Photo by Curtis Palmer via Flickr Creative Commons.
A city is the pulsating product of the human hand and mind, reflecting man’s history, his struggle for freedom, creativity, genius — and his selfishness and errors.
— Charles Abrams
There are times when I love Birmingham so much it takes my breath away.
I love Birmingham that much when I’m walking westward along 1st Avenue North late on a cloudless afternoon in winter, dazzled by the unworldly quality of the yellow-golden light angling hard against the northern-exposed façades of the buildings set roughly arow into the distance. The effect is not unlike standing before Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, the mammoth Bierstadt painting that hangs at the Birmingham Museum of Art, in which the mountains that frame the verdant valley are set brilliantly aglow by the rays of a setting sun that beckons the viewer into what then was America’s frontier, intimating the promise of discovery and the possibilities of progress.
I love Birmingham that much when I hike the hills and hollows of Ruffner Mountain, a place where it is tantalizingly easy to imagine a time when Birmingham was itself a frontier, a time long before the notion of birthing an iron-fueled metropolis began the culmination of 550 million years of geological congruence — the proximate location of vast deposits of iron ore, limestone and coal — that occurred nowhere else on the planet. Clambering up and down steep inclines, squishing through red-brown ferrous mud in the hollows, smelling the bittersweet admixture of leaves, bark and lichened rock warming in the sun, the relativity of time becomes palpable.
But there is more: Rising from the ground, or embedded in it, are objects of iron and brick, concrete and stacked stone, constant reminders of the human history of the mountain — and Birmingham — in the 19th and 20th centuries. If the contemplation of geological time boggles the mind, the physical experience of Ruffner Mountain and the industrial artifacts that populate its grounds has the effect of clearing it, making way for reflection that places one’s own brief time on earth in proper perspective.
I love Birmingham that much when I roam amid the industrial relics and ruins of Sloss Furnaces, the complex at downtown Birmingham’s eastern edge that was established in 1881 (no structures from that time remain on the property) and was long the primary destination of the ore from the mines that honeycombed Ruffner Mountain. It was the creation of James Withers Sloss, who played a decisive role in the founding of Birmingham and for a decade-and-a-half thereafter was involved constantly in efforts to advance its fledgling iron industry. Wandering the site now, amid this palpable history, I find it possible to feel not only Sloss’s presence, but that of the workers who toiled in its hellish bowels, rendering the raw materials that were the city’s lifeblood into the stuff of which personal and civic fortunes were made.
I love Birmingham that much when I stand atop Red Mountain, on the observation deck that rings the pedestal on which our statue of Vulcan stands. From there, surveying the length and breadth of Jones Valley, I often think about the statue’s circuitous journey to this place of prominence, through periods of neglect and near abandonment to ultimate restoration and reverence as the enduring symbol of Birmingham — and reflect on how that journey parallels and echoes that of the city itself.
I love Birmingham that much when I visit Kelly Ingram Park, the most sacred ground in this city, our Valley of Jehoshaphat, where citizens, many of them mere children, came and gave of themselves to make Birmingham — and America, and the world — a more just place. Walking through the park, gazing across the way at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four young girls made the ultimate sacrifice — unwillingly, with no say in their own demise, no means or opportunity to plead their cause against the force of hatred and the minions of evil who brought that force to bear — that awoke a nation and washed Birmingham, quite literally, in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb, I am always aware that my own paltry efforts toward the betterment of Birmingham pale in comparison. It is to this place I come to renew my commitment, and to reconnect to the inner peace that, thanks to the courage and conviction of those who came before, is the birthright of every citizen of our city.
I love Birmingham that much when I sit down each week to write this column, to contemplate and enumerate and extemporize upon the things that make us what we are, that inform our sense of civic identity and point us in the direction of our ultimate destiny as a city. The good and the bad, the vexing and the inspirational, the things that divide us and the things that unite us, the stirring successes and the maddening, repetitive failures — all are part and parcel of each and every day in the life of our community, and of our lives as individuals. And while that is true of every person and every community, the lines between these dichotomies with which we deal seem at once more blurred and more unbreachable in Birmingham than in any other place in the world.
Of course, this just bears out the fact that love is a complex emotion. Endlessly so. And it occurs to me now that that very complexity is why I love Birmingham so much — and why I’ve been happy to spend my life studying it and writing about it. It has been well over three decades since I decided that there was and never would be a place I’d rather live and work, and I have never once doubted the essential rightness of that decision. This city — its people, its places, its possibilities — are more a part of me than I can ever express.
My home is here. My heart is here. My soul is here. And whenever I feel my spirit flagging, my determination waning, my patience tried to the point of fury, all I have to do is look around and, invariably, be reminded of why it is that I love this place — and to have my breath, once again, taken away.
