I’m still zoned out from my perfectly restorative trip to Puerto Rico last week — during which I did not much but write, read, and paddle around in the ocean. So I’m sharing with you this week a piece I wrote in 2018, the year I wound up going to PR five times. I went for pleasure, and also for work — or was it for work but also for pleasure? In a perfect world, wouldn’t they be one and the same? This was the year I spent on the road (which I wrote a bit about last month) looking for … something. I had just turned 50 and was existentially distressed about my place in the world, my precarious career, my intractable loneliness. I did not know then that I would fall in love a few years later, nor could I know that just as things were seeming more stable my life would take a turn toward the precarious in a whole different bodily dimension. I tried to get it published, but no one wanted it, so I posted it on Medium for a bit, before taking it down because it just seemed weird. Maybe it is! A memory play, an experiment in the present tense: I look back at this now and I think it captures some strange essence of that time. It’s long. Enjoy.
“There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.” — Rachel Cusk, “Outline”
Cass Avenue, Detroit, 9 p.m. June 2018. A crowd chokes the entrance to Cass Cafe, and spills off the curb into the road. A woman extracts herself from the door of the restaurant and hops up atop a picnic table.
“Everybody! Hello!”
Ora is the co-coordinator of the food programming at the Allied Media Conference, which is why all these people are in Detroit, and the organizer of the Dream Cafe and Community Food Hub, a series of pop-up dinners that are the reason all these people are outside Cass Cafe. The scarf wrapped around her curls is losing its battle with the humid June night, but she is unflappable, and right now she is trying to get the assembled to quiet down and listen.
“Thank you all for coming and for being SO PATIENT,” she says. “This is all such an amazing experiment that we’re doing here with our Dream Cafe! We’ve never done it before and we’re doing it on the fly and everyone is giving their all and basically we are building the plane while we are flying it and now … we are OUT OF FOOD.”
“But!” She continues, “we’ve got a dozen chickens and some leftovers from lunch and we’re gonna set those up on a table in the back of the restaurant and if there is anyone here who is super hungry you should go on in and have some. No charge.”
I met Ora in May, in Puerto Rico. I was in San Juan to write about a project she was working on with Tara, an agroecologist on the island. There, then, I was at times speechless in the face of her personhood, her agency and moral authority. I am reminded of this all over again now.
“Do you need help?” I ask, as I leave to find food somewhere else. “I can wash dishes.”
She texts me the next day.
“I love the idea of a journalist embedded in the dish pit. Can you come to Cass at 6:30?”
“Just call me George Orwell,” I type back. I’ve come to the AMC in search of meaning, or at least language to help define a newer, better way of being in the world. The kitchen seems as good a place to find it as any.
***
Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2018, the Allied Media Conference is a utopia: a gloriously inclusive, everything-positive alternative universe of artists and activists and media makers who bring their ferociously best selves to Detroit for one weekend a year. All over the campus of Wayne State University young and less-than-young people flock to over 300 panel discussions, plenaries, meet-ups, and strategy sessions. There are conference delegations representing queer farmers; feminist filmmakers of color; community radio programmers from Saint Paul; Black Lives Matter organizers from Indianapolis. It is flamboyant and fierce and deeply sincere, and everyone is beautiful.
At the opening plenary, on building resilient infrastructure in the wake of disaster, leaders from Detroit, New York, and Puerto Rico speak to the potentiality of building new worlds, along new models, as the old ones have continue to irredeemably fail. They are inspiring, but I am still flooded with despair as the speaker from We The People Detroit decries the ongoing water crisis that left Michigan’s citizens parched and poisoned. How can you find the stamina to build new worlds when you have no water to drink?
I have realized that I want badly to not just believe in new possibilities, but find a way to enact them, for myself and for others, but I worry that I am too old to find my place in this better world, too shy, too late. That the forces arrayed against any such possibility are too strong. Despite the explicitly inclusive ethos of the AMC I am adrift. Later, I see someone I admire from Chicago across the lawn and I hide behind a tree.
I am grateful for Shea, who is introduced to me by Ora before she flies off to put out another fire. Shea is an activist, a teacher and publisher, and cofounder of Detroit Summer, a long-running program that facilitates community engagement for teens. I buy her a gin and tonic and she tells me with a sly smile about how 18 years ago, Detroit Summer “stole” the AMC from it’s early home at Bowling Green University and brought it to Detroit, where it has lived ever since.
I am grateful for Amy, my Detroit-born and -bred host, who is in a band and wears excellent eyeliner. She has never heard of the Allied Media Conference, and thus can hang out in her yard with wine and the dog without worrying that she is missing out on the revolution.
And I am grateful for Megan. I run into her at a panel; it’s on understanding indigenous food traditions as means of healing collective trauma, and it is heavy. I am so happy to see her. She’d left Chicago some years earlier, and I have lost track of her exact whereabouts but I know from Instagram that she’s working at a sustainable farm somewhere in New York state. It turns out the farm is in Beacon but she lives across the river, in Newburgh, the Detroit, she quips, of the Hudson River Valley.
After the panel we are drained. We skip the next session and walk up Cass for ice cream instead. Later that night, after our third beer she will confide that both her parents had died in the past year, the second abruptly thirty days after the first. She is not, she says, exactly OK.
