How walking in Flint soothed rage, anxiety and Xanax hunger
In those first days, of course, it all felt so haunted. Even before COVID I was doing a Xanax every night to put up with Trump, and when I woke up in the morning, after the blessedly fretless sleep, I’d feel slightly sick to my stomach and, even in my carefully doled out doses, already in mini-withdrawal: I was limiting myself to half a .25 a day, taken before the “Eleventh Hour” to assuage the effects of the latest numbers and whatever somebody did in that unflushed toilet of an Oval Office. I knew I shouldn’t watch that late at night but it was, as others have noted, masochistically addictive. I was no different than anybody else, really. I know millions of us were watching it, eventually tethered to the tube and keeping track of foreboding graphs, jagged inclines up, up, up, and video footage of bodies stuffed into closets until they could be carted out to refrigerated trucks.
One day in the worst of it, that horrifying March, my musician neighbor, our tenant in our rental house next door, pulled out his cello. It was after the governor’s “Stay at Home” order and we literally weren’t supposed to leave our houses for anything except food or emergencies. Alone on the cracked slate back porch, he played and played.
From across the driveway and a rusty fence, we heard the heartbreaking legato but we didn’t know how close we should get. I went outside, opened the creaky gate between us, and stood about 20 feet from him in the stiff spring grass that hadn’t greened up yet. Between bow strokes he said he was okay, alone in the house. But okay. I took pictures of him and stood there crying: it felt as if the world was losing something, but beauty was fighting back. He has a big red beard like a prophet, and I find that reassuring. I feel close to this kid, who’s barely 25. “I’m crying,” I called out to him, in case he couldn’t see. “Thank you.” Where you live can make a difference in traumatic times: Having a neighbor who can play a cello so soulfully it will break your heart was a blessed thing. Later he left to seek refuge with his girlfriend, but there was that one day, and I’ll never forget it.
Somewhere along the line I had a flareup of the IBS that plagues me off and on in agitated seasons, and this was one of them. As the plague kicked in, I had two or three teleconferences with my doctor: I’d peer anxiously at her narrow frame on my phone, her face knotted in weary compassion. I was not her only stressed-out patient, she confessed; multitudes were scratching at her electronic door, so to speak, for refilled prescriptions and reports of sleeplessness and gut troubles — our guts knowing very well to be afraid. “Something is eating at me,” I said. I saw her nod knowingly on her end. “Get some exercise,” she ordered.
Most days my husband and I slept in and he would venture out to get coffee at our favorite place, still open for drive through. I folded myself up on a big green chair and waited for Cuomo to come on with his (up till then) New York charm. What did we know? By midday, it got stuffy in the den. Lucky for me, in 2014 we had taken advantage of one of the remarkable Flint real estate deals and bought a house with a dozen rooms to wander around in. Still, even 2800 square feet can satisfy only so much human longing.
Eventually I realized I could leave the house and I could walk, and probably nothing bad would come of it. I could be alone but also outside, and breathe air probably not full of virus.
Before the shutdowns Ted and I, both in our 70s, had been dragging ourselves to workouts at a health club four days a week, with an excessively cheerful trainer who wrangled us through our geriatric paces on a menagerie of machines we would wipe down even then after our minimal eighth-decade sweats. We kept track of things — how many reps, how to wrap or insert our bodies into the equipment and then disengage and untangle them afterwards. We felt saintly but despite little occasional squirts of endorphins we were unvisited by any lasting ecstasies. Then the place locked down anyway.
A walk seemed simple in comparison. What I remember from my first COVID walk is the exhilaration of outdoors. Breathing: my lungs taking in air — it was spring, remember? I got emotional moving around in it, going wherever my body could take me.
At first, the streets were deserted…under the “Stay at Home” order none of us knew yet whether it was safe. It was spooky. But it was also quiet. I drank it in. I started out with a route of about a mile and gradually added loops and more blocks around the neighborhood to about three miles.
Eventually I saw a few other people, like escapees in a post-apocalyptic world, masked and wary. We’d be startled by each other — people going out of their way to make space between us. After all, we were being told we could kill each other if we got too close. Sometimes there would be a little clipped conversation, from a distance and through our masks, whether we knew each other or not: “Hey, how you doing? You okay?” It felt alien and intimate both: the impulse to reach out was strong.
At least there was the relief of dogs — I could pet dogs at the end of their leashes even if the other walkers kept their distance. Now I know most of them by name: Roscoe, Ellie, Maggie, Sophie, Gabby, Golden, Brandy. Besides my husband, those dogs were the only other creatures I touched for many months.
The walking route I settled on encircles and encapsulates my city’s contrasts — the residential Tudors and upright colonials from the city’s baronial 20th century prosperity, past a clutch of mid-century modern ranches, and then through blocks of neat little General Motors bungalows built eighty years ago to house the AC Spark Plug and Buick City working class; some on that side are vacant, but it doesn’t look bad…yards are tended, a white picket fence in evidence here and a new roof going up there — the workers at first masked on the roof peaks. This is a lovely Flint, Michigan — and though ruin continues to characterize us, my walking route suggests a fuller picture.
At two corners the musky scent of pot wafts out noticeably and big trucks rumble in and out of two track driveways. So that’s how they’re getting through it, I surmise, like me and my Xanax. Here and there an American flag dangles — and I wonder now, sadly, which side they’re on…which patriotism or vein of anger that flag suggests.
About 400 paces from my front door is a little stream called Gilkey Creek. It threads 10 miles into, through and around my neighborhood, finally flowing into the Flint River downtown. That makes Gilkey Creek part of the Flint River watershed. The creek has been known to the native populations for three hundred years; it’s one of the features of nature here I love and value.
