Thursday, April 2, 2015

An Absence of Unicorns by Megan Crane

When I tell people that I voluntarily chose to move to Flint, I am usually greeted with looks ranging from confused to appalled. Flint, Michigan, a rough-shod blue-collar town gracelessly eroding at its seams, crumbling into its eponymous river as more and more people flee. The town has been described by author Ben Hamper as “greaseball Mecca” and by noted journalist Gordon Young as a “city that continually challenged the national media to come up with new and creative ways to describe just how horrible things were.” Flint has a well-deserved reputation for toughness, and Michael Moore’s documentary Roger & Me depicted the gritty reality of post-GM Flint accurately, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It is one of the most violent and crime-ridden towns in the United States. It is also roughly two hundred miles south of my hometown. However, despite growing up in rural northern Michigan, Flint has been a part of my life for as far back as my memory reaches. In an indirect manner, it has helped to shape my adult personality, and that leaves me owing it a spiritual debt, as we all owe the things that create us.


My father was part of the Flint diaspora of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. He left the city with the hopes that he could find peace and a quiet life up north, and that his offspring would be spared the dangers of a childhood like his, shielding us from the crime, pollution, and general decline of his hometown. Interestingly, Flint still remained nearly a day-to-day topic of conversation in our home. Lee Iacocca and Roger Smith were names I recognized and could identify by face by age five. Michael Moore was someone to be mocked as being “not-from-Flint,” a fact which irritated my father for some unknown reason, as was Moore’s removal from my great-aunt’s bookstore at the hands of my grandfather, who did not approve of the filmmaker’s use of profanity in the presence of ladies.

We made frequent trips south to visit my grandparents and uncle, who remained residents of Genesee County. I would compare Cross Village, Michigan, population 200, where I spent my childhood, to Flint, with rather unfavorable results. Flint had large libraries, museums, a mall, a planetarium, and so many, many things to do. Cross Village, on the other hand, boasted a post office, a tiny general store/gas station, a bar that we were strictly forbidden to enter, and a one-room schoolhouse that educated children in kindergarten through sixth grade until it closed shortly after I entered third grade in 1990. Sturgeon Bay, one of the upper reaches of Lake Michigan, was directly across the street from our front yard, but I had little appreciation of this fact as a child, focusing more on the injustice of the lack of pizza delivery and door-to-door mail service. I felt cheated by the lack of other children to play with and would plead with my parents to move south. My father would attempt to deflect my efforts with what were meant to be cautionary stories of narrow escapes from shadowy-faced hooligans or tragedies that would have never occurred in a suburban setting. However, I was a precocious child, an early reader with a sense of adventure who preferred the reality of Unsolved Mysteries and Reader’s Digest to the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys, and I developed the ghost of resentment against my parents for depriving me of what I saw as my birthright to eat at Halo Burger and shop at the Genesee Valley Mall.

As I slouched my way through my teen years and into my early twenties, I developed into something of a gypsy, managing to live in several of the small scattered towns north of the forty-fifth parallel without staying more than three or four months in each. Eventually, I settled in Petoskey for a few years, continuing to work as a cook as I had done throughout high school, and always dreaming of escape from what I viewed as a restricted small-town existence. After all, small towns limit opportunities, and the tradition of going off to the city to make a name for one’s self is time-honored for a reason. I still harbored thoughts of Flint in the back of my head, often getting on realtor.com to look at housing costs, searching Flint’s craigslist for cooking jobs, and reading a wonderful blog for former Flint residents, FlintExpats.com. However, while most of the blog’s followers read it for its trips down memory lane and to keep abreast with new developments in their old hometown, I used it rather more as one would use a Spanish dictionary while vacationing in Mexico. Finally, I began to piece together a bigger and more accurate view of Flint than the one garnered from family stories and childhood visits, seeing the city without the rose-colored glasses of childhood fantasy. Flint was dangerous. Flint was dirty. However, it still had colleges and museums, still had history oozing through every pockmark left by an abandoned house, seeping through the wizened and blackened stumps of the burnouts. It invaded my life — most of my friends in Petoskey were either originally from Flint or had ties through their parents to the benighted city. Flint still called to me.

In 2011, I moved 1,800 miles south of Flint to Austin, Texas, searching for year-round employment as a chef. I found a job easily and climbed the ladder rather quickly, ascending from lower-rung prep cook to sous chef, or second-in-charge of the kitchen, in less than two months. Things were going rather well throughout 2012, and I had just been offered the chance to run my own restaurant, an offer I was getting ready to formally accept when my mother suffered a massive heart attack. Six weeks later, I had sold everything I owned that did not fit into two messenger bags and a carry-on suitcase and was on the Amtrak from Austin to Chicago. Two days after leaving Austin, I installed myself at the Super 8 Motel on Miller Road and began looking for a job and a place to live in Flint. I have been living in Genesee County ever since.

