Back In The Region

The Calumet region is the little-known northwest corner of Indiana, abutting Chicago, Lake Michigan, and a hybrid rural/suburban DMZ that gives way to the yokeldom, culturally and geographically, for which Indiana is much better known. It's tempting to call The Region disowned or disavowed, but it's mostly more benignly a simple blindspot to Chicagoans and Hoosiers alike. A land of slag and ditches, oil tanks and rail tracks, industrial candles of flame-topped stacks, it presents both great ugliness and great beauty (either in turn shocking, forlorn, melancholy, bemusing) if you care to look.

The current economic crisis in the US is accurately being described as [probably] "the worst since the Great Depression", but for the Region already had its worst.  One hundred years ago it was a pulling in boatloads of ore, coal, and industrious immigrants,  extruding steel, tidy little neighborhoods, and a burgeoning middle class. Decades ago, irreversible oxidation claimed much of the miniature metropolitan infrastructure and the middle class that had built it. True tales of Gary of old are now most likely to be dismissed as myth.

But the Region is still here, and I am back for my grandmother's funeral. Granny lived in Miller when I was born. Her obituary and funeral brought out names from the extended family and friends that would sound like home to a Region expat:  Molik, Zemelko, Krejci, Kolachovsky, Miklos, Kantowski, Lobodzinski, as would tales both mundane and mythical: near-crippling injury shrugged off as minor nuisance, cars driven with 200,000 miles but no brakes, Uncle Lud offering a standing reward of $1000 to anyone who names their baby "Ludwig".... Fortunately for my boys, Uncle Lud is long gone. But they will be passed on the history, as the Region offers lessons not only of avoidance, but also of aspiration.