The Long Haul

I love reading George Eliot's Middlemarch and love the baseball season and keep rooting for the recovery of Kellogg, Idaho for the same basic reason: all three are about the long haul. Each time I've read Middlemarch, I've known I was in for a long commitment, but that as the story of this complicated Midlands village slowly unwound and as Eliot carefully weaves the complex web of relationships between the characters, I feel this deep satisfaction of knowing these characters deeply and that Eliot is helping me see that in time, under the pressure of time and events, the truest and deepest nature of each of the characters will unfold.

Likewise, the baseball season. Sports pundits sometimes refer to the baseball season as interminable. My students have said the same about Middlemarch. But, watching the baseball season unfold over the long haul gives fans a chance to see the truest and deepest character of each team emerge. Take, for example, the Twins and the Tigers. The Twins' season was like a slowly developing work of classic comedy. Early on, their season looked like a disaster, but the Twins stuck together, weathered injuries, the doubts of their fans, the indignities of commentators, and the strength of their team's character prevailed. It took the long haul to fully reveal the admirable qualities of the Twins. The long haul also revealed some weaknesses in the White Sox. Whereas a year ago they lived by the one run game, this year they died by it; it takes long seasons for the odds of living and dying by the one run game to play themselves out. Sad to say, the long haul also revealed that the Tigers didn't quite have a full tank of fuel. It was a dark comedy. The team failed, but not completely. The Tigers are tarnished, but alive. Young, gritty, scrappy, the Tigers made to most of their hot play before the All-Star break, but the long haul exposed that sooner or later, over the long haul, young pitchers will be up and down, young hitters fold under pressure, and Maggie Ordonez cannot not be counted on for big hits in big games all that often.

Kellogg, Idaho has also been exposed by the long haul of history. When the town was young and the smelters were new and the ore was plentiful and in demand, and, when the forests were plentiful and the timber in demand, Kellogg was a front running town and the Silver Valley a national leader in silver and lead and zinc production. But extractive industries cannot survive the long haul. The seemingly immortal Uncle Bunker proved mortal in the face of changing economic forces and changes in the public's tolerance of environmental damage.

I'll reflect more on Kellogg and the long haul in future blogs. For now, I look at these images of two of my favorite places in Kellogg, the YMCA where I made my best friends and played hours of basketball, ping pong, and dodge ball and the Liberty Billiards, known to most as Dick and Floyd's, where I learned about class difference, being a sports fan, and how to drink beer. In the long haul, these places will become condos. Their character will be lost. Memories will die, too. These places just couldn't survive in the long haul of the crushing social and economic change in our country. In the Kellogg pennant race, they led the league for years, but have fallen into the cellar. We who love Kellogg are hoping that, over the long haul, Kellogg will be strong again and return to its pennant winning ways.