Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

City Light and Power: Views of My Grandfather Walking

In 1930, my grandfather was working on the railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad to be exact, or "the Pennsy" as he and the rest of Fort Wayne called the PRR. He was then a management trainee, learning the workings of the company by working various jobs in each of the company's divisions. That day in 1930 he was a trackwalker, walking track, gandy dancing minor repairs. His supervisor sidled up to him as he inspected a frog at a junction on the west side. "Jim," the man said to my grandfather, "times are tough. We have to lay you off for a few months." The railroad called him back in 1941. Way before then, my grandfather had found a job working as an orderly at the Irene Byron Sanitarium north of town where he would wheel the TB patients onto the screened-in porches even in the middle of the winter. He'd sometimes take the interurban to and from the hospital grounds, where he would spend the week in a dorm, returning home to the house on Oakland Street to stay a day with his wife and daughter, my mother, who called him Jim and had to be reminded this stranger was her father. Often he'd walk back and forth to save the fare, following the interurban roadbed, inspecting those tracks for free. He was happy when he had the chance to work closer to home and took a job work ing in the city for the city. When the railroad called him back in 1941, my grandfather had five years under his tool belt reading meters for City Light. He saw no reason to go back, a decade later, to resume his training for the trains.

I hardly remember it now after all these years. It was there at the end of Calhoun Street, arching over the road between the Allen County jail and the box factory-the City Light sign. A lacy grid of steel girders supported the neon tubing. It looked in my memory like a precarious mesh of rusted struts and guy wires you could easily see through. Could you see too, in the distance, the blocky powerhouse on North Clinton across the river near Lawton Park? You could surely see the smoke billowing from its stacks, the superstructure of the sign back downtown a kind of frame, a parable of power. At night the arching cantilevered metal disappeared in the dark. There floating above the street was the City Light logo, an asymmetric illuminated crossword, the vertical C–I-T-Y intersecting the horizontal L–I-G-H-T, pivoting on the single i both words shared. And emanating from that crisscrossed core, zigzagging bolts of lightning bisected the right angles of the words. I remember them flashing, those bolts, but I can't be sure. I can't forget the illusion of those letters floating above Fort Wayne, stitched and twitching against the velvet of the night sky, or its simple message of a C–I-T-Y of light, of L–I-G-H-T all lit up.

My grandfather walked to work to work a job that required walking. He read meters. He walked each day from his house in North Highlands near Hamilton Park a few blocks over from Oakland Street where the family had moved, always stopping on his way downtown at Precious Blood to say a quick prayer in the rear pews of the church, light an old-fashioned candle in the narthex, then walk the rest of the way to the office on Lafayette Street south of the Wabash tracks. I told him once about a story I read called "The End of the Mechanical Age" by Donald Barthelme in which God appears as a character. And how is God depicted? As a meter reader sporting coveralls (like my grandfather) with His flashlight poking out of the back pocket (like my grandfather's). In the story, God was reading the quantity of grace in the world as he went door-to-door. There is something intimate and omniscient to the job my grandfather performed. Because he walked everywhere, the size of the city retreated back down to a human dimension, a human scale, as he transversed it. There is only so much distance one can cover on foot, and that covered distance goes by at a speed that allows one to see and to connect and to remember. He connected, following the power grid of wires that knit the city up. He remembered every kink in the concrete grid of city streets and every square of sidewalk. Each day he took another route out into the city that led him down all the alleys and through the backyards and, in most cases then, underground into people's basements where the meters were kept near the coal bins, the root cellars, and the ash pits. There were people home to let him in the house. "Meter man" was his only password. It was a secular and sacred pilgrimage for him, this daily constitutional. Every day, he walked. He walked in his own footsteps for forty years.

The electricity my grandfather read was the alternating current kind. The electrons stuttered back and forth along the wires' cycle. My grandfather too on his journeys completed daily, weekly, monthlong orbits around the city. He circulated, and because there were periods of time between particular visits, he would notice the changing landscape about him. Citizens tinkered with remodeling, adding a porch or patio, or they let their places go. And all these changes were overlaid with the particulars of the changing seasons. He set meters and shut them off. During the Depression he'd turn off the power at a delinquent house in sight of its unemployed occupants, who supervised his work in silence. A few months later he would be back at the same address to switch the juice back on, the bill now paid. But on the way in he'd pass the gasman there to turn off the gas. The customers had only so much money for the utilities and had run up the one as they paid the other back down. My grandfather witnessed as he walked. Here, this obsolescence, and there, this rebirth.

I have on my key ring a meter seal my grandfather gave me. It's a tab of red plastic, an inch long rounded on one end like the top of a tombstone. The plastic is branded with the initials "CL&P"-City Light and Power. On the other end are slots where two ends of a wire, curled into a loop, can be inserted. After setting a meter, my grandfather would close the access panel and seal it with the device, threading the wire through the grommets on the meter case, then snapping it into the locking plastic tap. If anyone tampered with the meter they would have to break the wire to open the meter case. The meter on my house here in Alabama has the same kind of seal. It is outside, the back of the house. In the summer, you should see the disk inside the meter's glass twirl. The hands on the five dials spin around, recording the usage consumed by the power-hungry airconditioner. Occasionally I will catch a glimpse of my meter reader as he walks down the side street and slips down the little hill to read my meter. He is there and then he is gone. It seems so old-fashioned still. The meter itself has not changed much from the time of Edison, who probably invented the way to charge for the electricity at the same time he was making the products that used it. And the reader walking, that is just as old-fashioned. You would think they would come up with some other way to check. I suppose they have. The information transmitted electronically or the scoring determined through elaborated mathematical algorithms run by a very distant and stationary computer. Some days, when it isn't too hot, I walk the several miles to work. Chances are I am the only one walking to get someplace. At the office, my coworkers find it curious. The meter seal I mentioned is on my key ring that holds my car key, after all. With each step I take, I hear the tiny tinny clinking in my pocket.

We waited in the dark. A fuse had blown-the electric steam iron tipping the scale. We had fuses, not the more modern circuit breakers, in our house on Clover Lane. My father could easily replace the blown fuse. He worked for the phone company, and had been, like my grandfather, a member of the international Brotherhood of Electrical Workers-the IBEW. I have my grandfather's union buttons. They depict the brotherhood's logo-a hand made into a fist squeezing a bundle of bolting electricity. My father could have switched out the blown fuse but instead called my grandfather, who lived down the hill a dozen blocks away. Getting the call, he strapped on his tool belt. I have the tool belt too. It is a modest one with a single leather pouch equipped with a screwdriver, flashlight, needle-nose pliers, black electrician's tape, wire stripper, and wire cutter. My grandfather headed out, walked down Poinsette along the rim of Hamilton Park and up the hill on Emerson, hardly a walk at all for him. Years later, I realize why we sat in the dark waiting for my grandfather to come fix the fuse. I figure it is kind of a union thing, things electric being the purview of my grandfather, a kind of featherbedding. Even then it was a funny family eccentricity. My family took on the silly inconvenience in order to tease my grandfather's seriousness of purpose and task. But finally this was what my grandfather did his whole life: He went door-to-door bringing light, bringing power. His family could suffer a few minutes of darkness to appreciate that, passing the time by laughing at the picture of that old man wading through the pools of light cast by the street lamps, in his City Light overalls and his worn utility belt riding his hip like a gunslinger, a brand new fuse gripped fast in his fist, striding purposely to our rescue.