PUB NOTES: It’s Not Where You’re From
(It’s where you’re at)
by Chris Horne, publisher
Somewhere in everyone’s head something points toward home,
a dashboard’s floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn’t matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you’ve risen or fallen to.
- from “The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina” by Miller Williams
A couple weeks ago, I went back to Georgia for my Mammaw’s birthday, which she and I celebrated on our own over pulled pork and chicken salad, Fox News playing on mute in the background. Later, at dinner, my Mom told me I saved notes from the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa to compare the handwriting. If I was born with that skepticism, it came with equal parts optimism. When I got my rental stuck in Mom’s muddy driveway an hour before I had to get to the airport, I asked for her help instead of calling a tow. In between all that, I caught up with old friends and visited a few old haunts, fanning away the nostalgic haze just long enough to appreciate how much has changed in the four years, this month, since we moved to Akron.
From the outside, Macon doesn’t look like much. The city is disguised by Interstate exits lined with gas stations, hotels and chain restaurants, like the Applebee’s where I waited tables when my writing didn’t pay. Thousands pass through daily, seeing nothing else because it looks like Anywhere, USA. You have to get beneath the surface to find the city’s real treasures.
Which is true of most places. Which is why I love the Signal Tree in Akron.
Like most things Akron — devil strips, professional female mud wrestling, Lewis Miller and his architectural church design called the “Akron Plan” — I learned about the Signal Tree via the Internet while we were still in Georgia. It was city of Akron photographer Bruce Ford’s gorgeous, striking wintertime portrait, which I later contemplated ganking when I saw it in the mayor’s office. Fortunately, before venturing into criminal territory, my friend Allyson Boyd gifted me a framed copy of her dad’s photo. That was at the party announcing we’d won a Knight Cities Challenge grant for Unbox Akron, two weeks after The Devil Strip launched. Almost every day since, I’ve looked at that photo hung by my front door.
The story of the Signal Tree may, it turns out, be apocryphal — Nathan Eppink from Summit Metro Parks offers a challenge to it on page 30 of the July issue — but it’s still a powerful story. As the legend goes, the Signal Tree marked the Portage Path so Native Americans knew where they were as they traveled down the Cuyahoga River. It was the perfect metaphor for the festival — Signal Tree Fest — we’ve organized with our friends at Lock 3, a celebration of what makes Akron unique.
How do you know you’re in Akron, OH instead of Syracuse, NY or Des Moines, IA or Las Vegas, NV or Macon, GA or anywhere else? Answering that question every month is why we’re so adamantly local.
If you only experience the city from its surface you might as well be anywhere. Where’s the fun in that?
Being deeply local is about being more deeply alive. These points of distinction do more than help us know where we are. They help us know who we are. It’s about people.
Thanks to the way I live — la vida local #sorrynotsorry — I’m connected to the folks who make the shirts I wear, prepare the food I eat, run the nonprofits I support, create the art I enjoy and mix the drinks that caffeinate me …and the dranks that intoxicate me. Though they’d be wise to deny it, I call many of these people my friends. Now, no math can calculate how much better my life is compared to our first year in Akron when I worked in Cleveland and seldom explored what this city offers.
Even though it’d have been a hectic summer regardless, starting Signal Tree Fest was a no-brainer. This festival lets me celebrate a place that’s given me and my family so much while doing it alongside the people who’ve made our lives so rich. For us, that’s what being here is all about.
//Chris Horne is dad to Maddy, hubs to Heather, publisher of The Devil Strip, creative director for Unbox Advantage, and a 2017 National Arts Strategies Creative Communities Fellow. My Mammaw thinks I’m handsome.
