a small wooden hut on his property in New England. It’s about a writer’s fastidious vanity project, a “simple” structure executed with the help of an architect, a builder, and frequent consultations with the ghosts of Thoreau, Le Corbusier, Aristotle, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But while I sometimes found the combination of philosophical musing and practical building applications a bit precious—do you really need the first century B.C. writings of Vitruvius to decide on the pitch of your roof?—there’s no denying that Pollan tapped into some of the elemental forces that had a hold on me. He helped me understand the intrinsic power of houses. They aren’t just investments; they define us.
“Like the clothes Adam and Eve were driven by shame to put on, the house is an indelible mark of our humanity, of our difference from both the animals and the angels,” he wrote. “It is a mark of our weakness and power both, for along with the fallibility implied in the need to build a shelter, there is at the same time the audacity of it all—reaching up into the sky, altering the face of the land. After Babel, building risked giving offense to God, for it was a usurpation of His creative powers, an act of hubris. That, but this too: Look at what our hands have made!”
I wasn’t building a house, but this was exactly the feeling that came over me after completing grandiose projects like replacing the toilet seat in our only bathroom, a seemingly simple task requiring three trips to the hardware store for expensive tools after I discovered the bolts holding the seat in place were threaded into the tank, submerged in water, totally inaccessible, and completely rusted. After puncturing my left palm with a flathead screwdriver and irreparably scratching the toilet bowl with a hacksaw, victory was mine. A new toilet seat. I, too, could exalt in the power of creation, once I disinfected my hand and stopped cursing the plumbing gods. It was glorious.
Despite the growing list of minor injuries I racked up whenever I worked with tools of any sort, the house became a refuge for us. We felt safe. Secure. For me, it was a totally unexpected development, but it wasn’t the only one. Reassuring memories of the modest two-story house with faded green aluminum siding where I grew up in Flint started flooding back to me at unexpected moments. I found myself thinking about the different rooms: the upstairs bedroom with the Nerf hoop and Fran Tarkenton posters I shared with my older brother; the breezy screened-in front porch where I often sat with my mom in the summer after dinner; the tiny bathroom with a tub but no shower that all five family members somehow shared. I had odd but pleasant dreams where I was driving a convertible around the familiar streets of Flint, calling out various landmarks with a megaphone like a tour guide: “On your left is the store where Saint Mary’s students used to shoplift Hostess Ho Hos after football practice. And on your right is the fence I successfully jumped in fourth grade, narrowly escaping four unknown kids intent on kicking my ass for no particular reason.” It was as if the love of my new home reignited all the warm feelings I had for my old one. There was just one problem. I was pretty sure I’d never had exceptionally fond memories of Flint before. Something weird was going on here.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1984, I couldn’t wait to escape Flint. A pretentious teenager with a new-wave haircut—a mullet in reverse—who made a big show of reading Harper’s magazine and The Catcher in the Rye, I viewed Flint as a cultural backwater, nothing more than a dying factory town.
I thought Ben Hamper, a Flint autoworker turned best-selling author, pretty much summed up the place in his hilarious book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line:
Flint, Michigan. The Vehicle City. Greaseball Mecca. The birthplace of thud-rockers Grand Funk Railroad, game show geek Bob Eubanks and a hobby shop called General Motors. A town where every infant twirls a set of channel locks in place of a rattle. A town whose collective bowling average is four times higher than the IQ of its inhabitants. A town that genuflects in front of used-car lots and scratches its butt with the jagged peaks of the automotive sales chart. A town where having a car up on blocks anywhere on your property bestows upon you a privileged sense of royalty. Beer Belly Valhalla. Cog Butcher of the world. Gravy on your french fries.
There were so many residents scrambling to escape in the eighties that renting a U-Haul was almost as tough as finding gainful employment. Moving trucks beelined to places with better weather and more jobs. Florida. Georgia. Texas. California. Assembly lines had never encouraged creative thinking, and there seemed to be a bunker mentality among those lucky enough to have a job in Flint. They were hunkering down, hoping to avoid the layoffs as long as possible, maybe even make it all the way to retirement. Life in Flint was risky, but it was no longer a place for risk takers. The future was somewhere else.
My family joined the flood of Flint refugees. I headed off to college in Washington, D.C. My brother found a full-time job teaching and coaching at a small Catholic grade school in Jacksonville, Florida. My two sisters, happy to escape the Michigan winters, followed him there and soon landed work. They all lived in the same apartment complex. Jacksonville was not an unfamiliar locale. The family had briefly lived there before I was born. It was the navy town where my parents had met and fallen in love. So when McLaren Hospital offered my mom a buyout with lifetime healthcare and a small pension in 1986, she took it and moved to Jacksonville. She wasn’t eager to leave Flint, but she missed her kids and didn’t like living in our old house all alone. Everyone except my grandmother had said their goodbyes to the Vehicle City.
As an undergraduate studying political science, I wasn’t exactly proud of my Flint heritage. I would sometimes lie and say I was from Ann Arbor to avoid the disdain that often followed if I told the truth. After all, even people from Detroit looked down on Flint. I was attempting to pass myself off as some sort of sophisticated anglophile, fond of Romantic poetry and obscure British bands, and I didn’t think the Vehicle City fit the image I was trying to construct. The Smiths, my favorite band at the time, regularly sang about postindustrial Manchester, a rough English equivalent of Flint minus the gun violence and the muscle cars, but I failed to make the connection at the time. Abstract English deindustrialization was so much cooler to me than the homegrown variety. I had no regrets about being the last make and model of my family to roll off the assembly line in Flint.
After college, I became an active member of the Flint diaspora, finding work as a reporter in Little Rock, Arkansas. Compared to my hometown, it was strange and exotic. I marveled at how few bars there were, only to discover that many counties in Arkansas had none at all. They were against the law! Unions were equally scarce, although technically still legal. I regularly got to interview the state’s charismatic governor, some guy I had never heard of before named Bill Clinton. It was such an insular city that I interviewed Bill and Hillary once when they were in line behind me at a Little Rock movie theater. We were waiting to see The Doors. Bill did all the talking. Hillary looked distracted. I was also in the crowd, notebook in hand, when Clinton announced in 1991 on the steps of the historic Old State House near downtown that he was running for president.
Just when the novelty of living in the South was wearing off, I managed to land a cushy fellowship in Great Britain. I had few responsibilities other than studying Victorian literature at the University of Nottingham and delivering speeches to drunken British businessmen about life in America. It never crossed my mind to include Flint in my presentations.
When my funding ran out, I conducted a frantic transatlantic job search and landed as an editor and writer at a mediocre alternative newsweekly in San Jose. A few years later, I migrated north to a much better paper in San Francisco. In contrast to Flint, there was an irrational sense of optimism floating around in the dry Northern California air. The weather was so mild that people whined about a little fog just so they’d have something to complain about once in a while. Everyone came off as friendly and happy and physically fit. They were brimming with big ideas. Even after the dot-com bubble burst, it was a hopeful place compared to Flint.
So why, after more than a decade in this paradise of positive thinking, did I suddenly miss the Vehicle City so much? Why was I getting teary-eyed just thinking about the city I couldn’t
