On Foot in Downtown St. Louis

I woke up this morning thinking about some words penned by D. H. Lawrence in his wonderful but forgotten 1920 novel, "Women in Love." The quote, which I think suitably depicts the human experience for all of us, goes like this: "One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere."

As I stretched out in bed and thought about these words, I felt the need for some sort of adventure. My life as a secluded hermit poring through books and scribbling in journals is very rewarding to me, but sometimes a man needs to step out and get some air in his lungs. Sometimes he needs to venture forth and test his mettle against the wilderness… even if it is only a wilderness of steel, concrete, screws and bolts.

Within a minute I was up, in the shower, and champing at the bit to learn what the Universe had in store for me. Another quote went through my mind as I lathered shampoo into my hair, courtesy this time of John Lennon and his song, “All You Need is Love”: “There is nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.” Although I’ve never been sold on the concept of “fate,” I wondered if the ripples caused by my decision to do things differently today might not produce something of significance. Wishful thinking, I knew, but hope springs eternal, or so Alexander Pope believed.

I got dressed and opened the front door.

The weather wasn’t entirely optimal for an excursion: a bit cloudy, a tad chilly, and the forecast did threaten rain at some point later on. Still, I was well insulated inside my shawl collar sweater, and walking always makes me warm, even in the cold, so I decided what I was wearing was good enough and I began moving down the sidewalk to the west where, just a few blocks from my apartment, a Metrolink train station is conveniently positioned. I knew that for a few bucks it could take me downtown, so that’s what I chose to do.

After buying my ticket, I got on the train and sat down by the window. There was little foot traffic (this station is always deader than disco), so the train departed after a few moments, even though there was barely anyone on it.

I don’t know if it’s like this in other cities, but nothing can match watching the sights of St. Louis through the Metrolink that cuts into the heart of it. It’s a perspective of my city I can’t get anywhere else, for the tracks wind through the back parts and behind buildings where one ordinarily cannot reach. This being a bit of a gloomy day, I leaned my head forlornly against the window and watched the city fly past—here an abandoned factory, there a dilapidated house or two, here a junkyard with the rusting hulks of yesteryear’s vehicles, forgotten about and left to dissolve into nothing. And though the gloom got to me, I wasn’t entirely sad. I felt alive. I felt aware. I felt that though the same fate of the rusting cars awaits me, my death is just as natural as my life and is therefore nothing to fear. It wasn’t yet 10:00am, but I already knew it was going to be a good day; all the earmarks were there.

As the train approached downtown, I began to feel a familiar sense of relief wash over me, a comforting awareness that I was back in my element. There is this invisible barrier, known only to me, that exists somewhere between Kingshighway and Grand Avenue that, once crossed, does something to the inner tranquility of my soul. I’ve never been entirely sure why, but I just feel so absolutely at home in and connected to my city; it’s like leaving Mordor and feeling the delightful solace of being back within the Gondor city limits. Perhaps it’s because there are still so many opulent buildings in downtown St. Louis that date back to the 1800s, and being among them stirs up all my romantic notions of nostalgia, notions which are comforting to me while possibly seeming quite absurd to others.

Watching the skyscrapers of downtown approach through the window of a train is a pleasure I rarely get, and something about it always makes me wish people still took trains all day, as they used to in the 1940s and 50s. There’s something about seeing your city from a train that, to me, harkens back to some simpler time in our past, when news was derived from a paper you purchased on a street corner for a nickel, and you actually took the time to stop and get your shoes shined while you read it. I ache for those times in my heart, and I wasn’t even alive to experience them the first time. Obviously, there is a deep root of discontentment growing inside of me somewhere, a patent unsatisfaction with the present which makes me romanticize what I think the past must’ve been like. This is a failing in me, no doubt, though I have no plans to correct it. I’m a fool and a dreamer; I know that.

With no forethought, I opted to get off the train at 8th and Pine, right in the heart of downtown, deep in the bowels of the skyscraper jungle. That station is underground; it’s one of the few stops along the St. Louis Metrolink that echo what I imagine the subway experience must be like in Manhattan. A steep staircase leads passengers to the street level, and I sprinted up these two at a time, eager to get back into the fresh air.

