SEVEN
Mid-January, 2014. Flint is in the news, another financially strapped, predominantly Black city under state-imposed financial control. An unelected emergency manager advances a plan to save money by drawing the city’s water from the Flint River. My wife and I had visited Ima Nell between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the first such visit in almost a year. We were shocked by the extent of her frailty, her precipitous decline. Today, I sit stranded listening to Michigan Radio, the local NPR affiliate, recovering from surgery to repair chronic Achilles tendonitis. The same condition, untreated, had hobbled my father in his twilight years.
By late February, foot immobilized in a walking boot, we set off, my brother and I, bound for our mother’s Tennessee hometown, the place she has lived since our father died in Florida seventeen years earlier. She keeps a small, neat condo on high ground across the river from the old county courthouse—happier than she’s been since marrying and leaving home sixty-two years before. She’d been little more than a girl—young and in love, yet stricken with a longing for home from which she never recovered.
Lately she’s been falling, every tumble requiring costly EMS rescue. She is helpless to care for herself, no longer able to drive safely, cook, or manage her affairs. Her robust younger sister, whom she has come to rely on for care and support since returning home, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The two of them together are a hazardous combination of unintentional heedlessness, stubborn denial, and zany comedy duo. Not long ago, she opened her door to a Eureka vacuum cleaner salesman, a slick huckster who must have smelled blood in the water. She purchased an expensive model much too heavy and cumbersome to be practical. I had no idea vacuums were still sold door to door. Not long afterward, she bought a lightweight, inexpensive Shark at Walmart. Can openers, fasteners, and jar lids—insurmountable barriers. Trips to the mailbox are freighted with hazard enough to rival the Pacific Coast Trail. An expensive senior alert system goes unused at critical moments, the very contingency for which we had purchased it. An acquaintance of hers, a woman with nursing experience, offers to provide companionship and around-the-clock care in her rural home a few miles east of town. We’ve set aside two days, my brother and I. Time enough to assess things, convince her to leave her condo, negotiate a monthly fee, and make all the necessary arrangements. As the months drag on, we will make little effort to disabuse her of the belief she is only on temporary hiatus from her home.
Back home before dinner gets cold, our hope; naiveté laid bare. I am eager, a bit too gung-ho, perhaps, to play dutiful eldest son. Something roils inside. I have other muddled, ignoble reasons for making the trip. Chief among them grievance, shame, and a reservoir of raw, tangled emotion long suppressed. I yearn to surrender to aching need, burn to bear witness to the tragic opening scene of her inevitable decline. I fear she’ll be lost to me before we can—what—reconcile, forgive, redeem the years squandered? Everything else is for show, reprise of a role I can play in my sleep.
Passing through Ohio and Kentucky, climbing ever higher, pressing on into Tennessee, we utter euphemisms for feelings we can’t begin to articulate; equivocate and dissemble. Banalities roll off the tongue, sweet and cloying. Dusk blankets the Appalachian foothills. Ima Nell and all her possessions, a condominium and its contents, a twenty-year-old car that embodies the heroic myth of her late husband await our arrival, poised for final disposition over the coming eighteen months.
EIGHT
Flint is a river town due south of Saginaw Bay, settled by fur traders, lumbermen, land speculators, and brokers of farm commodities, incorporated in 1855 to accommodate the needs of a vibrant carriage manufacturing trade, ballooning apace to support a nascent automobile industry. The local labor pool of the day was shallow—people of German and Scandinavian stock who had already found prosperity growing corn, silage, and sugar beets and raising livestock. Immigrants from European nations deemed less desirable, like Ireland, southern Italy, Poland, and new nations risen from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with the offspring of former enslaved people fleeing Jim Crow, are wooed for their willingness to take the worst jobs for the shortest wages. Grateful for work, sufficiently constrained by a capricious social contract so as not to sink their teeth to deeply into the hand that fed them.
Industry and citizenry, like the first European settlers and the Ojibwa before them, drew Flint River water until 1967, when the city connected to the reliable but distant Detroit municipal water system. The river lends the city a disarming leer, a drunken grin plastered between the hangdog creases of the interstates. The ironic heart of the joke—abundant, clear flowing water drew the first humans. Today, the lack of safe water threatens continued human habitation. The damage took less than a lifetime. I cross the river several times a day, delivering water to people living near its banks. In some places it flows stunned through a barren concrete trough. Little houses on shaggy oxbows, Jon boats in yards, herald slower, cooler sections, shady and inviting on hot afternoons.
The river runs a shameful gauntlet, doomed to parade past what’s left of this once vibrant city of hard-working union men and women. It mirrors the surviving edifices of the wealthy, long decamped, and the more modest dwellings of the forgotten and forsaken. The river leaves town quietly, wanders north to vanish into an indifferent Shiawassee, before quietly drowning itself in Saginaw Bay.
NINE
After weeks of stacking water in dining rooms, hallways, basements, garages, bedrooms, and bathrooms; under stairwells, behind couches, next to stoves and refrigerators; on counter tops, coffee tables and landings; outside, on screen porches, I’m still surprised to hear the hectoring chirp of a smoke detector with a dead battery. Chirping, common as brimming ashtrays, threadbare carpet, pungent cooking odors, pit bulls, crime bars, blaring televisions, and children rendered mute by our sudden, inexplicable presence in their living room. The first few times I state the obvious, as if any reminder were needed.
“My son’s coming tomorrow.”
“I called the landlord yesterday.”
“Shit, I ain’t even notice it no more.”
I observed a few small rituals whenever I visited my mother in her final years. They required minimal effort, took less time than making toast, but satisfied a yearning in both of us for much more, desire subsumed for something considerably less, but much safer. Upon arrival, after a perfunctory embrace, before hauling in my bag, I would dutifully replace her furnace filter and put fresh batteries in the smoke alarms.
The AmeriCorps kids who volunteer with the Red Cross had, up until the water crisis, busied themselves installing residential smoke detectors throughout Flint. Now, their talents have been repurposed to install faucet filters. I don’t know if replacing dead batteries remains part of their official duties. I learn to ignore the chirping, stepping around busted recliners, leaving a trail of bottled water down dim hallways, working quick, quick, back to the truck—on to the next stop.
TEN
It’s not much of a plan. Drive to Flint. Present myself to the proper authorities. Lose myself in mindless, cleansing labor. The little research I’ve done confirms that the American Red Cross is the official portal for organized volunteer efforts in Flint, aside from the ad hoc efforts of churches and local service organizations. In the earliest days of the crisis, a ragtag army of citizens, city workers, law enforcement, and Michigan National Guard mobilized to distribute water and filters. The American Red Cross Flint chapter isn’t too hard to find. It’s on the I-69 service drive near downtown, just south of the University of Michigan-Flint campus. The Brutalist, seventies-era building is just up the road from a General Motors assembly plant and Sitdowners Memorial Park, commemorating the famous Flint Sit Down Strike. In the months before Christmas, 1936, a nascent United Auto Workers union froze auto production in Flint, winning legitimacy and wage and working condition concessions from General Motors.