Ithaca: the last Rhiner

Ithaca’s Rhine is difficult to define, but easy to feel in one’s memory. Chronological and geographical distinctions are easily disproved, but the sentiment and effects of the Rhine can be confused with no other element of Ithaca’s societies or culture
My father (1917-1993) and I (1947-soon) are both life-long residents of West Hill; the odd numbered houses of Elm Street near Chestnut Street perch above Floral Ave, and the boatyards in which we spent many years of our lives are adjacent to the swamplands that, before Flood Control, formed some of the dark and doubtful haunts of the Rhiners. In the 1920s and 1930s my father and the bolder of his many brothers would hop down the bank to the wetlands below, to socialize (that is to say, play) with the young Rhiners down there, not excluding the ‘coloreds’ and the doomed transient hobo kids strung along by a feckless parent. Fishing and fistfights, mostly; but either activity would be followed by some congenial hanging about, until the West Hill kids would scamper up to homes and chores and dinner, and the Rhiners would disappear into the hovels and camps, and vanish from consciousness. “They never came up to play with us,” said my father, “Dad would have skinned us alive.”

Nate was a Rhiner who had settled in, one might generously call it. He had an awfuland tattered shack a few yards north of the Buffalo Street bridge, and, uncommonly, a boat, that sometimes ran, and always listed for the sloshing bilges. He was grizzled and unkempt, toothless and greasy, and made rather an impression on me in the 1950s. My father would always hail him, thought they doubtless never met. His boat must have formerly been rather a dashing craft – sleek, many years before – but it had degenerated into a heap, with flecking paint, loose decking, gashes, wounds, and much creek scumdirt. Reconstruction in the 1960s erased any trace of Nate’s life in Ithaca.

Throughout the Rhine era, notions of its crime and poverty were often exaggerated into a dangerous kind of unwholesomeness and depravity. A sort of social eugenics seemed to supply enough of a gulf between its people and ours, on West Hill or Fall Creek or South Hill, but democratic Education began to integrate persons who otherwise had no occasion to mingle. I became aware of Joe Simon in 1960, at Boynton Junior High School on Buffalo Street. He was a Rhiner in all ways. I believe he lived on Cherry Street, in execrable conditions, and his share of life was a desecration. He wore the same clothes every day; and I never knew him to own a winter coat. He was undernourished, small and weak. Despite these afflictions, Joe had classroom friends, and was included in the joshing and jokes, though he too probably never was invited home. One day after school I saw him on the street; he’d secured a one-serving bag of potato chips, and just as he opened it a Creeker came along and needled him into sharing his chips. It is possible to imagine that those chips were the most nutritious meal he was going to have all day. As he palmed the open bag to the other boy, several more Creekers came by, each dipping their hand in for a chip. Joe could only smile, and let all the chips go, with a sort of bemused exasperation that might have suggested he’d rather have the amiable attention of those boys than the chips.

Later that winter Joe and his cousin were walking on the railing of the State Street bridge near today’s Jungle, which is rather an innocuous area for transients compared to the much severer privation from which it is sometimes said to derive. The other boy slipped and fell into the ice and creek below. I don’t imagine either of them could swim anyway, and certainly not floundering in icy water. Joe, of course, immediately dived in to try to help his cousin. Death by drowning.

Those of us whose parents were reasonably proficient at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, or those of us who might even have flourished at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, will have Ithaca fixed in our memory as a benign and healthy place in which to have matured with other persons who grew up in Ithaca, but it is unlikely that our lives lived out in the second half of the Twentieth Century and curling into the Twenty First Century will have ever demanded taking the measure of that within us which might have been forced to go into the cold water heedless. I have afforded myself the privilege of calling this courage, and if I cannot see it in myself or in others, I can see in other people when it is not present. Lives lived “safely” stink.