Steaming manholes, dolphins, and burnt-out houses

a day in Baltimore

At the back of the pool, they keep the equipment. Three-color-striped balls, a fake heron, ropes and floats. The floors and benches are faded and peeled, like the old stucco on the homes of aging people. The view beyond the pool across the harbor likewise shows the shadow of better days—the giant sugar factory (Domino in red-light letters) that haunts the waterfront from long ago. It is a Monday. Hardly anyone is there. But the dolphins swim. They turn and duck and rise and dip. They come up for air and expel quickly, before slipping under with the swift elegance of a predator. They nudge the ball. They hold their tail in the air. Their eyes are dark and alert as they pass the underwater windows where children gaze. They are trapped.

Sharks pass close to your face out of nowhere, teeth poking out of their jaws. In one tank there is a ray laid out like a rug, and so many turtles and fish they are as crowded as the furniture in the Victorian drawing room. Sitting deadly still are two caimans, so well camouflaged among the tree branches and the water, one feels a chill upon noticing them. In the Amazon section, a macaw ruffles itself right next to the visitors, a scarlet ibis sits proudly in the trees, and almost out of view hangs a sloth.

Baltimore has an art-deco insurance building, trucks so big one expects them to rise up and begin to fight each other, and steam flowing out of manholes into the street. In the harbor are warships, a submarine, a lighthouse boat. A giant former power-plant is now a seafood restaurant and a Hard Rock Cafe. For lunch, you can visit the Italian quarter or find southern classics or go to the indoor market. On a three-mile loop of the downtown area, I saw so many abandoned buildings, drunks falling off the curb, caught the smell of marijuana on the breeze, heard a man hold down the horn for fully thirty seconds at the intersection, and was unable to get inside any churches. One woman walked along muttering to herself, a bin-liner slung over her back. Under the large glass corporate building, on the corner of Baltimore Street, sits a preserved historic building. It is empty now, used only to advertise apartments a few blocks away. Close by is a large building in Greek revival style, locked, with nothing to name it, and signs saying trespassers will be prosecuted.

There is a bookshop full of paperbacks, poetry, European novels, where a classical station plays Mozart, and I feel as if I stepped into England for a moment. On the U.S.S. Constellation, two men climbed the rigging without a harness. It was a Monday and many things were closed, such as the museum with the world’s largest Matisse collection and Edgar Allan Poe’s house. The roads are deleterious everywhere, with pie-dish potholes: in the worst parts, one genuinely worries for damage to the car. You have to go slow enough to swerve the chasms without provoking some hothead to honk you.

We drove home the long way. Police speed past as we keep to the limit. The trees are lush and thick, woods standing deep beside the highway. Neat, elegant, Protestant churches, with clean white spires, stand proud against the changes of time. Strip malls of fast-food go by. In a market dedicated to fresh, healthy food, irritating rock music plays. Nice houses spread back as thickly as the woods; in the wealthy areas trees and shrubs are in profusion, blossom everywhere. This is all very far away from the west side of Baltimore, which is so derelict that on every street at least one home was burned out and boarded up. One building had been abandoned for so long a tree was growing out of the front. That too was in blossom.

As we glide along the smoother roads closer to D.C., the sun is going down, the river shines, and the rising towers of the church and business glow together. We sing along to Nina Simone. There are moments of great beauty on the George Washington Highway. Soon enough, we come out in front of the Pentagon. The diggers are busy extending Arlington cemetery, planes are rising, a new moon waxes in the darkening sky.