34 Springfields
My mom is obsessed with litter in the neighborhood. She keeps track of shattered beer bottles hurled out the windows of cars, cigarette butts, and tiny drug baggies — the one filled with white powder, the one hypodermic needle she found. Also, the rampant dog poop problem. The last one at least she feels she can change. She talks about it constantly with our neighbors, spies on people walking their dogs — do they have a plastic baggie hiding on their person or are they perpetrators or not? She created a post on the Middleford Home Owner’s Association forum dedicated to heightening community awareness of the problem. She is forever researching natural methods to keep dogs off our two lawns — perhaps jointly a square four feet — and has lately roped off the new sod with thin yellow rope drawn across garden stakes. My mother, the activist.
It’s a common misconception that there’s a Springfield in every state. There are only 34. Regardless, I imagine that there is a town like Springfield, Virginia in every state: transitional and piecemeal, made up of many cultures yet without a single unifying characteristic. There are schools, places of religion, houses upon houses. Only the winding I-95 connects Springfield to other towns and counties in the D.C. metro area, chronically constipated with cars driven by people trying to get elsewhere.
June 21, 2017, an article in the Springfield Connection reads: “Murder of Reston Teen: ‘A Deadly Case of Road Rage’ No evidence of hate crime; investigation continues.” In Springfield, things could always be worse. This article, one of the top stories of the week, serves as insight into what Springfield wants to hear. It could have been worse. We don’t always reflect the greater problems of the country. The article covers the vigils held for the seventeen-year-old Muslim girl run down by a car. It talks about harmony and love, and the support that the ADAMS center mosque felt from the interfaith community, and other such acts of solidarity. The Springfield Connection article does not dwell on how the car’s driver, 22-year-old Darwin Martinez Torres chased after the girl with a baseball bat. The message is familiar to me: Springfield is a community.
When I spent the months after my Freshman year of college scrambling to find a summer job anywhere that I wouldn’t run into people that I went to high school with, I argued with my parents about why I wouldn’t apply to work at Chili’s, Bertuccis, or worse still, the Kingstowne movie theater. I applied to Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, what I considered to most closely resemble places of culture in Springfield. I received silence on behalf of my potential employers. Ultimately, swallowing my abhorrence of nepotism, I accepted help from my neighbor and began working reception for the nearby salon she managed inventory for. Before that, several weeks into my listless summer, I lazed on the couch in my parent’s house and wrote the hook to a song I never finished.
“Suburbs and strip malls are killing my brain,
All cement and cellophane.”
Despite its pop-punk styled themes, the song never reached into further understanding beyond my firm, cynical sentiment. Much like my understanding of the only hometown I’ve ever had — a place whose families were small towners who had never left the country, or oft-ignored immigrant families, or rotating cast of military families, like mine, cycling in and out of the Pentagon — the song was all surface, no substance. I hated Springfield. Why did I hate Springfield? There has always been an underlying insidiousness to communities of seemingly happy families.
I marvel at how easy it is to enter the West Springfield High School parking lot. It was always an open campus when I went there, and still is. I remember how in gym class we’d all gawk at the middle-aged men who shared our track for their midday runs. It shocked us then that no helicopter parents had entered complaints to close the campus to protect us from strangers. It surprises me now that I’ve pulled my car into a parking spot perfectly overlooking the football field.
The latest “scandals” I’ve heard of concerning my hometown are primarily related to the growing local presence of the MS-13 gang. A lot of teenagers have gone briefly missing only to turn up weeks later. A couple people have died. And it’s reported just like that in news and gossip alike: isolated incidents perpetrated by “criminals,” dehumanized the second that a teenager fulfills the gangster stereotype.
Unrelated to gang violence, but speculated as such at first, a 22 year old woman — West Springfield High School class of 2011 — turned up dead in the lake a couple years back, the one with the biggest hills next to it where we all used to go sledding when it snowed, where older kids go at night to sit on the fence and smoke pot. Articles reporting her death don’t picture her at all. Not leaping, suspended in midair, about to make a basket in her navy and orange West Springfield Spartan basketball uniform. These articles show Huntsman Lake, its placid water disturbed only by a still flock of paddling geese. The reasons for her death were never released.