Yes, that is the same beleaguered and infamous waterway which for seven years has been so painfully implicated in our city’s water debacle. As we Flint residents often say, and I feel I must say again, it was not the river’s fault. The river is the cleanest it has been for generations — while not without challenges, its monitored water quality has been largely “excellent” since 2014/15, according to river watershed experts. The troubles happened in our pipes, where the consequences of stupid human actions played out. Fuck ’em, we are still very apt to say. It was because they didn’t understand or wish to understand the nature of a river — its particular chemistry — or take the time to understand, or care what that would mean to 90,000 other people, so many of us poor, so many of us children. It irritates me afresh that I have to bring it up again, before I go back to walking. Because before the pandemic hit, we were already exhausted by the water crisis. We were already hollowed out and pissed off, the new trauma aggravating the old one which had barely subsided. And here we were again, in a mess not of our making. Yet in a cruel difference, this time we have been kept apart as the deaths piled up. It was too much. Too much.
And so it mattered that from the start I let myself just savor the creek — the simple sounds and smells and sights of it: the cardinals in the shrubs along the bank, the heron that is sometimes spotted in the shallows.
What I have needed is not rage, not more rage, but rest, quiet, peace. Breathing. Letting the mind go wherever it wants.
I cherish the notion that the creek “feeds” the river — they are both female spirits to me, nourishing. When I walk along Gilkey Creek I’m grateful. Sometimes it sparkles in its little eddies at the bridge on Sunnyside Drive, and sometimes this time of year I spot a pair of mallard ducks. Almost every year they have babies, their progress protected and documented with delight in the local Facebook pages. Of course there’s also inevitably trash stuck among the eddies and fallen logs: Vernors cans and cheap vodka bottles and this year, abandoned COVID masks jammed up in it too — humans are jerks. A quartet of loving neighbors put up little yellow signs that say “Please Be Respectful: No Littering, No Dumping.” They clean it up from time to time, spreading goodness.
At one big curve of the creek is what is left of Pierce Park, once an18-hole golf course owned by the city. Years before the pandemic it got shut down when the city couldn’t afford it, and the clubhouse, once a watering hole of some congeniality for GM executives who had long ago moved on, sat there empty year after year, getting graffitied and generally beat up. I like walking back there — in the tall grasses around what used to be putting greens, milkweed sprung up around a lone prickly hawthorn and the creatures have moved in: rabbits, raccoons, a family of deer, and even some coyotes. Now hardy neighbors convene to clean it up, making paths, a garden — they are wonderful people, welcoming Mother Nature back. I like that — I confess I like it better as a wild place in the middle of the city than something manicured and forced. It comforts me that in this gentler presence of humans, the earth is taking over again. Walking through the park settles me into a stoic peace of mind, breathing and accepting what is.
In September, months into the plague, somebody set fire to the Pierce Park clubhouse. The destruction was total. So, the scene changed — the ruin inescapably dramatic, the stone pillars that had made the building seem elegant and invulnerable now naked and towering over piles of twisted metal and char.
At first seeing those ruins made me angry, but eventually resignation set in. Despite the overall loveliness of my neighborhood, if you live in Flint long enough, you get kind of numb to ruin. The burned clubhouse morphed into little more than another feature of interest…just another blighted corpse. I’m not proud of this. It’s just the way it is. It’s been eight months now and the carcass is finally marked for demolition. I walk by it without wrath — accepting it as another reminder, as if we need it, that chaos is the way of the world. As the carnage settles, well, there’s an architecture of stark beauty in the remains. Or that’s a cliché. It’s not beautiful — it’s a sign of something falling apart. Well, let nature have it back, I mutter into the air.
And so I walked one day, and then the next day, and then the next, until I had done it weeks and now months at a time: the hour-long trek both necessary and beloved. I’ve done it through sultry summer days, bundled up through ice and snow and rain and wind, through the fragrant red and ochre autumn, and now, in this second pandemic spring, green flowering and the mallards back again. Now we walk without masks. Remarkably, the air, in Flint’s post-industrial era, usually smells sweet. Because the creek traverses so much of the neighborhood, there’s often an earthy fragrance, life growing and recycling back into itself.
I know which potholes and broken sidewalks to sidestep. Without even thinking about it I navigate now familiar curves, turns and curbs. Ragged old silver maples watch over spindly sycamores, newly planted by the neighborhood association.
I went through one pair of walking shoes and bought some new ones — a nerve-wracking in-person, masked up excursion to the running store. My legs feel strong and adequate. I walk with my shoulders back and my head up; I fill my lungs on a breath of eight. Most important, my husband and I got double vaccinated and now possibilities of my former familiar freedoms are opening up.
But still, some days I need that walk so badly I can’t wait to get out there, to pound around the path. Other days I have to drag myself, but when I pry myself out, my mind goes into a trance of trudging and breathing and looking around, and when I get back, I feel so relaxed I fall asleep on the couch, even before Rachel Maddow repeats herself a hundred times, and certainly by the time Brian Williams launches his up-till-midnight blues. My gut has stopped eating at me, too. I thank Trump’s defeat for that.
Of course the world continues to rain down trouble, but every day my walk is a choice of self-love: antidote of stillness for the agitations of my mind. I breathe and rest and require nothing more. My neighborhood, a combination of ruin and reclamation, is perfectly suited to my needs. And with the rhythm of my own body, I hypnotize myself away from fear and dread. It’s been working for me.
I put the Xanax bottle on a top shelf where I can’t even see it. Some days I totally forget it’s there.
Jan Worth-Nelson, a poet, essayist and former editor of East Village Magazine in Flint, can be reached at janworth1118@gmail.com.
