excerpt

Standpipe

Have a blessed day, they tell me.  Many times over.  I’ve never felt so blessed.  The people who say this seem too bereft of excess blessing to justify such lavish generosity.  I’m grateful, but my gratitude is leavened with a liberal dash of liberal guilt. 

I return to Tennessee in April, 2014 to visit my mother.  She lives with a companion who keeps her safe around-the-clock.  Television, the bright bulb around which they batt morning, noon and night.  Two months have passed since my brother and I forced her to leave her condo because she could no longer care for herself.  The health of the other woman is only marginally better than mothers.  I drive forward in time to where dogwoods blossom, tilted snow caps languish on the highest peaks of the mountains, and morning mist lingers in the hollows.  For the record, I am here to nose around her care, drive her to the local Veterans Administration branch office to file a benefit application, shampoo the carpet in her empty condo, newly listed.  Left unspoken is the mighty tug of our long untended love for each other.  If not precisely estranged, we have held each other at arms-length for years for reasons I won’t begin to understand until after her death.  At fifty-eight I am gripped by yearning sudden and urgent as the throb of a dead limb returning to life.  Astonished moth drawn to the mystery of flame.  In the morning I wake to my own echo in the empty condo.  A dun colored halo on the carpet recalls the table where once we sat morning long drinking coffee, gazing out on the feeders, recoiling from the bare hot wire of the past.  I drive to Lowes for cleaning supplies.  Seven hundred miles north water department employees in Flint perform the engineering operations necessary to begin drawing water from the Flint River.  On April 25^th, 2014 someone pushes a button and river water surges through the pipes for the first time in almost fifty years. 

May 24, 2016.  I like a sucker.  A simple declaration I try and fail to understand in the silent moment that follows.  I certainly don’t interpret it as a request, which it certainly is.  Part of the problem, the speaker, a boy of seven or eight, is almost inaudible to me, a man with moderate hearing loss.  The other element contributing to our impasse is the distraction of a State Police cruiser three doors down, lights ablaze, the first moments of a traffic stop in progress.  Three boys sit on a low wall in front of a house next door to the home of the family we’ve come to service.  Neighbors on porches escaping the heat observe the drama unfolding between the trooper and the occupant of the suspect vehicle.   My partner, a retired nurse, signals to me from the front porch the amount of water needed by the people living there.  We dispatch our duty quickly and efficiently.  The boys, faces alive with equal measure sweetness and mischief like the covers of rotating baseballs, watch us return to the ERV, slam the doors shut.  Here it is again.  I like a sucker, only this time it’s directed to my female counterpart.   Oh my goodness I’m so sorry sweetheart.  I haven’t got a sucker for you today.  Even I hear him clearly this time.  Carefully I pull away from the curb, ease the ERV around the tableau of pulsating cruiser and dusty sedan.  All four doors open wide, the sweating trooper, beefy hands encased in gelatin green surgical gloves, rifles the contents of the front compartment.   The driver, a slight woman in her early twenties stands handcuffed in front of the car, levels a glare as we pass.  Suckers.  Colorful nuggets of sugar on a stick done up in a party twist; enduring, simple pleasures, moments a patient child can extend into sweet eternity.

June 29, 2016.  The Garmin funnels us down this street for the third time in fifteen minutes.   Four addresses all within stone’s throw of each other, but displayed non-sequentially.  I have little use for GPS, preferring the crisp snap of a back folded map.  Delivering water in Flint is feasible only with GPS, but the satellite-dependent tool is only good as the input of the user.  Today is blistering hot and sunny.  People are out and about sitting on porches, walking to or from the moribund commercial strip on Saginaw.  Liquor stores, cellular phone kiosks, store front churches, check cashing windows, hair shops.  We make small talk with a man who looks a qualified seventy.  His small house neat as a pin, yard tidy and trimmed.  He retains the bearing of someone accustomed to people moving quickly to the other side of the street for him.  He’s grateful for the water.  Take away the long braided pony tail, web of tattoos, and leathery face he could pass for a retired University of Michigan economics professor who keeps his hand in a long running weekly game of squash.  We make profane jokes at the expense of the governor, shake hands and wish each other a great holiday weekend.  I ease the ERV away from the curb while my partner records the required logistical data.  Someone yells from my side of the truck.  Hey!  Hey, I need some disaster relief!  I glance back and fix the source.  Hey!  Could use me some disaster relief, too!  We saw him on our second pass down this street.  Thin, bandy-legged, ropey-armed, walking a swollen pit bull on a too-thin lead.  Dog and owner bask on the front steps of a small bungalow.  I slow, reverse, back up beeping five or six houses, park, and exit the truck.  Dog okay, I ask?  Nah, she won’t do nuthin’.  What do you need?  Ain’t got no food, no water, no money.  His darting eyes charged with current like a Tesla coil.  I open the doors at the rear of the truck, pull down four cases of water.  Now, where did he get to?  The pit is somehow up in the driver’s seat of the ERV crowding my partner for space, pinning him against the passenger door.  The engine idles.  I pray the dog doesn’t step on the gear shift and engage the transmission.  Finally, man and dog retreat to the porch where I’ve stacked their water.  I wish them a good Fourth of July weekend and we’re off.  As we pull away I notice he has donned a pair of glittering, outsized USA! opera glasses on a plastic wand.  He’s mugging and waving like an unhinged Uncle Sam.  Stars and Stripes Forever booming from a bunting covered gazebo materialized suddenly amid the blight and ruin wouldn’t surprise me in the least. 

