An Ancient Emptiness
September 4th, 2006
It’s Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day - maybe Easter Sunday - maybe even Labor Day (though I think only WalMart and the little fruit stand over the hill from me actually honor that holiday anymore) - and I’m off to visit some friends in Uniontown this evening. No matter whose margarita party or DVD-fest I’m going to, the route I take from my middle-of-nowhere digs into the Capitol of Fayette County will take me right through Uniontown’s center of commerce: the square of malls, shopping centers, gas stations and restaurants bordered by Matthew Drive, Route 21, New Salem Road, and the hoary ol’ National Pike itself, Historic Route 40.
Joe Hardy and the other County Commissioners can pretend that their newly-renovated(-and-gentrified) Downtown is the economic heart of Uniontown, but everyone knows that the county’s cash-flow pulse really originates from that Quadrangle of Retail Titans on the city’s western flank. The place is a fecund swamp of capitalism, with the Uniontown Mall (home to the venerable old department-store chains Sears and JCPenney), WalMart, KMart, Lowes, Home Deport, and now Target rising like lotus-blossoms above the concrete lillypads of their parkinglots, and all manner of smaller businesses and restaurants crowding around them like so many eager frogs poised to snatch with their tongues some of the innumerable dollars buzzing around the big stores’ honeyed bargain-bins. Take a drive past the area some afternoon. The intersection of Routes 21 and 119, right below the WalMart/KMart/Lowes plazas, will be choked with traffic drawn by the sweet pollen of Falling Prices and Blue Light Specials. The parkinglots will be packed solid, people swarming like ants in the glare of so much windshield-shattered sunlight. The strip of restaurants along Route 40 by the Mall will be crowded with hungry shoppers and a hundred different species of thirsty vehicles will be queued up at the nearby Sheetz like beasts at an oasis. Hell, even if you drive through the area at four in the morning, you’ll still find the place abuzz with activity, because most the restaurants, and the WalMart, are open 24-hours-a-day.
But today….Today, this holiday, is different.
As I come round a bend on Route 21, I can see the WalMart plaza on my left, the KMart/Lowe’s plaza just a bit beyond it. And - just as I expected them to be - they’re empty.
The halogen lamps burn atop their metal trunks but their light falls on bare, filthy asphalt gridded with chipping yellow paint, shining with a strange, confused glare in puddles of melting snow or rain or motoroil. The WalMart’s doors are bright with empty light and the big red letters flicker with alertness…but no one’s there to justify the light. The smaller stores along the plaza’s crescent, even the Shop n’ Save, are dark and still. A chilly, hollow feeling shivers through me, a pleasant melancholia. I slow down. There are other cars on the road, sure - other people no doubt going to visit friends or family, too - but none at all where I’m so used to seeing them.
I hang a left at the stoplight by the Taco Bell (also cold and dark, even its neon OPEN LATE sign snuffed) and slowly, reverently, drive through the eerie stillness of the WalMart lot. I turn my car’s CD player off and listen to the minimalist whispering of my tires on the pavement. Even empty as it is, I can’t bring myself to violate the order of the painted lines and drive slantwise across the lot - that would be tantamount to driving against the grain of ley lines. I drive slowly up an aisle to the front of WalMart and sit there for a moment, letting my mind drift like a piece of windlifted litter through the…the nothing. Here, where there’s usually so much - cars and trucks going in and out, here and there, back and forth; folks pushing squeaking carts, pulling squeaking children; sun- or moonlight splashing over everything - now there’s just…artificial light falling like luminous dust on vacant benches, speedbumps covered in frost, squashed pop cans and random pieces of paper, a lone shopping cart lying on its side in its corral like a sleeping calf. And me. My mind busies itself with metaphors to fill the cathedral silence of the empty lot.
A day or two before, most likely, I had been a part of this place’s usual hustle-n’-bustle. My car sat in one of those handicapped spaces over there. I crossed the sideways-striped pedwalk in front of the sliding doors with hundreds of other folks, going in with a wad of bills rustling quietly in my pocket, coming out with a bunch of stuff rustling loudly in a blue plastic bag. I’d probably been singing quietly to myself, as usual, as I went about my business, and when I’d hopped back into my car and fired her up, the sonorous booming of my woofers had muscled into the air.
