Читать книгу Standpipe - David Hardin - Страница 10

TWO

Flint is boxed in north and south, east and west, by interstate highway and a bypass, a web of concrete and asphalt built chiefly to serve the needs of industry. On maps, the city is situated on the mound of a sprawling, industrial-sized baseball diamond—the chemical plants and refineries of Sarnia, Ontario at first base; Saginaw’s automotive suppliers and Midland’s Dow Chemical on second; Lansing’s auto plants and the state capital holding down third; Detroit calling pitches behind home plate. Balance a bat along an axis between Grand Rapids and London, Ontario—Flint is your fulcrum.

Beyond the baseline, table-flat farmland extends north into Michigan’s thumb, endless outfield where they raise sugar beets, soy beans, corn, and a particular strain of anti-government libertarianism. The McVeigh brothers, Timothy and James, along with accomplice Terry Nichols, once called Michigan’s thumb home. Budding domestic terrorists, they perfected homemade fertilizer bombs in the endless, isolated, corduroy expanse of plowed fields and distant wind breaks. Hit a long fly ball and, if the wind is right, watch it carry left past West Branch for an out-of-the-park home run, ricocheting among white pine and jack pine forests up north. Unless, of course, it drifts foul into shallow Saginaw Bay.