Shortest Way Home Read online

  Everyone’s own homeland is Kashmir to him.

  —AFGHAN PROVERB

  CONTENTS

  I: REMEMBERING

  Chapter 1: The South Bend I Grew Up In

  II: LEARNING

  Chapter 2: City on a Hill

  Chapter 3: Analytics

  III: CAMPAIGNING

  Chapter 4: The Volunteers

  Chapter 5: “Meet Pete”

  Chapter 6: A Fresh Start for South Bend

  IV: GOVERNING

  Chapter 7: Monday Morning: A Tour

  Chapter 8: The Celebrant and the Mourner

  Chapter 9: A Plan, and Not Quite Enough Time

  Chapter 10: Talent, Purpose, and the Smartest Sewers in the World

  Chapter 11: Subconscious Operations

  V: MEETING

  Chapter 12: Brushfire on the Silicon Prairie

  Chapter 13: Hitting Home

  VI: BECOMING

  Chapter 14: Dirt Sailor

  Chapter 15: “The War’s Over”

  Chapter 16: Becoming One Person

  Chapter 17: Becoming Whole

  VII: BUILDING

  Chapter 18: Slow-Motion Chase

  Chapter 19: Not “Again”

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  1

  The South Bend I Grew Up In

  Dawn comes late here along the western limit of the Eastern Time Zone, so far from the coast that our first sunrise of the year arrives after eight in the morning. Most January days are cloudy, making sunup a hidden and gradual process, less a moment of daybreak than a cold shift away from the illuminated night, in which the cloud ceiling and the snow cover reflect the sodium streetlights between them into an orange glow so bright you can read the paper outside at four in the morning.

  So the first hint of morning actually makes things seem darker, as the amber night light yields and the sky deepens into a kind of electric indigo. The species of light evolve around you, from luminous ambience to discrete points of light along the horizon, the general giving way to the specific.

  Looking at this scene from the fourteenth-floor windows of the mayor’s corner office, it’s easy to imagine that you are in the wheelhouse of a ship at sea. Adding to the effect, if it’s windy out, the air pushes and pulls the picture windowpanes, making a noise far out of proportion to the wind’s actual strength, as though the entire building is buffeted by a great gale. A few snowflakes whirl out of the air and fly up across the reflection of your fluorescent-lit face, and you feel like touching a piece of furniture to make sure you are steady.

  It was that kind of deep winter morning on New Year’s Day 2012, my first day as mayor of South Bend, a city of one hundred thousand people in northern Indiana. My hometown. Peering out across my empty desk into the lingering blue of a slow-motion midwinter dawn, the sky no longer orange but not yet gray, I pondered what to do with my first few minutes of unscheduled time.

  Day One had commenced early with a visit to the Street Department garage to encourage the plow crews, and a stop at Memorial Hospital to greet Caleb, the first newborn of the new year. Now I was upstairs in my new office, and there was plenty on the schedule for the rest of the day, building up to the formal swearing-in ceremony set for that evening. But in this unstructured moment, what exactly should I do? Go over the speech one more time? Open my new city government email? Check the weather again, I quickly decided, and find out how the plows are doing.

  Snow, of course, can be a beautiful thing. It is the great benefactor of children, promising canceled school and hot chocolate and downhill sledding. But it is the mortal enemy of any mayor it touches. One day’s worth of bungled plowing is all that stands between a mayor and political disaster. At a minimum, as Mike Bloomberg experienced, a rough or mishandled snowstorm can bring days of criticism; at worst, as Chicago’s Michael Bilandic and New York’s John V. Lindsay learned the hard way, it spells career oblivion. Even after it melts, mayors curse the past winter’s snowfall, because it invariably refreezes to become the progenitor of a mayor’s other great enemy and prey: the pothole.

