Village life: Thinking about escape from Flint

I've been thinking about escape.

Note that I wrote:  "thinking" and not "dreaming of," and also note that I said "escape" and not "escaping." Because if I'd said "dreaming of" it would sound like I really want to, and if I'd said "escaping" it would sound like I'm really going to, the progressive momentum of the "ing."

As I tell my students, so much depends on syntax. So much depends on picking the right word.

Because the idea of escape, from any life, from Flint, from my life in Flint in particular, from a lovely neighborhood and a lovely house and two cats and a five-year contract with a nice little union-negotiated pay bump — the idea of escaping from all that is justly complicated and, some might say, counterintuitive.

Except for the fires.

And the recent fatal overdose by heroin of a remarkable, cherished, beautiful young man.

And the way two tulips trees painfully flowering are all that's left at the corner of Dort and Davison, on the massive brownfield that used to be AC.

One of Robert Hass's most important poems to me is Meditation at Lagunitas. It begins:

"All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking."

I am preoccupied on these sparkling, blooming days, all their counterarguments pink and brilliant green. I am preoccupied with loss and what it has to do with Flint.

At the end of the semester this year, I found myself quoting Henry James to all my students:

"Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."

And right in the middle of saying it, standing up in front of two dozen restless kids with spring fever who only wanted to get out of there, it startled me, what all is in that sentence that Henry James wrote. And in that one word, "lost."

There's a bedeviling twist to the word. Lost.  Much has been lost. Much has been lost on us. On us.

There, in that overheated, claustrophobic classroom, I wanted to get out of there myself. To escape all those losses weighing us down, like a bully pinning his victim, knee to the back, sitting on us, like a poor nerdy kid face down in Flint grit. And I hope that the meaning of all of it is not lost.  I hope that the losses are not lost on us.

But sometimes I lose my pluckiness and sometimes I am afraid.

I confess — I've been obsessed with the fires. I've been going around looking at the charred remains — the caved in foundations, the pungence lingering like a bossy ghost, demanding to be breathed in.  Do you know what I mean, the pull of the smell of fire?

I made my husband drive me by the burned-out holes on West Court, and the one on Stockton, and the two on Oak.

I got out and took pictures, especially the one with another abandoned house next door, the one that's now famous, that says on its plywood front, "Do not burn down."

I posted the photos on Facebook.  I told everybody what I saw.

Here's the thing — my guilty not-so-secret.  I have An Out.  That's what several of my work colleagues and long-time acquaintances have been calling it. An Out. In fact, as I write this I am sitting in My Out — an LA hillside.

Any time I want today, an ordinary Monday, I could get up and look out at the sea, take in lungfuls of the salty air fresh from its cleansing trip across a thousand miles of ocean.

Yet here I am, even in My Out, thinking about Flint, and worrying about Flint and wondering if I dare to permanently escape.

I've even tossed around the phrase "exit strategy," like getting out is a political decision, something that has to go before a panel of judges, a lineup of beards and scary eyebrows.

Or worse, the people left behind.

I get the impression some of my friends and colleagues are uneasily envious — the thing that's muttered, tinged with a little misery, "At least you have An Out."  The part none of us wants to face, a difficult thing to say — if we are trapped, what does that say about us?  And shouldn't we all refuse to give in?  Shouldn't we all keep at it, working together like the communards in a Chinese propaganda poster?

And after all, there's the Farmers' Market and 501 Grille and The Torch and those daffodils I planted in my front yard that came up lustily and bright, and finches on the feeder, and ducks on Gilkey Creek, and a new baby named Frances across the street, and my friend Grayce writing new poems in the middle of the night on Kensington.

But I'm just saying, sometimes there's that word again, tantalizing and troublesome — escape.  Not yet dreaming, not yet escaping.  Just thinking about escape.

It was the burned out house on Wellington, for some reason, that hit me hardest.

I'd just dropped off my cans and plastic and dwindled bags of papers at the horrid CBC Recycling, and I knew I was close. I told myself I shouldn't go by another one.  I've been on edge, I warned myself, and it would only get me down.  But I understand myself. I have to look, to try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.  Blah blah.  And so I cut across Saginaw and took a left turn.

The usual.

A gorgeous spring day, a caved-in foundation. The sagging yellow tape. And what got me most — three trees, infernally blackened.  Three trees burned but still standing, snugged up to the crumbled brick, phantom limbs of a happier time. I trust you'll forgive my melodrama here, since what, after all, is more gripping than 107 fires in this town we are trying to love?

It was the trees that broke my heart.

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Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She teaches writing at UM-Flint.