Behind Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, which hosts the county’s Emergency Warming Center on the nights it gets activated, there’s a sharp drop-off towards Fulton Street and the east.
If you walk out there, out from the warmth and press of people crowded into the basement where cots and blankets and coffee pots fill the available space, you can watch the sun rise about 7:45 a.m.
Walking through the group just outside the back door getting a post-supper smoke break just after the last few guests checked in last night, you could come to this same spot and see the Licking County Courthouse lit for the holidays. We’d considered having a tree for Christmas in the warming center area, but it would take up space we needed for practical purposes. There’s a tree upstairs, in the dining space the guests can enjoy during mealtimes.
There’s some historical layering going on here atop the Fulton Street bluff, which bends past West Main Street to run east and west along Maholm Street. The 10 feet or so of elevation marks the difference between bottomland along Raccoon Creek and the glacial outwash terrace that is the plateau on which the 2,000 year old Newark Earthworks were laid out. Just to the north of the warming center location is the notch in the bluff where the due east-west avenue extended from the edge of the plateau to the Octagon a mile west of here.
Talking to the guests at the warming center, they are well familiar with the edges of the creek, the lay of the land, the distance from here to the hospital one way, towards the Octagon, and about the same 1.5 miles the other way to the courthouse. Most of them — even those in wheelchairs or on rolling walkers — have made that three-mile journey from one end to the other at one time or another.
The idea that Native Americans once walked these same intervals is something I end up talking to guests about. Most of them are generally aware of earthworks and parks, but the age catches some by surprise, and the fact that today’s tribal nations once resident in Ohio are coming back to visit and honor these sites is usually cause for further interest and questions.
Our landscape today is not kind to people who find themselves without housing, and making their way across it on foot, or surviving in the middle of it without solid shelter, is what our guests all have in common. That’s why when they hear we’ve assessed the risk of high winds or low temperatures to where we pull together the community-wide network of volunteers and open up the warming center overnight, they appreciate the shared effort. Some are grimly silent, and understandably so; other guests are intent on helping us sweep and carry out trash, chiding each other on cleaning up spills and encouraging one another on how they can get by once this respite is over. The community effort is not just “us” for “them,” the guests are always pitching in to one degree or another.
It is a healing place, this warming center. Guests come with deep wounds, some physical (one set of challenges we try to assist with), many emotional as betrayal or abuse has created some of the circumstances that bring people here unhoused, needing respite and rest. We have visiting nurses and program staff who come by along with the general volunteers to see what specific needs can be met; there are counselors and clergy who come just because they want to be present and speak, but more often, they listen. Listening alone can be healing; at the very least, the start of healing.
Standing on the Fulton Street bluff, watching the sunrise, aware of the lines and avenues and embankments still present in the neighborhoods around us, along with those now just traced on old maps, it is hard not to wonder about the healing nature of this place millennia ago. The journey here, the walk from the creek to the northern avenue and along it to the Octagon; perhaps a circuit from one geometric enclosure to another, from one ceremonial site to the next, between the rivers that frame this upland . . . was it meant to be a healing journey? Wouldn’t it be?
It’s cold, and time to go back inside. But uncomfortably, our next step is to close the “emergency warming center” for the day and ultimately to turn the guests back out onto the streets, today’s blacktop and concrete pathways, sharing the journey with high speed mechanical vehicles, and perhaps a vague awareness of ancient reflections moving more at your pace on foot.
How did those former builders, workers in soil and clay, weavers of reeds and branches, keep themselves warm and safe and alive in their day, in this same place? What did healing look like for them, individually and in community? Is that healing still resident here in the landscape we travel today?
But it’s time for those meditations to end: there’s sweeping and mopping and stowing away to do. The time of shelter is ending, and we are back into the chill of a new day, all of us looking to survive, to endure, to heal. Right here in Newark.
Jeff Gill is a freelance writer, wandering storyteller, and occasional preacher in Granville, Ohio.