Читать книгу Standpipe - David Hardin - Страница 18

TEN

It’s not much of a plan. Drive to Flint. Present myself to the proper authorities. Lose myself in mindless, cleansing labor. The little research I’ve done confirms that the American Red Cross is the official portal for organized volunteer efforts in Flint, aside from the ad hoc efforts of churches and local service organizations. In the earliest days of the crisis, a ragtag army of citizens, city workers, law enforcement, and Michigan National Guard mobilized to distribute water and filters. The American Red Cross Flint chapter isn’t too hard to find. It’s on the I-69 service drive near downtown, just south of the University of Michigan-Flint campus. The Brutalist, seventies-era building is just up the road from a General Motors assembly plant and Sitdowners Memorial Park, commemorating the famous Flint Sit Down Strike. In the months before Christmas, 1936, a nascent United Auto Workers union froze auto production in Flint, winning legitimacy and wage and working condition concessions from General Motors. The strikers ushered in a national golden age of middle-class prosperity and job security. The strike united the racially and culturally diverse work force and their families behind a common cause. The BBC called it the “strike heard ’round the world.” The company, supported by state and local government, opposed strikers with deadly force. A number of men were wounded by gunfire. President Roosevelt’s intervention on the side of organized labor, and the tenacity of the strikers, eventually forced GM to recognize the UAW.

The half-life glow of all that socialist passion, the high drama of men and women putting their lives on the line for a just cause, is difficult to detect this morning. The parking lot adjacent to the chapter is busy with the coming and going of nondescript yellow Penske trucks. The surrounding neighborhood looks forlorn and abandoned. Traffic is light. Pedestrians, at least those unencumbered by shopping carts or bulging trash bags, are nonexistent.

I’m directed upstairs to a large conference room that appears to have been the locus of a great deal of recent activity, inexplicably ceased. Cases of soft drinks are stacked in corners. Empty pizza boxes overflow trash bins. Passed from person to person, I’m eventually assigned data entry duty, transcribing logistical data from field records into a database. The software is balky. My enthusiasm wanes. Teams of corporate volunteers in puffy down jackets and Gore-Tex boots tramp in, then tramp back out. Everything feels impromptu, a strange combination of urgency and ennui. Quickly tiring of data entry—it fails to measure up to the muscular narrative I created for myself on the trip north, stacking water in a sandbag chain, chaos swirling around me, desperate citizens clambering for their fair share—I flag down a woman who exudes authority. Soon, I’m on my way home, having passed the background check, fledgling Red Cross volunteer.

A week or two of online training, classroom CPR certification, day-long conference room seminar, and a road test around downtown Flint in a gleaming, late-model ERV, and I’m ready for my first day. I show up thirty minutes early equipped with a crisp new city map, stiff leather work gloves, and dawning awareness of my naïve assumptions about the city and this, its latest crisis. I arrive that first day expecting a bracing plunge into frenzied, ground zero-scale efforts to save the citizens of Flint. There’s nothing about long-traumatized Flint this frigid morning, however, to suggest anything more urgent than a city waking to familiar trouble, hoping merely to survive until happy hour, choir practice, or Wheel of Fortune. I’m the newest team member in a stubborn grudge match destined to play itself out long after I’ve left the field.