Real Life In Flint

Real Life in Flint

            I walk through Flint’s poor neighborhoods nearly every day.  On the East side where the streets are named for states, probably fifty percent of the houses are burned out shells.  Chimneys stand like the pistils of tulips after the petals drop off.  Trees of Heaven grow in the cellar holes.  There is the occasional altar of candles and notes on the porch steps that remain—prayers and love for family members who died in the blaze.  Graffiti on one house reads “R. I. P. Grandpa—Gone But Not Forgot.” 

Life goes on in the occupied homes, evidenced by the plastic backyard kids’ toys, the open windows, the dogs tied up and sleeping in the sun or standing at attention.  There’s one house that seems more like a homestead with a bright green John Deere tractor, a vegetable garden, and bee hives that are painted in Crayola colors.  A homemade sign on the corner of the property places it at the corner of Kansas Street and Kansas Street.  Every time I pass, I feel like I may not be in Flint anymore.  As I walk, I often wonder why I am drawn to neighborhoods like these and why I could never live in Grand Blanc or Flushing or Davison or even in the desirable neighborhoods of the city proper.  Why?  The simple answer is that poorer neighborhoods feel more real to me than perfect houses sitting on perfectly manicured lawns or those monstrous beige tract houses that we used to call “McMansions.”  I’ve lived in different cities around the world, and in each one, I gravitated to the poorer places:  the squatters’ shacks on the hillsides around Ankara, Turkey and the wooden Russian houses in the outskirts of Semey, Kazazkhstan.  When I was lucky enough to be invited inside, the furnishings were nonexistent or very simple, but the fabrics, the colors, the cooking, the crude bathhouse in “kitchen garden” with bushes of black currants spoke of life.  I feel the same thing in Flint:  in ruined neighborhoods, life shines out because it isn’t being choked off by middle-class conceptions of what is good.  When you think about it, aren’t most of our conceptions of what is desirable inspired by magazines and fostered by the media.  They are image-driven, but life is found in the blowing clouds, the running stream, the jumping dog—life is active—doing, making, thinking, being.  I can hear the objections:  she is romanticizing poverty!  There are real people suffering in Flint without clean water, without access to nourishing food.  How is there more life in such blighted, forgotten places?  I maintain that even in the miserable poverty of many Flint neighborhoods there is the force of direct human experience, misery, compassion, ignorance, and warmth all mixed up together.  There is an honest life there.  And there are backyards with homemade ponds and beds of flowers that a couple works hard on together.  There is a swing where a lonely teenager goes at night to listen to her music while fireflies rise and fall around her.  Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.

Note the John Deere tractor behind the house and the corn shoulder high

Beehives in the same backyard

            I moved to Flint from a very desirable city, Boston, where I’d lived for ten years while I was in graduate school.  I was very happy to be offered a job here, and despite Flint’s bad press—my mother and I had watched Michael Moore’s Roger and Me at Easter after I’d accepted the job—I was so thankful not to be moving to a college town like East Lansing or Ann Arbor.  Something told me that I needed to be in a “real” place to begin a “real” life.  So that gut feeling about Flint being more “real” has been with me for a long time, but I didn’t really take my own thought seriously until I encountered related ideas in a couple of books I happened to read for pleasure this summer.  News flash:  that’s why good books are essential:  they help us attend to our own experiences, to take them seriously, and to make something of them.  In short, literature helps us learn to think.

Summer Reading

Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854)

For years I’d wanted to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I finally read it the first week of June and found it to be much deeper and more challenging than I’d anticipated.  The main take-away for me was that all of us ought to live more purposefully.  As you may recall, Thoreau, who’d lived in the village of Concord decides to give up village life and build a house on Walden Pond.  His was an experiment in discovering what he really needed to live a satisfying life.  He believes that most people don’t think they have a choice in how they live but spend the best part of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of life—old age.  Thoreau recommends that we take a deeper interest in the things we love to do—in our reading, our gardening, our thinking, our walking.  “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.  In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.”  Thoreau arranged his life so that he had time to walk, to fish, to swim, and lots of time to read, reflect, and study.  Because the cost of housing and the cost of living is significantly lower than in Flint than in many other American cities, it is possible, with a little conscious effort, to arrange our lives so that we are not slaves to our jobs or our needs for a certain high lifestyle.  We can, if we desire, live in Flint as lifelong students—of Truth.

As I read Walden, I had a strong desire to buy a ruined house on the east side and rebuild it.  But the more I thought about this urge, the more I realized that I can work on the house and garden I occupy on Avon Street in the East Village.  Thoreau’s book actually did move me to clean out my closets—to pitch and purge—to work my way through the layers of delusions and illusions to see if the life that I am in is “real”—and by “real,” I mean a life that I am choosing.  Here is how Thoreau puts it:

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui (a base), below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer*, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” 

“We crave only reality,” Thoreau writes; and when I read those words, I could not help but think back to the feeling that led me to Flint.  I wanted a “real” life.  But I hadn’t the courage to push my thought further, and it was only general feeling of dissatisfaction or desire for something else that Thoreau’s words worked on.  One day when I was reading the book, I happened to be walking in Kearsley Park, and I asked myself: “why can’t real life be found in Ann Arbor?  What do you have against college towns and ‘cool cities’?”   The answer I came up with is that in such places, the good life, comes ready-made.  As long as you have enough education to get a job that pays six figures, you can buy a really “nice” house.  You can eat in very good restaurants.  You can go to concerts, lectures, arts’ fairs—events where you can meet other interesting, educated people.  Your sliding debit card satisfies all of your needs.  You don’t have to make up a life, you don’t have to pull it out of yourself, you don’t need other people ever.  In short, you don’t have to feel hunger, cold, pain.  You will be living in padded comfort—warm in winter, cool in summer; and you will never think that this sheltered life is not terribly dissimilar from a padded cell.