Now, just the gentle purr of my idling engine sounds huge in the ceremonious silence. I’m not in a hurry to grab my purchases and go, to escape the mercantile hubbub and go home to my quiet house. The world is quiet tonight.
I take a quick turn through the equally-empty KMart parkinglot - and spot a lone figure pushing a mop within its locked doors…a ghost earning time-and-a-half haunting the still light and the silent ranks of registers.
A moment later, I’m cutting across the Uniontown Mall’s parkinglot as I head for Route 40. I’m a little more familiar with this place’s emptiness, as my friends and I have spent many a late night at the 24/7 Eat n’ Park just below the Mall - but there’s a qualitative difference between that familiar afterhours emptiness and tonight’s more pure emptiness. If you drive through the Mall parkinglot at 3am on, say, any other Saturday night, you can practically sense the tension of the next day’s workaday crowd, smell the future exhaust, feel the rumble of tires on the macadam. But tonight…this is rest. This is one of the Mall parkinglot’s few days off. Well, except for the small huddle of cars clumped up against the front of the Carmike Cinemas - the movie theatre’s always open - and, perhaps, the Boston Beanery at the other end of the structure…but even they lock their doors and turn off their sign on some days. Regardless, the Zen vacancy of so much untrammeled asphalt seeps through me like a cool, gentle breeze as I pass through it, enjoying the sight of quiet where usually there is so little.
These moments of abandonment are growing fewer and fewer with every year. They used to be familiar, a run-of-the-mill sight, back when I was but a pup in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Almost nothing was open twentyfour hours then, and many businesses - even massive retail chains like KMart or Montgomery Ward - didn’t even open up on Sundays at all. The Sabbath was the first empty-lot feast to fall beneath our civilization’s exponentially-accelerating consumer culture. Now every streetcorner has a 24/7/265 Sheetz, or a GetGo, or even little mom’n'pop convenience stores populated at all hours by bored teenagers begging for a holdup just to add some pep to their allnight shifts. The world doesn’t rest anymore: our American civilization eats No-Doz for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; our economy has beaten the tyranny of night and sleep, religious observation and tradition. There are kids being born right now who will regard the old 9am-to-9pm era of business as being hopelessly primitive, wasteful, and tedious.
Is this a bad thing? No, not really….I’m always stopping at WalMart at 1am when my shift at the Herald-Standard’s composing room/ad-design department elapses. If I run out of peanut butter at 4am on a Thursday morning, I can just run out to the Sweet Pea’s on Route 21, or the Giant Eagle in Uniontown for my fix. Hell, if I need a new mouse or a new keyboard for my computer at midnight on Labor Day, I can always swing by WalMart for that. I haven’t enjoyed a “typical” 9-to-5 lifestyle or work routine since 1997: working the night shift at the newspaper has gradually rendered me nocturnal, and were it not for 24/7 superstores like the Big W and allnite gas oases like Sheetz, my life would be flatout impossible.
But still….There are times when it’s comforting to see the world at rest. To see the sliding doors of Capitalism locked and all the lights turned off for just a little while. To see empty parking spaces and to feel no urge to duck into the ”sweet spot” closest to the front of the store before someone else snags that primo chunk of parking realestate. There’s an eerie peace to be found in a paused world, because it’s now so uncommon. Peace and quiet are rarer than radium today, and I relish the handful of minutes I get to spend once or, at most, twice a year passing like a ghost through sleeping parkinglots.
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Is this an issue that can be solved by organizing labor? I don't know. The more I read and think about it, the more that it seems to me that the aberation is really the 1946-1969 period, when the U.S.A. was sucking on the sugar-tit of the spoils of World War II. I don't know if our economy can really support that kind of a lifestyle right now.
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I think the greatest aberration in labor was the invention of the salary. Fixed salaries are all well and good for CEOs and upper-level management types, but for average rank-and-file workers and the middle-management types who do the majority of the actual work? If you're making $60K per year on a salary no matter how much - or how little - you actually work, what is the reward or impetus to actually go above and beyond the call of duty to earn some welcome, extra $$$? Believe me, were I working a salaried job that paid me, say, $1000 per week whether I worked the expected 40 hours, or 60 hours, or even 80 hours, I would work exactly 40 hours and no more - because it's not like I'd be getting paid anything extra to work longer hours.
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