Otherwise, it’s been quiet since they arrested my high school band director the week of senior prom.
A brooding selfie. June 12, 2014, 5:14pm. Mr. Einuis had been arrested that morning in Wind Symphony rehearsal. Or, rather, the police had escorted him out of rehearsal and arrested him in the parking lot.
“If anyone thinks they can continue the rehearsal, do so,” he had said as the officers marched him out. Without an explanation, we struggled process his detention, and the gravity of our world wouldn’t shift just yet. A student must have finally reported him for one of his mood swings. He was a large man with a large personality. He ran the band with unorthodox rage and passion, but that improved the band. We practiced as much as heavy homework loads would allow both to avoid disappointing him, and to win his jubilation after a successful rehearsal or concert. If someone had reported him just because he was probably — band members agreed behind his back — undiagnosed bipolar, it was selfish of the student. Our final concert was that night. We had planned to record a selection of songs to use for our application to the National Concert Band Festival. In the photo I grimace. I’m in my mother’s Honda with the seatbelt on in the school parking lot, in my black polyester concert dress and standard issue pearls, a pair of beaded earrings that I still wear. My eyes are deep green. I think I remember thinking while taking that photo that I was witnessing the end of an era. I was even more melodramatic back then. But then, we never did submit that application to the National Concert Band festival.
Mr. Einuis was arrested for propositioning a fourteen-year-old boy. It made sense, said the parents. Happens with a lot of teachers. That’s why they get jobs around children. Everyone was talking about it. The story even broke across the Fox 5 station for the DC Metropolitan area. Everyone had an opinion. Most adults were supportive, hoped the band was coping, offering whatever they could do to make life in the buzzing hallways more tolerable. Others were happy to take the opportunity to unabashedly emphasize one detail of the case, the victim: “boy.” They loved the scandal of the married band teacher, not only being outed as a pedophile, but a gay pedophile to boot. As a whole, Springfield isn’t homophobic. From individual to individual, some Springfielders are, and even those who aren’t don’t bother themselves to understand the nuances of LGBT+ identities or how they’re completely separate from fetishes and mental illnesses. As such, conversation surrounding Einuis’s arrest unflinchingly conflated pedophilia with homosexuality. Of course it was a boy, many said, of course.
Three and a half years later, in the West Springfield Parking lot, I can see that the marching band has grown. I saw in a Facebook video posted by a band mom that the uniforms have been changed from the white pants and shoes of my day to accent our (sometimes) impeccable marching technique — a roll step whose straight-legged stride balanced between the front heel and back toes used to create a triangle of light that you could see all the way down a row of marchers. Now the marchers wear black pants, and all of their legs are bent. Maybe it was the end of my era. But the band is bigger now, and that means that the students are happy.
We weren’t always happy, but we were good. And, as Mr. Einuis used to say, “Getting good is really hard, but being good is really fun.” Even now, years later, I struggle to separate the different identities of Mr. Einuis as we knew him. Every once in a while, I’ll run into someone I was friends with in high school band, and the topic will inevitably come up. On one hand, he was a pedophile, someone who caused real distress and harm to more than one survivor, on the other hand, he was a man struggling with one or many mental illnesses, on still another hand he was our band director and only teacher that knew me all four years of high school. I have a lot of fond memories of his class, and learned a lot about self-discipline from him — ironic, I know. He wrote my college recommendation letter. Yet, as far as reporters were concerned, only one facet of Larry Einuis mattered, and I know that it is the only aspect that anyone in Springfield will remember when he is released under probation in the year 2026.
Over Thanksgiving break, I picked up some groceries at the local Giant. The boy bagging my groceries, after eagerly shaking my hand — an act which did not faze cashier in the slightest — asked me if I went to West Springfield. I told him I used to.
“Did you know Mr. Einuis?” he asked.
I laughed, mostly because I knew that Einuis’ continued legacy could only have one source. “Yeah, I did.”
