Читать книгу 100 Miles of Baseball - Dale Jacobs - Страница 11

Marshall MI

We wake to ice on the trees, ice encasing our cars. By the time we finish breakfast, the Tigers have already cancelled both ends of their split doubleheader. No word yet from the University of Michigan.

We’d stopped briefly at the Albion College ballpark on the way to Marshall, Suzanne noting how much more impressive the athletic facilities were compared to when she was there in the early ‘80s. Immaculate in its upkeep, the campus was, from all outward appearances, prospering. The same couldn’t be said for downtown Albion, with its many boarded-up storefronts, like gaps in a fading smile, providing a backdrop for the few people who walked its streets. The city’s best days looked to be behind it.

After breakfast, our host, himself originally from Albion, tells us that there’s no longer a high school or a hospital in Albion and that those absences have accelerated a decline that had been coming for years. We were not imagining the contrast we saw between Albion, the elite liberal arts college, and Albion, the declining Midwestern town.

As we drive home in even harder rain than the day before, Heidi keeps checking to see if Michigan have cancelled their games with Maryland yet, but the team’s Twitter account maintains that they’re going to play. At five o’clock, long after we’re back in Windsor, they finally begin play, a game that Michigan wins 6-3 in eight innings. It had to have been the most miserable game, one that would have made the Henry Ford game feel like baseball on a sunny afternoon in July. We haven’t watched any baseball since April 1 and I’m anxious to see a game, but not even this project could have coaxed me out today.