William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)

It’s in a prison cell that the eponymous hero of Godwin’s novel—a book I, thankfully, chanced upon this summer—has a key insight, and it is this:  with his mind, alone, he can transcend the abjection of his lower-class position.  I’ll summarize the plot in a few sentences:  Caleb is a very intelligent young servant who enters the employment of Ferdinando Falkland, a cosmopolitan and benevolent country gentleman.  Falkland is subject to fits of unexplained melancholy, and Caleb discovers that he harbors a dark secret:  he is guilty of murder and, worse, he let two poor men take the rap and be hanged for his crime.  When Falkland discovers that his servant, Caleb, knows his secret, he accuses him of robbery and has him locked up.  When after his prison awakening, Caleb uses his ingenuity to escape, Falkland pursues him relentlessly.  It is a compelling read and offers a searing critique of Britain’s legal system and social system.   

But what captured my attention was Caleb’s prison awakening to the reality that, even in the most hopeless-seeming situation, he can be his own master if he learns to control his thoughts.

“I found out the secret of employing my mind.  I said, I am shut up for half the day in total darkness without any external source of amusement; the other half I spend in the midst of noise, turbulence and confusion.  What then?  Can I not draw amusement from the stores of my own mind?  Is it not freighted with various knowledge?  Have I not been employed from my infancy in gratifying an insatiable curiosity?  When should I derive benefit from these superior advantages, if not at present?  Accordingly I tasked the stores of my memory and my powers of invention.”

Had Caleb Williams not been imprisoned, would he have been forced to fall back on his own ingenuity?  Had I moved to Ann Arbor instead of Flint, perhaps I would have had so much mental stimulation coming from without that I would not have had to use my own mental powers to write two books, many articles, keep a blog, and come up with writing projects and classes to convince students from working-class backgrounds … and you, dear readers, that literature is essential for living a good life.  If we don’t discover that “the mind is its own place” perhaps we will never escape the various forms of tyranny that continue to subdue us even in this so-called democratic country.

William Godwin understood society as constituted and maintained by strategies of inclusion and exclusion.  Because Caleb was born into the lower-class, it is almost impossible for him to prove his innocence in the face of Falkland’s accusations.  A victim of “class profiling,” he will always be vulnerable to lies that derogate his character and criminalize him.  Sound familiar?  Sure.  It’s the injustice that the Black Lives Matter movement was created to address.  But Godwin offers a slightly different solution:  he thinks that each individual must speak out and share his or her experiences in conversation and in writing.  In the course of the novel, Caleb becomes a writer:  from hiding, he writes the lives of criminals to make money, and in the climactic trial scene when he confronts a Falkland (radically transformed by guilt and malevolence to the resemblance of a corpse), he decides that the only thing to do is what writers strive to do—”lay the emotions of my soul naked before [his] hearers.”  His story  proves the strength and goodness of his character to the jury, to Falkland, and to the reader.  Black lives matter—yes!  Poor lives matter—certainly!  But how many individuals, in the throes of loneliness or depression or addiction, wonder if their own life matters?  I wager that many of us fight this battle every day.  If we would only take the time to read more and better books, novelists and poets would help us be more interested in our own experiences, help us value and pursue our own unique lines of thought, and help us sing--

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.*

Inspiring Flint

Flint is a Realometer that we must check everyday.  Some days it can feel like a prison from which we want nothing but to escape.  Other days it feels like a laid-back mother that gives us the time and freedom we need to play at what we love.  Everyday Flint is, for me, a muse or an angel of Reality that will, if we I her, help me see the earth again, “cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.”*  What I felt twenty years ago is true:  real life is more possible in Flint than in Ann Arbor because Flint, minus the easy-ride of GM factory jobs, throws us back on our own resources, while the city awaits the much-needed creativity of her people.

*Nilometer, a device used by ancient Egyptians to measure the rise and fall of the Nile.

*W.H. Auden, “Elegy for W.B. Yeats”

*Wallace Stevens, “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”

Maree-Anne On Avon Street, Flint

When I moved to Flint in 1996 to teach Shakespeare at the university, I rented an apartment on Avon St. in the East Village (#701), and, as it happened, the man I married lived a few houses down on the other side of Avon Street (#710).  Mary Jo upon Avon:  the Shakespeare teacher reading the plays on a street named for the river that runs through Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.  It was not chance that determined the street’s name.  It was Edward Thomson, a lawyer who lived in our neighborhood during the nineteenth century and who amassed the largest collection of Shakespeare volumes in the state.   His collection--746 volumes--was donated to the University of Michigan main campus in Ann Arbor at his death in 1886, and the Avon name is about the last trace of his presence in Flint.  The summer before I started teaching at UM-Flint, I stayed in the Bed and Breakfast at the other end of Avon.  It was a June of humid air, cloudy days, and fireflies.  I walked up and down the quiet street, imagining myself holed up reading, wondering whether that activity alone could make a satisfying life on Avon Street.  Twenty years later, I can say that this has been a great place to disappear into books, but I am more and more thankful for the people—my neighbors—who are pulling me out of my hole and into the river of life.

Edward Thomson's library in Flint, circa 1876

Avon Street Bed and Breakfast 

My porch at 710 Avon St. becomes a sort of library in the summer

Late last winter I went to an educational session on baroque music before a performance of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” that was to be performed on original instruments at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor.  I sat in a circle with other adults.  The Asian women to my left said her idea of a good way to die was listening to classical music in a bathtub, and a handsome professorial type on my right, wearing a purple shirt and corduroy jacket, started chatting me up.  What did I teach?  Where did I live?  FLINT?  REALLY?  Is there anything to do there?  Do you meet people like yourself?  That question was provocative.  What did he mean … “like myself”?  I assumed he meant people like him, people with the same level of education and the same basic cultural interests?  “No.  Definitely not.”  What I didn’t tell him is that I am deeply grateful to be surrounded by true Others. 