“He’s in jail now. Twelve years!”
I know I shouldn’t, but I do feel bad for Mr. Einuis. And worse for his wife who has had to continue to face the community following his arrest. She was and is still a middle school band director in the area. I’m sure she’s not free of the lingering rumors either.
As I watch from the parking lot, I note that at least the color guard is good. Our color guard used to be small because anyone who was more involved in dance than band had trouble drinking our militaristic Kool-Aid, and dealing with Einuis’s mood swings. That’s what he used to be famous for, his self-described “highs and lows,” which ranged from euphoria at a successful concert to rage-filled tantrums at one too many missed notes in a rehearsal. Whatever struggles these current students face, it doesn’t keep them from the activities they love, and it doesn’t infiltrate their focus. Their hand-over-hand flag twirling is tight and in sync. When they send their rifles spiraling up in neat circles into the air, most of the rifles snap back down into the hands of their owners instead of hurtling against the rubber track.
What is Springfield? Once farm land, then the small town between more interesting market towns, then the small patch of suburbia outside of D.C. only really notable for its inclusion in the “D.C. Metro Area.” Two streets away from my high school winds a road with two lanes going either direction called Old Keene Mill Rd. named after James Keene’s saw and grist mill which was constructed between 1796 and 1800. With a story like that, you ought to be picturing a rural town, with low buildings and local shops. A coca-cola machine outside a general store. The neighboring Occoquan has that and more. Its quasi-gothic Victorian townhouses squat aside the town’s namesake river, and all up and down one street there are small artisan shops and wine shops and inns that serve Virginia peanut soup and promises of ghosts where the old theater burned down. You can drive to Occoquan in 15 minutes or less, but it’s not part of Springfield.
In Springfield, the road which my old high school lay just off of was Rolling Road, so called, I had been told, because farmers used to roll their hay bales down the long hill toward the market the next town over. When the marching band’s charter buses used to turn the corner onto Rolling Road, our sleepy heads nodding in the late evening/early morning light of evenly spaced streetlamps, our band manager, Gretchen — a hyper-organized student leader who was always packing Lily Pulitzer gear — used to trill every time, without fail:
“We’re rolling onto Rolling!” She was always met by groans, but secretly we loved her for it. We made a community of our own in Springfield, as many do, even when it failed to function as a larger community.
What is Springfield? It was formed officially in 1847 around the Orange and Alexandria Railroad’s Daingerfield Station, named for Henry Daingerfield, whose “Springfield Farm” gave the town its name. After 1851 they built a post office, then another post office in 1877. During the Civil War there was a skirmish and a Confederate raid at post office number one.
Mr. Einuis used to do an impression of a “real” southerner, someone who lived south of Northern Virginia.
“Civil War! Civil war?” He’d exclaim, mocking, shaking his head vigorously, “There was nothing civil about it!”
Within those same four years at West Springfield I got in an argument on Facebook with a bass clarinet player, a heavyset boy with blonde hair and dark eyebrows. He tried to tell me that the KKK, as a modern institution, wasn’t actually racist. It’s about white pride, he informed me.
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That argument nearly cost me my leadership position in the marching band. My drum major interview lasted 20 minutes, twice as long as any other candidate, as a panel of sectional instructors and Mr. Einuis interrogated me on my actions.
“Do you think that it’s possible to put back together a feather pillow if you tore it open on top of the Washington Monument?” Mr. Einuis asked me, straight faced. “You may have alienated a member of the band when you started that argument.”
“That single band member was in the process of alienating and threatening a far greater majority of the band.” I objected.
“I don’t disagree with your argument, only your choice of battleground,” he told me. That’s a direct quote. I wrote it down later that night. Facebook, a battleground. I was incredulous then, but in 2017, when activist campaigns are forged with hashtags and presidents threaten nuclear war on Twitter, it makes a lot more sense.
“Do you think that it’s possible to collect all the feathers and rebuild that pillow?” He wanted me to apologize to a racist for calling him out for being a racist.
I swallowed my pride. “I think that with some dedication, you could try.”
