Standpipe

I can recall being in Flint on only three occasions before volunteering with Red Cross Disaster Relief.  About fifteen years ago we attended a Jeff Daniels concert at the Whiting Auditorium.  It was a pretty good show.  I remember his sweet, wistful version of “Michigan, My Michigan”.  Before that, 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 almost forty years ago to attend a backyard barbecue at the home of a coworker.  I remember driving in past mammoth Buick City, wearing a pair of lavender pastel capri's and matching knit polo.  I got drunk as a lord in my jackass pants then drove two hours home looking like a Picasso harlequin imagined by Jules Feiffer.  Flint, when I thought about the city at all, was “Roger and Me”, a municipal abstraction 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.    

Standpipe

July 6, 2016.  This neighborhood is new for me, southeast side west of Dort Highway.  Not the worst I’ve driven through, but forlorn and desperate looking even on a brilliant, sunny afternoon.   I park in front of our next stop, a modest ranch on a deserted residential street.  At a glance I note a few boarded abandoned houses, cars parked in various states of disrepair, yards gone to seed, planes of puckered shingles, tongues of driveways coated with bagged empties.  A street at once depopulated in aspect but alive with small flickers of life; a green hanging plant, small pink bike tipped on its side, hum of a window AC unit.  Pock, pock, pock.  Across the street, occupying a vast corner lot, stands a well-kept ranch.  Behind the house, dominating the backyard, is a full sized tennis court surrounded by a high fence.  A tall referee chair stands next to a net post.  The chair is empty, net ragged and sagging.  A solitary older gentlemen in blinding tennis whites practices his serve, ethylene glycol colored balls glowing like pushpins on the large campaign map of the opposing court.  The Sport of Kings clinging to life in the barren hinterlands.  Pock, pock, pock.  The man has a relaxed, easy serve.  I wave as I exit the ERV.  A bottle of water sits behind the service line.  He anoints me with his racket, dips into the wire ball caddy, mechanically economic, fluid and soaring in spirit.     

Standpipe: Delivering Water In Flint

June 29, 2016.  The Garmin funnels us down this street again, the third time in fifteen minutes.   Four addresses all within a stone’s throw of each other.  I must have entered them in the wrong sequence.  Before volunteering in Flint I hadn’t much use for GPS, preferring a folding paper map.  Delivering water in Flint is feasible only with GPS, but the satellite dependent tool is only as good as the data entered into it.  Today is 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 outlets, check cashing places, hair shops.  We make small talk with a man who looks a qualified seventy.  His small house is pin neat, yard trimmed.  He retains the bearing of someone accustomed to people moving quickly to the opposite side of the street for him.  He’s grateful for the water.  Take away the grey pony tail, web of tattoos, and leathery face, he could pass for a retired economics professor who keeps his hand in a long running weekly game of squash.  We make profane jokes at the expense of the governor and legislature, wish one another a great holiday weekend.  I ease the ERV away from the curb, accelerate 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, fix the source.  Hey, could use me some disaster relief!  We had seen him on our first or second pass down this street.  Thin, bandy-legged, ropey armed, walking a swollen pit bull on a too thin lead.  Dog and owner are basking on the front steps of a small bungalow.  I slow, reverse, back up beeping five or six houses, park, step out of the truck.  Dog okay, I ask?  She won’t do nuthin’!  What can I do for you?  Ain’t got no food, no water, no money.  His darting eyes burn with high current fizz.  I open the doors at the rear of the truck, pull down four cases of water.  Where has he gotten to?  The pit is up in the driver’s seat of the ERV crowding my partner for space, pressing him against the passenger door.  The engine’s running.  I hope the dog doesn’t knock the gear shift and engage the transmission.  Eventually, man and dog retreat to the porch where I’ve stacked their water.  I tell him to have a good Fourth of July weekend and we’re gone.  As we pull away, I notice the man has produced a pair of glittering shirt board, Uncle Sam-worthy, U.S.A. opera glasses on a plastic wand.  He’s peering through the eyeholes and waving manically.  A brassy Stars and Stripes Forever played by a uniformed band from a bunting covered gazebo materialized suddenly amid the blight and ruin wouldn’t have surprised me in the least.