Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) Read Online Free PDF Page A

him.
    Cursing, panting, hooded, puffing smoke like a steam locomotive, Orville at last rounded a turn and saw the old train station. A rusted crane rose close by the tracks, a forgotten sentry, its hook dangling down. The station was in shambles, paint peeling, brick crumbling. A sign read
    Â  OLU   B   A
    Some pestilential Caribbean outpost, perhaps? In the murky dusk, the shapes seemed spectral. Orville looked around, hoping someone had stayed to meet him.
    No. No one was there to meet him.
    In the waiting room he found a water fountain. Thirsty, he stared at it, at first hopefully, then superstitiously, and then, with each slow, stalking step he took toward it, accusingly. He pulled the handle. Nothing.
    He walked out of the station and up the hill to the main street, Washington. How small everything seems, he thought, as if it’s a toy town for a child. A banner spanning the mouth of the town featured a spouting grinning whale and the message
    WELCOME TO COLUMBIA
    A WHALE OF A TOWN
    SPOUT
    ( Society to Preserve Our Unbelievable Town)
    As he walked up the dead-straight backbone of the town, he saw, on brand-new signs announcing each cross street, the same grinning, spouting whale. Why whales? He vaguely recalled being taught in school that Columbia had been a whaling port, with whales caught in the Hudson River. But wait a second. Whales live in seawater. The Hudson is freshwater. Whales in a freshwater river?
    In the haze of this last leg of his journey up Washington, one sight stopped him.
    Just above Third Street, across from the neglected Painted Lady Lounge, was the General Worth Hotel. Once grand, it was now falling down. It was three stories tall, nine windows wide, made of brick. Now all the windows were boarded up or broken, graffiti and bullet holes were prominent, and the classic portico held up by four Doric columns was sagging badly to the right. An old sign read GENERAL WO      HOT   . Orville had a vision of his mother, wearing a dazzling cobalt-blue satin gown, as President of the Hospital Auxiliary at the annual Spring Fling benefit, flanked by her beloved candy stripers as she made her grand entrance down the majestic staircase to the ballroom of the Worth.
    In front of the hotel was a three-person picket line, each person carrying a sign that said “Worth Saving.” They were circling a yellow plastic pail for donations. One of the picketers was an old, white-haired woman walking with a cane. Another was a boy with dazzlingly bright red hair, straight red hair that whirled like water as he hopped and twirled. The third was a woman about his own age with slightly darker straight red hair. She wore a work shirt and jeans and a purple scarf and she was limping.
    As a doctor, Orville could not help but read bodies, as farmers read land and weather, or sailors weather and seas. Dimly, through his exhaustion, he took it all in at a glance—the muscular upper torso, the built-up shoe, the asymmetric pelvic tilt—all of which told a story of a chronic deformity, maybe a childhood injury or illness. Despite the heat he shivered. Why, he wondered, as he had wondered more and more lately, do I have such trouble now with the deformed?
    Through the gauzy dusk the three circled silently.
    He walked on. In the town of his childhood, the walk all the way from lower Washington up to Fourth and then a long stretch up Harry Howard past the Fireman’s Home had been a great distance. Now, in the toy town of his less expansive vision, it was not far at all. Soon he was on the outskirts, in a development of ranch houses, and at the door of his sister Penny’s ranch.
    Wet, bruised, and bleeding, smelling like creosote and bitten all over by ferocious insects, several weeks late for his mother’s funeral and dressed like a pizza, on August 14, 1983, Dr. Orville Rose arrived home in Columbia.

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    â€œMom did
what?
” Orville shouted.
    â€œCalm down,”