Life in our little town

The Ballmer Mencken never knew

There was a guy flat-out on the sidewalk in front of our house Sunday. He seemed at first to just be sleeping but he had the eerie stillness of junkie torpor, except for his lips and chest, which moved slightly when he snored. He did not respond when I yelled and jostled him. I called 911 and got a recorded message: We will be with you shortly. Please stay on the line.

A hold message on 911! Five months after we came to Baltimore the place is still full of surprises.

Not that I’ve made much of a tour. My work — painful, unrelenting, a shame on this great nation that has no Living Treasure program and so obliges its genii to grind copy for a living — keeps me from exploring as I’d like, but whenever I get around to it I find something impressive, even when at first the attraction seems modest.

Take the Zoo, for example. It’s not very big or impressive in the usual ways, especially if you’re used to the Bronx and DC ones, and the big jungle cats in particular have the spavined look of old troupers sick of kids gawking at them. (I should say that there is no hint of neglect and the zoo staff are obviously devoted to their charges.)

But the animals have plenty of room — as do the humans, because one of the weird and sometimes spooky things about Baltimore is how few people you see in most parts of it; anytime anything is crowded it’s a shock. And the extra breathing room makes touring the Zoo feel less like you’re crowding up on the critters and more like you’re just dropping by their homes. (Sometimes they seem to feel the same, as when we saw, from quite near, a male Northern Ground Hornbill strutting around with a rock in its mouth — a gift, a zookeeper told us, meant to entice the female, who was then occupied with their chicks.)

Another nice feature, from one of the Zoo’s recent renovations: They have left up some of the old 19th Century Zoo cages, which are rather cramped and grim, and made a lane through them on the way to the newer environments, so you can get a sense of how far zoos and humanity have come.

Speaking of animals, I haven’t seen any ravens yet but crows are thick in the skies and not shy about making their presence or opinions known. Get a load of this, from my home office back window [sound up]:

Kia says they’re mobbing a big bird — perhaps the turkey vulture I saw in our alley recently, eviscerating a squirrel.

I’ve already gotten in some theater, which is not easy, because local companies have a habit in their communications of burying the lede (that is, exactly where and when their shows are, which may be some sort of local tradition rather than marketing ineptitude).  

I saw for example an original, bombastically-scored rock opera about old-time Canadian gold-rush doings called The Gold Night, presented by the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) in a disused bank building; the toilets were two flights up and we couldn’t use the elevators, undoubtedly for liability reasons. BROS has been at this sort of thing for 14 years, but The Gold Night had a ramshackle let’s-put-on-a-show feel, partly because the all-volunteer troupe dug deep into its human reserves to field a cast of about two dozen actors, some of whom I would guess had never acted before, and partly because the extremely ambitious set that alternated between the entrance to a snowy mine and the lobby of a 19^th-Century boomtown hotel, with a private locomotive, a steampunk earth-tunneling device, and “ice worms” operated with inflatable tube-man technology thrown in, required some long, awkward stage waits to move around.

But! The pit band was tight, the effects were clever, and many of the players (can’t name them because I can’t find a program online! Baltimore!) were actually good, sometimes to my surprise — e.g. there was a guy playing a doctor who was very slow to pick up his cues and didn’t have much of a stage presence until they got to his big number, when suddenly he became a total R&B god, galvanic and irresistible. Oh, also there was a bar, which helped.

I also try to get around at street level. The photos here are from a walk Kia and I took in Upton. Northeast of us is the swell Bolton Hill neighborhood, which one could easily mistake for the plummier parts of Brooklyn Heights, and southwest is Upton, which, not. I’ve talked before about dilapidation and my resistance to romanticizing it. But an alternative to romance is recognition that people live here and make something out of it, and thus redeem it. The unmatched street art is a sign of that; so are the majestic old churches, often of Maryland stone and sometimes lichenized green, which have Sunday services with beautiful music pouring out of them, guarded by friendly men in security vests who, if you pass by, will show an interest and suggest you come in sometime and catch the spirit. I might just. It may be God is easier to see in the hard places.