Standpipe: Delivering Water In Flint

This neighborhood seems pastoral, almost idyllic on a warm sunny late spring day.  Large swaths of verdant, vacant land exist in place of demolished houses.  A riot of weeds, tangle of vines, saplings and thorn bushes swallow old fence, busted apron, old sycamore and blackened foundation, all of it overlaid with littered street grid.  Arm out the window, the world here is sun dappled and sweet smelling.   I imagine thriving populations of small game, larger predators and birds.  Same place one week later, overcast, heat oppressive.  I’m stricken by an undeniable sense of foreboding, primitive reptilian brain response of the hunted.  The undergrowth harbors unseen danger.  Abandoned houses are nothing less than great blackened lungs gasping for breath, cellars filling, standing water black, gleaming with oil sheen. 

Standpipe: Delivering Water In Flint

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 Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV).  Coming even with the gleaming blue and white stack, an old man yells, asks do we need some water.  He arches his eyebrows theatrically, peers over the top of wrap around shades.  He waits a beat or two then explodes into laughter, yawning and toothless.  I shake my head, wave and laugh all the way to the corner.  In the side mirror the man conducts business, our moment drained of color, forgotten.   

Standpipe: Delivering Water In Flint

Two large images, portraits of women, displayed on the front of an abandoned house.  I haul six cases of water to a woman living in the home next door.  There are only a few houses left standing on this street, two, maybe three of those inhabited.  Lush undergrowth and sapling trees reclaim old foundations.  I ask the woman about the images.  She says the city is going to tear the house down.  The images, I ask again.  She retreats inside, room dim, reply trailing off.  I can’t hear what she says.  I return to the truck under their level gaze, serene in the face of the inevitable.