Reading Angle of Repose While Moving Back East: The Sequel
Was reading Angle of Repose when I was in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago (the house-hunting trip) and realized where/when I’d last read it: when I was moving to NYC back in 2005. I remember sitting in the airport in Cincinnati (where I was making a connection on Delta) reading it and thinking it was particularly odd to be getting so wrapped up in The West while abandoning it for the most East Coast of east coast cities.
It also struck me as probably a really bad way to begin the NYC adventure — by longing for the wild, open spaces of the west.
There’s a lot that’s different this time around, though, in particular:
- Pittsburgh is not New York City. You can drive in Pittsburgh. There are grocery stores with parking lots. Stuff is CHEAP. I’m going to be living in a house with a yard and a garage. I’ll be working with a group of people and I’ve already met some that are cool while at the same time not manic-depressive.
- Pittsburgh is sort-of the West. Definitely through the Angle of Repose lens Pittsburgh would have been considered more like the wilderness that it would have been like the civilization of New York. And it’s sort of a frontier town anyway. Once you get out of downtown and Oakland, Pittsburgh starts looking and feeling like the capital of Appalachia, more like a part of West Virginia than part of the same state that includes Philadelphia.
- The west isn’t The West. Maybe there are parts of Montana and Nevada that shouldn’t be painted with this gloss, but the modern-day west has nothing to do with the frontiers and taming-the-wilderness values and lifestyle of Angle of Repose. That’s one of the things the road trip taught me — the romantic West is pretty dead. In fact, it seemed more controlled and less “rugged individualist” than a lot of other parts of the country. Wyoming had the most offensive, threatening road signs in the country (e.g., “if you don’t wear your seatbelt, we’ll find you and it will cost you”-type messages) and most of the west was similar. Granted, I tend to perceive the world almost exclusively through a windshield, which might not always be an accurate reflection of reality, but still — driving in Michigan, for example, felt considerably more free. And after you’ve been on the trail to Half Dome for an hour and a half, you realize that the freedom and solitude and therefore to a large extent the bigness of the western wilderness is likewise little more than a matter of legend.
So basically, I think Pittsburgh will be much better than New York. And I don’t think it fits my ideal place to live, but after that road trip, I don’t know that a close approximation of my ideal exists anyway. Oh well.
And I still think that the book ends too quickly and/or that the author should have spent a little more time on the framing story to better justify its existence. And it’s still one of my top five books of all time.
bkd
(A photo to keep the front page concept from breaking:
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Bathrooms in East German Apartments I Used to Live In
The real tragedy is that I only have photos of 3 1/2 of the bathrooms. And really not the good ones either. Man, but I’d *kill* for a picture of the Döbeln plumpskloh (sp?), especially if it showed off the mid-winter frozen condensation on the window and toilet seat. Man. Oh well.
The upside of these photos is that they give me good ideas of what I should do with my house I’m maybe gonna buy in Pittsburgh. Very good ideas.
Gera (March-May 1993)
I’m not sure how using the Gera bathroom for two months did *not* kill me. And it was the nicest one I had the whole two years. The washer-dryer combo emptying into the tub is a nice touch. Sehr mode!
Dresden (January-May 1992)
That one was at the Kurt-Fischer-Hotel (which was not actually a hotel; we called it that because if someone was getting blitzed home, that missionary stayed their last night with us — I’m sure I personally inspired everyone who came through there to eventually straighten up, fly correctly). The shower fed off a two-gallon hot water tank; the desk lamp over the sink seems like an under-utilized concept. And if I could, I’d usually try and hold it till I got to Tiergartenstraße 40 in the morning.
Weimar (December 1991-January 1992).
I don’t think the bathtub actually worked here, which explains why the definitely non-functional communist Schleudermaschine is inside it. And the best part of this apartment was that we had a Nazi fork among the silverware. Should have grabbed it on my way out. Biggest regret of my mission.
Borna (August 1991-December 1991)
The toilet is through that door. The door is down the stairs from the apartment. Because it’s not a flush-toilet, that’s why it’s nowhere near the actual apartment (I figure).
Um, so yeah. Then here’s my ranking of Best Bathrooms of East German Apartments I Used to Live In That Are Not Pictured Above:
- Döbeln – Frost on the inside window of an in-house outhouse toilet closet!
- Halberstadt – For some reason the apartment had 12 rooms and covered 2,000 s.f., but the bathroom was contained in a cubby hole. (We had a library in that apartment, a workout room, a clothes-drying room, and a room where we threw unwanted baked goods.)
- Hohenstein-Ernstthal – Very little recollection of this bathroom except that it was in the kitchen.
- Hof (bei Weber) – Though technically in West Germany, Hof was East Germany in spirit. And we had a neighbor who was always begging to borrow our shower because he was tired of having to bathe in his sink. A lot of things wrong with that. (Also wish I could have scored a copy of that tape Denny and Kalama(?) made for Omi Weber — so many regrets.)
- Mittweida (bei Jentzsch/Laube sort of) – We were living in an apartment that the Laube family was renovating while living in alongside us. Got walked in on a few times (they hadn’t gotten around to putting a doorknob on the bathroom yet).
- Hof (the *good* Wohnung) – Utterly westernly normal.
Somit aufgenommen.
bkd
PS, Re: the headline, it’s the *apartments* that I lived in; I did not live (primarily) in the bathrooms.