Baltimore - Life on a Summer Street

Baltimore is hot – sweltering hot. One hundred and eighteen degrees Fahrenheit in the sun hot, it’s the pavement; even the trees and shade are intimidated by the cement and stone. Your clothes are soaked; the sweat stings your eyes, already squinting from the sun.

Baltimore is an old industrial city, struggling against obsolescence, home to one of the world’s great universities, Johns Hopkins, yet weary and poor. I was born in Pittsburgh, a close cousin to Baltimore, both symbols of the decline of the rust belt – shipping and steel. Washington is a young city - never scared by industrial blight, just poverty and crime, and the vagaries of national politics.

I seem to visit Baltimore in the summer when it is hot, when you think of a cold beer before noon. Everything is shinny and bright at the Inner Harbor, yet a few blocks away the leaves are covered with road soot. The soot even looks sun bleached. In a strange sort of way it remind me of the old westerns of Arizona, Sun without shade, thirst without water. Everyone crowded into the cool darkness of the local saloon. Maybe Washington is home, the suburbs, air conditioning, where life is good and your sweat is clean. To me Baltimore is broken curbs, street grime, and the heat of a mid-afternoon in August. Some of us call that character.