  AS I LEARNED GROWING UP, snow can be a great unifier in a place like South Bend. When a storm is past and the glinting winter sun emerges, so do we with our shovels, and as water drips from icicles along garage gutters we appear in our alleys to dig out our cars. It becomes a social activity based on cheerful neighborly commiseration. Snow furnishes the grounds for conversation—and even though we pride ourselves on being able to handle it, a good enough snowstorm can supply conversational fodder for weeks or even years to come. Like rain for the English, snow to a South Bender is worthy of intensive discussion even though, or perhaps because, it is so familiar.

  Ask anyone who is old enough to remember, and they will tell you all about the Blizzard of ’78. According to my parents, it was still the universal conversation starter even two and a half years later, when they arrived on College Street with their U-Haul from Texas, not long before I was born.

  “Have you heard about the Blizzard of ’78?” someone would ask as you were pumping gas, waiting in the checkout line at Martin’s Super Market, or slicing into your roasted chicken at a dinner party. And once the question is asked, it makes no difference how you answer. Prepare to hear about the Blizzard of ’78.

  BY LATE JANUARY THAT COLD YEAR, there were already a couple feet of snow on the ground. Forecasters knew a storm was coming on that Thursday, January 26, perhaps a serious one, but no one realized it would be historic. The mayor was traveling, so Pete Mullen, the city controller, was in charge by default.

  By the time he arrived at work, as the snowfall gathered speed, it had already been a terrifying day for Pete. He had started his usual morning routine—shower, shave, putting on a suit—and was getting some coffee when he paused to check on his two-week-old infant and realized that the child had stopped breathing. The baby was scarlet-red; no air was coming out of his mouth. Pete turned him over and patted him on the back. Still nothing. Sprinting upstairs with the infant in hand, he woke his alarmed wife and handed the child to her while grabbing the phone to call 911.

  Soon there were police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance at the house—as Pete recalled, “When they hear it’s a baby, they pull out all the stops to get there.” It wasn’t snowing yet, at least not much. A paramedic stuck something in the baby’s throat and opened his passageway, and soon he was healthily inhaling and exhaling. Pete rode in the ambulance to the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital, where the family’s pediatrician was waiting, while Mary Lou waited anxiously at the house with their other kids. Once it was confirmed that the boy was all right, the doctor offered to give Pete and the baby a ride home, then take Pete to the office.

  So by the time he arrived on the fourteenth floor at noon, Pete Mullen was already drained. But it was clear now that this storm was going to be a big deal. I can picture Pete looking out at the same view I see now, noting the shrinking visibility—first you can’t see the West Side anymore, then all you can see are the buildings across the street, then just the courthouse down below, and finally nothing at all but a dull white glow where your view of the city ought to be.

  By midafternoon, Pete was telling everyone to get home but be ready to come in the next day. Not willing to risk leaving the office and being himself unable to get back, he found a couch and spent the night there, waking up five hours later with his suit still on. As the winds blew snow into drifts ever higher, stranding cars and burying neighborhoods, Pete would stay in the office for two more nights, manning the city’s response. On Thursday, temperatures fell to zero and winds peaked at fifty-five miles per hour as the bulk of what would be a three-foot snowfall struck the city head-on. But it
was the drifts that set records, piling up ten feet or even more.

  The Chevy dealership downtown loaned the police department some of its four-wheel-drive vehicles for emergency personnel to get around. If you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to be working downtown on the emergency response, you might rate a lift home. Once or twice a day they would get Pete home to check on his family and get a change of clothes, a process that involved dropping him off at the corner of his block and calling his wife to tell her to expect him as he trudged up the unplowed street in nearly chest-deep snow. Almost an hour later, he would make it to the door of his house, panting, five doors down from where he had been dropped.

  City resources were not enough, so Pete arranged to contract with every individual he could find who owned a pickup truck with a plow. By Saturday, the snow had abated, but the stress level was mounting as people began to run out of food and supplies at home. Main roads were beginning to clear, but much of the city remained buried. From a National Guard helicopter, Pete saw how many houses were covered up to the windows. On the campus of Notre Dame, students were jumping out of third-story windows with glee, and daring each other to try it from higher.

