For Sue. So, it shall always be.
“He’d grown up on endlessness and his mother. In the beginning, they were the same thing.”
—Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
Have a blessed day, I’m told over and over again. I’ve never felt so blessed. Kindness, bestowed by people too bereft of surplus to warrant such generosity. I’m grateful, but my gratitude is leavened with a liberal dash of liberal guilt. I wince despite myself every time I hear it uttered. Repetition dulls the sting. Liberated by banality, I mourn the loss.
ONE
Late February, 2016, I complete training and qualify as a Red Cross Disaster Relief Volunteer (DRV) behind the wheel of a boxy, red and white Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV). I deploy to an officially declared Disaster Relief Operation in Flint, Michigan—city long on the wane, lately devastated by a municipal water supply contaminated with dangerous levels of lead. Children and the aged are at greatest risk. A local pediatrician is among the first citizens to sound the alarm, spurred to action by a rash of symptoms turning up in her young patients. By early 2016, the men, women, and children of Flint have been drinking lead-contaminated water, far in excess of federal safety standards, for many months. Widespread lead contamination is, sadly, become common place. But in 2016, Flint is novel among that unfortunate club of communities devastated by man-made disasters sexy enough to have captured the public’s fickle imagination. Right up there with Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster (West Virginia), Love Canal (New York), and Times Beach (Missouri).
The seeds of the crisis had been planted over a year before,
