The Dimensions of Erie

It was years before my quiet Cleveland suburb really felt like home, like I wasn’t just hovering over a map of the place, my feet never quite touching the ground.

Not long after we moved here, when he was just three, my son was convinced that we would topple into Lake Erie if we drove too close to it. “Turn, Mommy,” he would plead from the back seat if I drove us within a couple of blocks of the lake. “I don’t want to fall in the water.” 

I understood how his eyes and his budding logic could color it dangerous. Coming straight at it from several blocks away, the blue of the lake seemed to creep up the horizon line, higher than it should be, rising up like a murky, wet backdrop behind the trees. 

I think about this now on my nightly summer walks. Two blocks away from the lake, it’s true that the horizon feels off-kilter. An optical illusion of perspective. It seems that I could trip, stumble forward, and find myself plunged into the water. 

Of course, as I near the shore, the horizon rights itself and the danger diffuses, loses its sharp teeth. 

In another dimension maybe I don’t go for walks in the summer. I stay in my house, blast the air conditioning so high I have to pull on a sweater. In another dimension there is no house; in another, I don’t exist at all. 

The lake exerts a strange gravitational pull, always tugging us towards it. Sometimes we hunt for sea glass, skip stones, point at the far shore and shout, “Canada!” On summer nights, on my walks, I let my feet carry me to the sand. There the air is lightly chilled, smelling fishy and vegetal and like a cold fist of damp clay. 

I grew up in Ohio, but not here. Not Cleveland. Not city. My Ohio was dusty. Rural. There were corn fields and soy beans, and the leaves of both crops were itchy if you let them touch the skin of your shins. Country-Ohio, where blackberry brambles grew up along old fence rows, and we all swung our heads in unison if a car came down our road, crunching on the gravel, kicking up a cloud of dust. Now who could that be? 

Here is different. Cleveland, with its city shoulders, with its industrial relics like ancient ruins – the silhouettes of rusted bridges, crumbling concrete supports for elevated train tracks, scattered twists of rebar. Cleveland’s ghost-industrial structures feel as much a part of the fabric here as the midges that swarm from the depths of the lake in late spring. 

In another dimension maybe I never left my home town at all. Stayed put and became a teacher. Had lots of babies. Maybe I can smell the yeasty scent of their heads if I close my eyes, standing on the shores of Lake Erie on nights like this. In another dimension, maybe I have no babies at all. In another, people don’t have babies, but lay small, purple eggs and wait for them to hatch. 

So many things are different – this Ohio, that Ohio – but there are similarities, too. When I was visiting for the first time, considering a life-explosion of a move from San Francisco to Cleveland (Don’t do it! They don’t call it ‘the mistake on the lake’ for nothing, one Bay Area friend warned.), it was a familiar bird that tipped the scales for me. 

I was at the end of a day of meetings – one-part job interview, one-part them selling me Ohio – and back at the hotel, ready to collapse into my lumpy, rented bed. My heart was in my throat about the decision in my hand. San Francisco was wearing me down – the cost, the anxiety, the multitude of daily frictions, the teeny tiny one-bedroom apartment, now with a baby in a crib in the corner. But moving back to Ohio – any Ohio – felt like such an enormous change I almost couldn’t fathom it. Like it was a game of make believe. Pretend to move to Ecuador. Pretend to move to Finland. Pretend to move to the Moon. 

I clicked the lock on my rental car, had my laptop bag slung over my shoulder, my high heels cutting sharp into the flesh of my feet as I clicked across the asphalt to the Marriott Inn and Suites when I heard it. A red-winged blackbird, its call like a throaty waterfall that rang in my ears, familiar as the word “home.” 

This is it, then. Home. 

In another dimension maybe that one bird doesn’t choose that one moment to trill its mating song and things tip the other direction. I stay in San Francisco for a few more years until a pandemic rolls into town, and the tiny, one-bedroom apartment shrinkwraps around us, suffocates us slowly. In another dimension, maybe red-winged blackbirds are predators and their songs are ominous, a warning to stay away. In another, maybe I don’t know what their song sounds like, and it doesn’t matter if it sings or doesn’t sing because I don’t have the right ears to hear the song with.

I had moved to other cities before. Chicago, Los Angeles. San Francisco. I was a brave adventurer! But none of the moves had prepared me for what it would feel like to move across the country with a toddler in tow. 

The preschool I enrolled him in required an emergency contact. My Mother, three hours away, was too far away to qualify. “We need someone closer,” they insisted. But there was no one closer. It was just us – me and my son and this new-but-strangely-familiar-feeling city. I scribbled down the number of a colleague I had just met, which felt like admitting on paper that I was all alone. My shame in ink on a preschool form.

The move and the divorce that eventually came with it were terrifying. At night in my bed, in my new and spacious apartment — three times the size of my San Francisco flat and a fraction of the price — my heart would race. It would gallop and stumble around in my chest, the feeling bursting like panicky hiccups in my ribcage. 

I worried that something would happen to me at night, that my heart would run out from under me, and then what would my son do? He was only three. I tried to teach him how to use my phone to dial 9-1-1. We acted it out. I pretended to fall and hit my head. Laid on the kitchen floor and closed my eyes. Say it. Say ‘9-1-1. My Mommy needs help.’ He would giggle and lay down with me, his head on my stomach, scrunching his eyes closed, too. I would hug him, press his little body against mine like I could fold him back into me.

I don’t want to play anymore, he would tell me if we acted it out too many times. He wasn’t worried I would fall and hit my head or that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. He just wanted to be sure we didn’t topple into the lake. 

We explored our new home. No more Bay Area hills to climb or light rail trains to wave at – the J Church trilling through an intersection near our apartment. Instead: All of the playgrounds in a twenty-mile radius. All of the ice cream shops, too – though our favorite was always the one with the train that moved along a track suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes he wanted sprinkles on his cone, sometimes he didn’t. I culled my life down to a 5-minute loop between home, his preschool, and the office, and on the weekends we went for strolls and picnics in the Metroparks, visited the library, packed up the car and drove to see my parents in that other Ohio, somehow still too far away. 

In another dimension maybe Ohio folds in on itself. This Ohio and That Ohio are suddenly overlaid just so. Corn fields and lake shores lapping against the edges of each other and no half-state-wide yawn spread out between them. In that dimension, I take walks with my mom on Saturday mornings, have dinner with my dad on Sunday nights. In another, sadder dimension, maybe there is no Ohio at all. In another even sadder dimension, there is no corn. 

It took so long to settle myself here, for it to really feel like home. I was enamored of it, but Cleveland kept me at arm’s length. I wanted to be friends, but couldn’t seem to drag pass the threshold of chilly acquaintanceship. I kept reaching, but never felt like I could quite get my fingernails into the meat of it. Couldn’t get to know it the way I had in my other cities. 

Will you ever be mine, I asked the skyline, the steelyards, the ghost town of downtown. 

It was easier for my son. He wiggled his small self into all the nooks of this place, embedded himself, didn’t even have to say “please.” This place feels like home to him, I realized, because it’s the place where all of his life is happening. And with that realization, my bound-up roots released and plugged down into the ground. Because if this is his capital-H-Home, then my roots have something to hold on to after all. 

In this dimension, my son makes a city feel like home to me, plunks his heart down on its shoreline and invites me to plunk mine down, too. In this dimension, we don’t rehearse my death in the kitchen anymore. In this dimension, I no longer feel adrift. In this dimension, it sometimes happens that I’m driving north and Lake Erie floats into view, and I remember how once upon a time my son cried out from the back seat that we were too close to the lake and if we weren’t careful we would fall right in.