Ghost Town

I don’t know what it feels like to die, and hopefully won’t for quite a while, but I imagine that it’s a bit like the day before a winter storm.

It’s not a terrible analogy, if you linger on it. Ahead of some catastrophic event set to incapacitate you, the top priority – the only priority, really – is getting your affairs in order. Do what you need to do and get where you need to be, because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed to anyone, but especially not to you.

For my last day on Earth, I decided to drive to a Cleveland State basketball game, while doing my best to forget about the inevitable. I listened to old songs that transported me to a different time and place, stopped a couple times to enjoy the view, and blew up my calorie budget with a Frosty.

I also thought a little bit about how I drove to CSU basketball games on each of my last two birthdays as well. The logic, maybe on the verge of rationalization, was in the vicinity of “well, this is what I do, I can’t think of a more appropriate use of this finite time.” Some people use milestone occasions to do something big and different, as they’re able, but the writer in me sees the literary value in going out just as you lived. There’s really no reason to blow up the core dynamic. Monica and Chandler don’t have to move to the suburbs in the last episode. The show can just…end.

This time was a bit different in at least one respect, though. The game was in Youngstown, a mere 80 miles from my house, and I was a day early. I’d never go to Youngstown a day early given any other option, but this time, there wasn’t.

My initial destination, the downtown DoubleTree by Hilton inside the historic Stambaugh Building, certainly felt like a bucket list “spend it while you can” experience. My previous overnight stay involved a Motel 6 in Oak Creek, WI that smelled and sounded like a house party, an idea that carried some added authenticity through the fact that some guests appeared to be living there. The night before that saw me at a Super 8 in Green Bay, a place that didn’t offer the same chance of a contact high, just a broken vending machine next to a photo of Brett Favre.

A king bed in a four-star hotel with room service, in the heart of one of the Horizon League’s #MajorCities? A space where I wouldn’t be afraid to turn on a black light? Sign me up. I checked in, walked a few blocks to a junior hockey game, came up with amateur assessments of a few skaters with seemingly unlimited tomorrows, then returned to Room 401 for as much gluttony as I could tolerate.

Next thing I knew, I was awkwardly sprawled across the bed, as if my body wasn’t sure what to do with that much surface area. My headphones – I’ve needed sound to sleep since middle school – were on the floor, tangled up in the long-ejected blankets.

Instinctively, I grabbed my phone off the nightstand. 8:34. I guess I wasn’t dead.

Maybe an hour later, I ventured down a silent hallway, clomped down the Stambaugh Building’s 120-year-old staircase, then past a locked restaurant with chairs on its tables, and out the front door, where I was confronted with a sight both familiar and novel: A good seven or eight inches of snow had fallen overnight, with that total continuing to expand by the minute, on the way to a final tally between 12 and 15.

I paused to look up and down Wick Street, which was covered in a ghostly haze that, under different circumstances, could have been mistaken for the afterlife, that far-off, yet comfortable, realm. The silent, ethereal beauty of that moment was somehow both liminal and tangible.

Also, right about then, I realized that I had yet to see any signs of life beyond my own that morning. Maybe, my mind began to wander, it was everyone else who died. Maybe I had misread the signs the day before, and the cancelation of events from college basketball games to my nephew’s birthday party was brought on by an imminent apocalypse. Maybe I was the lone survivor, the last of my species, now forced into managing a futile survival.

Regardless, absent any other idea of what to do in that situation, I slung a backpack containing a laptop and several extra pairs of socks over my left shoulder, and started walking down the middle of the vacant road, up a hill and into the veiled unknown.

As any disaster film aficionado knows, there’s generally a point somewhere in the middle of the second act when the protagonist slowly encounters other survivors, who then coordinate to either fight back against an existential threat or learn to manage their new reality.

Slowly, but surely, that began to happen to me as well. My first encounter with another human involved someone who tried to follow me north on four wheels, but had to retreat when learning that his Honda wasn’t built for the conditions. Somewhere around Rayen Avenue, there was another pedestrian who thought better than to try to get anywhere with two-wheel-drive, and we exchanged knowing waves.

StoneFruit Coffee offered more than a greeting, defying all expectations simply by being open to serve a latte and a breakfast sandwich. The mere presence of that staff of two and their functioning equipment, serving as a refuge from the lunar landscape outside, was notable enough to draw in a news crew from WFMJ-TV just as I was leaving.

A few blocks, a couple tissues, and one more hill later, I made it to Zidian Family Arena at Beeghly Center, and ran into about five more people two hours ahead of Sunday’s game. Most of them seemed a bit stunned, both at the fact that they made it inside and that they had to work that day at all.

Despite Youngstown State’s best efforts to keep people away from the contest, roughly 15 fans eventually showed up to watch the Penguins thrash CSU. That number, of course, doesn’t count the teams themselves and other necessary personnel, which went through their own harrowing journeys to get there. YSU coach Melissa Jackson picked up her players at their respective apartments. Vikings director of basketball operations Hanna Zerr, according to assistant coach Jenna Bolstad, “planned our trip to Youngstown about five or six different times.” The home school’s athletic director, Ron Strollo, ended up running the clock since nobody else was around to do it.

Each came away from the unique happening with a story of plunging headfirst into the unknown, and coming out okay on the other side.

Mine ended, as it usually does, by talking to Chris Kielsmeier, who greeted me with a surprised “What are you doing here?”

In that moment, I shrugged. That evening, I realized how I should’ve answered.

“Cheating death for one more day.”