The Drive Home, Part II: The Scratch

I-68 through Cumberland could be considered the Interstate Highway System's equivalent to an old wooden roller coaster. Originally built during the mid-1960s as an elevated solution for alleviating the city's local street grid from long-distance through traffic, it has hardly been upgraded since, even as a modern freeway filled in around it, connecting Hancock to Morgantown and points west.

Now it's so woefully below standard that it boasts one of the lowest posted speed limits on any controlled-access roadway in the country, dropping to 40 miles per hour as you slalom through town. Narrow lanes, a paucity of shoulder space, and virtually non-existent merge areas, not to mention the omnipresent neon orange cones, ungainly vehicles, and vest-clad crews unleashed by seemingly interminable construction . . . it all leaves an unsuspecting motorist suddenly nervous about how safe it really is, like those rickety amusement park thrill rides.

You might be so focused on navigating this anachronism of an expressway that you'll miss the view as I-68 swoops into the valley where Cumberland lies. The humble redbrick skyline is punctuated by a half-dozen church steeples and capped by the strikingly handsome Romanesque tower of the Allegany County Courthouse. In front of the green backdrop of Haystack Mountain, it looks almost like the two-dimensional set for a play, perhaps one about Cumberland's bustling and prosperous past.

Time was, a city could grow and thrive on the back of geography alone. All you needed was to be situated at the foot of an extensive mountain plateau, adjacent to a major river, surrounded by lush forests, and near a big vein of coal. Someone would see fit to build a canal connecting you to the wider world, followed by a plethora of railroads. Then would come the cornucopia of factories and mills.

Cumberland's rise is a familiar story, but then so is that of its decline. The halcyon years were not to last forever. America grew up and did its best to abandon its industrial childhood, preferring instead to hire other adolescent economies to do that dirty work on the cheap. Pittsburgh Plate & Glass shuttered its Cumberland plant in the early 1980s and a consolidating Goodyear yanked its Cumberland subsidiary back to Akron in 1987. After peaking at a modest but vibrant 40,000 residents during the war effort of the 1940s, the city today sits half empty, and those who remain have faced an uphill battle against lagging economic indicators and health-related factors like substance addiction.

On this particular late afternoon, the slanted light does an admirable job of trying to conceal the residual scars from such a dramatic turn of fortune. But in traversing the quiet streets of this once-lively burg at ground level, the clues are there to be seen.

There’s the corner bar, windowless but door ajar, the blue flicker emanating from televisions providing the strongest source of illumination inside the saloon. It’s enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of the old men, clutching their Buds and Millers and staring, blank-eyed, into the familiar security of the glowing boxes as their country rides off into the sunset without them.

Outside, there’s the couple, she overweight and wearing an early-aughts pop-punk band t-shirt and sweatpants, he string bean thin and clad in faded jeans and a stained beater. She pushes a stroller, while the orange tracer of a smoldering cigarette dangles from his lips. They can’t be much beyond their early twenties, but their faces are lined and worn, eyes sunken, belying their youth.

It’s a scene that’s replicated throughout the greater Appalachian region. These mountains were once the western frontier of a rising democratic, capitalist nation where anything was possible, defeating this natural barrier to expansion first and foremost among those possibilities. In fact, that quest lit one of the many fuses, if only a small one, beneath the powder keg of growing discontent within the then-Colonies. Many settlers felt aggrieved over what they viewed as an unnecessarily constipated process, enacted by their British overlords, for the exploration and occupation of western territories.

After they were conquered, the mountains gave up what they had beneath them, fueling a nation's ascendency to industrial juggernaut and thence to global power. Maybe it was a deal with the devil all along, but several generations on and for most of us, these locales are yet again blank spots on the map— "here be decay." Only this time, it's by design.

These hills were once the country’s metaphorical backbone, symbolic of Made In The U.S.A. ingenuity and bravado. But now we’d rather pretend we didn’t rape this land and all but eradicate its indigenous peoples just to give ourselves a leg up, only to bring the house of cards crashing down when it suited us, leaving millions scrambling to free themselves from the collapsed wreckage. No, it’s out of sight, out of mind, except as fodder for occasional empty, patronizing pity or cruel humor, ignorant jokes about inbreeding and poor dental conditions. Or, arguably even worse, to be used as a prop every couple of years by aspirational Leaders of the Free World, then promptly cast aside as each election cycle dissipates into hindsight.

But the truth persists that it’s a constantly evolving, unforgiving artificial world that our wealth-worshipping society has invented, and some places just aren’t going to survive. Bigger Rust Belt cities have had the wherewithal to facilitate a renaissance, generally by pivoting towards finance, medicine, education, and technology, but it's the smaller cities and towns that continue to fall through the cracks en masse. The young have no reason to stay but little means to leave. Meanwhile, the elder cohorts whittle away the days that are left to them, scraping by on the paltry remnants of severely dented promises—if not outright broken ones.

