Off the Beat 1: There’s a smell in the air

I grew up in Garfield Heights, not far from the Transportation Road exit off I-480. It’s about 20 minutes from anywhere. Downtown is a straight shot up 480 to 77 North. The Brecksville Reservation is the opposite direction, down 77 South.

Growing up, I knew summer was here when the smell would show up.

It would hang in the air for days. Thick, sour and unmistakable. Rotten garbage drifting through the sky like something seasonal, like disgusting blueberries. The Angel of Summer was here to bless me with a good vacation before I had to go back to school in the fall. It didn’t come from anywhere I could point to. I don’t remember anyone talking about it either. Or maybe they did, and I just wasn’t paying attention. I was usually outside, riding my bike or playing basketball with my friends, running full speed through it without thinking about the air entering my lungs. To this day, when I smell that smell, I want to go outside and play.

After a while, it didn’t even register as something worth noticing. It was just part of the “fresh air” my parents told me to go outside and get when I was inside playing too many video games. It wasn’t until years later, in 2006, that I realized the city I had been living in my whole life was built next to a landfill. I learned it when they tried to build the City View shopping center on top of it.

It was supposed to be something new. Something better. For a minute, it felt like it might be.

Then the ground started to sink.

Methane gas moved in. Stores started leaving one after another. Walmart. PetSmart. Jo-Ann Fabric. Some blamed safety issues. Some blamed contracts. Some people just didn’t want to shop on top of a garbage dump. Eventually, there wasn’t much left to argue about because there was nothing left to argue about. Just a landfill wearing a nice hat. 

Now it’s something else.

The buildings are still there. People work there. I couldn’t tell you doing what. There’s a Chipotle and an Applebee’s. Those make sense, they feel like they belong. Everything else feels like it’s just there. It only exists to talk about now, really, and every once in a while, when I’m getting off the highway, I see it, and I think about it.

How can something be built with that much certainty and then slowly give way underneath itself so fast? And then how easy it is, after a while, to forget what was supposed to be there in the first place.

A lot of things around here work like that.

They don’t interrupt anything. They don’t announce themselves as problems. They just sit slightly outside the normal flow of things, close enough to see, but easy enough to camouflage themselves into everything else. Eventually, you stop thinking about them, whether they’re people or buildings or scents, the oddness blends in, and then they end up belonging to your life.

“Off The Beat” will be about those people, places and things. Those moments we smell, but eventually get used to. The ones that don’t quite fit in but don’t quite get questioned either. The things that we just pass by in this bizarre little post-industrial corner of the world we live in. The details that linger just long enough to feel like they should mean something, then settle back into the background before anyone has to decide if they do.

I’m not trying to explain them all the time, because a lot of the time, there isn’t an explanation that would make them feel any more complete anyway. I’m just going to notice them. I’m going to notice them for you, because even if it offers no explanation, you can still find something valuable in them. I think Leonard Cohen said it best in his song “Suzanne,” 

And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed

I’m not digging for anything new or unearthing new facts to get a major scoop. I’m just paying attention to things longer than I used to and trying to find the heroes and the flowers inside all this garbage.

Because once you start, it gets harder to stop.