Standpipe. David Hardin

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       Acknowledgements

       About The Author

      For Sue. So, it shall always be.

      “He’d grown up on endlessness and his mother. In the beginning, they were the same thing.”

      —Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater

      Have a blessed day, I’m told over and over again. I’ve never felt so blessed. Kindness, bestowed by people too bereft of surplus to warrant such generosity. I’m grateful, but my gratitude is leavened with a liberal dash of liberal guilt. I wince despite myself every time I hear it uttered. Repetition dulls the sting. Liberated by banality, I mourn the loss.

      ONE

      Late February, 2016, I complete training and qualify as a Red Cross Disaster Relief Volunteer (DRV) behind the wheel of a boxy, red and white Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV). I deploy to an officially declared Disaster Relief Operation in Flint, Michigan—city long on the wane, lately devastated by a municipal water supply contaminated with dangerous levels of lead. Children and the aged are at greatest risk. A local pediatrician is among the first citizens to sound the alarm, spurred to action by a rash of symptoms turning up in her young patients. By early 2016, the men, women, and children of Flint have been drinking lead-contaminated water, far in excess of federal safety standards, for many months. Widespread lead contamination is, sadly, become common place. But in 2016, Flint is novel among that unfortunate club of communities devastated by man-made disasters sexy enough to have captured the public’s fickle imagination. Right up there with Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster (West Virginia), Love Canal (New York), and Times Beach (Missouri).

      The seeds of the crisis had been planted over a year before, in 2014. I deploy to a city for which I have no particular affinity, nor harbor any bad blood. Just another town through which I’ve passed free of claim, like Camden, Maine; Greenville, South Carolina; or Great Falls, Montana. Unlike those other places, however, Flint is only a ninety-minute drive north from where I live, home to fellow Michiganders—trolls like me, living below the Mackinac Bridge. My taxes went to pay the salaries of the men responsible for the disaster and those endeavoring to deflect responsibility and avoid criminal prosecution. Michigan taxpayers and the citizens of Flint will foot much of the bill and endure all of the heartache for a scheme borne of market solution, anti-tax, small government machinations. What happened in Flint could happen to any community. It could happen to mine, but that’s unlikely. I live in a mostly white, financially solvent suburb just north of Detroit. The majority Black citizens of Flint were considered politically irrelevant and socially expendable by those in power long before their water supply was contaminated with lead. Flint, like other poor communities of color around the state, is much more likely to suffer the disastrous consequences of ideological social engineering put to practice.

      My mother, Ima Nell Hardin, began showing the first signs of decline that will lead to her eventual death, around the time Flint’s water troubles began. We were inseparable my first five years, moon and planet in symbiotic orbit around my often absent yet omnipresent father.

      Gene Hardin had escaped north from impoverished east Tennessee a few years after returning from the war. He fled a dirt-poor tobacco patch in the shadow of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Freed himself from a tyrannical grandfather, a cold, overbearing mother, and a father bullied into submissive silence. He never looked back on the twilight hollow of his unhappy childhood. He was lured to Michigan by good paying union work in the lower tier of the automobile industry—hauling new Chryslers to small towns throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Ima Nell married him straight out of high school, where she had demurred on academics for an independent study in the gossamer web of dewy boy-and-girl romance, patiently waiting for eligible prey to light, unawares. Together, they fled south across the Georgia state line to marry in a hasty civil ceremony, before lighting off for the territories—Hamtramck, Michigan.

      Hamtramck,