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. The strikers ushered in a national golden age of middle-class prosperity and job security. The strike united the racially and culturally diverse work force and their families behind a common cause. The BBC called it the “strike heard ’round the world.” The company, supported by state and local government, opposed strikers with deadly force. A number of men were wounded by gunfire. President Roosevelt’s intervention on the side of organized labor, and the tenacity of the strikers, eventually forced GM to recognize the UAW.
The half-life glow of all that socialist passion, the high drama of men and women putting their lives on the line for a just cause, is difficult to detect this morning. The parking lot adjacent to the chapter is busy with the coming and going of nondescript yellow Penske trucks. The surrounding neighborhood looks forlorn and abandoned. Traffic is light. Pedestrians, at least those unencumbered by shopping carts or bulging trash bags, are nonexistent.
I’m directed upstairs to a large conference room that appears to have been the locus of a great deal of recent activity, inexplicably ceased. Cases of soft drinks are stacked in corners. Empty pizza boxes overflow trash bins. Passed from person to person, I’m eventually assigned data entry duty, transcribing logistical data from field records into a database. The software is balky. My enthusiasm wanes. Teams of corporate volunteers in puffy down jackets and Gore-Tex boots tramp in, then tramp back out. Everything feels impromptu, a strange combination of urgency and ennui. Quickly tiring of data entry—it fails to measure up to the muscular narrative I created for myself on the trip north, stacking water in a sandbag chain, chaos swirling around me, desperate citizens clambering for their fair share—I flag down a woman who exudes authority. Soon, I’m on my way home, having passed the background check, fledgling Red Cross volunteer.
A week or two of online training, classroom CPR certification, day-long conference room seminar, and a road test around downtown Flint in a gleaming, late-model ERV, and I’m ready for my first day. I show up thirty minutes early equipped with a crisp new city map, stiff leather work gloves, and dawning awareness of my naïve assumptions about the city and this, its latest crisis. I arrive that first day expecting a bracing plunge into frenzied, ground zero-scale efforts to save the citizens of Flint. There’s nothing about long-traumatized Flint this frigid morning, however, to suggest anything more urgent than a city waking to familiar trouble, hoping merely to survive until happy hour, choir practice, or Wheel of Fortune. I’m the newest team member in a stubborn grudge match destined to play itself out long after I’ve left the field.
ELEVEN
This neighborhood west of Dort Highway near Dewey Park is new to me, forlorn and desperate-looking even on a brilliant, sunny afternoon. I park in front of a modest ranch on a deserted residential street. Note a few boarded-up houses, parked cars in various states of disrepair, yards returning to meadow, baking planes of puckered shingles, cracked tongues of driveways speckled with empty water bottles. A street at once depopulated in aspect, but alive with flickers of life—a green hanging plant, a small pink bicycle tipped on its side, hum of window AC. Pock. Pock. Pock. Across the street sits a sprawling, well-kept ranch. Behind the house, dominating the backyard, a full-size tennis court simmers behind a high fence. An empty referee’s chair hovers above a net post. A dignified older man in blinding tennis whites practices his serve, anti-freeze-colored balls glowing like pushpins on the large campaign map of the opposing court. The Sport of Kings, clinging to life in this post-industrial hinterland. Pock. Pock.
My father paid no attention to professional sports. Zero. Unlike other dads on the block, he didn’t putter around the house on weekends with a cold Stroh’s in his hand, listening to the Tigers on WJR. We never attended a game together. He installed a backboard on the garage, but I don’t think I ever saw him shoot a free throw or recall him dunking on me. We made a half-hearted attempt once at a round of golf. I won’t say we never played catch, but I don’t think he owned a glove. The little I learned about the arcane rules of baseball … well, let’s just say the finer points of the game still elude me. Therefore, it’s difficult to imagine us playing something so intimate, so intensively competitive as singles tennis. Hard to picture us sharing so intentional a space as the green and red rectangles of a public court on a hot July afternoon, facing off across the eleventh commandment of the net. Impossible to see him, in my mind’s eye, run.
The man has a relaxed, easy serve. I wave as I exit the ERV. He salutes me with a tip of his racket, dips into a wire ball caddy, form flawless, his spirit seeming to soar with every smash. I hope he finds a worthy opponent. Game, set, match.
TWELVE
A man loiters in front of his building a good distance from the street. I’ve called ahead to avoid having to drive around searching