My gypsy ways had left me familiar with the adjustment period following every move. Transitioning to a new city means new slang, new eateries, new traditions and routines and habits. My prior familiarity with Flint did not make the transition easier, though. Rather, I felt as though my dad was always walking a couple steps behind me. At the public library, I could almost see the shape of my father, age fifteen, slouched over a notebook and scribbling away. As time passed, I began to see certain traits inherent in my father’s personality explained by the daily reality of living in a factory town like Flint. I began to notice the way that hometowns shape people’s personalities. I am a small-town girl in my heart. I believe in helping the neighbors out and in always trying to believe that people operate with the best of intentions. My sister and I refer to this as “keeping our unicorns,” a sort of stretched metaphor meant to represent the naivetĂ© necessary to believe that the crushed syringe on the ground at the bus stop was dropped by a frazzled diabetic, or that the elderly couple missing for a week simply ran off to Vegas to renew their vows. I like my unicorn; I have grown quite fond of it and have managed to hold onto it for over thirty-two years. Many of my friends “back home” still have theirs too: when your neighbors were once your parents’ neighbors, when your mailman is the fourth cousin of your first grade teacher, and when the cashier greets you by name not because you are a regular, but because you were friends with his older sister in middle school, it is fairly effortless to maintain some level of faith in humankind.

My unicorn, however, has always kept close company with a healthy dose of cynicism. This might sound contradictory, however, my native intelligence led to some rather ferocious bullying when I was a child, which then led to the anxiety issues I still suffer from. After moving to Flint, I began to notice a profound absence of unicorns. People were cynical. People were harsh. So many people felt trapped by the city and dreamed of escape. Meanwhile, Flint kept suffering. The people who fled were the people with education, with fighting spirit and a desire for change, the people still capable of dreaming of better things. It seemed to me that this was one of the roots of Flint’s troubles — all of the people who could help turn the city around and make it better had left or were preparing to do so.

Did I have a right to feel this way? I, too, had fled my hometown, even going so far as to relocate across the country. My travels had shown me, clearly, that where one grows up shapes the person one becomes. In much the way a parent shapes their child’s character, for better or worse, the place where childhood shades into adulthood also dictates several basic parts of personality, such as cynicism, political leanings, slang and its delivery, and often, even choice of career. Had I not grown up in Emmet County, it is impossible to say what I would be like today. My rural upbringing left me with a healthy concern for the environment that focuses more on conservation rather than repair, a love of tree climbing and kayaking and swimming, and a love of animals, especially strays. Since my overall “up North” vibe was one of the things that initially attracted my fiancĂ© to me (he is also an up north boy), I cannot say with any certainty that my marriage in July 2015 would be taking place.

I was starting to feel somewhat guilty for leaving Petoskey and Cross Village until it struck me: those towns were not dying. Cross Village was not the town of my youth. Real estate developers had discovered it in the mid-1990’s and proceeded to blanket it with soulless mansions that saw their inhabitants for three weeks per year. Cross Village, as far as I was concerned, had reincarnated. Petoskey is and has almost always been a resort town, dependent on tourists for the bulk of its economy. It holds a location nearly in the center of the three surrounding ski resorts and has a wildly popular casino and a small but quaint downtown. The residents are well-accustomed to the sudden influx of people in the summer months, and for the first month of “ski season,” and many working-class families augment their household income in the off-season by hunting, fishing, raking leaves and shoveling snow, and other odd jobs. Petoskey would survive without me and others of my kind, dreamers with a passion for a good fight and the smarts to recognize that the road ahead would not be easy.

My curiosity satisfied on that account, I turned to Flint. I had chosen to move here from Austin, rather than back to Petoskey, where my parents now live. On the surface, I rationalized my decision by claiming that it was far easier for me to find a job and affordable housing in Flint, rather than go back to the layoffs and crazy in-season insanity of the tourist towns up north. After all, it was better to be only four hours south rather than a seven hour flight plus a two hour drive away. Now, however, I removed myself from that equation and realized that, in fact, my primary motivation underneath my adult-sounding claims of economic stability was a five-year-old girl in pigtails looking up from her Encyclopedia Britannica and saying “We can finally move to Flint?”

Did I owe Flint a debt, being one generation removed from the right to call it my hometown? Had it truly exerted enough influence over me from two hundred miles away that I could claim any part of it? People who left Flint for greener pastures were referred to as Flint expatriates; what would the term be for someone like me, a gypsy returning to settle in the land of her father? Had Flint born any responsibility for shaping me as a person?