I got the position.
In 1970, more than 90% of Springfield was white and middle class.
In 2012, Springfield still acts like it’s 90% white despite paying lip service to diversity. The local paper, the Springfield Connection publishes a web article, “Schools Attract Immigrants to Fairfax.” The author promises that the downsides of new immigrant families who don’t join the neighborhood watch or local committees will fade as their children “assimilate.” It concludes with the promise of better food, asking that for the next “Independence Day potluck picnic, please ask your new neighbors to bring along a special dish from their homeland to share.”
Meanwhile, if you read the Middleford neighborhood Homeowners Association’s online forum, you’d think that “Teenage Angst” was the root of all the neighborhood’s problems. According to the forum site, Nextdoor.com, the average age of users in my neighborhood is 50 years old. It doesn’t surprise me that accusations of trouble on the forum consistently accuse teenagers for stirring it up.
The accusations flash across my screen like headlines. Teens! They speed in BMWs while texting, endangering the toddlers at the playground. They throw bricks at street signs and then bike away before anyone can identify them. One neighbor posts, “Someone played mailbox-baseball with our mailboxes — AGAIN!…Gotta Love Teenagers.” But when another neighbor needs a lawn mowed or pet sat, “it’s the perfect job for a teenager!” As far as Middleford homeowners are concerned, they themselves couldn’t possibly be the problem.
This past September, someone left a series of racist notes on Asha Tahan’s car. The notes, Tahan describes in a Middleford Homeowners Association forum post, ranged from, “go back home monkeys” to “something about cotton collection.” She didn’t tell her children. “I didn’t want my kids to feel bad” she wrote, “but yesterday my daughter found a bag filled with trash in the top of her car…we are not sure where this will end.” Tahan is a linguist working toward her PhD, and Middleford resident of 9 years. The neighborhood responded, vowing vigilance and attesting to the neighborhood’s diversity as a comfort. The general message is this: the person who committed this crime does not represent the neighborhood as a whole.
One neighbor responded, “rest assured these cowards will get caught eventually. Please don’t let these racists affect you…The majority of people in our region are kind and accepting of everyone!”
One said, “We recently felt the need to put a yard sign that says “hate has no home here”. I hope one of your neighbors will come forward.” As though heartfelt signs were lasting solutions and the confessions of a threatening racist neighbor would be comforting.
Another: “Please know that this is not typical of most Americans. Most of us are kind and compassionate.” Still another blames “ignorant white trash.”
One helpfully commented “Do not make too much of these unfortunate incidents. In a country of over 300M, you will find people like the ones who are trying to annoy you. Spend more time thinking about all the good gestures you have encountered over the past nine years”
And then, my personal favorite: “This is likely an immature schoolboy trying to be a tough guy. Nothing to do with racism, imho.” Another neighbor cites the story of an Iranian neighbor who once had his mailbox bashed, a problem shared by many members of the neighborhood thanks to — you guessed it — teens who indiscriminately “get a thrill out of causing mischief,” and offered dismissively, “It may be you are not the only ones experiencing this.”
Several other commenters recommended that the mother report the harassment to the police. One suggests the installation of a “fairly affordable” security camera out front, to catch the perpetrator in the act. All neighbors agree that the crime makes them “sick,” “sorry,” and “saddened.”
The mother thanked the neighbors for their comforting words, saying, “I didn’t expect less…I am really overwhelmed by your kind responses”
In 2012, according to election data, Fairfax County was 57.19% liberal. On my most recent visit, I went for a run through the Middleford neighborhood. The “Hate has no Home Here” sign stuck in one neighbor’s lawn lives on the same street as the bumper of a jacked-up Chevy truck which boasts NRA and “anti-terrorist” bumper stickers.
June 8, 2017, Vernon Miles of the Alexandria Gazette packet interviews an Alexandria community member comments on anti-black and anti-Islamic posters plastered around Springfield’s slightly more liberal neighboring Alexandria. ““The kind of racism that people talk about in the south is a little bit different from what you talk about in Alexandria… a town where nobody wanted to talk about it.” He calls it a “Nice-Nasty town.”
