The Days That We Have Seen
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
A year ago, I left Adrian for Dad’s place in New Hampshire. There were still fistfights in Meijer’s then, over the last rolls of toilet paper. Whole sections of the store were picked clean of canned goods, bottled water and ammunition. They’re redoing Meijer’s now, making one of those well-ceilinged, blue-trimmed stores with a two-lane drive-up pharmacy like the kind in Grand Rapids. The shelves are stocked, but they’re rearranged so nobody can find anything. Printed signs taped to traffic cones apologize for the mess and promise better things to come.
Last May, my friends started a magazine, and I started writing for it. I didn’t know what I was going to write, but I wanted a piece in every issue. Not really wanting to write about myself, or particularly knowing how to, I decided to write about my hometown, hoping that a project grounded in a place I knew well would be a key that would help me understand our strange and ominous days. A year later, and I am far from understanding anything. Nobody knows what this past year will go on to mean for anyone who survived to look back on it: I think historians and politicians and artists will be striving to contain and categorize 2020 for as long as there is a future that has room for historians, politicians and artists. The things that happened last year in Adrian, Michigan, will — no doubt — be of little note within the arc of human memory.
But here are some things that happened. In the past year, 163 people died of Covid-19 in Lenawee County. Within 48 hours, 9 of the radical and indefatigable Adrian Dominican Sisters died from Covid, leaving their anti-war and anti-violence work to the shaky hands of the future. At least 10,000 people in the county contracted the virus and survived, and now about one in three people have been vaccinated. In the middle of the crisis, ProMedica finished their plan to close Bixby Hospital in Adrian, and Herrick Hospital in Tecumseh, consolidating them into a campus out on M-52. They absorbed the YMCA when they lost their lease on Maumee, and now all the health and human services in Adrian are north of town. There’s a walking trail there, but you can’t really walk to it, which is hard on a city where 1 in 4 live in poverty. The city government passed an ordinance closing Adrian’s parks from sunset to sunrise, citing the nuisance aspect of homeless people having a place to sleep; they voted not to allow families to keep chickens in their backyard, citing the nuisance aspect of hungry people having enough to eat. In the BLM summer, local law enforcement held community talking sessions to reassure people that police violence would never come to Adrian, and it was probably reassuring to the kind of people who never see a nightstick swung in anger. We re-elected Tim Walberg to the US House of Representatives, where he will continue fighting remedies for Global Warming and global pandemics, committed to the plans of his angry God and his rich donors. The slow strangling of American life continues in Adrian as it does everywhere else in this country: a slight uptick in spectacular violence, a tightening degradation of working people, a lingering sense that a reckoning — no civil war, at least! no coup d’etat! — has only been postponed.
A year ago, I stopped by Martin’s to have a drink before I left town. I usually do, and that time we sat in reclining chairs on his patio. This year, we had a fire in his backyard, on the grass he re-seeded after they redid the septic, and Robby came. Robby’s been back in town for months, and he’s been having the kind of bad sleep you have in your childhood bedroom. He can’t make Martin really understand why he has to leave, any more than he or I could really understand why Martin never would. A few drinks in, Martin starts talking about how he’s nervous because he knows his next kid is going to be a girl and he doesn’t think he knows how to raise a daughter. He keeps saying I just want her to be happy, because he’s worried he won’t be a good dad, and Robby keeps saying you’ll be a good dad because Robby doesn’t really think that anyone is going to be happy in the future. I love hearing them talk, even though I don’t have much I want to say. Watching the fire, with its sparks like little stars racing up into the night, I whisper, oh, the days that we have seen — a not-quite joke that was only for me.
I don’t know who any of this has been for. I don’t know if what I’ve done with my writing is any testament to the time we all lived through, because I don’t know how anyone is going to look back on any of this. I don’t know if what we’ve all survived is something that later we’ll be be proud of surviving, which is to say that I don’t know if the worst is yet to come. Sometimes I wrote draft after draft and I never made myself happy, and sometimes the words came so fast and free that I was caught in the stream and my fingers barely found the keys in time. I wanted to write a piece for every issue of my friends’ magazine, and I mostly did — and if I’d known what good company my writing would stand in, or how many people would read No Contact, I would have been too scared to start. I wanted to write about Adrian because sometimes a thing as enormous and insignificant as your hometown gets stuck on repeat in your head until it becomes nonsense, and sometimes it’s like a song you can just barely remember: if you could just hum a few bars, then everything would make sense. Everything would be okay.
