop rich interior lives, which Urb and I have cultivated ever since.
Columbiana makes sense to me.
Columbiana makes sense of me.
If you want to know me, take a walk along its streets, some of them still revealing the original bricks under the asphalt.
I grew up there with kids who thought I was exotic because I was born in California. Kids who had never even been to Pittsburgh or Cleveland, 75 miles away. And had no apparent urge to do so. Everything essential for them was there. They were each other’s people, having been there for generations. Urb’s family tree of town denizens leans all the way back to shortly after its founding in 1803. Urb is Columbiana: all the way in, all the way down.
Columbiana, small as it was, did not feel stifling to me. Nobody I knew locked the doors of their houses. We kids ran free in the woods, along the tracks, in the park, until Mom rang the dinner bell. Columbiana did not exist behind a wall. It had no clear boundary. It blurred into the countryside around it.
Columbiana is the navel of its own universe. The center of the town is a circle around which traffic flows north, east, south, and west. It has its own subtle gravity holding it together and drawing people back into it. A gravity that attracted me to make my summer visit. It was as if I had a trace of iron in my solar plexus that picked up the town’s magnetism.
It is hard to wrap one’s mind, much less one’s soul, around a big city. I lived in Los Angeles for years and loved it, but LA was never myself the way Columbiana was myself. Unlike Cleveland and Pittsburgh, you can carry Columbiana in your pocket and rub it between your thumb and forefinger. Columbiana carries you in its pocket and rubs you between Highways 7 and 14.
My self-conception included Columbiana. Once a person learns how to drive a car, its wheel becomes an extension of the driver’s body. Columbiana was the natural extension of my body. I didn’t just live in Columbiana. I lived Columbiana.
I’ve been carrying the town with me, driving it around the country, around the world, for 57 years. When I visited it this summer, a fractal dimension of the town was returning to itself. Columbiana’s trees were already lining my neural pathways, so seeing them along the streets stimulated within me an uncanny sensation. Every step I took was strangely self-referential.
Through my childhood in Columbiana, I developed personhood, and gained placehood as well. From the circle in its center, I have gone north, east, south, and west, far into the wide world. By Columbiana I am oriented… wherever I may go.