Growing Younger - Duluth observations 10/27/07

The city is growing younger--yet I feel it's innocence slipping away. Even the Lake retreats. Experts say, "Its never been so low." It makes you wonder where its going, but its waves still crash on the rocky shore, and the sun still shines warmth between the canal lighthouses, so at least there's that.
So much can change in just one summer: Friendships, living locations, tuition, and what I used to see as a wonderful oasis of classic creativity and life can be destroyed by "economic boosting" construction. Though the shoreline landscape changes in the direction of tall metallic monstrosities, the early morning people are the same as they ever were. They still stand facing the rising sun as it emerges from Superiors depths, shilouetted on the rocks, small dark hooded figures, hands deep in their pockets, fingers grasping at a warmth they know can come only from themselves. But I notice in the background of these familiar figures, poetic as they stand, an ever increasing number of glistening spandex and headphones reflect and flash the rising sun, bouncing metallic figures as they jog, backs to the lake, faces watching the shoreline.
I've missed Duluth. I miss the Duluth that was old and forgotten. Like a wonderful secret of fascinating people, old small business, nature mixing with civilization, and, of course, Lake Superior. I've watched it change. I've watched over sized condo complexes, after beating down environmentalists and political activists petitioning for the smaller picture, steal the lake and the sun from those small businesses and from that 18th century Gothic clock/bell tower. That classic building used to admire the lake and absorb the light and heat from the sun. Its sandy brick blending with the forested hillside. Now, fifteen-story-high buildings block it from sight.
Imposing single panned windows and chrome casing reflect the suns light and heat right back, bright and accosting to all that look at it, as if it didn't want or need the gift. I wonder at its purpose. Why sit behind a window to see the beauty of the lake when you can come and sit next to it and hear the waves crash, feel the spray sting your face and in the winter freeze to your face? Why not feel the cold and the heat as it is, and let the sun warm your face as the wind chills it? Why force it into a limited frame of a window pane--like an animated painting--where you can't touch it, you can't taste it, you can't feel it on your skin?
Pictures and paintings are for memories--windows into the past as a reflection of what once was--but has long sense gone. What if in our urgency and greed to capture the beauty of the world we prematurely turn it into a memory? What good will all those windows be when there is nothing left to look out too? All the windows will then need to be replaced by big LCD screens and they will have to show animated paintings of what used to be. A memory you can no longer touch. Not even if you wanted too. And all I know of that beautiful and hidden bell tower from this vantage is the faint sound of the bong-dong calling out the hour over the ever growing hummm of speeding SUV's.