The northwest corner of 8th and Pine is home to the luxurious Arcade Apartment building, constructed in 1906. I have actually been in these apartments, and they are worth the high price one has to pay to call them “home.” I wasn’t interested in them today, though. I walked past them, heading south, in the direction of the City Garden, a two-block patch of foliage and sidewalks nestled among the great steel and concrete fingers that reach up toward the sky like so many dominos waiting to be knocked over.

There’s a Kaldi’s Coffee right on the northeast corner, and that was my first stop. I usually take my coffee black, but I was feeling extra-adventurous today, so I ordered a tall café mocha with a dollop of cinnamon. While I waited for them to make it, I took a quick look around. The City Garden is home to several bizarre sculptures and a few interesting fountains, and despite the dismal weather, people, mostly kids who should’ve been in school, were crawling over every inch of them. I grinned, half-wondering if maybe there was a reason why so many kids were off on a weekday. That was when I felt the first raindrop.

It was only a light mist, and being a pluviophile, I was not deterred by it. I took my café mocha into the City Garden and strolled around in a very relaxed manner, casually examining, not for the first time, the strange sculptures littered about this small respite nestled within the commotion of downtown. One of these sculptures is a giant, hollowed head on its side (made of bronze, I think), big enough to walk into if you’re short like I am. Children love it. I walked into it and peeked out through the empty eye sockets, sipping my latte and thinking about the irony of how a massive, decapitated head in the heart of downtown is a beloved attraction for kids. I wondered if anyone else questions whether the message conveyed by this isn’t healthy for young, curious minds. But then again, we are a society that has grown inured to a certain amount of violence exhibited in public places. To wit, there is a man nailed to a cross displayed on many street corners in America, and no one thinks this is a bit odd.

From the City Garden, with my coffee in hand, I wandered west to the Serra Sculpture Park, an unremarkable bit of grass with a boring brown wall dissecting it. This wall, one assumes, is the sculpture referred to in the name of this place. Trust me, if you visit St. Louis and miss it, you’ve missed nothing. Still, I had to cross this block of nothing to get from the City Garden to the Courthouse (the new one, not the old), where I was wed in June of 2007.

As the drizzle picked up slightly, I stood at the steps of this phallic building, looking up at the fourth-floor windows. There was no way I could remember in which room the nuptials had taken place, but I grinned at the fourth-floor all the same, as I typically do, knowing it was where one of the best decisions of my life took place.

I was approached by a homeless guy just then. He crept up behind me and tapped my shoulder, shaking me from my reflections and asking the standard question uttered by bums all over the world. “No,” I replied. “I don’t have any change. But I do have a debit card, if you’d like some food.” He eyeballed me for a moment, mistrust in his eyes, then he scoffed and walked away, clearly not interested in eating, prompting this observer to wonder what he had hoped to buy with my spare change. A mystery, that.

I chucked my empty latte cup in the nearest bin, stretched, and decided to head east, retracing my steps back through the City Garden, in the general direction of the Riverfront.

I turned north at 7th Street, heading for the intersection at Chestnut, where the old Wainwright Building stands, a russet-colored structure built in 1891 and generally recognized as the first skyscraper prototype in America. Though it’s scarcely an eye-opener nowadays, in its time the Wainwright Building was quite the architectural wonder. Bypassing it, I turned left into Keener Plaza before reaching Chestnut.

The drizzle faded to nothing as I crossed Keener Plaza and beheld the magnificent wonder of St. Louis’s Old Courthouse, a Federal-style building originally dating to the 1830s (though the present façade was largely completed in the 1850s, and the dome in the 1860s). It was here, in 1857, that the famous Dred Scott case was tried, albeit unsuccessfully. Now it’s a museum and a national historic landmark.

I approached the whitewashed steps, though I had no plan to go inside. I’ve investigated the interior, ad nauseum. Mostly, I just like to stand outside and envision all the drama that has gone down while this building remained standing. Somehow, it survived the Great Fire of 1849. It stood steadfast while the cholera epidemic killed 10,000 St. Louisans that same year. I also was conscious that until 1861, slave auctions were held on the very steps where I was standing just then… and when you think about it, the 1860s really isn’t all that long ago.

