need—imagine life on the receiving end. Decades of insult on top of injury, a people asked to pay the price, once again, for this nation’s original sin. I’d grown up confused, listening to my father’s casual racism, bias born of resentment. I recall as a small child visiting Tennessee with my family, sitting with him and my maternal grandfather on the screen porch, asking whether there were any “colored people” living there. I’d never seen anyone of color on our trips south. They erupted in gales of laughter. My face burned, the joke on me, neither of them seeing fit to explain the punchline. I’d grown up with every advantage, rejected my father’s bitterness, but was slow to appreciate just how lucky I was. Now, newly arrived in Flint, stoked with righteous rage, I’m keenly aware of just how charmed a life I’ve led. Over the coming months, I’ll meet hundreds of Flint residents. We’ll endure many awkward encounters and enjoy occasional moments of grace.
I begin my first day in the flatly fluorescent bowels of the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department Emergency Command Center in downtown Flint. Uniformed officers, State Police troopers, and Michigan National Guardsman sit around a table in a too-warm, windowless basement. They chat, drink coffee, and manage to look casually lethal, drowsily blasé, and vigilant as Dobermans, all at the same time. We’ve come to retrieve a tactical radio transmitter that will, when activated, summon armed officers faster than a frantic call through the 911 system. At least that’s what I’m told. I feel as though we’re about to leave the safety of some blast-walled Green Zone, heedless of the caution implied by these taciturn veterans. The radio will serve as an unwelcome reminder on this, my first day, and all the days to come, of the messiness of delivering water in Flint. Our business concluded, short and sweet, we head back through the labyrinth of tiled corridors and echoing stairways and make our way outside. The sun is just coming up behind clouds of steel wool loaded with abraded shipyard gray.
Our first stop, a warehouse on the north side where tractor trailers unload pallets of bottled water from all over the lower forty-eight and Canada. We are handed the keys to a Penske box truck, wait in line to back up a loading ramp into a cavernous bay where we will receive the first two of the day’s four pallets. Twenty burly men in camo Carhartt bibs and Cabela caps sit around a long table, chasing cigarettes with coffee, Red Bull, and Mountain Dew. Their role in the water game isn’t readily apparent to me. Warehousing a single commodity in such vast quantities at such a rapid rate of turnover doesn’t appear to require a great deal of manpower. Palleted H2O comes in one set of bays and goes out another. Two or three hi-lows move briskly, to and fro. My partner seems to know everyone, trades what passes for bon mots on a frigid mid-Michigan morning. Backing in takes three or four attempts before I clear the heavy steel door frame with less than an inch to spare. Everyone at the table is immersed, all-thumbs, in their bluish screens when I step down from the rig, studiously avoiding eye contact. No one pays me any mind.
I set about learning the nuts and bolts of the job, hustling cases of water from the high deck of the Penske truck into the houses, mobile homes, and apartments of the poor and infirm. It’s not the first truck I’ve driven. Stake trucks, U-Hauls, hi-lows—once, during a summer stint on a landscaping crew, I was entrusted with a standard dump truck towing a trailer carrying a Ford tractor and bush hog mowing deck. Padding my scant truck driving experience is almost, but not quite, as subversively thrilling as sitting high up in a guttering cab, looking down into the private spaces of the lessor vehicular world.
Gene drove a truck for nearly fifty years. I remember looking out on Oakland Avenue in Highland Park, through the huge expanse of windshield from atop a teetering pile of canvas tarps, rain ponchos, and old log books onto the roofs of De Sotos, Valiants, and Coupe DeVilles. The cab was equipped with only one seat. The deafening roar of the engine, the dizzying height of my perch, and the acrid smell of diesel combined to terrify me, wanting only for the safety of my mother’s arms. Greasy metallic fifth-wheel taste bitter in my mouth, I can still feel disappointment radiating off my father’s massive shoulders like heat from a stack pipe.
The DRV’s I meet are unfailingly nice. Many are retirees, proud veterans of Katrina or Sandy or flooding across the Mid-Atlantic, Upper Midwest, and Ozarks. They sport signature Red Cross wear: T-shirts, vests, and billed caps festooned with colorful service pins. I deploy in fits and starts. A snowy, late winter Friday; a sleet-driven Tuesday; a cold, drenched Saturday followed by a brilliant Wednesday and a warm, damp Thursday. Eventually I will volunteer in Flint, Wednesdays mostly, February through July—a mere five months. Most DRVs in Flint deploy full time, as do a rotating group of young AmeriCorps volunteers. They live dormitory-style on stipend meals, drink bottled water, and take two-minute showers to minimize exposure to water-borne toxins. Six days a week, week after week, for months at a time. Some were here at the beginning, when water distribution was a slapdash affair, manning a logistical Wild West network of emergency distribution sites, the heavy presence of law enforcement and the military tinting the whole affair a flat, third-world shade of camo. My disaster relief vest helps dispel the nagging guilt of a slumming dilettante, but only a little.
FOUR
An old woman quietly tends the past in her cramped, tidy home on a crumbling residential street, living room crammed with decades of cherished family mementos. Every available surface is covered with photos of gowned graduates; children’s art work curling at the edges; samplers; images of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. rubbing shoulders with Jesus; tea service; great slab of a family bible; JFK and RFK; portraits of children, grandchildren, and possibly great-grand-children suited up for basketball, baseball, and football; Frederick Douglass; figurines of Degas’s dancers; beatific images of Christ and Christ in His agony hung redundantly on the wall; Barack and Michelle Obama; shirt-board fans printed with Bible verses; family reunion panoramas, everyone sporting identical pastel T-shirts against a backdrop of towering trees and enamel blue skies.
The walls of the house I grew up in were monastically bare. It was like being raised in a small, struggling gallery between exhibits. Later, after my father retired and they’d relocated to Florida, my parents’ stucco ranch was the repository for a considerable haul of ceramic bric-a-brac from the flea markets around Orlando. The few family photos, mementos, and keepsakes on display competed with cocker spaniel-sized Bengal tigers, toucans, sombrero-wearing campesinos, and a few generic seascapes.
The walls of my mother’s condominium in the last few years of her life featured generic prints from Walmart, a few bucolic rural scenes, one or two multi-window mat displays of family photos chosen, seemingly, at random. A Hallmark ode to grandmothers occupied a spot eye level on the wall opposite the guest toilet. Fighting for purchase atop an entertainment center, a few family portraits bore cramped witness to longdistance offspring, their spouses, and their kids.
The past, our past, vied for pride of place with Thomas Kincade knockoffs and framed classic-car porn my father had clipped from magazines.
“Do your kids and grandchildren visit much?”
Her features cloud, she sags on her walker. “No. No, they don’t. They’re all so busy.”
I can think of nothing to say in reply. I stack her water neatly, inhale one last lungful of rosewater, liniment, and fried ring bologna and flee to the safety of the ERV’s cab. Remarkable, how I fail to acknowledge her uncanny resemblance to my mother until much later.
FIVE
A case of twenty-four sixteen-ounce bottles of water weighs about thirty pounds. Stacking reduces the footprint, but concentrates structural load in one small area. It exerts pressure on the bottles in the bottommost cases, increasing the risk of leakage and water damage to subfloor and joists. Distribute your water—don’t stack the cases too high, I advise people living in tiny bungalows, claustrophobic flats, cramped apartments, and ramshackle mobile homes. Living room floor space is given to entertainment centers, oxygen machines, cluttered coffee tables, sway-backed