Springfield is middle schools named after white American authors. Irving, Poe, Twain. Nearby High Schools are named for their towns — West Springfield, Annandale South County — or other white men — Thomas Jefferson, Edison, Lee (Robert E.), Key (Francis Scott), J.E.B. Stuart. This past July, the Fairfax County School Board voted to rename the last one by no later than the start of the 2019 school year. So there’s some progress, however slow.
In 1946 the realtor Edward Carr made the real Springfield when he subdivided it for urban development along the newly formed Henry Shirley Highway, AKA I-95, AKA the road you must take to go anywhere other than Springfield. He figured it was the last undeveloped area within 12 miles of Washington D.C.
What is Springfield? A lot of houses made of the same materials but priced differently. Neo-colonial townhouses, normal sized houses and McMansions all with the same beige siding or brick, everything painted fading evergreen or navy, or farmhouse red. 1960s ranch houses. Some new developments for apartment complexes, but mostly neighborhoods of 3–4 bedroom houses packed side by side by side, one manicured lawn shared between two houses, the cement sidewalk stretching on and on.
What is Springfield? A town where the most exciting things to happen were the refurbishment of the mall and the reconstruction of the high school. These are exciting, in a way. The Target parking lot had become notorious for crime, and the cement block of the Macy’s had long turned grey with 40 years’ exposure to dirt and exhaust. For a long time, the manager of the men’s department at Macy’s describes, people would come in, grab an armful of clothing from a rack, and look him in the eye as they walked out the automatic doors without paying. Now the rebuilt mall has valet parking and a farmers’ market on Saturdays. It’s hard to find a parking space, even on a Tuesday in the middle of the day.
Springfield community members discuss crime in soundbites. They dispense “Did you hear?” stories with disgust and forbidden delight, occasionally offering opinions but rarely interrogating them. It reminds me of Donald Trump, when he retweets hearsay as fact one moment, then denounces news sources as fake the next. Everyone enjoys being an authority, but not all will do the necessary homework.
The online nexus for the Middleford Home Owner’s Association features a post by “Certified Crime Prevention Specialist,” Michael who’s advertising “The DEA Drug Take Back Initiative — Saturday October 28th.” He describes a drop off box in the lobby of the West Springfield District Station in which individuals can deposit unused of expired medications. Does Springfield have a prescription drug abuse problem? Your guess is as good as mine.
When towns like Springfield try to claim that they aren’t symptoms of national problems, they delay progress. Where else do national struggles with opioid addiction, race, mental health, fear of LGBT+ identities, the criminalization of individuals, and insufficient education about intersectional issues begin except on the microlevel? If the privileged majority silences challenging conversations, it caters to ego and the fiction of homogeneous normalcy while stunting the growth of a real community which supports all its members and confronts trouble head-on.
I wasn’t a good ally until I interrogated where I was from. As a former military brat, for much of my childhood I had no hometown, and when we settled in Springfield after my father’s retirement, I did not want one. For a long time, I denied that Springfield had any effect on me. At first, I thought that my cosmopolitan, international school education made me better than progressive-presenting Springfield. It delayed my education of local issues. Springfield and I have been made of the same stuff all along.
Later, I had to realize that Springfield was not confined to the serpentine reaches of I-95 — something I could escape by harmonizing with the echo-chamber of my liberal college. When Barack Obama got elected, like many others, I had hopes that we were entering a post-racial America. When Donald Trump got elected I, along with many other liberal students, trudged across my campus to a silent mourning dirge. Meanwhile, my peers of color shouted, “Wake up! Racism never disappeared. We’ve been working hard, where have you been?”
For the privileged of the nation’s many Springfields, it can be tempting to slumber until the next hashtag “wakes” us. It can be tempting to fret about dog poop and teenage angst, and pretend that the government treats us all equally, boasting color-blindness and unity. Or, we can tear down the white picket fence, the walls, and the glass ceilings, and get to work building supportive communities out of the hometowns we actually have.
