Urban Discoveries Baltimore

I’d meant to write a post tonight about where to go sledding in Baltimore, but then this weekend, the answer to that question appeared to be: the ground. Small, cackling children skidded down every street and sidewalk in my neighborhood, gurgling a blend of real and imaginary languages, trailed by their proud, apologetic parents. The snow filled me with wonder (I’m from Atlanta) exactly until the minute Sunday night when I began to shovel my car out of it.  An hour and a half later, I crept onto the first of a series of suddenly one-lane streets and suspected that the blizzard had provided a microcosm for Baltimore’s essential charm.

  Because the basic strategy my roommates and neighbors and I had embraced was: call friends, hoard booze, and hunker. We poked a couple times into the numbing waste––to smoke or lend a shovel or visit the (thank you) somehow open mini-market. But mostly we kept to our sliver of Baltimore, as most people seemed to be doing, at least until the roads became passable and the public world resumed its nagging. This cozy cellularity, rather than depriving us of the city’s basic quality, reminded us of what that quality is.

  Baltimore may not, at the moment, serve as a shining city on a Federal Hill, but it can claim plenty of hyper-local specialties, some of which are uniquely ours, others we make our own: Arabbers, corner bars, arts festivals, drag shows, duckpin bowling, Berger cookies, medicine, roller derby, DIY theatre, club music, lacrosse, and crab cakes. It may even be fair to say that, aside from our avian sports teams, Baltimore has no mainstream culture, but rather a cluster of independent subcultures. At our best moments, these separate lives are symbiotic, though perhaps not very often.

  Neither Southern enough to skip the snow altogether, nor Northern enough to be prepared, we survive, shut away for the time being in our little neighborhoods, cooking up a way of life.

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