Читать книгу Standpipe - David Hardin - Страница 16

EIGHT

Flint is a river town due south of Saginaw Bay, settled by fur traders, lumbermen, land speculators, and brokers of farm commodities, incorporated in 1855 to accommodate the needs of a vibrant carriage manufacturing trade, ballooning apace to support a nascent automobile industry. The local labor pool of the day was shallow—people of German and Scandinavian stock who had already found prosperity growing corn, silage, and sugar beets and raising livestock. Immigrants from European nations deemed less desirable, like Ireland, southern Italy, Poland, and new nations risen from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with the offspring of former enslaved people fleeing Jim Crow, are wooed for their willingness to take the worst jobs for the shortest wages. Grateful for work, sufficiently constrained by a capricious social contract so as not to sink their teeth to deeply into the hand that fed them.

Industry and citizenry, like the first European settlers and the Ojibwa before them, drew Flint River water until 1967, when the city connected to the reliable but distant Detroit municipal water system. The river lends the city a disarming leer, a drunken grin plastered between the hangdog creases of the interstates. The ironic heart of the joke—abundant, clear flowing water drew the first humans. Today, the lack of safe water threatens continued human habitation. The damage took less than a lifetime. I cross the river several times a day, delivering water to people living near its banks. In some places it flows stunned through a barren concrete trough. Little houses on shaggy oxbows, Jon boats in yards, herald slower, cooler sections, shady and inviting on hot afternoons.

The river runs a shameful gauntlet, doomed to parade past what’s left of this once vibrant city of hard-working union men and women. It mirrors the surviving edifices of the wealthy, long decamped, and the more modest dwellings of the forgotten and forsaken. The river leaves town quietly, wanders north to vanish into an indifferent Shiawassee, before quietly drowning itself in Saginaw Bay.