Gary, Indiana

It’s already dark by the time the driver reaches Gary. The array of smokestacks, cooling tanks, and any number of industrial skeletons huddling over the city are lit by a sulfurous orange glow. Some of the towers have needles of blue light coming off them. Looking out from the partially raised highway at the chaos below, one would believe that this city is busier at night than at any other point during the day.

The stench is toxic, and it’s not unusual to see plumes of black, blue-gray and purple smoke occasionally waft across all four lanes. It’s hard to believe that people can live amidst the constant frenzy of cranes, trucks, trains, and derricks, but they do; ninety eight thousand of them.

Once he gets through the main core of plants and factories, the driver comes upon where a good chunk of them live. Standing before him are four identical housing blocks in the style of grandiose, New Deal ambition (or wishful thinking, depending on which side of the walls one is standing). They are monumental in blandness as much as they are in size. Even in the midst of a night breathing with fumes and unseen fires, the driver can imagine their original brushed-sandstone facades of just a few years ago, now caked with a thorough layer of cancer-colored soot. It makes his own lungs wheeze, so he takes another drag from his cigarette. Somehow, its heady mix of nicotine and carcinogens serve as a relief from the living poison cloud seeping its way into the pickup from outside. The residential areas don’t smell much better than the wasteland of factories, rail yards and power plants, but the dispersed signs of life –lights in the windows, a few stray dogs, and the dead grass of a cemetery- stir something primal and reassuring within.

Luckily, Gary -for all its importance as a hub of industry, in conjunction with southern Chicago, serving America’s heartland- is geographically concise. The driver is in and out in a matter of minutes. The US Steel compound on the shore of Lake Michigan, abutting Gary directly to its north and complete with a sludge moat, razor wire walls, and latter-day turrets of cast iron, is slightly bigger that the city itself. As for which of the two is more unsightly, more grotesque in its rust sculptures and unblinking sulfur lamps: that is a question the driver is all-too-happy to leave hanging in the low ceiling of smog. It clings to the early evening horizon –stooped like fog and lit from below in an amazing, chemical orange- and disappears immediately behind him.