Bohemia lost

There are other differences I'm getting used to. People seem to drive in the middle of the street here. If a car's coming at you on a residential street and there are cars parked along both curbs, one of you is going to have to pull over, even if there is room for two cars, because the other driver is straddling the middle of the road. Something to do with St. Louis being on the Mississippi, the traditional, if not actual, midway point of the country? A healthy berth given to people potentially exiting parked vehicles? I don't know.

Also, St. Louis has the longest red lights and the shortest green lights I've ever seen. I can't explain and will not listen to scientific evidence of its impossibility. And of course, there's the weather, hot and sticky now, soon enough to turn bitter cold, both new to me. So far I'm doing fine with the heat, much to my surprise after two decades of enjoying the weather in a city that once supposedly saw the headline "77 Again Today -- No Relief in Sight." I'm loving the hot Midwestern nights. I bought a barbecue the other day, though I betrayed myself as a Californian by grilling fish on its maiden voyage.

The biggest difference between St. Louis and San Francisco, though, is attitude. In just the two weeks that I've been here, I've seen several examples of St. Louis fretting about how the world sees it.

The week we arrived the big story in town was Weeweegate, the kind of local politics cause célèbre that most towns get to enjoy from time to time. Everyone talks about it for a little while, and then it blows over. In San Francisco, for example, in the mid-'90s, the mayor, running for reelection, managed to let a couple of morning radio guys photograph him in the shower.

Weeweegate is the case of a female member of the Board of Aldermen who either did or did not urinate in a trash can during a board meeting. The alderman, Democrat Irene Smith, was filibustering against a redistricting measure that she opposed when she heard the call of nature. She asked the acting board president, James Shrewsbury, for a bathroom break. Shrewsbury, who had appointed the committee that drew up the map that Smith opposed, was not feeling charitable, bathroom break-wise. He said that if she left the room, she'd give up the floor and the measure would come to a vote.

So, according to news reports, Smith's supporters surrounded her with bedsheets (where did they get bedsheets?) and maps as she squatted over a trash can. Nobody will confirm or deny whether she actually let loose, but in any event she was cited by the police for lewd and indecent conduct for the appearance of urinating in public.

"We are the laughingstock of the country," said Mayor Francis Slay in the aftermath. But an informal poll of journalist colleagues and friends on both coasts, folks who keep up on current events, did not turn up a soul who had heard of this little set-to.

Meanwhile, the Riverfront Times, the local alternative weekly, ran a piece dissecting an article in Art in America in which a writer surveyed the St. Louis art scene. And news of a financial crisis at the St. Louis Symphony elicited an editorial in the Post-Dispatch that pointed out that "the Symphony is one St. Louis institution that actually merits the overtaxed superlative 'world-class.'" The editorial, a call to arms to support the symphony, went on to say, "The region needs reasons to feel good about itself, that it is not a has-been, a formerly great, a dinosaur."

I can't imagine San Franciscans worrying so about what people elsewhere think of them. In fact, San Franciscans -- that is, the residents of my San Francisco, the one that has melted away -- know what others think of them: They're crazy and godless. It's simply received wisdom that San Francisco is the best, the only place in the world worth settling in, and there's no point in worrying what anybody else thinks. If they don't live in San Francisco, they must be losers anyway.

So I'm adjusting to this new perspective, without having adopted it yet. I can't picture ever worrying about what people think of my new city, but if I ever become a true St. Louisan perhaps I'll take on the self-consciousness, the need to apologize, that comes from living in a city that's lost 59 percent of its population in the last half-century, that went from being the eighth largest city in America in 1950 to the 50th largest in 2000, an exodus unrivaled in American history.

In the meantime I have a long way to go to learn enough about the place to form real opinions of my own. There are racial things going on here, for example, that I may never understand, and I certainly haven't begun to. Race, in fact, is the subplot of Weeweegate, since the plan opposed by Smith, who is black, would move the ward of a black alderman from mostly black north St. Louis to mostly white south St. Louis.

I have a feeling race is a subplot of a lot of things here. When I say "mostly black" and "mostly white," I'm not talking about a few percentage points. Walk west along a street called Delmar Boulevard and almost everyone who lives to your right is black, almost everyone who lives to your left is white. Keep going and you'll reach St. Louis County, separate from the city, with a booming population that's 77 percent white, compared to 44 percent in the city, and with nothing approaching the city's poverty or crime levels.

The second week we were in town Weeweegate was replaced in the headlines and on the talk shows by a controversy over new gates at Forest Park, the giant, centerpiece park that was home to the 1904 World's Fair and is now home to many of the city's cultural institutions. The proposed gates, for six of the park's entrances, are giant abstract steel things designed by famed landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The price tag would be $6 million, paid for by a private foundation.

The battle falls pretty much along the usual lines in matters of public art: Supporters of a proposed work say it's beautiful and essential and that its opponents are mouth-breathing philistines who wouldn't know good art if it bit them right through their fanny packs. Opponents say that they'll put those ugly things in over my dead body, and if they're going to spend all that money, why don't they spend it on (insert pet project here)?

I have no dog in this fight. I don't care what they do with the gates. But I did pay a sunset visit with the wife to a piece of public art that just about everyone agrees on. The Arch is the most recognizable and beloved piece of public art in the country other than the Statue of Liberty. The wife and I already love it as though we've been living with it our whole lives. From afar or from right underneath it, it's a hell of a thing, it really is.

All my life, I've lived near the water. From time to time I've stood on the beach and watched the water come toward me in waves. The other night I sat on the top step of a long stairway that leads to the base of the Arch and watched the Mississippi River. The water flowed past me, left to right. I don't know why that struck me, but if the movement of water can dig the Grand Canyon, maybe it can carve little changes in me too.

"If they're going to spend $6 million on Forest Park," I thought, "I wish they'd put in a few more water fountains that actually work."

And for the first time, I felt a little bit like a native.

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