This post is not really about the election - not really. It’s really about time, and economics, and racism, and nostalgia. But it’s worth mentioning, for those who read this in the future - or me, in the future (hi, me!) - that today, November 3, 2020, is the Presidential election here in the United States.
Like a lot of people, I was feeling some…weirdness about this election. I happen to be in Jacksonville, Florida, visiting my parents. This is where I went to high school. I brought my bicycle on this trip and so, without any real clear sense of where I was headed, I set out on my bike this afternoon, just to get the jitters out. I picked a sort of downtown direction, mostly because I’d never ridden that way, and I had half a thought that I would try riding the Skyway, the weird monorail that Jacksonville has (which I’ve written about in the past and is worth a whole post in and of itself).
As I got towards downtown, it occurred to me that I was going to be riding awfully close to my high school. So I decided to stop by.
A few things are worth clarifying at this point. First of all, I haven’t been - physically - to my high school in at least 20 and probably closer to 25 years. I graduated in 1994, 26 years ago, and - although I liked my high school and have positive memories of it - I just never went back. This is an interesting fact in and of itself, and it points to a couple of things about my life, and about Jacksonville. Probably the most relevant thing it points to is the vast gulf between different areas of Jax. My parents and I lived in various different areas of Jacksonville, but all of them out towards the east, east of the St. Johns River and well towards the beach. At some points we actually lived in a different city, Atlantic Beach. It’s worth noting here that Jacksonville is, physically, huge - the fifth largest city in the world, by land mass. It takes almost an hour - more, with traffic - to drive from my parents’ house to my old high school.
(Some of you may wonder: didn’t you go to your neighborhood high school? And the answer is no; Jacksonville, like many Southern cities, tried a system called Magnet schools, where they put the best schools in the worst neighborhoods, to try to attract suburban white kids into inner cities. It worked, sorta: we went there, but then we just went straight home. Being in downtown Jacksonville meant about as much to my high school experience as being on the surface of the moon).
I’m not really sure exactly how long it takes to drive because, well, we never go. Like, literally, my parents and I never - ever - go that way. We just don’t. There’s nothing there that draws us. No restaurants. No culture. Nothing. When I leave my parents’ house, it is more likely that I am headed to California than that I am headed to downtown Jacksonville.
That’s weird, right?
When I lived in SF, I went downtown. Portland, San Diego, Austin, New York City - I often lived outside downtown, but I went downtown fairly regularly. More in some places than others, but yeah, I went there. And I’m a person who loves to explore. I’ve been to almost every corner of Austin or Portland or Oakland because I like to see what’s there. Even the “scary” parts of Oakland were totally fun and full of culture to explore, even if yes, I did lock up both my bike wheels. But I don’t explore Jax - at least, not that way.
But today, I did. I rode down Myrtle, over 13th, down Bay. I took the Skyway. I stopped by my campus. And the high school was appropriately nostalgic for me. It hasn’t changed at all - at least physically, on the surface. I didn’t go in and wander around because, of course, school is in session and that would be creepy. But there’s still the same diagonal courtyard, the same weird double doors. It’s smaller than I remember.
I rode up, of course, on my bike. And this felt deeply weird. You see, I have never - not once in my life - ridden my bike to my high school. Not when I went there, and not since. It turns out, there’s a bike path - pretty nice! - about a block and a half away from the front door of the school, but I found it totally by accident; I had no idea it was there. I’ve literally never - ever - gone in or out of that school except in a car; either one I drove myself, senior year, or - before that - one driven by my parents. Occasionally I took the school bus, but even that was fairly rare.
That’s weird, right?
But this time - for the first time in my life - I rode around. I rode around the area, hit up the Westside. I tooled around for a good 15-20 minutes. And here’s what I learned: downtown Jacksonville, especially compared to the part of Jacksonville that my parents live in, is a completely and utterly different culture. A different country, really. A different planet. And: it is the land time forgot. It looks exactly the same as it did in the 1990s - and even then, it looked old. It is very African-American, of course. And it is also very poor. But I have been to other poor places, and other Black places, and what struck me about downtown Jacksonville, the word I couldn’t escape, was stagnant. It was stagnant: stagnant like a buzzing fly on a hot Southern day. Stagnant like a broken-down Datsun on blocks in a front yard. Nothing was happening. There were no new businesses. No construction. Nobody was putting up new signs - not even for the election. Nothing was for sale. No bike lanes, no construction crews, no orange cones. People live there, of course. Cars were driving around. But nothing was happening.
What makes this especially jarring is that the area where my parents live - also, I remind you, technically the same city even though an hour away by car - is the opposite, all frenetic activity; new businesses, new strip malls, new Mayo Clinic, new apartment complexes and condos and gyms and even a place that only does Live Action Role Playing. In short, the American Dream - as we conceived of it back in the 1950s - is alive and well in White Jacksonville, but in Black Jacksonville it is as dead as a doornail.
That’s…weird, right?
I mean, no, of course it’s not weird. We read about this all the time, of course. Systemic Racism. It’s a thing. But it’s weird to literally ride your bike between Boomtown and The Land Time Forgot. It’s weird to one minute be surrounded by new Chipotles and the next minute riding past a house whose roof has been in the same state of mild disrepair since I was 18 years old. It’s just Weird.
And it’s even weirder when it’s around your high school.