Things have changed on Avon Street since Edward Thomson’s day.  The mansions of General Motors big-wigs that once lined Kearsley Street are gone, and those who live on our street are a mix of home-owners (factory workers, a pair of professors, and a retired nurse), down-and-out renters, single-mothers, group-home inmates, students, and, until recently, one very public alcoholic.  My husband often brags that we live within our means and aren’t in an all-white suburb, but I’ve been more self-critical: “Get real, honey, how much do we interact with the neighbors?”  Ay, there’s the rub.  Fran, who rents rooms across the street, remarked once, “You guys keep to yourselves.”  This is and is not true.  I’ve always opened the door to people like Mary, a squatter in a nearby abandoned house who used to come around a few years ago, asking for change to do laundry or ride the bus, and once she just needed menstrual pads.  Moreover, my reading is not self-isolating or self-comforting (not completely) but an act of love, a going out of my own nature, a sympathetic identification with the mystery of the other, whether the other is a neighbor, a stranger, or God?  But it is true:  books are not enough and have only whetted my appetite for real interactions.  In my own way, I am just as hungry as my neighbors.  Maybe that’s why I have become such an avid walker.  I walk to shed the “tiny, tiny myness,” and to be swept up in the life of nature or the street, to feel myself a part of what Virginia Woolf describes as, “that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room.”  But I credit the group-home guys—men with an array of psychological disorders, living lives of radical dependency—for pulling me out into the stream of life. 

Eric with Panda on the porch of Harmony House

Even in the cold of the winter months, they are out on the porches of the two houses nearest Court Street.  “I like your dog,” yells a newcomer, sitting alert and smoking.  I thank him.  The next night, he shouts the same thing, “I like your dog.”  “That’s a cool dog.”  “He keeps you company, doesn’t he?”  Another night he asked me if I read the Bible and warned me that “Jesus was coming,” but mostly he stuck to talking about Panda.  Eventually, I asked his name, and over time we talked more and more.  He introduced me to an older black man, John—quiet and unassuming.  But through Eric, I gradually warmed up to another, more pesty guy who shuffles around in a down vest and army hat and doesn’t hesitate to ask for empties and spare change.  At first, I didn’t like him because he commented unselfconsciously about my January-May marriage: “Hey, that your husband?  He’s kind of old, huh?  Ha, ha.”  Paul says “Bottles’-guy” (our name for him before I learned his real name) is “way out of it,” but I disagree.  “Captain Frank—U.S. Army” is perceptive and enterprising, just trying his best to keep some dignity in a lousy situation.  He told me that he’d tried to join the Army, but they “kicked [him] out.”  Undeterred by rejection, he simply pretends.  When hot weather hit in late May, Frank started asking me for pop.  I’d open to the knock at my door and see him standing there, begging for “a can of Coke or something.”  Coke?  Sure, no problem.  What’s a can of pop?  I got in the habit of picking up liter bottles of Fanta at Kroger for him and the occasional box of cookies.  I’d leave them with whoever was sitting on the porch.  When we had a bumper crop of strawberries, the group-home guys passed around the brown paper bag filled with red berries right off the bush.  I don’t mean to make myself sound like a do-gooder because I’m the one who benefits from the exchange.  I may nourish them with food gifts, but they nourish me with their greetings and the opportunity to be a provider.

They call out to us from their porches.  They shout requests, greetings, blessings.  How many neighbors in “good” neighborhoods do that.  No one comes around asking for an egg or a cup of sugar anymore or to borrow a rake or screw driver, but these guys have needs and aren’t shy about making them known.  Because they do, they draw us close, invite us to share something of their lives.  The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, “Happiness is made up not of an absence of needs, whose tyranny and imposed character one denounces, but of the satisfaction of all needs.”  What I take him to mean is that happiness is accomplishment:  it exists in a soul satisfied and not in a soul that has extirpated its needs, a castrated soul.  Frank needs pop, Gregory (a wiry black man with a broad toothless smile) needs an onion a cup of ice a hug, Eric needs a friend, and I know that I need to feel part of a community.  “Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being:  thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun,” and, I would add, sitting under a tree or on a step and talking to my neighbor.  “Distinct from my substance but constituting it, these contents make up the worth of my life.”  Levinas’ philosophical musings are spot on.  The human being thrives on her needs; she is happy for her needs.

But the truth is—meeting my neighbors’ needs has not come easily.  The relentlessness calls of the group-home guys may be teaching me kindness, but I have at other times struggled with being the only affluent open-hand around.  How much can I give?  Are they going to hit me up for money every time we meet on the street?  Every time I express my curiosity about their lives?  My dealings with Cathy made me acutely aware of my own needs for friendship.  Cathy is black, poor, lives with a younger black man, Jamie, who is, as she says, “slow” but nice and “learning to cook.”  She tries to work—collecting signatures on petitions and sometimes cleaning houses—but she’s also addicted to pain meds and sells half her monthly prescription on the streets.  I’d given Cathy rides downtown when she regaled me with stories from past lives when she went to UM-Flint, did theater, had a career as a singer, made $50,000 a year, had teeth and lots of friends.  When I bumped into her last summer around the Cultural Center, she said her brother was dying of brain cancer and wondered if I had any cleaning work for her to do.  I didn’t.  I like Cathy, but it bothered me that she could never remember my name.  I knew hers.  I knew her story.  The fact that she kept calling me “Mary Ann” or “Mary Jane” or “Mary Lou” made me feel funny, like she was just talking to me to get something.

