Welcome to Tales From the Crystal City

 Welcome to Tales From the Crystal City. 

It’s a nickname that was bestowed on the town in which I live sometime in the 1880s, not long after the discovery of natural gas reserves led the city fathers to offer it up free to those who wanted to do business here. The place thrived and by the end of the decade, the east side of town was home to several glass companies with names like Canastota, Lythgoe, and (of course) Crystal City [1]. 

All too soon, the natural gas ran out, and the Crystal City’s burgeoning glass industry was consigned to a footnote in local history. But the name remains, as a sort of ghostly reminder of a place and time that lives on in the stories that pile up dream deep, sedimented like the wetland mud and glacial clay that lies beneath the parking lot blacktop. I’ve come to think of the Crystal City as a sort of invisible landscape [2], a spectral twin mapped on top of the present day town, an unseen topography of magic and dread, longing and promises and love songs. Like glass, this Crystal City of my imagination gives the sand, soda ash, and lime of the everyday an eerie transparency, an absent presence. Hold it up to the light and see how the spectral world beyond shimmers and shifts.

I’ve lived here in northwest Ohio for 34 years and I’ve traveled down many paths, each of which has led to a different version of myself—expat, townie, student, teacher, slacker, proto-punk drummer, lover, husband, archivist, diarist, father, dreamer, obsessive, ghost. . . . I am all of them. But none of them. alone, capture everything about my story in this town, tangled as it is with that spectral country of the mind [3] where I live in my imagination, seeing patterns and correspondences, glimpsed in passing on this neglected corner or that. Fences, broken bottles, rust stains like faces, dry leaves whispering in empty parking lots, cirrus in the west. A street sign rattling in the wind. A crossroads on a map, the shadows thickening under the trees, roads and neighborhoods huddled close. Dreamscapes of houses under a bright white sky. 

If you head out past where the street lights end, where the pale white cumuli linger faint blue high in the predawn light, where the spectres gather to share their stories, you might hear the dreams of the Crystal City humming in the wires. They tell of the Black Great Swamp, its million acres drained and tamed over sixty years, reduced to a few wild tangles amid the squares of wheat and soybeans. The damp land gridded and surveyed, chased to the edges of things by surveyor chains and fence posts, dark copses of trees black on the horizon line, the stillness of corn and leaf mould. The smoky shacks in oil field blue midnights, the taste of cheap liquor acrid in the mouth, the mud beneath the finger nails. An infant wails in the flickering lantern dark, her mother’s eyes flat like endless fields. There are Klansmen in the pews. The shades of the Odawa and Miami, loaded onto paddle boats to be sent down the river. Indian Charlie, the last of the Wyandots, smiles his crooked smile for flashbulb newsman beside an Army issue tent. The sacred mounds of Adena ancients ploughed redemption flat by Lutheran farmers in the white skull daylight. The rush of morning traffic. 

Dollar store fluorescence and bright pauses in the checkout line. Tang of musket smoke and the dark spot spreads like black fungi on the Kentucky boy’s woolen tunic where the walnut and sycamore grow, his broken face mirrored in steel and plastic, harder than bone. There’s acid flutter and feedback sizzle in a North Baltimore cow shed, psychedelic immanence out on Hough Road, sheriff willing, eternities sketched on napkins in 6 a.m. apartment dawns after heady nights of music and friends and beer and cigarettes. Here a young family of four eats Huevos California at the Parrot and the Peacock as the November sun flares behind a bare tree skyline; there a dark-haired hippie girl from Elyria reads about the human mind in dorm room silver bright with foil. The invisible landscape of secrets and dreams contains multitudes, a spectral host that bides its time. 

Here I conjure, dig, reconnect, reconstruct my subject, the threads—landscapes, voices—as they run back through the years, tangling briefly with my own briefish passage through this time and space. Here I map the bones and sinews of that invisible landscape and dream the Crystal City awake. 

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[1] Honneffer, Eric. "The Irresistible Lure of Collecting Glass Once Made in Northwest Ohio." 3 September 2018. Center for Archival Collections. Bowling Green State University. Accessed 26 April 2021.

[2] Ryden, Kent C. Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. 

[3] Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. New York: Bantam, 1986. 265.