I want to trust that there’s hope, that the concept of the Great American Town isn’t in its Late Cretaceous period, the Doomsday Clock ticking towards the inevitable meteor, but the question of what happens next can’t simply be hand-waved. Perhaps, eventually, nature just runs its course, reclaiming the lands that once belonged solely to it.

Some places have tried to resuscitate themselves, to varying degrees of success, by reorienting outwardly and marketing themselves as a destination where people might be compelled to come dispose of their disposable income. It's not a foolproof panacea by any stretch. Such strategies are loaded with their own set of drawbacks and perils: The jobs created tend to be primarily of the lower-paying service variety; it doesn't take much to disrupt a tourism-dependent economy (a severe weather event at an inopportune time, for instance); too much popularity can lead to runaway gentrification. But surely it's better than just sinking into oblivion?

Cumberland, for its part, has turned to the vestiges of its past importance in its own gambit for survival. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was an engineering marvel in its day, enabling boat traffic to smoothly bypass the Potomac River’s often-unruly flow between Cumberland and Washington, D.C. In spite of rail's depressing effect on water commerce, the canal managed to maintain its utility well into the railroad era.

Today, the entire length of its towpath has been transformed into a National Park Service-administered bike trail, which hooks up with another major trail in Cumberland: the mostly paved Great Allegheny Passage, which occupies the former right-of-way of the Western Maryland Railroad and continues on all the way to Pittsburgh. At 330-plus miles, it's the longest unbroken bike path in the country, whose "golden spike" connection has made Cumberland into a bicycling mecca of sorts.

The iron horse is in on the act, too. The Western Maryland terminal has been restored and operates popular excursion trains to nearby Frostburg and back.

How much effect has been yielded by these endeavors? Per the immediate eye test, it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot. For every house whose upkeep visibly appears to be the product of attentive care, there are three or four on the same block that are scuzzy and ramshackle, unpleasantly playing right into the negative stereotypes of Appalachia.

Commercially, a similar story is spun at first glance. During the mid-1970s, downtown Cumberland’s main shopping street, Baltimore Street, was converted into a pedestrian-only promenade, last-ditch chemotherapy aimed at a cancer that had already metastasized. It was a maneuver that was tried all over the country in economically waning small industrial cities and towns, and pedestrian malls were unfairly scapegoated when those places suffered anyway. That stigma in the urban planner's manual has taken decades to erode, and even today there are plans in place to re-convert Baltimore Street into a thoroughfare for motor traffic.

Regardless of its final form, though, a pulse is fluttering once again through its brick paving. There are a handful of real restaurants interspersed among the junky "antique" shops and vacant storefronts, plus a coffee cafe that would not be out of place in Portland, and even a bona fide bakery. The centerpiece is a renovated and refurbished 1930s theater that now hosts events of all types, from stage performances and classic film screenings to DJ sets and bachelor auctions. Former Tony Award-nominated Broadway actor and Cumberland native Mark Baker lent New York gravitas to the project until his death in 2018. Though no one would quite mistake Cumberland for the West Village, slow motion has to be better than no motion.

At the foot of Baltimore Street, a bridge crosses Wills Creek over to the hill upon which stood Fort Cumberland, in its time a tangible manifestation of the very limits of white man's control over this New World.

The fort was the site of a key moment in the early military career of George Washington. The Virginia militiaman was largely responsible for leading the killed-in-action General Braddock's troops in retreat to Fort Cumberland following their humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela outside present-day Pittsburgh in 1755, during the French and Indian War. Washington's "gallant behavior" in a bleak situation earned him a permanent command of the Virginia Regiment. The rest, as they say, is history.

The county courthouse and an Episcopal church now occupy the footprint of the fort, but the one-room cabin that served as Washington's headquarters has been preserved and moved across the street to a creekside parklet. Outside the cabin stands another emblem of history: a stone obelisk, demarcating the beginning of the Old National Road.

Logically, when the National Road was laid out, much of its route from Cumberland into southwestern Pennsylvania followed the path blazed by Braddock’s doomed expedition, itself pieced together with ample assistance from friendly Indian groups whose hunting trails had been unlocking these mountains since time immemorial. Centuries later, we’re conveyed in multi-ton metal chariots with the comfort of climate control and smartphones to hold our hands as we hurtle along at speeds once the stuff of pure fantasy, but damned if we’re not still just following in Chief Nemacolin’s footsteps.

As suffering places scratch and claw to find their way in this exponentially unfolding epoch of technology that is ruthlessly doing its utmost to leave them behind, I can't help but sense an optimistic allegory in the presence of Mile Marker Zero. There is still possibility. We have to believe it can and will arise for those who are able to forge a new direction forward out of what came before. The sad truth is it won't happen for everyone, everywhere, but the more that goes right for hurting communities across these states, the better off we'll all be for it.