One day in early December, it was cold.  I’d come in from walking the dog and had a small bit of time before picking up my daughter from school.  There was a knock at the door which I had not closed.  “Mary Ann!  Mary Ann!”  It was Cathy.  “You got any pain pills?!”  This was before I knew of her addiction.  “Well, I have some Tylenol.  That’s all I got.”  “Really?  I figured you must have something stronger.  I mean, we ain’t getting any younger.”  I was annoyed.  I stomped upstairs to the medicine cabinet, picked up the mostly empty bottle of Tylenol, stomped down and handed it to her.  “And MY NAME is MARY JO.”  I know she heard the annoyance in my voice, and hers came back lilting and laughing, “honey, you know most days I can’t remember my children’s names.  Not since I had that stroke.”  And somehow in that conversation, she tucked in a very clear statement of her needs and values for “food, sex, and travel” in that order.  I remember admiring her clarity and thinking that that wasn’t a bad short list of necessities.  I closed the door and locked myself into my own trap.  I knew what was bugging me:  maybe Cathy was in pain, but she had enough gumption to walk across the street on a cold, cold day and ask for help.  She had enough spirit to find a man to sleep with.  She could say what she needed.  Could I?  I felt shitty for taking out my frustration on her.  And after picking up Katya from school, I stopped at Rite Aid, bought her Motrin, a couple of small bottles of whiskey, and a chocolate bar.  Christmas was coming.  Settling my daughter in the house, I carried my purchases across the street.  Cathy and Jamie lived upstairs in the same house where I used to have an apartment (701 Avon).  The doorbells are broken now—out of state landlord—and to get their attention, I had to shout up toward the window which is usually open.  “Cathy!  Cathy!  Hey, I’ve got something for you.”  She came down, opened the door, and invited me upstairs, but I said I couldn’t stay.  I apologized, gave her what I’d put together, and we hugged.  I was grateful that she was so forgiving, that she was willing to give me a second chance.

Cathy with boyfriend, Jamie in front of 701 Avon Street

Even before I began talking to Cathy, I’d connected with her boyfriend, Jamie, because Jamie loves my corgi, Panda.  One day, when he was still just a puppy, Panda squeezed through the fence and ran straight over to Jamie, who often sits in a white plastic chair along the sidewalk.  “Hey Panda, Panda, Panda,” he says, putting his face close to my dog’s, brown eyes staring into brown eyes.  For a long time I’ve known that Jamie needs an animal to care for.  He’s familiar enough with us now that if he sees me in the porch or in the backyard, he’ll come over and come right on in.  The first time he lifted the latch and let himself in the fence, I was troubled.  This is MY YARD.  I didn’t say you could come in.  I felt the annoyance of having an interloper on MY property.  I hated myself for having these feelings, and, thankfully, I was able to put them aside and enjoy watching Jamie play with Panda.  And we talked.  I asked him if he was born in Flint.  “No.  Thailand.  I’m adopted.”  Thailand?  I was really surprised.  He explained very clearly—not “slow” at all—that he was born in 1968—“a Vietnam baby”—in Bangkok to a Thai woman and an American father, who was a soldier.  He loves Chinese food and isn’t angry about having been abandoned.  “Things were unstable.  There was the war.”  He grew up in Hurley Children’s Center and was adopted by a white family in Flint.  “That’s why I get along with white people better than most blacks.”  Eventually, after we’ve compared notes on adoption, talked about Flint, and Panda is dead tired from the tug of war game, I tell Jamie that I need to start cooking dinner.  I tell him that because I am used to my own quiet and my own space, and I am ashamed that I have such a low tolerance for human company.  Something I want to change.  “Okay.  Hey,” he asks with a big tonal question mark, “can you spare a few bucks?”  “What d’ya need?” I ask, feeling friendship corrupted by obligation.  “Oh, I don’t want to be greedy, but maybe like ten dollars.”  I go inside and pull a ten out of my wallet and hand it over, once again feeling that ugly feeling that everything with them comes down to money.  We just had a nice conversation, I’m thinking.  Why does money have to enter in?  Of course, the answer is that he and Cathy are poor.  She, as I’ll find out later, needs pain medicine and she had already spent her monthly check.  Jamie was trying to meet her need.  What’s wrong about having needs and asking for help?  Nothing.  And I pray the day will come that I will, with genuine gladness, meet such needs because, in the scheme of things, I can … without suffering any loss.  And because, Cathy does pay me back.  Several days later, she comes trundling over, heavy purse on her arm, waving dollar bills in the air like a fan, “Mary Ann!  Mary Ann!  I got some money for you.”

A week or two later, I’m pull my car in the driveway and Jamie runs over.  “Hey, you know that white guy …” , and, weirdly, I do know the man he’s talking about—the drunk who, for many years, has sat on his porch downing box after box of Rose wine and smoking … for hours everyday … winter, spring, summer, fall.  He was the neighborhood watchman.  “He died.”  I was genuinely shocked.  Jamie knew his name was “Brad,” and I knew there was a lot of traffic between the two porches—Brad’s and Jamie’s—and that Brad had had some kind of relationship with the rail-thin black woman, “Vivien,” who I somehow imagined to be a crackhead.  I’d stayed away from Brad when he started giving flowers to my toddler daughter and later when he got in my face and told me I needed to call Child Protective Services about Sam and Jasmine’s mother.  I wrote him off as a judgmental jerk.  Did I think … that I was the only neighbor who had the right to form judgments?  Just as Brad was a constant presence on his porch, watching the street, so he was a touchstone in my mind.  Some winters he’d drink outside, wearing a hard hat and a beige Carhart jumpsuit, and I envied him his freedom from responsibility.  More recently, he’d hibernate during the winter and I’d worry when he hadn’t come out even once the weather got fine.  I hoped quietly that he’d survived.  During my own deep depression two years ago, when I was smoking and drinking during the day (little sips of wine from a demitasse cup), Brad’s presence two houses away made me feel less alone and less messed up.  “He died. … How?” I gasped.  “I don’t know, but when they found him, he’d been dead in the house for three or four days.”  “Oh, God.  That’s awful.”  There would be no second chance this time.  No hugs.  No liquor exchanged.  No nothing. 