By March 2016, I complete my training and satisfy requirements to become a Red Cross Disaster Relief Volunteer (DRV) behind the wheel of an Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV), cousin to the boxy ambulances driven by Emergency Medical Service Technicians.  I deploy to Flint, city long on the wane, lately devastated by a municipal water supply poisoned with lead and biological contaminants.  The DRV’s I meet seem very nice, most of them retired, some ex-military, all veterans of Katrina or Sandy or flooding across the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and the Ozarks.  They sport Red Cross wear proudly festooned with service pins, wait for the late night call, deploy for weeks at a time.  I begin work on a snowy Friday, first day of a five month deployment at a leisurely pace of one day a week.  Most DRV’s in Flint deploy five days week as do a rotating group of AmeriCorp volunteers.  They live dormitory style on stipend meals, drink bottled water, endure two-minute contaminated showers like everyone else in town.  Five days a week, week in, week out.  My Disaster Relief vest helps dispel the nagging guilt of the dilettante, but only a little.

May 11, 2016.  According to the Garmin the next address is immediately on our left.  The yard surrounding the adjacent boarded up shell trails off into what looks to be a vine and bramble choked vacant lot, but wait a minute.  Folded into the gloom at the back of the lot stands a low building that looks to have once served the lesser needs of timber and rail interests.  Posted on a planked shed in the middle distance is a warning BEWARE OF DOG.  The woman who presumably made the emergency water call stands in the dooryard.  She must see the ERV, surely hears the friendly double toot of the horn.  Fifty feet from the truck, approaching the dwelling, I ask after her dog.  The woman turns on her walker, makes for the open door, upper body supporting most of her weight, toes trailing feint calligraphy in the dust.  She says something I can’t hear.  Her hair is a child’s scribble done in fat, violet crayon, arms fleshy and tattooed.  We’ve surprised her policing up her yard in the early afternoon.  An empty water bottle tucked into her waist band, another gripped in her mouth.  I think of a vaudevillian bugler.  There is no dog.  Minutes later we’re all inside a stark, gloomy room:  sink, table, two chairs, vintage appliances, metal shelving unit, tacked on, brightly lit bedroom separated by a beaded curtain.  The walls are hung with dozens of tiny hand twisted gewgaws, miniature icons, candles everywhere, 19th century occult trappings balanced against stacked cases of water.  She wants thirteen more.  May 13th is her birthday and, of course, her lucky number.  You’ve got a pretty good supply on hand, I say.  Advise her about weight distribution.  Eight cases hold you until next week?  She shrugs, averts her eyes, smile like the Mona Lisa.  We distribute eight cases around the room, the most we can bring in one trip, prepare to leave.  You left me thirteen, right?  Reminds us of her birthdate.  Sure thing ma’am, thirteen.  Securing the hand truck in the rear of the ERV, a car approaches, slows, stops.  The passenger, a man of indeterminate age, a character out of Tolkien, long grey pony tail, sharp features, leans out the window.  She okay? Meaning, just what in the hell are you doing here?  A cottage deep in a wood, an old woman branded by village rumor, wolves on the prowl and the woodcutter, true of heart, ax in hand, keeping an eye on things.

February 26, 2016.  First day ride-along but I’m the one behind the wheel of a Penske box truck.  The woman training me, this is her seventy-second consecutive day of Red Cross disaster deployment in Flint.  Winter long and cold, she recalls slippery stairs, sopping feet, ice covered sidewalks, unrelenting demand.  It’s snowing now, spring still weeks away.  In back, three layers of bottled water ride upended like old seabed thrust up by plate tectonics, cases heaped atop the wheel well.  I dumped the pallet on the first turn leaving the warehouse.  Look at that place, I say, nodding toward a ramshackle mobile home park.  A shifting landscape of colorless trailers hunkered down among black skeletal trees, branches utterly convincing as the dead fingers of a lost race of giants.  The woman doesn’t suffer fools.  Says her aunt used to live here.  Not a bad park compared to some, she says.  Hours later, water gone, delivery list checked off, we’re headed back to the warehouse.  It’s snowing big wet flakes, sunset bullied into submission by shouldering clouds.  Now this park is really bad, the woman says.  A low place, scrub trees, dark forms dissolving into twilight.  The trailers nearest the road look like gaping skulls, black holes once fitted with windows and doors.  Aluminum long since stripped, insulation exposed, they appear in twilight as huge bales of gray cotton.  No lights are visible.  Oncoming darkness, damp, encroaching woods have rubbed away what’s left of this place, left holes in the newsprint obliterating what amounts to the drawing of an amoral two year old.  The woman says there are squatters.  I peer into the gloom for cooking fires.  Oncoming headlights on the road ahead, torches of the Kings men bearing news of plague, braving a shortcut, black woods closing in from all sides.  Collar soaked, shoes turned to sponges, I shudder from the cold.  Only the cold and nothing more.   

