wheelchairs, walkers, toys, game systems, bird cages, Richard Serra-scale flat-screen televisions, pet beds, playpens, hospital beds, bureaus, book cases, animal crates, grandfather clocks, curio cabinets, murky aquariums, and dinette sets.
Kitchen counter space goes to coffee makers, blenders, toasters, pots and pans, liquor and wine bottles, plastic food storage containers, recycling, canned goods, spice racks, dry goods, dirty dishes, sacks of pet food, utensils, glassware, and bottles of medication. The rest is a warren of negative space, narrow pathways angling to back bedrooms and bathrooms. Staircases leading to upper bedrooms and basements are home to shoes, cases of soda and beer, bundles of toilet paper, tools, mops, buckets, books, and brimming laundry baskets.
For the elderly and disabled, water stacked anywhere other than in the kitchen requires many trips back and forth to retrieve one or two bottles at a time, working their way through a shrink-wrapped case too heavy to move on their own.
Cases of water, like breeding rabbits, can swamp a dwelling in no time. The minimum weekly amount of water required depends on the number of people living under one roof. Summer heat doubles the need. No man is an island, except here—a people surrounded by water—John Donne, reduced to straight man.
SIX
A middle-aged man with red, rheumy eyes claims they’ve cut off his water, wants everything we can spare. He’s keen to find his phone, bellows to a guy across the street, maybe did he leave it over there? He ducks into his house, reappears waving a thick, dog-eared folder stuffed with clippings, legal and medical documents. Says the water made him sick, hikes his pants to expose a discolored leg. Yanks his waistband down displaying mottled flesh below the beltline. Brandishing the found phone triumphant, he taps. Here’s his interview with the Detroit Free Press. Swipes through photos taken at rallies, protests, and public meetings.
By now, media interest in Flint is waxing and waning with every fresh news cycle. A coppery Donald J. Trump announced his presidential bid from the bottom of a gilded escalator in Trump Tower nearly a year ago. The 2016 Republican National Convention will be held at Rocket Mortgage Field House in Cleveland in four short months. Only Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor John Kasich remain in the Republican race. In our semi-official-looking vests, sporting laminated badges, perhaps we represent one last, unpromising opportunity to capture the world’s attention, if only for a moment, before the room is sucked dry of oxygen.
Evidence presented, he rests his case. We deliver our verdict—six cases of Aquafina—then wish him the best of luck, three of us inhaling diesel exhaust at the rear of the ERV. We have our instructions. The less time we spend at each stop, the more water we can distribute during our shift. How many thirsty people would it have cost to give the guy a few more minutes, read the interview, maybe watch a couple of videos? He recedes in my side view, passionately appealing his sentence alone in the middle of the street until I lose sight of him around the next corner.
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
