The village had been trying to call us. Sara got an email from her friend Marsha, who is on the village council, to say that Jeff, the village manager, had been calling our house all morning. It was 11am, and we had been asleep. The kids wouldn’t go to bed the previous night until 1am, because school has been out for too long, and there is a spirit of excited panic that has ruled our house for weeks.
Jeff had been sending work crews around the village digging up people’s water and sewer connections, inspecting what they saw, and building a catalog of pipe and joint specifications. Like Flint, our water system was mostly lead pipes. But unlike Flint, the internal coating of the pipes still protected us from the toxic metal. Nonetheless, the village has been slowly developing a plan to upgrade the system and remove the lead pipes, as a hedge against future disaster.
Specifically, Jeff needed to dig up my back yard, but my 2002 Chrysler Voyager was parked over top the section of grass he wanted to dig up. Hence the insistent phone calls that we had been sleeping through all morning.
So, grumbling, I went about the room collecting clothes.
I came downstairs, collected the key from by the back door, and went out to the van.
It made a remarkable chattering and chirring sound, and the lights on the dash dimmed precipitously as I tried to start it.
It was dead again.
We had just had a new starter and new battery put into the van, a little more than a month before. But we hadn’t driven the van after that, and then, once the lock down started, we hadn’t even been outside very often.
Sara came out, and from our 2009 Hyundai, we jumped the van. The spark from the Hyundai brought the Chrysler roaring back from its cryptic undeath.
After we had moved our vehicles out of the way of the diggers, I decided I should drive the van for a while, to get the charge back up.
***
Two days earlier, on Sunday, there had been a great wind. Though the sky was dark, I persuaded Oscar and Abigail to come with me out to Sharon Hill to fly kites. We still had a dragon and a mermaid from when they were much younger, and they begrudgingly agreed.
I needed them to get outside because Abi spent almost all of her time developing elaborate TikTok routines with multiple costume changes and smears of makeup; Oscar painted model kits while watching an endless stream of anime. Neither had been outside for several days.
My hope was that we could run and fly kites, and get some energy out, the way we used to when they were little. Then maybe they could go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and then maybe I could sleep better (which I am not).
We drove north.
In Sharon Valley, by the Mill, the water line of the river was cresting the embankment, and the wind cut across the current creating v-shaped wakes, as though a thousand invisible boats raced down the water. Anglers were struggling to cast, but they persevered.
On the other side of the valley, at the top of Sharon Hill, we found that the parking lot of the preserve was empty. The sky was streaked, black clouds cut through with bright diffuse sunlight. At the base of the hill a vernal lake had formed, the water was iron and in the middle stood the curling claw of a leafless oak.
The wind was so stern that we struggled to open the doors of our car.
“Is that thunder?” Oscar called to me as he pushed open the door against the wind.
“No!” I replied sharply. I could tell he was scared, but he was also antagonistic to the idea of leaving the house under any circumstances, so the dad in me wanted to cajole him into moving his body and working out the energy that would otherwise erupt at 9pm with him and his sister running in circles and cackling.
Rain spattered the windshield, while Abigail and I struggled with the kites.
Oscar refused to leave the car.
“This is bad!” he called to us from his rolled down window.
Abi and I struggled to get the kites up. The wind cut across the knob of the hill laterally, and it drove the kites point down into the dirt. Eventually, with supreme effort, I got my kite above the sheering wind, while Abi dragged a snapping, angry mermaid around in the grass. From there, she came upon the carcass of a dead deer.
The spine and rib cage of the animal rested against a felled tree. It’s feet were neatly stacked some several feet away. And then, beneath a bare cherry tree lay the crumpled remains of its skin, like a spring jacket that had been tossed on the floor.
“This is bad,” she said to me quietly, beneath the roar of the wind.
We got back into the car, stowing our kites in the trunk. With grim optimism, I said, “I think there are the ruins of a haunted farmhouse north of here, you guys want to check it out? They call it The Pink Palace!”
Oscar started to cry and then to laugh, so we went home instead. They were very happy with their iPads. But they stayed up late late late.
***
And so, two days later, I was in the van driving west out of the village. I needed to drive to charge up the battery. And so once out past Wolf’s Westside, and beyond Grossman Road, I steered north along Sharon Hollow Road, beyond the old farm cemeteries into Sharon Township where the roads go narrow and turn to rough gravel, and the trees are too big for a man to wrap his arms about them, and they grow right up into the edges of the road, their trunks contorted and misshapen with burls.
Far into the rolling hills and countryside I came to the stone gate posts of the house. The lot upon which the house had stood was dense with trees, and you could see the foundation of the building up a slight rise to the north. But the home lot was just an island in an otherwise bare sea of fields, all freshly plowed.
There are old stories that the house had become the home of satanists, that there had been slaves there long ago in the early 19th century, and they had started a cult, that the land was cursed, and that was why the home had been lost in a fire.
But I had seen many collapsed farm houses in my time, the old yew bushes that had once been neatly tended by the front porch now grown wild and erratic, obscuring much of the stone heap that remained.
***
I drove out through the rolling hills, admiring the wetlands and looking for a subject I might come back and photograph. And then, once I had charged the battery enough, I bore south again. I headed toward the high school. The district has such a high percentage of rural poverty that given the crisis, and how far our village is from the closest grocery store, the school has been distributing free lunches twice a week to every family with children in the district. I decided I would pull in and collect the rations that would help feed us, and keep us out of the large grocery stores in the city.
The great concrete school loomed, empty and dark. In front, several lunch ladies stood with tables full of grocery sacks of food.
I waited in line, the mist hissing against the hot hood of the van.
There was a crossover in front of me, and a van in front of them. The woman driving the van leaned out her window and looked back. The woman in the crossover smiled and rolled down her window. I didn’t know either of them, but they were friends who hadn’t seen each other in days, maybe weeks. And as the line of cars inched forward, they chatted with such easy relief that I smiled to see it.
I came up to the curb. The lunch ladies all wore homemade masks and plastic gloves. They knew me, and gave me two grocery sacks. One for Oscar, the other for Abigail.
“I’m sorry the bags are all wet,” the one lunch lady said as she carefully set it down through my open window onto the passenger seat. It had been misting all morning.
The women in the two vehicles in front blocked the line, one pulled up next to the other, talking to each other from inside their steel boxes, at a safe distance. I pulled up slightly, to indicate that they should let the line proceed. But I was also sad to part their laughing talk.
As I drove through the village, I cried.
***
***
Fritz Swanson || Manchester, Michigan || March 31, 2020