American Siberia

Cackling in the Gloom

“Bro this looks depressing as hell,” one poster said in a comment on a video I recently posted of downtown Massena, NY. In the video, I am driving my minivan through the desolate streets, eyeing dilapidated buildings beneath the eternal grey overcast as a brooding Quebecois acoustic song plays on the radio. “It is,” I replied, “but Massena is a powerlifting gym for the psyche.”

This interaction caused me to reflect on the culture of “lifting” and workout gyms. The practice of repeatedly lifting heavy pieces of metal for the sake of developing the visual appearance of a Ken Doll has been ascendant in social media in the last decade or so — the meme “bro do you even lift?” is a testament to this. And doubtless, if a man were to lay down at the bench-press and thrust his hands beneath the 200-pound bar, he’d do so knowing that even though the weight is heavy, he’d get stronger by repetitively lifting it up. He’d have his health in mind, his figure, his sense of accomplishment. If he put his hands to the bar and said “bro this thing is heavy as hell,” he’d be right — but that’d be the point. Why, then, is the culture of “lifting” relegated only to the domain of physical fitness? Shouldn't there be gyms where a man can strengthen the psyche?

One could say that I live in such a gym. Our northern borderlands are a place of self-exile and profound bleakness — at least, that’s what meets the untrained eye. Saint Lawrence County New York is a place where one one must constantly maintain a high level of psychological fitness to thrive. Everywhere, there are signs of failure, signs of addiction and grief; rusted bridges and caved-in houses and the limp gasps of a foundering economy. The weather does not kick the brain’s serotonin pump into high gear — in fact, it does the opposite. Like the heavy bar that weighs on the arms of a would-be Schwarzeneggger, the gloom of the whole earth here weighs the heart down — and as this cold gravity bears down on the spirit of a man, it commands a response with all of the urgency of a two-hundred-pound bar of iron.

There, crooked foundations slouch under the weight of sodden old trailer homes. Driving by, a toddling child might cry barefoot in the snow as his parents throw bottles at one another, screaming. The billboard a mile down advertises Narcan — a drug designed to prevent opiate overdose deaths. Shimmering, icy reeds lilt above frozen swamps over which an impossible blanket of grey wool hangs in haphazard formations — the overcast simply never ends. Everywhere one looks, the land is funereal and somber, eulogizing itself in howling winds and inviting death upon ice-ribboned county roads. This is the northernmost point of the State of New York: You can't get farther from Manhattan than here. This is a land of extremophiles, and just as the weightlifter's fleshy mass is activated into a heaving flash of action under the gravity of the bell-bar — the mind, emotions, and soul of the northern man must rise against the impossible weight of his life here.

At first, this endeavor feels unthinkable. It simply cannot be imagined. The first-time visitor to northern Saint Lawrence County pilots his vehicle breathlessly around the cold, grey world, by boarded-up buildings and haggard little strip malls and faceless border patrol outposts in hoary pastures. He notices that he is at the edge of the world; that this place feels like a void between two nations. We are not in America — we are not in Canada either. The compass spins and the sleet lashes the earth. A brand new F-350 is doing burnouts in the Tim Horton's parking lot, lit orange by ancient halogen village lamps; a Quebec-plated prius quickly drives off to avoid colliding with the maniacally spinning truck. At the Open Net tavern, hockey is on, and Labatt Blue — that national drink of northern Upstate — is flowing in torrents amid feverish howls. Scrolling Zillow on a damp motel mattress, the visitor notices that livable homes sell for as little as $30,000 in Massena. "There's a good reason for that," he says aloud, exasperated by this bizarre corner of the Empire State.

But these parts are the homeland of some of the strongest people in America today. In a landscape where "nowhere-ness" bleeds across every corner and cornfield, the human heart must be implacable. This is American Siberia — a crucible in which mere boys are hardened into kings of an obscure and unknowable mental province where the soul must accelerate blindly through the gloom. Here, a man must "grow his own" optimism and hope, and these people do so with profound abundance and expert skill. This is achieved through a diversity of means ranging from contented fireside poker games in quiet cottages to violent crime and hard drug abuse on the international border. Whatever approach a man takes to contending with the extreme formidability of Massena's challenge to the spirit — he does so with a flavor of abandon that somehow bridges the impossible chasm between the jocular pensioner on a chummy fishing trip and the desperate lunatic sprinting through a final fugue in the wilderness.

Most folks here are, of course, extremely genteel. Hearty and practical, the smiling old farmers take their paper cups of weak coffee at the local Stewart's gas station and — if they're feeling especially bold on a snow day — a couple pastries. Their well-oiled square-body trucks idle in dawn's streetlight-lit vapors; their greetings and goodbyes are long and warm, and in a handshake with any of them one feels the power of capable hands, even among the elderly. Their wives are at home, watching the day's weather on the old television that sits beside wallpapered plaster and windows that have seen ice storms that'd make a Lapplander blush. In the village, there is an aura of an almost Soviet no-nonsense mentality that is vague, serious, and sleepy. Old janitors unfurl soaked mops upon aging concrete floors at the high school or the hospital without fanfare; young roustabouts load up in vans for another day of fixing an infinity of dilapidated buildings. The red-eyed hotelier emerges from his lair with the tousled hair of fitful sleep, surveying the street to discern whether he'll be sliding home on ice or keeping the rubber of his tires in full contact with the asphalt.

In all residents of this northern borderland, humor lay half-sleeping below a no-nonsense surface: humor is the essential arrow in the quiver of all who inhabit extreme places. This natural penchant for a wholesome guffaw would serve at a dinner table or at a bar — and it would serve at the slaughtering of a cow or in a record-breaking natural disaster. They laugh the laughter of those who've ascended to the highest corridors of psychological fitness — each one of them is a walking happiness factory. They fabricate their own optimism and contentment, burning so brightly from within that they cannot be trounced by a month of hard dark rain or their remoteness from the relevant, easy places. These men are hulking paragons of mental strength and self-mastery. Humbly, quietly, they continue — a feat that weaker creatures cannot endure with a tenth as much ease in even the warmest beach-towns and the hottest big-city nightclubs.

And they cackle — they cackle the extreme laughter of the northman, which feels almost violent in its complete self-sufficiency. Through momentous eras of achievement and comfort and through the most squalid mires of poverty and disaster, they do not merely continue — they do so cackling a whole-body cackle that erupts as a paroxysm of otherworldly peace that has completely overcome the elements and the economic odds. Once you see this, you cannot un-see it — even the empty, boarded-up buildings on the streets of Massena cackle. The unemployment office, the shuttered church, the monotonous grey bridge, the Murmansk-like winter scenery — all of it, cackling unto infinity. And the achievement of this laughter is far more difficult to secure than even the greatest physiques on Muscle Beach — it is the peak human form, to which all men should aspire fervently.

Therefore, one should not avoid settling in depressing places like Massena — one should seek them out, if only for a few seasons. If you can succeed here financially, you can succeed anywhere. If you can succeed here mentally — you are unstoppable. For in this world of self-exile, you drink in the doom as you ride 70mph through the flat icy wastelands where ragged poplars crouch; you accelerate above the pavement, realizing that here, everything is possible. Here it is: the "wild, wild east" — America's Siberia. This is not the place to seek happiness from a middle-man or to hope to be blessed with the easy, warm, external contentment of false Edens: it is a land that can make you psychologically strong and powerful if you rise to its challenge. Every day, optimism is tested. It either wins and burns brighter than anything else, or you punk out and go somewhere "happier."