  People who really needed to be somewhere got creative. An Israeli dignitary who had been stuck in town for far too long was transported by snowmobile to the LaPorte County line, there to be conveyed, somehow, to Chicago and on to Tel Aviv. When Pete finally made it to Martin’s Super Market, which had a skeleton crew selling whatever perishables they had left, he passed half a dozen horses tied up in the parking lot.

  Pete wasn’t the only one sleeping at work. Charlie Spiher, the director of the Mar-Main Pharmacy downtown, knew that people would need him, snow or not, and found a way to keep the pharmacy operating as everything around him shut down. He couldn’t let people go without heart medication or dialysis supplies. A few days into the emergency, he realized he had run out of what had suddenly become his most popular item: birth-control pills. I can’t find statistics to prove it, but locals speak of the hospital resorting to placing maternity beds in the hallway to accommodate an autumn baby boom, nine months after the storm.

  As normalcy reasserted itself in the weeks to follow, a new problem arose: where to actually put all the snow. Around here, it may stay below freezing for weeks, so the snow doesn’t just melt. That winter’s snowfall came to 136 inches, millions of cubic yards of snow that had to find someplace to go. It was forbidden for environmental reasons to push it into the river (which moves so quickly that it never fully freezes over, even on subzero days). Downtown, a stalled development project (now a bustling hotel and office building) had led to a semi-permanent giant hole taking up a city block, known to locals as the Hole. This turned out to be the simplest place for the whole downtown’s-worth of snow to be dumped. A radio station hosted a contest to see who could guess when the last of the snow would be gone; the winner guessed a date in May.

  FOR MY NEWLY ARRIVED PARENTS-TO-BE, these blizzard stories must have really been something. They had come from El Paso, Texas, where they had lived and commuted to work at New Mexico State University in nearby Las Cruces. This was high desert at the foot of the Organ Mountains, and snowflakes were rare and short-lived. The daughter of an Army officer who retired at Fort Bliss in El Paso, my mother had attended high school in a sun-washed building less than two miles from the border with Juárez in Chihuahua State, Mexico. No river valley could be more different from South Bend’s than that of the Rio Grande as it shunts through El Paso in the concrete casing that keeps its banks from shifting—a river forbidden to meander like normal rivers, because it is not just a waterway but also an international border. Mom had lived in Indiana before, as a girl in Scott County, but that was on the other end, near Kentucky, so far south of here it might as well have been a different state.

  For my father, who had emigrated from the island nation of Malta, the snow would have been even more exotic. They say the Alaskan Inuit natives have over fifty different words for snow, because they experience it so often and in so many different forms. The Maltese have none. When he calls his sisters back on the island on a winter Sunday to trade family updates, he’ll use the word “silġ,” which means ice. So if this newly naturalized Mediterranean immigrant had anything in common with his wife from Scott County, Indiana, by way of El Paso, it was that neither of them was a child of snow country.

  Yet, like the South Benders they were to become, they quickly learned to shovel snow. They taught themselves how to shift and brake differently when driving on snow, and adopted the cultural norm of talking with enthusiasm about memorable snows, even ones before their time, in an ever-escalating cascade of superlatives. Thus, when we celebrate my birthday each passing year, their story of that night in January of 1982 seems to grow in meteorological ferocity, the temperature further and further below zero and the snow cover ever higher above eye level, to the point that if you take them literally when they tell the story of the night I was born, it is an utter miracle that I made it out of the hospital—or indeed that anyone survived at all.

  But somehow, with help from Maria Concetta Portelli Buttigieg, my weather-shocked Maltese grandmother, who made her first and only trip to America for the occasion along with my astonished young aunt Myriam, Mom and Dad successfully delivered me to their small two-story house on College Street on the northwest side of South Bend.