As I stated earlier, I carry a healthy dose of cynicism nestled next to my unicorn. Some blame for that can be laid for the ferocious bullying I endured for four years, which led to a sort of nervous breakdown and a school transfer the next fall. However, a large portion of it I picked up attempting to emulate my father, and his was learned naturally on the streets of south Flint. I felt that my father’s toughness — and to me as a child, my father was the toughest man in the universe — would make me stronger than my tormentors, and indeed, I was disciplined a few times for losing my temper and fighting.

I believe that attempting to model myself after my father lent far more “Flint” to my personality than what I would have naturally inherited, based on examination of the differences between my siblings and myself, and taking our differing basic personalities into account. There are some common threads that mark us as having a somewhat-different upbringing than many of our schoolmates, such as our dark and slightly warped sense of humor, and our political leanings, which are far too liberal for ultra-conservative Emmet County.
All of this intense self-examination had tired me out. I stood and brushed the seat of my Goodwill jeans off and decided to make a run to Angelo’s for a couple coney dogs. It hit me, then: maybe the bits of Flint in me were enough to count. I grew up craving coneys and Halo Burger as equally as I did Mackinaw Island fudge and fry bread. Flint and Petoskey and Cross Village had struck an even balance in me, my hometowns and the home of my father and my father’s family. Both had come together to shape me into the woman I am now. I am fairly fond of myself as a person, for the most part, a geek bearing battle scars from intensive physical labor, the girl who will fight a person for hurting an animal while crying for the animal the entire time. This dichotomy showed me, finally, that yes, I did owe Flint in the same way I owed the towns of my youth. It had already been established that Cross Village was beyond recognition and that Petoskey had never needed me. That left Flint.

I needed my homemade mythos of Flint as a child. It represented all the large dreams of a city that my child’s brain could create. It gave me a focus point while I struggled through the long days of school, watching over my back for my tormentors, getting in fights on the playground, that there was a place out there where I would be able to get through one day unnoticed, with no one calling me a freak. As I grew older and started to make my way in the world as a chef, my vision of Flint shifted to that of a place that would not scorn my working-class upbringing, where the economy was troubled but there were still opportunities available, where everyone got a chance if they were just willing to work for it. 

Sitting on my sofa, tonight, in the living room of my little house in Atherton Park, I see that my vision remains largely unchanged, merely more concrete.
Flint helped shape me as a person on a number of different levels. Most importantly, it gave me a touchpoint. This crumbling town was a beacon of hope for me as a teenager, and it is difficult to let go of the illusions cherished at that age. As an adult, Flint represented myself to me, in a way. Battered and torn down by the establishment, it struggles and has been struggling for years to come back from the ashes of the burnouts and the devastation left in GM’s wake, finally attempting to recreate itself as a college town. I spent years struggling to overcome crippling low self-esteem and horrible attacks of free-floating anxiety after being ostracized and hurt, finally recreating myself as a loud, brash, cocky chef. It has only been over the last eighteen months that I have been able to let my original geeky book-obsessed self out of hiding. Flint has a reputation for being hard, dirty, crime-ridden and poverty-stricken, yet underneath that reputation lies good people, amazing cultural sites, and a wealth of experiences and history one would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. People who grow up in Flint are resilient. They are survivors, able to roll with whatever life throws at them, for the most part. They share a sense of community and nostalgia that keeps them coming back for visits, keeps them busy on their computers googling “Safetyville” and “Hamady sack” and “coney dog Flint-style” when they get homesick. In towns with a large population of Flint expatriates, they tend to find each other almost as though drawn to one another. They share almost a unique love-hate relationship with the city of their birth. None of these characteristics would be present in these people to this degree had they not grown up here. Flint has shaped them — and to a lesser extent, me — in ways no other city could manage.

We — each of us who walk and breathe and eat — owe our parents a spiritual debt for spawning us, raising us, teaching us who we should — or should not — be. In much the same way, where we come from shapes who we are. I am a second-generation Flintoid, a northern Michigan girl raised by an expatriate with the Flint worldview, a Flint repatriate. I came home because of my mother, because I owe it to her to be close while she recovers. I choose to live in Flint for the same reason, because I owe it to aid it in its resurrection. As I was able to rebuild myself into a stronger, better person, albeit one with visible scars from my past, so too can my adopted home rise again, rebuild, secure in its new status as a college town and wiser for its years of struggle. It just needs our help.


12 comments:

  1. Great read. Best wishes for you having a great life in Flint. A bunch of us expats talk all the time about how we'd like to help with our "benighted" hometown's "resurrection" and admire those who stuck around and have done what they can..and admire folks like Gordon Young who actually DID go back and do something. Many of us have post-traumatic stress from violent experiences growing up there and fear of that occurring is the deciding factor that holds many back. I was back for a funeral in November and was just overwhelmed by the decline of my north-side (Cook School) neighborhood.

