From the beginning of today's walk, I felt connected to Julian. Not far from the start at Noblesville's Hazel Dell Road, the Midland Trace Trail took me past a pond where I fished with my dad. Julian loved to fish. He and the males of all ages in his family went on annual fishing trips, renting a houseboat and bonding in meaningful ways (I'm sure they also let their beards grow scruffy, played jokes on each other, and told stories that improved the size of previous years' catches). I was surprised when I learned that Judge Julian loved to fish, and I can't imagine him with a scruffy beard. But people and things need a chance to change, at least once in a while. There's no reason why pragmatism and spontaneity can't co-exist.
To the south of that pond, used by the city of Westfield for water treatment, is a gravel pit where my dad and I also fished. (Mostly he fished and I sat on the enormous boulders, pretending they were horses--is there a little girl anywhere who didn't have a horse-crazy phase?) I think the gravel pit has been filled in at least partially to be a suitable retention pond for an upscale subdivision, and the boulders have likely been sold off and moved elsewhere. I'm guessing the fisherman Julian would long for the gravel pit and its massive catfish if he had known about it; the pragmatic Julian, however, would know that a gravel pit is too deep and treacherous to be part of a neighborhood--and he would understand that people have to live somewhere, so why not on a desirable piece of land? Change might be necessary, but it often is not easy--especially where one's memories reside.
I walked more than 85% of today's mileage on urban trails that used to be railway lines. I loved the well-kept, well-marked, wide asphalt path of the Midland Trace with its multiple neighborhood access points (and thank you, City of Westfield, for completing the trail to Hazel Dell, with ample parking, clean facilities, and bikes for rent). But I also love trains, and for the life of me I can't understand why a county that can't build houses or widen roads fast enough would not yet have its own light rail mass transit system. We promote a more healthy lifestyle with the trails, but wouldn't fewer cars (and perhaps the chance to stop paving over all of the farm ground for more roads) also contribute to healthier lives? Why can't we have both trails and rails?
Part of that thinking is the nostalgia I have for Westfield. My childhood was The Wonder Years, if you know that 1980s-1990s TV show, with our playing outside until dark, having our own neighborhood ball field, and riding bikes everywhere without worry. Until my senior year in high school, trains chugged slowly east and west through town on the Midland Railway (later the Central Indiana Railway) tracks just north of my church, Westfield Friends (a church instrumental in founding the town). Though we were smart enough not to stand near the tracks when the trains were moving, we did put pennies on the rails and wait to retrieve the flattened coins. I knew a family that lived just off the tracks, their house hidden down in a wooded ravine. And we told ghost stories about the Martha Doan Memorial Garden, now the Old Friends Cemetery, just across the tracks from my church. Trains also rumbled into town from the north and south on the Monon Line, its Westfield station just across from my great-grandparents' house. In earlier decades, my great-grandmother put out sandwiches for ramblers who hitched rides in the boxcars. I picked wild strawberries next to the rails and waved at the incoming trains to get the engineers to blow the whistle. I remember being fascinated and mystified when a train came in once with an engine on either end rather than having the standard caboose at the rear.
Trains are about going places, and I guess that has always been in my blood. Julian and I shared that trait. In the Ridlens' Museum of American Political Communication, there is a train room complete with a working train set. Julian told a beautiful story about how he and Sue rode the train from Logansport (her hometown) to Decatur, Illinois (his hometown) to announce their engagement. I love the romance of that; they could spend the journey focusing on each other instead of driving. Such a beautiful start to their lives together.
Sue and I had a chat yesterday about a "history of the interurban line" signboard I saw in Forest Park. When I mentioned my thinking that we have torn up all of these transportation lines to make walking and biking trails instead of finding ways to have both, she told me that Logansport used to have a line to Indianapolis, making it possible for her grandfather to live in his hometown and still commute to work in the legislature in Indianapolis. I was hoping that Westfield, in the midst of extensive alteration or obliteration, depending on your view, could have created that kind of opportunity as well, blending the old with the new. The uptown where I rode my bike to the drugstore my dad remodeled and had a daily root beer at the Dog 'N Suds he helped build will be unrecognizable very soon. Everything changes, but...do the good parts from the past have to go?
Julian was a student of history, but he was also an innovative, modern-thinking problem-solver. As I wandered through all of my old stomping grounds, from my church then past the drugstore that used to have a real soda fountain and the bank where I made my first deposit ($5.00) to my Sycamore Street neighborhood to my high school via the housing addition my father helped build, I tried to be the logical person Julian could be. I found much to be hopeful about: my childhood home has aged well, my elementary school has evolved from a sterile 1960s box to a thing of beautiful form and function, and some of the buildings that probably should have been razed when I was a kid have been given new life with truly stunning transformations. There is value in modernization and moving forward, finding more efficient processes or more elegant designs that fit the way people want to live. But there is a lot of good still left in what exists. Everything changes--and we wouldn't really want to stay in our childhoods. But I think Julian would say that we are responsible for being good stewards of our history and will benefit from keeping what adds value to our lives. After all, wasn't that likely the main point of all of those family fishing trips?