I kept heading east, crossing 4th Street into the Luther Ely Smith Park, a grassy knoll that separates the Old Courthouse from the Gateway Arch, sandwiched on two sides by immense buildings, one of which is quite attractive, the other being your standard eye-sore. The drizzle returned as I continued moving toward the Arch, though that wasn’t my destination. For those of us who live in St. Louis, the Arch has long ago ceased to be a novel experience. I wanted to go past the Arch and stand upon the levee, one of my favorite spots in downtown St. Louis.

The closer one gets to the Mississippi River, the more one realizes just how elevated the city of St. Louis is. It’s so easy to forget when you’re walking or driving through downtown that the city actually sits upon a large, sloping mound that rises up from the river. But once you cross beneath the Arch and reach the precipice that looks out over the water, you find yourself at the top of a massive flight of concrete steps that descend down to the levee. I am not a widely-traveled guy, so this may not be much of an endorsement, but as far as my experiences go, that flight of steps is the largest I have ever seen in person.

I walked down them now, remembering how the river rose up and covered at least half of them during the Great Flood of 1993. There are 64 steps in total, if memory serves, and by the time you reach the bottom, you already begin picturing yourself panting when you inexorably have to climb them later.

There’s a thoroughfare at the bottom, which was known as Wharf Street and/or Front Street a hundred years ago. Beyond that is the levee, a swath of weathered bricks that descend into the dirty water of the Mississippi River. These bricks were laid in the early 1850s after the city, in response to how quickly the Great Fire spread from the river to land in 1849, decided that the levee should no longer be the murky, misshapen incline of mud it had been since the city was founded in 1764.

To be frank, though the levee is one of my favorite spots in St. Louis, I will allow that it’s rather ugly and uninspiring. The water is a foul shade of brown. There is usually river trash and driftwood floating around. The river itself, though fairly wide, is largely unremarkable. And the far side, the shore of Illinois, is littered with unbecoming factories and foundries, and here and there a shack or two. It’s not exactly postcard fodder. But I love the levee because it’s home to my absolute favorite place in all of St. Louis: Eads Bridge.

But I didn’t come for that today. As much as I want to, I’ll write about Eads Bridge some other time.

Though I wasn’t initially sure what compelled me to come downtown today, I was starting to understand as I sat Indian-style on the levee, right on the dirty, weathered bricks where, a hundred and fifty years ago, burly stevedores used to load and unload cargo from all the steamboats that lined this wharf like a tin of sardines. "If bricks could talk," I thought to myself.

There was an April chill coming off the river, but it didn’t bother me; I always invest in thick sweaters that work. Facing the dark water, I sat with my back to the steps I’d just climbed down, and closed my eyes. Sighing, I was beginning to realize just how much I needed a peaceful day like this. Lately, I have been feeling like I’ve lost sight of myself and those things that have always been critical to me. My entire life I’ve been a man who went his own way, did his own thing, and never had room for the balking of naysayers. But life has a way of grinding you down to a pliable nub that will do or say just about anything to make things less complicated when “going your own way” fails to work out. Soon, you forget about your dreams, your beliefs, your private set of values, your resolve to experience your life on your own terms, and your unique sense of self. Sometimes the grind can just bring you to your fucking knees.

I say that as a man who does not work a traditional 9-to-5 full-time job. I’m not really part of the rat race, nor have I ever been. No, I’m one of those “free-wheeling” writers who sets his own hours and works from home, so who am I to be groaning about the grind? But life itself is a grind. Just being alive, just getting through a day, then another, then another… on and on and on, takes everything out of you. After a while, who you are and what’s important to you gets chiseled down to something more manageable, and soon you lose sight of all those things that once made you the notable badass you used to be. Where once you took risks and lived on the edge of possibilities, now you just hunker down and ride the storm out, believing that if you lay low enough, bad luck and shitty karma might pass you by and spare you further heartbreak or maybe just further inconvenience. You’ve been sidelined. Neutralized. Taken out of the game. Domesticated. Life has won. Your dreams have been beaten out of you, and the fire that once lit your path has been snuffed out.