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  2. Very well said....I live in the suburbs but am a Flintstone ...& Michigan IS the greatest state of all.

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  3. Lived there from age 4 (1954) to 1978 when I left for Chicago and greener pastures. Flint was a great place growing up but whenever I return, what I see clashes with my childhood memories. I couldn't agree more about living there made us who we are today. Well thought out essay.

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  4. Thank you for the beautiful read. I admire your courage and conviction that it will take people such as you to create a new, finer Flint. I may join you there in a few years.

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  5. Hi Megan, that's a good story. I'm a photographer in Toronto and were doing a portrait project across the country called the "American Dreams Project" - were going to be in flint late April and are looking for a few more people to photograph. We'd love to talk to you about it. You can see stuff on the project website www.americandreamsproject.org - many thanks.

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  6. Torrey Hammerberg XIIApril 14, 2015 at 7:53 PM

    Hi Megan. I finally figured out who your father is. I went to Flint SW and was in Marching Band with him and your Aunt Cathy. I didn't realize until recently that they were siblings.

    I like going to Petoskey, Harbor Springs, Cross Village, Cheboygan, Indian River, Pellston, and the other towns up there than haven't been completely modernized like some other towns up there I won't mention. I've eaten at Leg's Inn. One time my late mother in law saw Bob Seger there. He gave her a hug.

    There are some other people in that area from Flint SW living up there also-Debbie Fischer Dicken and Fred Rachwitz are two who come to mind in Cross Village and Harbor Springs.

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  7. Ian, I am definitely interested! Contact me on instagram, please? @mysweetroisindubh. Torrey, that's amazing. :) Up North is nice to be from, it's just not a place to be, to my mind. My dad had two other siblings as well, Cheryl and David. I'm unsure if they were in marching band or not. I've never met Ms. Dicken or Mr. Rachwitz, but my dad might have. I'll ask him next time I speak with him. I used to cook dinner for Bob Seger three or four times a summer, when I worked as a cook at the Dam Site Inn in Pellston (2000-2005). He was a good customer, in that he asked for very little and didn't crave special treatment based upon celebrity status, and he tended to tip well, according to the servers.

    Everyone else, thank you so much for reading this and taking the time to like or comment. As a child, my dreams were of becoming a writer or a chef. Now that I'm a mostly-adult adult (haha), that dream has evolved. I'm attending Mott with an eye to the transfer program. My focus is post-secondary education, concentrations in English and history, preferably Michigan history. Someday, I'll be teaching at Mott or maybe even UM. Reading each comment and seeing the enjoyment in each one not only makes me feel blessed and thankful, it confirms for me that my dream is a good one, and a good goal. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

    And most of all, thank YOU, Gordie, for running this. It means more to me than I could express in any language, English or otherwise. I can't begin to thank you enough. I'm sorry I haven't sent the other two papers on yet - I have finals in two weeks and I'm certain that math will always be my own private windmill to tilt at, but I'm trying...anyway, I will send them as soon as I survive my college algebra final. Thank you so much.

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  9. Torrey Hammerberg XIIApril 15, 2015 at 9:51 PM

    Torrey Hammerberg XII is a nom de plume that refers to the location of "The Rock". I don't have an instagram account, but if you have an email like Hotmail or gmail that you don't use much and won't cause an overflow problem, I'll come clean with my identity, like bustdup has! I've made some amazing connections from those if a=b and b=c, then a=c (there's that Algebra again!) connections from both memory and websites! This has been a phenomenal year talking to Flintites (Flintoids). Flint's footprint far exceeds its present size.

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  10. Torrey Hammerberg XIIApril 21, 2015 at 9:58 AM

    The Cottrill Family in Harbor Springs is from Flint. I believe they are in Real Estate there. They used to live on Nolen Drive. Linda Cottrill went to Flint SW. They changed the boundaries then. Not sure about the other Cottrills.

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  11. Hi Torrey, you can message me at daelana@ gmail.com (space inserted to defeat the spammers). Flint does indeed have a large footprint. I met a guy in Austin, fellow coworker, who had been busily bragging to all that he was from Flint. I promptly asked his old address, mentioned my grandfather's street name and the name of Dad's high school. He immediately started stuttering and finally said, quietly, "I'm uh, I'm actually from Fenton." Poor kid, lol. I think the call-out embarrassed him. Oh well. Hope to hear from you soon!

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  12. Megan this was a very long, but interesting story. Flint is my hometown. Although I was raised down south, Florida. I've learned that there's nothing like flint, abd I've come to realize that it's pretty amazing. Although I miss Florida so much! Keep writing stories. Tgryre great!

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.