Standpipe. David Hardin

to and fro. My partner seems to know everyone, trades what passes for bon mots on a frigid mid-Michigan morning. Backing in takes three or four attempts before I clear the heavy steel door frame with less than an inch to spare. Everyone at the table is immersed, all-thumbs, in their bluish screens when I step down from the rig, studiously avoiding eye contact. No one pays me any mind.

      I set about learning the nuts and bolts of the job, hustling cases of water from the high deck of the Penske truck into the houses, mobile homes, and apartments of the poor and infirm. It’s not the first truck I’ve driven. Stake trucks, U-Hauls, hi-lows—once, during a summer stint on a landscaping crew, I was entrusted with a standard dump truck towing a trailer carrying a Ford tractor and bush hog mowing deck. Padding my scant truck driving experience is almost, but not quite, as subversively thrilling as sitting high up in a guttering cab, looking down into the private spaces of the lessor vehicular world.

      Gene drove a truck for nearly fifty years. I remember looking out on Oakland Avenue in Highland Park, through the huge expanse of windshield from atop a teetering pile of canvas tarps, rain ponchos, and old log books onto the roofs of De Sotos, Valiants, and Coupe DeVilles. The cab was equipped with only one seat. The deafening roar of the engine, the dizzying height of my perch, and the acrid smell of diesel combined to terrify me, wanting only for the safety of my mother’s arms. Greasy metallic fifth-wheel taste bitter in my mouth, I can still feel disappointment radiating off my father’s massive shoulders like heat from a stack pipe.

      The DRV’s I meet are unfailingly nice. Many are retirees, proud veterans of Katrina or Sandy or flooding across the Mid-Atlantic, Upper Midwest, and Ozarks. They sport signature Red Cross wear: T-shirts, vests, and billed caps festooned with colorful service pins. I deploy in fits and starts. A snowy, late winter Friday; a sleet-driven Tuesday; a cold, drenched Saturday followed by a brilliant Wednesday and a warm, damp Thursday. Eventually I will volunteer in Flint, Wednesdays mostly, February through July—a mere five months. Most DRVs in Flint deploy full time, as do a rotating group of young AmeriCorps volunteers. They live dormitory-style on stipend meals, drink bottled water, and take two-minute showers to minimize exposure to water-borne toxins. Six days a week, week after week, for months at a time. Some were here at the beginning, when water distribution was a slapdash affair, manning a logistical Wild West network of emergency distribution sites, the heavy presence of law enforcement and the military tinting the whole affair a flat, third-world shade of camo. My disaster relief vest helps dispel the nagging guilt of a slumming dilettante, but only a little.

      FOUR

      An old woman quietly tends the past in her cramped, tidy home on a crumbling residential street, living room crammed with decades of cherished family mementos. Every available surface is covered with photos of gowned graduates; children’s art work curling at the edges; samplers; images of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. rubbing shoulders with Jesus; tea service; great slab of a family bible; JFK and RFK; portraits of children, grandchildren, and possibly great-grand-children suited up for basketball, baseball, and football; Frederick Douglass; figurines of Degas’s dancers; beatific images of Christ and Christ in His agony hung redundantly on the wall; Barack and Michelle Obama; shirt-board fans printed with Bible verses; family reunion panoramas, everyone sporting identical pastel T-shirts against a backdrop of towering trees and enamel blue skies.

      The walls of the house I grew up in were monastically bare. It was like being raised in a small, struggling gallery between exhibits. Later, after my father retired and they’d relocated to Florida, my parents’ stucco ranch was the repository for a considerable haul of ceramic bric-a-brac from the flea markets around Orlando. The few family photos, mementos, and keepsakes on display competed with cocker spaniel-sized Bengal tigers, toucans, sombrero-wearing campesinos, and a few generic seascapes.

