There’s something about gazing out a body of water that goes to the horizon that reminds you of the vast inhumanness of so much of the planet. I was struck by that last summer at the Indiana Dunes, on the shore of Lake Michigan. When the water rises up to the horizon like that, filling your vision, it’s not hard to imagine the existential panic Captain Ahab’s youngest sailor felt when he went overboard in a whale fight. The rest of the crew went off chasing the whale, and there he was, bobbing up and down with nothing but ocean around. Don’t worry, he got rescued, but in the hour he was alone in the ocean, something changed in him. While he had floated there, surrounded on all sides by undulating water ready to engulf him, “The sea had jeeringly kept his body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”
I was less likely to be engulfed by the inhuman expanse of the sea because I was on the shore, surrounded by giant umbrellas, beach balls, and plenty of sunscreened humans. Plus, out at the farthest edge of the coast, I could see the smokestacks of the steel industry. They’re strangely grounding, those giant structures at the edge of my vision. The sight kept the infinite of my soul from drowning, but probably because it felt like they were jeering at me. Sometimes if you want to be acknowledged, jeering is what you settle for.
The smokestacks reminded me of another way I’m engulfed – we’re all engulfed: in a world run by fossil fuels. Which is not great. Not just because they’re heating the planet up. Also because fossil fuel production takes land, and labor, and leaves an immense amount of pollution in the communities that surround it.
Jeering might be the right word, too, for how those smokestacks relate to the region around them. The Dunes are in the Calumet Region, which also includes cities like Gary, Hammond, and Michigan city – cities dominated, according to scholar and writer Ava Tomasula y Garcia, by smokestacks and “air you can see and taste because it’s so dirty.” The region was dominated for over a century by some of the dirtiest industries in the world.
Not too long ago, Ava published an article about all this in Belt Magazine. She tells the story of the oil and gas industry in Indiana, and considers how its influence continues to shape the region. It was because of that article that I wanted to talk with her. Ava is a graduate student in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she’s focused on medical anthropology. Specifically, she’s interested in undiagnosable illness that people living in the Rust Belt and the Calumet Region link to industrial toxicity. These are not “monumental” illness like cancer and asthma but things that are much harder to diagnose, like brain fog and nausea. I hope to have her on again to talk about that research. Today’s episode, though, is about how the geology of the region ended up shaping its industrial development, which also shaped its social history – who moved to the region, how race and labor struggles played out, and how regions like the Calumet, often known these days as the “Rust Belt,” are more complex than that term implies.
And after that, we go back through the archives of our classified ads, to remember what used to be for sale.
Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.