That night, all the neighborhood blacks hung out in the yard across from Brad’s apartment in those white plastic chairs.  It seemed to me they were waking him.  By the time I picked and washed a mess of strawberries to take over, they were gone.  Not quite:  there was Jamie coming up a side street.  He must have seen me standing in his yard, looking … for someone.  I gave him the bag of fruit.  He thanked me.  He didn’t seem to feel threatened by my presence in his yard, but, then, his has no fence. 

Just the other day, late afternoon, I’d walked Panda around a block and came up to Cathy sitting under the maple tree eating a plate of something she’d cooked.  She gave the dog her last piece of food and asked me to sit down and talk.  She filled me in on Brad—how he lived and how he died:  “He was in the Navy … cook on a submarine,”  “a hoarder,” “hundreds of wine boxes,” “spoiled meat crawling with maggots,” “Vivien was goin with him.”  She asked me about my life.  “What’s it like—Boston?”  When I told her about my recent troubles with my daughter, she said, “she’s not a lesbian, not screwing black guys or Mexicans—don’t let her go with any Mexicans,” and “she’s not having twins and needing an abortion … honey, your problems small compared to real-world ones.”  I laughed and agreed.  “Make yourself some banana splits.  Get yourself a journal.  You growing up with her.  Plus, I can tell she’s a good girl.  She’s beautiful.  Remember that day I was over at your place?  She came out of the house, looked me dead in the eye, and handed me a quarter.  She’s alright.”  I stand up to go, and this time, she doesn’t ask for anything.  “See ya later, Mary Ann.”  It no longer matters that she doesn’t know my name.  “Okay.  Enjoy the evening, Cathy.”  In the pale night light of summer around 9:00 I see her racing down Avon Street on a bike. 

My Avon may be a street in a rust-belt city and not a river in Warwickshire, but it, too, has a current.  Lately, I feel glad when I hear someone shout out, “Maree-Ann!” or “Hey, Jo-Jo.”  When I answer to these new names, I step into the current, let go my hold on all the tiny mynesses I’ve clung to—my name, my yard, my money, my free time, my work.  And free at last, liberated by my neighbors’ needs, I have to wonder where, oh where, does this Avon go? 

There were still horses on Avon St. in 1996 when I moved here.

Walking Away Toothache

            “As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude … .”  Thus begins one of John Donne’s “meditations” written during a time when fever confined him to his bed in a sickroom, unable to practice his vocation and unable to be sociable.  Sick people were quarantined in early-modern England—a time when populations were devastated by plague and there was no understanding of how infection spread or even what was infectious.

            I had occasion to identify with John Donne lately when, afflicted with a bad toothache that would not abate, I couldn’t see straight, think clearly, or even enjoy the simple pleasures of life … or so I thought until one walk on a breezy sunny afternoon saved me.  The experience of this one walk and its effect on my spirits proves to me the power of that triadic chord—mind, body, and world—played over and over every time the human being leaves her house, her desk, her yard, and strikes out for fresh woods and pastures new.  Leap the fence, be cattle no more but wild cow, back to nature, and you will find, as I found, that even in solitude, you are not alone but drawn out into an ocean of subtle intelligences to swim in a sea of infinite warmth and tenderness where grasses, weeds, the light on a stream will support and delight you.  This is possible even if you are isolated by physical pain.  “Does it work on emotions, too?” my daughter often asks if she hears me talking about cures or healing.  Oh, yes, it absolutely works on emotions.

            I walked a familiar path, focusing on each step.  I remembered watching a physical therapist move my mother’s leg when she lay in a hospital bed after breaking her hip.  “Breathe, Catherine, move through the pain.”  I repeated those words and was eased somewhat by the awareness that the pulsing pain in my tooth matched the rhythm of my legs carrying me forward.  The insight didn’t take away the pain but it naturalized it.  The walk became a real walk when I got into Kearsley Park and turned off the path to stray far into a grassy meadow, past the remains of last year’s “Occupy Flint” campsite.  There were old concrete blocks where men had sat to while away the hours in the sun.  I saw pieces of their tents and remembered how I’d given their encampment a wide berth on walks last summer.  As I was coming into what felt like the oldest part of the sward, deep indentations—almost like filled-in cellar holes—and straggling old trees covered with vines gave the impression of a landscape worked by human hands.  Suddenly I heard noise—squabbling and whinnying—underground.  Surprised, I looked for a human source of this sound on the far hillside, but there was no one in sight.  Then, I saw the hole and the brown fur back of a woodchuck.  This was not Avernus, not the entrance to an underworld where souls writhe in pain, but a simple den and where an animal altercation—between a landowner and a squatter or between mates—was underway.  The animal hadn’t seen me, but I was eager to see him and to witness how this conflict would play out.  I climbed up on the big fallen tree trunk nearby to wait.  I waited for what seemed like a long time, focused on the hole, but their negotiations or whatever was happening underground, gave me time to enjoy the sun, the breeze, and to study the wood on which I was sitting.  The tree had been down for a long time—split and open to weather and bugs.  I sat and thought about inner rot and underground squabbling.  These images seemed, at that moment, gifts from some cosmologic compassion given to make me feel better.  And I became better because I started to feel other things again:  I felt the sun.  I saw the beauty of simple grasses.  I noticed the color of my own hair as loose strands blew about my face.  There was more going on than the throbbing beneath the root of my tooth.  The sound of animal whinnying broke into my thoughts, and a brown head appeared at the top of the hole, its black eye staring directly at me.  We sat like that—he and I –for a long while.  I dared to move close enough to see the twitching nose, the gray-brown fur of the head change to red on the neck.  He didn’t move, but then I did.  I walked away, letting him finish whatever he was settling or trying to run from. 

