Origin of Surviving Sandtown

In the winter, there are different fears tied to the sleep cycle. In houses with insufficient insulation, the fear is two-fold. A person is afraid of it getting too cold. If the house can only handle the pull of so much electricity, that person may go to bed fearing that the breaker will trip while they're sleeping and they won't know it until the body cramps wake them up. Also, to stay warm, they may leave the electric heater plugged in as they sleep. There's a danger that comes with that, too. Those things can overheat and start fires. When it's super cold, and nothing seems to be helping, that's what a person does. My go-to bedtime process was to take a hot shower in the bathroom that lacked heat and then crawl under several blankets and comforters with the electric heater running because it was warmer than the gas heater. Then, I prayed selfish prayers about that heater.

The other fear that people sleep with in the winter is the fear of other houses. Quite a few of the inhabitable houses in West Baltimore are wedged between vacant houses. Houses that have previously been on fire. There are drug corners, drug addicts, and circumstances that push people into vacant houses. That's where the emotions get murky. How can a person deny another human being the right to seek shelter and stay warm? And yet, that person poses a danger in their search. What if they pick a vacant house on your block to hole up in? What if it's the house next to your house? What if they set a fire to stay warm? What if you wake up to discover that fire has spread and now your house is on fire, too? It happens. The average person doesn't go to bed worrying about it in the average city, but Baltimore isn't an average city. There are more than 14,000 vacant houses hugging its curves.

I've seen two types of reactions when people realize their lives have been put in danger that way: anger and panic. Two years ago, there was a fire at a vacant house two blocks away from where I lived. The firefighters showed up to put it out. They ripped off the plywood board and out popped this guy who didn't entirely seem like he was in his right mind. It appeared that the fire started in a burn barrel inside the house. It was contained to that house. That house was next to another vacant house, though, and the occupied house on the other side of that was home to a few children and a baby. The family who lived there was livid. They rushed out into the night and confronted the man who, again, didn't seem like he was in his right mind. First, there was a physical fight and even one of the children got involved. Then, there were threats of escalated violence. The man walked away, re-entered the burning house from the back, and popped out of the front door again with a piece of wood. He took that piece of wood with him to confront the enraged family. A family member grabbed a bat. The complicated ordeal didn't end until officers arrested the man.

The panicked reaction is worse to witness. In November 2021, there was a fire on a block consisting of mostly vacant houses in my neighborhood. By the time people in the occupied houses realized that their lives were in danger, it was almost too late. I lived four blocks away and had simply coasted down the street on my bicycle. I locked it up to a street sign and ran down the alleyway behind the fire. As I was running, I could hear people inside their homes reacting to a fire that was spreading quickly. I'll never forget the sound of a panicked mother begging her children to wake up.

So, I made this collage in an effort to depict the fear of something that cannot be controlled and the vastness of it. A fear that lasts beyond one night, beyond a singular event, beyond one block, and into the abyss of West Baltimore. I know it looks pretty from afar. Maybe, from a distance, almost anything can look like a beautiful mess. When you're in the mess, though, it doesn't feel beautiful. I imagine that quite a few of us could say that about our lives. What others see is the glint of the ocean's surface. They don't know the strength of the undertow.

I experienced some difficulties making the collage. First, I found myself going in the wrong direction. That was partially because I recognized rather quickly that I couldn't draw a vacant house. I lack the math skills necessary to depict space and distance in my projects. I thought I'd forgo the vacant house effort and just focus on firefighters fighting the flames of space. I went to bed thinking that was OK, and I woke up the next day feeling like it was a dumb idea. What can someone who can't draw multiple objects with just the right dimensions do about that, though? Well, they can butcher a painting of Venice, Italy. I knew that if I was creative about how I cut the houses out of the painting, then I could make them work for me. So, that's what I did. In my revised collage, you can see the dangers of West Baltimore, but you can also see the remnants of someone's hard work on painting a famous Italian city.

I learned a lot from West Baltimore. I learned that people live with a combination of fears, dangers, and threats that are written off as a norm when there should be nothing normal about them. After I finished making the collage, I returned to the fire site at the heart of it. That fire had burned multiple vacant houses on July 17, 2021. Three years later, the fire site had turned into a construction site. One day, new families will move into the buildings and fill them with their belongings. They won't know that they are seedlings sprouting upward toward the sun from the remnants of despair.