Baltimore

The borderland of American identity.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking a lot about borderlands, not just the kind guarded by Customs and Border Patrol, but the cultural, economic, and psychological borders we draw right here in the U.S. The kind you cross when you leave D.C. and hit a pothole. The kind that separates Old Bay from everything bland.

Take Baltimore. My hometown is a border city in every sense, caught between North and South, ambition and abandonment, pride and a very peculiar kind of postindustrial pain. There's an epic, never-ending debate over whether we belong to the genteel, Ivy-tinged North or the humid, heart-heavy South. And apparently, being "Mid-Atlantic" just isn’t sexy enough.

But that tension says something about America.