            Being caught in the gaze of a creature and sitting in an arboreal cavity changed my day.  The incidents were unpredictable, but felt like gifts.  Such meetings are what make life incalculable, what give it value.  At home I felt less alone and more responsive to the love that was available from corgi, husband, and teen daughter who loves to cuddle.  When I told my husband what I’d seen, he seemed interested and said that there are places in the country where woodchucks are called “whistle pigs.”  I made tea and took it to the front porch where I could still feel like I was outside among the leaves.  I sat down on the floor with my pets and I was happy enough to sing what I could remember of “How Great Thou Art:” 

O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art

            In my nights of misery, I’d thought of Shakespeare’s Iago who says he’s kept awake by a “raging tooth,” and I knew that Shakespeare had had a lot of other things to say about tooth aches.  His most quotable line comes from Much Ado About Nothing when a grief-stricken father, who has lost a daughter refuses to be consoled:  “There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently,” says Leonato to silence his well-meaning counselors.  But my experimental walk with toothache suggests that Leonato may not be quite right and that when we use our legs as instruments of philosophy, that which carries us beyond ourselves cures us.  
           The tooth pain slowed me down and woke me up to some basic things.  I learned something about finding, what it means that we are looking for something we have lost--faith in what's happening in the worlds we trod upon but never really observe.  I learned what acceptance is, what it means that we have to find ourselves where we are, at each present, and accept that finding in our experiment.  Most important of all--I learned that to be confident in nature is to be willing to be confided in by her.  To listen to all the hums, throbs, and whistles that indicate subterranean activity and to trust that awareness of that activity, whether it come in the form of a toothache or arguing woodchucks, will move us toward resolution and peace.

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postscript:  "Love and toothache have many cures, but none infallible, except possession and dispossession."  --Ben Franklin

Finding Thread Lake in the Heart of Flint

“What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty?”                                           --Henry David Thoreau

            There is a lake practically at the center of Flint—Thread Lake—just a stone’s throw south-east of downtown.  It began its life in a time before Flint became “Vehicle City,” when an enterprising miller, Rufus Stevens, dammed Thread Creek in 1830 to power a mill.  Stevens was the first white settler in Grand Blanc, and when he established his mill, there was wilderness all around Thread Lake.  As the carriage industry gained a toehold, an amusement park was built on the west end of the lake, and a trolley line brought thousands to enjoy the rides, the shows, the dancing, the boating at Lakeside Park from 1905 through the Depression.  Today, there is no evidence that such a park existed—just a big paved parking lot and the tin shed that was once McKinley senior center (now closed and the building scorched by arsonists).  Why did Flint give up on Lakeside Park?  Why has it forgotten its hidden gem?  The short answer is:  the automobile.  Once Flint residents had cars and the wealth to buy recreational toys and summer cottages, they couldn’t wait to go “up north.”  But this brings me back to Thoreau’s question: “what’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs”?  Thoreau, for those of you who don’t know, was a resident of Concord, Massachusetts in the 1830s and 40s, who built himself a little house on the local Walden Pond—a mile from any neighbor.  In his writings, he adjures us not to go looking further and further afield for recreation and refreshment but to seek the wild source in our own backyards and, more importantly, in our own selves: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves.  There is none such.  It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream.”[1]  The collective abandonment of Thread Lake—most Flint residents don’t know where it is!—is a symptom of larger cultural problem.  As I write this, the lake is literally vanishing due to a dam breach.  Its carp-filled waters rush through open gates, while bald eagles search the mud flats for remaining fish.  If we viewed this as a different kind of water crisis, perhaps we could muster the collective will to save this patch of wilderness in our backyard.  To help you understand why Thread Lake might matter, let me tell you a story.

Midway at Lakeside Park on Thread Lake, Flint, MI., c. 1905

            I moved to Flint from Boston in 1996 for a teaching job, and I became fast friends with my department secretary, Fran Frazier.  It was Fran who introduced me to Thread Lake through reminiscences of summer days when she’d take the street car to Lakeside Park with her father.  She remembered eating cotton candy, riding the roller coaster, and renting rowboats.  Fran lived on Stockton Street in what once had been a boarding house her parents ran for factory workers.  Her dad worked at Chevy-in-the-Hole and had used his first paycheck to buy a fiddle.  When she died, Fran gave my husband that same violin.  She said it would be a gift for me, too—music in the house—if I wasn’t like her mother, a killjoy, who was annoyed by sound.