      The walls of my mother’s condominium in the last few years of her life featured generic prints from Walmart, a few bucolic rural scenes, one or two multi-window mat displays of family photos chosen, seemingly, at random. A Hallmark ode to grandmothers occupied a spot eye level on the wall opposite the guest toilet. Fighting for purchase atop an entertainment center, a few family portraits bore cramped witness to longdistance offspring, their spouses, and their kids.

      The past, our past, vied for pride of place with Thomas Kincade knockoffs and framed classic-car porn my father had clipped from magazines.

      “Do your kids and grandchildren visit much?”

      Her features cloud, she sags on her walker. “No. No, they don’t. They’re all so busy.”

      I can think of nothing to say in reply. I stack her water neatly, inhale one last lungful of rosewater, liniment, and fried ring bologna and flee to the safety of the ERV’s cab. Remarkable, how I fail to acknowledge her uncanny resemblance to my mother until much later.

       FIVE

      A case of twenty-four sixteen-ounce bottles of water weighs about thirty pounds. Stacking reduces the footprint, but concentrates structural load in one small area. It exerts pressure on the bottles in the bottommost cases, increasing the risk of leakage and water damage to subfloor and joists. Distribute your water—don’t stack the cases too high, I advise people living in tiny bungalows, claustrophobic flats, cramped apartments, and ramshackle mobile homes. Living room floor space is given to entertainment centers, oxygen machines, cluttered coffee tables, sway-backed sofas, cockeyed recliners, space heaters, wheelchairs, walkers, toys, game systems, bird cages, Richard Serra-scale flat-screen televisions, pet beds, playpens, hospital beds, bureaus, book cases, animal crates, grandfather clocks, curio cabinets, murky aquariums, and dinette sets.

      Kitchen counter space goes to coffee makers, blenders, toasters, pots and pans, liquor and wine bottles, plastic food storage containers, recycling, canned goods, spice racks, dry goods, dirty dishes, sacks of pet food, utensils, glassware, and bottles of medication. The rest is a warren of negative space, narrow pathways angling to back bedrooms and bathrooms. Staircases leading to upper bedrooms and basements are home to shoes, cases of soda and beer, bundles of toilet paper, tools, mops, buckets, books, and brimming laundry baskets.

      For the elderly and disabled, water stacked anywhere other than in the kitchen requires many trips back and forth to retrieve one or two bottles at a time, working their way through a shrink-wrapped case too heavy to move on their own.

      Cases of water, like breeding rabbits, can swamp a dwelling in no time. The minimum weekly amount of water required depends on the number of people living under one roof. Summer heat doubles the need. No man is an island, except here—a people surrounded by water—John Donne, reduced to straight man.

      SIX

      A middle-aged man with red, rheumy eyes claims they’ve cut off his water, wants everything we can spare. He’s keen to find his phone, bellows to a guy across the street, maybe did he leave it over there? He ducks into his house, reappears waving a thick, dog-eared folder stuffed with clippings, legal and medical documents. Says the water made him sick, hikes his pants to expose a discolored leg. Yanks his waistband down displaying mottled flesh below the beltline. Brandishing the found phone triumphant, he taps. Here’s his interview with the Detroit Free Press. Swipes through photos taken at rallies, protests, and public meetings.

      By now, media interest in Flint is waxing and waning with every fresh news cycle. A coppery Donald J. Trump announced his presidential bid from the bottom of a gilded escalator in Trump Tower nearly a year ago. The 2016 Republican National Convention will be held at Rocket Mortgage Field House in Cleveland in four short months. Only Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor John Kasich remain in the Republican race. In our semi-official-looking vests, sporting laminated badges, perhaps we represent one last, unpromising opportunity to capture the world’s attention, if only for a moment, before the room is sucked dry of oxygen.

      Evidence presented, he rests his case. We deliver our verdict—six cases of Aquafina—then wish him the best of luck, three of us inhaling diesel exhaust at the rear of the ERV. We have our instructions. The less time we spend at each stop, the more water we can distribute during our shift.