As I sat on the bricked levee and thought about this, I tried to identify what exactly had sidelined me. I knew it wasn’t my marriage and I knew it wasn’t my job. I love my wife and I love being a writer. So what then? Just time, perhaps? That fucking tick-tock-tick-tock of time passing monotonously by? Possibly. Sometimes that slow passage of time is like a dripping faucet; you have no beef with the sink or the tap, and even the sound, when you think about it, is really rather soothing. Ah, but that steady fucking drip, that tiresome certainty, that in-your-face inevitability… it can drive you insane. Time is like that. It just keeps on dripping and dripping and sometimes it gets so loud you can’t hear anything else, and you find yourself in possibly the worst kind of suffering imaginable: you’re bored.

I thought about the D. H. Lawrence quote that was on my mind this morning. Suddenly, it all made sense. "One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres… into our own nowhere." That need I felt for adventure, that desire to get out of the house and do something different today, that feeling of being sidelined—it’s all because I’m bored. I have grown bored with myself, bored with life, bored with all the things my own little slice of the world has to offer.

Some absurd voice inside, which sounds a little too much like Daffy Duck, reminds me that I’m “of a certain age” now. It could be a midlife crisis, Daffy says, or at least the beginnings of one. It’s definitely possible, though I’d be just a little disappointed in myself for succumbing to something so prosaic and predictable.

I stood up and stretched, noting a rumbling in my belly. It was just about lunchtime, so I decided to climb up the flight of 64 steps and find a hole in the wall to grab a bite. Per my previous prediction, I was definitely panting and out of breath by the time I got to the top.

About an hour later, with my stomach full of fried rice, I found myself back at Keener Plaza. The sun was at last trying to peer through the clouds, and the temperature seemed to be rising, as it’s wont to do by afternoon. So I decided to take advantage of the situation and park my butt on the bench that circles the fountain (which features a partially naked man in mid-stride) at the center of the plaza. Facing east, with the Old Courthouse directly in my view, and the Arch behind that, I thought again about the revelations I’d had at the levee.

The thing about boredom is that it sucks the soul right out of you. I’m not talking about an afternoon of nothing to do; I mean the enduring kind of boredom that lasts months, maybe even years, the oppressive boredom that makes getting out of bed in the morning a grueling chore that, more and more, just doesn’t feel worth it. While it’s true that I am speaking of First World, white people troubles, suffering is nonetheless relative to the people experiencing it.

Sometimes we just get stuck in a rut. We’ve been doing the same things over and over for weeks, months, years… settling into a routine that has very little surprises left in it. No matter how much you love your spouse, boredom is the natural result when years of the same old thing pass by, one after the other, until even sex becomes predictable. And we get to the point in our lives where we’ve watched so many Netflix shows, been to so many of the same restaurants over and over, and thoroughly discussed all there is to talk about, that soon the drudgery of it all becomes the very thing that’s unraveling all the pleasure and joy you once found in these activities.

As I sat on that bench in Keener Plaza, I realized that I was now stuck in this sort of rut, that my life, which once had been characterized by vigorous energy and derring-do and the taking of risks, had been stuffed into a genie bottle of security and predictability and convenience and, worst of all, monotony. I don’t know; maybe that’s just what happens as you get older. I used to look at middle-aged men when I was younger, seldom inspired by what I saw. “I’ll never be like that,” I’d tell myself. “I’ll never be that way.” And now here I was, sitting on a bench in downtown St. Louis, realizing with some consternation that I’ve become all the things I loathed when I was young. I play it safe now. I take the easy, convenient road. I keep risks at bay. I do my best to fit in and cause no ripples. Years of tedium and survival and intermittent periods of heartache here and there have beaten the fight out of me. And beneath it all, something inside of me is screaming…

I suddenly didn’t want to be downtown anymore. I got up and made my way briskly to the train station at 8th and Pine. I was just a block away when clouds finally burst open, and the real rain, which had only been toying with me earlier, began to fall in a strong torrent. I didn’t have to walk too far in it before I was shuffling down the steps. Somehow, being underground with the rain falling above gave me a warm, tingly feeling, and it occurred to me that sometimes being alive is defined by the shelter we seek, that often being shielded from the storm can be as thrilling as dancing in it.

As I rode the train home, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get myself out of the rut I was in, but I sensed some satisfaction in knowing that I could get out if I wanted to. And I remembered the words of my hero, Albert Camus, who said that everyone’s bored. Smiling, I looked around at the other passengers on the train just then, feeling better, because I wasn’t alone.