In the years when I was friends with Fran, I was also getting to know Paul, my future husband.  Paul is archivist of The Genesee Historical Collections Center, housed in the UM-F library.  I told him all I’d heard about Thread Lake.  I remember one particular conversation over breakfast, the summer we married, when I marveled at how much water there was in Flint:  there’s the Flint River, Kearsley Creek, Gilkey Creek, nearby lakes, and, of course, Thread Lake.  “I wish we had a boat … wouldn’t that be cool … to paddle around Flint?”  When I dredged up this dream, my version of Huck Finn’s raft on the Mississippi, I never expected Paul to embrace it, but he did.  Later that same day, we were at Rocky’s on South Saginaw, buying a green aluminum Radisson canoe—light enough to throw on the car—and that evening, we were paddling it on Thread Lake!  For the next 3-4 years, from courtship through marriage up until the adoption of a baby daughter, we headed to Thread Lake many times each week of spring, summer, and fall.  We explored every bay, every mucky swamp.  Usually, we’d put the canoe in at a dock at the end of Winans Street (off Lippincott) in an historically black neighborhood, where we’d seen the carcasses of dogs deposited (dog fighting is still ghetto sport).  Sometimes we’d often see the same guy fishing off the dock, who told us tales about snappers that lived back in “the hole,” and when we asked where exactly was “the hole,” he gestured up toward the creek.  We’d head in the direction, paddling upstream, scaring ducks, observing herons, and once even startled a coyote who was doing his own hunting.  Pressing further into wilderness, Paul determined one summer that we should clear the creek of branches that blocked our passage to the interior and, sure enough, waist-deep in water, using a small chainsaw, he cut through and cleared the blockage.  Later his own circulatory system clogged, resulting in a heart attack, and the flow of energy in our marriage ceased.  But those Thread Lake summers, we experienced the mythic truth that rivers, streams, and ponds bring the principle of circulation to settled societies.  I remember one July 4^th, when we packed a small cooler with beer and Chinese take-out, and paddled out to the big island (just oak and goose poop) to wait for the fireworks.  They came, but so did a screech of brakes, a crunch of metal, and the sound of smashing glass—accident on I-475 that runs along the lake.  How much better off we were alone on an island in what seemed an isolated lake, faraway from chaos and ruin.      

I have no doubt that this search for wildness close to home was an essential activity for a newly married couple.  Nobody else knew or cared about Thread Lake, but we did.  It was our secret world, our private place to explore.  Paul and I tried out other lakes further away:  they looked cleaner but were always filled with loud motor boats, jet skis, and drunken men.  We always went back to Thread Lake, and it worked like a charm for all that ailed us.  Just like Thoreau who felt his “spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness,” we felt energized when floating on muddy waters.  You could never see the bottom, you could only wonder what monsters lay below.  Unfathomable and mysterious, this lake would never be a tourist destination, would never be on anybody’s “bucket list.”  It somehow reminded us that marriage did not have to be a normalizing or a civilizing process … that it could be a mutual encouragement to grow wild.

Once we adopted a daughter from distant Kazakhstan, things changed.  As she grew, we tried to share our love of Thread Lake with her.  Paul took her ice-fishing there one winter, but she got too close to the hole and fell in.  We took her in the canoe, but she never took to it, and, as she became and tween and a teen, she was more drawn to society than either of her parents, much too interested, for our taste, in staying connected to people in the ephemeral worlds of Facebook and Instagram.  As a result, our canoe sits unused in backyard, overgrown with weeds, and serving as a hooch for two corgis.  The longer we stayed away from Thread Lake, the sicker our marriage got.  Every summer for the last five, I’ve thought about buying my own house and moving out.  This spring, I noticed from I-475, on my way to grocery shop at the Hill Road Meijer, that Thread Lake seems to be drying up.  Sad but fitting.  No lake.  No marriage.  I told Paul what I’d seen, and a couple of weeks ago, we headed over to check it out on a Saturday evening after dinner dishes were done.  He had a hard time admitting that the lake was disappearing.  “Paul, it is different.  It was never like this.  It is dying,” I said desperately.  We walked the mud flats at the edges and were surprised at how relatively clean the lake bottom appeared to be.  “Hey, look!  There are lots of clam shells.  Fresh water clams.  Is that a sign of health?”  We walked the familiar paths through the woods, up to the ruined picnic pavilion where, in the past, we’d untangled sweet pea vines, located individual plant stems with difficulty, and dug up a few to transplant into our backyard garden.  The wild plants never took.  But that night, we spotted two bald eagles perched in trees above the lake on the other side, looking for fish whose big brown backs were easily visible in the shallow water.  The walk was sad, but the place still worked its magic because we could still see new things; and I felt close to Paul without needing to use old words.

In the weeks following our discovery that the lake was in critical condition due to a dam breach in February, Paul and I began a different kind of rediscovery.  He found detailed topographical survey maps at work that he scanned and attempted to merge into one huge map of the lake region.  I spent time reading articles from old Flint Journals that helped me better understand the history of the lake that was in my brain and bowels.  Once we gain access to the wildness in ourselves, Thoreau writes in a journal entry, anywhere on the globe can become “thrillingly novel and wild.”  Then and then only, will humanity be able to “restore all things to their original primitive flourishing and promising state.”  So … this was my mission:  to discover a more promising time in the history of Thread Lake that was not just my private world but the place of recreation for at least two generations of Flint’s workers.

            Research gave me a new appreciation for the resiliency of the lake.  It nearly died once before.  During World War II, there was talk of a possible Civil Works Administration project that would have enlisted me to clear stumps from the lake bottom.  To facilitate this, the lake was drained and remained dry for a year.  But the work never got done.  When thirty-four cases of malaria were blamed on the lake “left in bad condition,” members of the South Flint Club, angry at the incessant delay and passing of the buck, accused the City Park Department of “discrimination.”  This news item was in a Detroit Free Press article from 1935; and many journalists compared Flint’s Thread Lake to Detroit’s Belle Isle, suggesting that it was dereliction of civic duty to let the lake go. 

That was just one “day in the life” of a lake that survived—re-filled and flourished, although not much longer as a “Mecca” for the “throngs” seeking to ride the roller-coaster, listen to the concerts by the “Flint Colored Band” (1905), the “Buick Band” (1916), the “Moose Band” (1935), or dance to the Quintano’s Italian band of sixteen pieces at the pavilion (1913).  Its heyday was a brief 30-year span from 1905-1935.  But there was other information to be culled from the public record that spoke to the wildness of the lake.  Based on a study done by the Michigan Department of Conservation, it had the largest carp concentration of any Michigan lake:  700 fish per acre.  Of course, no one eats carp—no one but my husband’s gypsy friends, who, when they visited from Chicago, fished the Flint River for carp to make soup.  In addition to breeding an undesirable fish, Thread Lake’s spring-fed waters made especially good ice, if you can trust advertising of “Flint Spring Water Ice Company,” which sat on the shore of the lake in 1913.  The company identified the source of Thread Creek twenty miles south and west of Flint in the hills near Drayton Plains in Oakland County. 