  TO BE BORN IN 1982 is to be just old enough to remember the Soviet Union, and to have its fall be the first seismic geopolitical event of your lifetime. I remember the kid who dominated second-grade show-and-tell with a little chunk of the Berlin Wall, gray and rough on one side but smooth and painted on the other, a trophy from his father’s business trip to Europe. And there was Ms. Martin repeatedly explaining to us why our maps and globes, with “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” spread in impossibly stretched letters across the Siberian tundra, were now obsolete.

  Coming into the world in the early 1980s puts you in that senior segment of the millennial generation that still remembers life before the smartphone. Today I couldn’t tell you the number of the phone on my own desk, but I still know my friend Joe’s number from sixth grade because I would punch it daily after school on a phone we had not yet learned to call a “landline.” If I dial that number even today, one of his parents will still pick up.

  I’m young enough that I don’t always use a TV set to watch television, but old enough that you might catch me using the phrase “flat-screen TV,” as if they sell any other kind. Only now can I make sense of the way my grandparents’ generation used to talk of “color TV” long past the time when you could find a black-and-white TV for sale anywhere in America.

  From my freshman dorm room in late 2000, the most high-tech thing I did every morning was log on to South Bend’s WNDU.com and look at the two-inch-square, low-resolution still image from the webcam on their transmission tower aimed at the Golden Dome, updated every few minutes—a grainy but comforting link to home. Websites didn’t have much to them back then, I can see myself telling my grandchildren one day. But things moved quickly. By senior year, as I was banging out my thesis on an early-model iBook, a few sophomores in another dorm were creating a website patterned after the “face books” that Harvard passed out at the beginning of the year so that we could figure out who was who in the dining hall.

  Being in your thirties today means you have lived more or less half-and-half with Democratic and Republican presidencies, known twenty years of peace, and fifteen of war. It means you were grazing the boundaries of adulthood when we all experienced the sudden reversal of what some fashionable scholars had taken to calling the “End of History” after the close of the Cold War. That shock came my sophomore year, a crisp September day in Boston, as it was in Manhattan, when history thundered back into being. It wasn’t hard to tell by sundown that everything would be different, that irony and apathy wouldn’t dominate our years after all, that our generation would go to war just as our parents’ and their paren
ts’ did.

  History was back, and in hindsight it’s obvious that we had actually never been living outside its rhythm. But in the horror of that sunny Tuesday, all we could make out was the onset of a major shift. I remember thinking that suddenly our generation’s project had been abruptly reassigned—that yesterday we had been absorbed in Clinton-era concerns around globalization, the distribution of wealth, and the consequences of technology, but now we were being plunged into a different realm, dominated by things like warfare and terrorism.

  Today, it has come full circle; we see how often war and terrorism are driven by the dynamics of globalization, the distribution of wealth, and the consequences of technology. Like laws of physics, these forces were animating our affairs all along—which should have been no surprise to people from a place like South Bend, a city wrestling such forces long before economists and newspapers gave us terms like “globalization” and “Rust Belt.”

  BY THE TIME MY PARENTS’ U-Haul appeared on College Street in May of 1980, little remained of South Bend’s industrial heyday but a widespread plague of empty factory buildings. I grew up among them, unable to fathom the tragedy encoded in their condition. From the back seat of the car on the way to Martin’s, I scarcely even asked about the enormous brick structure with the even taller white smokestack that we would pass after the turn onto Elwood Avenue. Ghostly, it presided over the junction where our residential area met the strip mall containing our go-to grocery store, along with Osco Drug, a Little Caesar’s, and a Laundromat. Only years later would I go around the back of that giant brick brewery to explore the parking lot, bounded by an ex-railroad with waist-high weeds poking up between the ties, and look up at the several stories of ruin, with one outer wall gone completely, exposing floors in naked cross-section like you’d see in footage of war zones, topped by inexplicable trees growing from somewhere on the fifth floor.