DANK
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
They move in silence over the concrete wall along the Trestle Trail and down the sloping ground to the dirt track beside the riverbank. They’re under the footbridge now, and here’s where the other taggers work. Their work is commercial, or editorial: five-pointed upturned crowns for the Latin Counts, mixed in among teenage interpersonal slurs, speculations on the sexual pathologies of the Adrian police department. When DANK was making their start as an artist, this was a good spot. They can see the last two letters of their name in an early, shaky freehand, poking out through layers of fresher paint. There’s no point in battling over this terrain anymore: it’s played out, too safe to paint here, under the bridge where no one can see. The art must be shared with the wide world, broadcast even to people who will hate it, as a testament to the people the art is made for.
DANK shifts the backpack from one shoulder to the other as they make their way under the bridge and along the trail that leads up through the woods and into the meadow. The backpack should never be on both shoulders—it must be ready to jettison at a moment’s notice. The spray-paint canisters, each wrapped in an old sock to prevent their tell-tale clamor, are incriminating.
The ground levels out, becomes softer, spongier. A little water leaks in through the lace-holes of their sneakers. This meadow is some kind of drainage field—the aquatic topography of Adrian, the numberless culverts, water main access terminals, and meadows like this that stand empty and marshy, collecting runoff water from the streets and parking lots. These sometimes-waterways form a complex network of paths and hideouts known to drug dealers stocking caches, to the homeless seeking shelter, to the insomniacs who wander here; those human beings with whom DANK shares the city and this darkness.
Dew lies heavy in this meadow, wet grass glows red in the distant light of the CVS drive-through sign. It’s dangerous to walk out in the open here; you can be seen from Bent Oak Road and the parking lots off M-52, any cop might see you. Ahead of DANK, three feet high, stands a concrete shape like a citadel for fairies, crowned with a rusted manhole cover. Alone in the very center of the meadow, its head pokes out a little up above the untamed grass. DANK squelches across the open ground, unslinging the bag and removing the first can, checking the color-coded lid in the light from the CVS sign. Green, close enough to the color of the grass and the maple leaves for the colors to play together, close enough, they hope, that it will look almost like the letters grew here, kin to the grass and the maples. They shake the can and start the first layer.
In the old days, when DANK worked in stencils and sloppy freehand, when they made the pieces that seemed so bold and new and which now embarrass them, this took longer, looked worse and made more of a mess—telltale paint on fingernails and sweatshirt sleeves, from when they had to hold the stencil in one trembling hand. The first coat clings to the concrete wall like a green shadow and they apply the second a few moments later, white: spraying thickly to fully obscure the darker base-color. The white runs, but they’ll clean it up with the trim layer, black edging to make the letters stand out.
There’s a sudden light behind them, white and cold as day. Spotlight. They drop to the ground and are perfectly still.
DANK was the purest artist Adrian ever produced. We knew them only by their work: the name, or maybe just the word. DANK variations appeared like fireflies one summer when I was home from college and Robby was done with college and we wandered, sleepless, looking for anything to imbue the lonely streets of our hometown with vitality and meaning. At least three-dozen DANKs appeared on the undersides of bridges, on concrete pylons and the walls of old factories, decommissioned rail depots. The later ones, when the artist had really come into their own, were done with a calligrapher’s precision, the colors chosen to converse with their surroundings—red to recall a nearby warehouse sign, green in a wooded area, blue where the matching, painted rails of the Trestle Trail swooped overhead, like a frame. DANK favored Trestle Park, as anyone might, although most of the DANKs there have been painted-over, or sandblasted into oblivion. They’re hard to find, ten years later. Like a lot of artists I grew up with, DANK left the city. Or else they just stayed, stopped making art. But I hope not. On an over-sprayed overpass in Ann Arbor I saw a DANK, unmistakably our DANK, that jumped out to me the way a batling’s cry cuts through to its mother, and it gave me some flicker that DANK is still at large, that maybe someday they’ll return.
Adrian, like many small towns trying to reinvent themselves, has attempted to create what can be advertised as an art scene. There’s a yearly arts festival and a storefront gallery; the Croswell Opera House gets remodeled and reimagined every few years in increasingly ridiculous and cloying ways; there are sculptures by local artists on every corner downtown—sculptures that are commissioned and left up for a year or so before they are sold privately and replaced with new sculptures. Nothing DANK ever did could be bought or sold, and nothing spray-painted on a forgotten slap of concrete was ever part of an urban revitalization. DANK didn’t make art for the kind of people who can afford to think about trends in property values—they worked for the benefit and joy of the dispossessed, the miscreants, the midnight wanderers, proclaiming in defiant, inflatable letters: look at this place: we were here.