“The pure sparkling water that bubbles up from the earth at beautiful Drayton Plains flows through the meadows and woodlands over a gravel bed until it reaches the wood-crested southern shores of Thread Lake.”

Pretty bucolic, huh?  I confess that “pure” and “spring-fed” were never in my mind in those summer days of canoeing on the lake.  Indeed, I assiduously avoided putting my hands and feet in that water.  As it turns out, I was wrong to be so finicky, and Paul was right to get in up to his armpits to saw apart the fallen trees that blocked our way.  True, the lake was cloudy.  It looked dirty, but I don’t think it was polluted.  There was always too much wildlife, too many clams, and the lake bed is clean, all things considered.  When I looked at the Atlas of Genesee County from 1873 and noticed that all the parcels of land around the lake (50 acres, 25 acres, 30 acres) were identified by farmer’s name and colored with shades of pink, yellow, and light green, I could almost envision the fountainhead of the lake, bubbling up in some idyllic pasture in Oakland County, and I could almost see the shores of my lake as “wood-crested.” 

1873 Atlas of Genesee County, showing "Thread River Mill Pond."

Thoreau, who had his finger on the sluggish pulse of village life in every time period, knew that what is needed is “a little more manhood or virtue”—by that he means primitive vigor or wildness—to “convert the district road into an untrodden cranberry bog, for it restores all things to their original primitive flourishing and promising state.”  If I began to recover Thread Lake with a day or two of research, I knew that a walk—a mini-pilgrimage—would take me to the holy land again—the essential wilderness of the place and of myself.  Through the neighborhoods I sauntered—south and west from my house.[2]  I crossed the railroad tracks and headed down to the lake.  I walked carefully along a four by eight board across the dam, passed workmen who assured me that new steel gates are being made, and headed up the muddy path.  “Here I am!” I said to myself—at the site where the carnival music and dance bands once played, and where, today, a strange sound woke me:  the slap, slap, slapping of swans’ wings hitting the water as they drummed themselves aloft.  The sound forced me out of my thoughts to participate in the lively event of witnessing two enormous birds lift off the lake’s surface.  And in the sound of wings on water I also heard the slap of canoe paddles, and that sound made me think that my marriage may not be dead yet, might still be a promising place like Thread Lake, if I can find in myself once more that wild urge to strike out from my habitual paths.

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[1] Henry David Thoreau, Journals, Aug. 30 1856, Henry David Thoreau, An American Landscape: Selected Writings from His Journals, ed. Robert L. Rothwell (New York:  Paragon House, 1991), 126-27.

[2] In his essay, “Walking,” Thoreau discusses the etymology of saunter, which he says derives from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la Sainte Terr,” to the Holy Land.  See Thoreau, “Walking,” Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 260.

Bravo Beaver!

Since school ended, I have been enjoying a small spot of nature everyday rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape.  Sure, I go to the same park—“the Hogbacks”—but there are so many different trails, and each one has special beauties.  I won’t try to verbally map the terrain today (that’s for some other time), but I want to share something wonderful I saw and what that sight made me think.  My dog and I climbed the main road up to the ridge that looks down over the blue lake.  Blue water allows me to use my own eyes again after I’ve squinted to avoid the too direct glare of today's sun.  Sheltered by the woods, my dog and I walked the hog’s back.  A hogback, which gives this nature area its name, is a geologic feature:  a ridge, formed by differential erosion of an outcropping, that leaves steep drop-offs on both sides of a narrow path.  The silhouette looks like the back of a creature (if not exactly a hog).  We walked the ridge, checking the vernal pools for frogs and wading in the lake.  We continued past the beech trees that have been tortured by the cutting letters of human loves, past the blooming may apples, until we intersected with another ridge.  We turned left and began to climb the second hogback for a view of another river.  Then Panda wanted to go down, down through the grass and over the moss, down and down to the brown river.  I followed him, clutching at branches to prevent myself from going down too fast.  He has a low center of gravity—almost no legs—a corgi; and I am an ungainly woman with a tendency to gather speed as I go and not worry once I start to move.  We made it, and at the bottom, the two of us go our own ways, exploring.  Panda immediately plunges into the river … brown and deep as his eyes.  Meanwhile, I wonder at all the fallen trees.  Did they all fall naturally down the slope and at such odd angles?  I take a closer look at a huge weathered stump, and I see that it was felled by a beaver.  The trunk was at least a foot in diameter, maybe wider.  The animal must have chewed away for days—love’s labor?—and once it was down, he couldn’t move it.  It was just too big.  He hadn’t planned.  He hadn’t assessed.  He wasn’t human.  He did what came naturally.  Bravo, beaver!  What heart.  Maybe he couldn’t use that great big log, but I have to believe that his labor—Love’s Labor—wasn’t lost.  It stood there as a perfect instance, to me, of poet, Robert Frost’s notion that anything we attempt in this life is actually a test of how our will pitches into commitments and then is judged for whether the original intention had been strongly spent or weakly lost.  This quality of pitching in and riding our impulses is the same whether we are working in business, school, art, science, love, or marriage—"strongly spent is synonymous with kept.”  No doubt that beaver built one heck of a dam on one of these fast-moving streams and is now enjoying the fruits of his labor in some saturated beaver meadow—if not in this woods, then in his dream of some other.  Thinking about the beaver, who was off to fresh woods and pastures new, I laughed at the way he reminded me to remind others not to be so over-concerned with calculation and assessment, but to do what comes naturally, remembering that humans, too, part of Nature instead of little gods that control it.