City of Valleys
I want to write something about the place where I was born.
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama, but it is hard for me to think of it as a city at all. Here is a definition of a city: a place where the signs and efforts of human habitation have overwhelmed and defined the landscape. This is not what I feel when I am in Birmingham.
The people who built Birmingham were businessmen. Far from what was then considered civilization, it was discovered that the mountains contained iron ore. Railroads were built, and certain industrialists succeeded in getting them to intersect here, instead of somewhere else; and with an odd but characteristic mixture of simplicity and grand aspiration, they decided to name this conjunction for the greatest industrial city of the contemporary world.
Beginning as an aspirational Birmingham, England, it gradually transitioned into an aspirational Pittsburgh, "the Steel City of the South." Now, the steel furnaces, mills, and factories that once darkened the sky have disappeared so entirely that it is difficult to believe they were ever there; and Birmingham has passed to presenting itself as an aspirational Atlanta.
All these urban and civilizational trappings sit lightly on Birmingham. When I am there, as I was recently, it is not these things of which I think.
