The twilight will unfold, unhurried, across the St. Joseph Valley. There is soon just enough to make out the heron, if we are lucky, stalking cautiously on the opposite bank. To some he is a villain, guilty of helping himself to fresh protein from neighbors’ koi ponds, but to me he is an elegant bird.
Down past the campus of IU South Bend and on across the bridge, we are for a few seconds outside the city limits of South Bend and instead in Mishawaka, our smaller twinned city to the east. But turning right, heading back west with the dawn’s early light at our backs, we almost immediately come back onto South Bend territory. Along the way, geese hiss and rearrange themselves while we proceed on a wide, well-lit sidewalk, perfect for running except for the minefield of goose shit.
Some say that these were once migratory Canada geese that, as a result of habitat shifts, or climate change, or perhaps sheer laziness, decided to split the difference between Canada and Mexico and just hang out all year on the banks of the St. Joe. Whether that’s true or not, they are certainly abundant. With goslings around, they are warier and meaner than usual, flapping their wings at us as we cut through a group of them dominating the bank and the sidewalk. Mayors in South Bend and Mishawaka have tried to abate the goose situation over the years, but none has solved it yet. Efforts to scare them off have been ineffective; the occasional move to cull them met fierce opposition from animal rights activists, even a “vigil to honor slain geese” organized on Facebook in response to a particularly aggressive effort in Mishawaka once. With all respect for those who care for animals, the response to that situation displayed a loss of perspective worthy of TV satire, or beyond it: even the writers of Parks and Recreation would probably have stopped short of dreaming up the sign someone held up that day, reading QUACK LIVES MATTER. In any case, leaving the geese alone has proved to be the least bad option so far, and so joggers and geese will have to coexist.
Back across the footbridge to the north side of the river and running back the way we came, light gathers around us and brings the trees along the banks into relief. Across the water from us is the Crooked Ewe, once a VFW hall and now one of the best restaurants and breweries in town. Where Vietnam veterans once hosted fish fries, the Ewe now offers nitro coffee and ramen with smoke shiitake, glace au poulet, kombu, scallion, and one-hour sous vide egg, with your choice of brisket, pork belly, shrimp, turkey, or andouille.
On this side of the river it’s a little more old-fashioned, as you pick up the scent of bacon from the diner in the middle of the Farmer’s Market, whose red walls have stood on this ground for nearly a hundred years. As farm-fresh food has come in and out of fashion, the place has hosted its butcher, Polish baker, fruit and veggie offerings, cheese shop, knickknack dealer, and lunch counter as always. Now you can also find coffee roasted by a start-up in an old factory nearby and arugula from a community garden network, but the place has never lost its heartland style. Its feel is still homey, and jars of pickled eggs and strawberry preserves outnumber those of salsa and kombucha. Under its roof on a Saturday morning, it is as if American society never fractured after World War II. Korea vets in flannel shirts down from Michigan, accompanied by ruddy grandsons in Under Armour camo jackets, coexist peacefully with Montessori moms navigating strollers between clumps of grandparents eyeing big baskets of apples and small ones of plums. Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.
We pass under the Grand Trunk Western railroad bridge, and hear the rumble of a train advancing overhead. There is no horn, thank God. I think of the painful summer that once followed a miscommunication involving a letter sent by the Federal Rail Administration. The letter went to a city attorney, who never opened it, for the understandable reason that he had passed away six years earlier, and the consequence was a suspension of this neighborhood’s designation as a Quiet Zone. Horns from a hundred trains a day blared at all hours, and an entire side of town began to lose its mind and told me so, one email and phone call at a time. My public works staff worked aggressively to make sure all of our railroad crossings met the guidelines to be safe enough that passing trains don’t have to sound their horns, then waited powerlessly for the FRA to respond—all while my inbox filled with messages, and sometimes recordings, from frazzled neighbors desperate for a good night’s sleep. They were not interested in hearing that this was out of our hands and with the federal government, or that the railroad companies were deciding on their own how long they would take to comply with the reinstated Quiet Zone. I was the one they knew how to reach, and I had better explain what we were doing to fix it. It took months, but at last the horns were silenced.
We pass under a bridge, part of a structure that I’ve begun calling the On-Ramp to Nowhere. A highway-style cloverleaf here governs an intersection that could easily be handled by a stoplight or a roundabout. It was completed in the 1960s after years of planning, designed to handle the flow of tens of thousands of workers leaving the Studebaker zone at the same time every day—and finished shortly after the plants went quiet forever. Someday it could be redeveloped into a small park, a residential block, or, who knows, maybe a flying garden after the fashion of the High Line in New York or an on-ramp-to-park project now in the works in Buenos Aires. But that’s not in the budget just yet.
Off to the right rises the stately facade of Jefferson Intermediate Center, the finest piece of architecture in the South Bend public school system. It seems too big to be a middle school. Chasten taught here, as a long-term sub while he was in graduate school, after he moved in with me. The kids here range from middle-class families in the well-off neighborhood nearby, to residents of the homeless center downtown.
Back through Howard Park, we stay low along the water and come to the East Race, the best symbol of our city’s knack for finding new value in what is already ours. The East Race began life as a canal for powering sawmills, typical of the 1840s, when canal-building became such a craze that it led to the bankruptcy of the entire state of Indiana and a provision in the state Constitution to prohibit the state from going into debt. This canal seemed to have worked out fairly well in its day, but by the 1970s it had fallen out of use and was filled in, a sort of industrial scar across the east side of the downtown. Mayor Roger Parent saw value in it and, controversially, invested heavily in restoring it until it was opened in 1987 as America’s first man-made whitewater rapids. Today it’s part of our parks system, and for a few bucks you can raft or kayak down its thousand-foot run. We can raise or lower the speed of the water through three large gates at the top, adjusting the difficulty level of the rapids.