2015 begins with a public meeting in Flint to address emerging water quality concerns of the citizens.  One after another they approach the microphone, brandish bottles of discolored water, register foul odor, the rancid taste.  State and local officials dismiss a growing chorus calling for a return to the Detroit water system.  Community activists arrange for independent testing by scientists from the University of Virginia.  A local pediatrician documents high lead levels in her young patients.   Journalists come nosing around.  The state stonewalls, key players already orchestrating the covering of their privileged asses, fudging data, pointing fingers.  With events in Flint unfolding, I’m on my way back to Tennessee, animated with urgency.  I received a dreaded late night call from a no-nonsense surgeon, heard myself authorize emergency surgery.  My mother is bleeding internally, some kind of intestinal blockage.  I stop only for gas and bathroom breaks, keen to arrive in time to greet the surgeon as he emerges cap and gowned from the chill of the operating theater into the humorless light of the timeless waiting room.

April 27, 2016.  Traffic is brisk in front of a church where volunteers hand out free cases of water.  Eight or ten people are standing on the sidewalk spilling into the street as I ease past in the lumbering ERV.  Coming even with the gleaming blue and white cube, an old man yells, asks, you all need you some water?  He arches his eyebrows theatrically, peers over the top of fat wrap-around shades.  He waits a beat or two, then explodes into knee slapping laughter, mouth yawning and toothless.  I shake my head, give him a lazy wave laughing all the way to the corner.  In the side mirror he has resumed business, our moment together drained of color, forgotten.  

I recall being in Flint on only three occasions before volunteering with Red Cross Disaster Relief.  About twenty years ago we attended a Jeff Daniels concert at the Whiting Auditorium.  It was a good show.  I remember his sweet, wistful version of Michigan, My Michigan.  Years later, I watched my wife finish the Crim Festival of Races half-marathon run through rolling hills and leafy streets of some of the city’s better neighborhoods.  My first visit was over forty years ago to attend a summer backyard barbecue at the home of a coworker.  I recall driving past mammoth Buick City wearing pastel clam diggers cinched with a jaunty nautical rope belt.  I got drunk as a lord in my jackass pants then drove home looking like a Picasso harlequin imagined by Jules Feiffer.  Flint, when I thought about the city at all, was “Roger and Me”, cautionary rust belt tale a few freeway exits south of the faux-gemütlich hokum of Frankenmuth, the place where heavy southbound traffic on I-75 was relieved by the US-23 split siphoning cars off to Ann Arbor, easing my drive home from many an idyllic northern vacation. 

She’s been gone nearly a year. Time enough to align rage and grief unleashed by her slow decline and death with righteous anger over the agonizing descent of Flint, a once vibrant river city reeling from a steady progression of insults and death blows. The tragedy of Flint sparked the combustible undergrowth of unfinished business between my mother and me.  Personal grief and impotent rage fueled my naïve determination to right a wrong in Flint, its citizen’s mere urban abstraction, a city in which I had no personal stake.  My mother had lived in Michigan over forty years without once setting foot in Flint as far as I know. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely confluence of tangled emotions.  As profound a personal loss as I had suffered, it was a trifle in magnitude compared with the daily suffering of the people I met in Flint.

May 18, 2016.  My latest partner in the ERV speaks with a Dixie drawl.  Val is not her real name.  Born in Missouri, reared in Flint, she has lived here for over forty years.  In her late fifties or early sixties she’s a former nurse who reminds me of my aunt Doris; the cigarettes, dry barking laugh, dip of the chin, the lidded eyes suggesting flirtation, conspiracy, or both.  She is among the first city residents hired by the state to keep Flint supplied with potable water. Standpipes I call them, a means of bypassing compromised plumbing to convey the most basic of human needs the final leg into the beleaguered homes of Flint.  Up until last week she passed out water at a drive-up distribution center.  I’m training her to deliver water to people who can’t get it for themselves.  She considers this a promotion.  Soon she and others like her will replace Red Cross volunteers, putting me out of the water delivery business for good.  I welcome them with open arms.  Someone should benefit, however inconsequential financially, from this sublime debacle.  The job pays eleven dollars an hour, forty hours a week guaranteed for at least a year.  A real talker, accent flaring and fading, by lunch Val has confided many intimate, harrowing details of her life.  A nine year old son lost to cancer, another debilitated by a head injury inflicted during an assault, a probable hate crime, dark stretches of despair, other sorrowful things.  Val calls me sweetie, calls everyone we meet sweetie or child.  Hugs for all the women, a hand on the arm or back for the men, a ready smile for all.  Well aren’t you just the sweetest thing!  You take care now this heats just plain awful, innit?  What you need darlin’?  I have nothing to teach her about this job, absolutely nothing at all.  Not one goddamn thing.  She arrives fully prepared to do the real work of delivering water in Flint.

The End