But before that we go back to the Cass Cafe. It is time for my turn at the dishes, except they don’t need a dishwasher right now, so I am serving instead. Megan, years of fine-dining service under her apron, has volunteered as well. The pop-up this night is by iCollective, an organization of indigenous activists and Native chefs offering pre-colonial cooking, family style. We serve platters of seed crackers, smoked tepany bean spread, and Detroit-foraged mulberries under the direction of a friend of Ora’s from NYC, who runs a fair-trade spice company. He is kind and professional, and seems happy that we’re there.
We do not run out of food.
Standing at the pass, waiting for sheet pans of blue corn polenta to set in the kitchen, I am calm, happy. I know how to do this. Maybe I should give up journalism, go back to food service, get a job in a cafe. For ten years now the thing that has made me a living as an adult most of my adult live has failed to do just that. For ten years I have been grasping at handholds, a short gig here, a fellowship there, redirecting my goals, re-defining my self, ever smaller. I am tired, and I am 50 and I am, it seems likely, an old model that has failed. But here at least, with my arms behind my back, neutral against the wall, I know what to do next. I should make this a practice, just noting when I’m happy. Strung together, such conditions may define a path.
Later, I plunge my hands into soapy greasy water and one by one render each plate clean.
***
The next day OK I am hungover, as Megan and I have ended the night at the old man bar up the road, talking about life and its losses until we can only peer, silent, into our warming beers and contemplate unknown losses yet to come. She is leaving soon but I catch up with her at the bus stop and say goodbye, before we each board a different bus for a tour of the city, or part of it at least.
The tour I’m on is led by Rich, a former Ford auto worker, UAW organizer, activist, friend of Shea’s. In his 70s, I guess, he’s wearing a T-shirt from the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center that reads: (re)evolution. He has a deep, encyclopedic knowledge of Detroit history and politics and interrupts himself repeatedly, querulously, to wonder: Does this make sense? Do you know who Coleman Young is? Am I boring you?
The bus idles outside the glorious ruin of the Packard Plant and he schools us in twentieth century labor history. You can’t understand today without understanding what happened yesterday, he says, let along figure out what you can do for tomorrow. But he won’t let us off the bus. He’s done a lot of these tours. If we get off the bus, it’ll take half an hour at least to get us all back on, and we don’t have that kind of time, there’s too much to see. I am fine with this; I don’t need to see everything myself. It’s more interesting to see through his eyes.
So we sit on the bus and gaze across the field at the plant, 3.5 million square feet of it. The four-story facade, gloriously graffiti’d, stretches a city block before its famous bridge arches across Grand Boulevard and the complex continues on. Cars haven’t been made there since 1956, and for the most part it has been empty since the 90s, a magnet for scrappers and ruin pornographers. In 2015 a tiger got loose in the plant. Along with a bobcat and two wolves, it was being used by a British photographer for a shoot when it slipped away from its handler. Rich doesn’t bring this up, but I remember a Detroit writer I work with describing the episode with wonder as “peak Detroit.”
The auto industry was once the engine of the American Dream, says Rich. This plant employed 11,000 workers. Another 100,000 worked at Ford Rouge. Two million people lived in Detroit in the 1950s. Now, it’s 850,000, and one third of the city is vacant land, past which the bus trundles on.
We stop at the Heidelberg Project, Tyree Guyton’s singular installation of shoes, dolls, painted clocks, and dotted houses sprawls across multiple sites in the east side neighborhood of McDougall-Hunt. His aesthetic vision is inscrutable, but his motivations are clear: to redefine one block — in an area gutted by the 1967 riots and never rehabilitated — on his own terms, cleaving to a value system that honors the found and common. In Detroit the model community can be built from spare parts; why not elsewhere?
We are allowed off the bus to explore. Everywhere, the ground is stained wine-dark with mulberries. I find some that haven’t been trod upon and pop them, sweet and warm, into my mouth.
***
Detroit writer, activist, and artist adrienne maree brown cohosted, along with Mariame Kaba, the AMC keynote I have missed in order to wash dishes at the Dream Cafe. But now it is Sunday morning and the lecture hall is full of bed-headed attendees, drinking their coffee, tea or mate, listening to brown speak, rapt. She is talking about pleasure.
Have the sex, she says. Kiss the kisser. Do the drugs, if that’s your thing. Do what you need to do to push pleasure into the practice of daily life, and your politics.
How would your life, your community, change if you did this? If you made space for the things you love and long for rather than by reacting to that which you fear?
She puts on an audio recording: Audre Lorde, reading “Uses of the Erotic,” her transformative 1978 essay, and together we close our eyes.
“The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” says Lorde. The recording is scratchy, wearing its age with pride. “It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
I read this in college, in the 80s. Most of the people listening with me weren’t alive. I feel the neutral weight of this fact and try to keep it there, smooth and round, unencumbered by the associations that surround it in the dark, seeking to accrete to it.
We are instructed to listen, and to take notes when a particular phrase or passage strikes us, when we have an emotional response.
I listen and there are hot tears under closed lids. I heard this so long ago, and somehow didn’t listen, or couldn’t, and now I can’t stop the tears, mourning the pleasure, and the power, I have denied myself when I was too young to expect any better. I write this down.
“Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
On the recording, the poet gets to that famous part. The paragraph equating pleasure, and power, to the kernel of yellow coloring embedded in wartime packs of white margarine. A kernel that, once warmed and gently massaged between thumb and index finger breaks open to spread throughout, soaking the cool, pale packet with its sunshine.
These lines made us all smile secret smiles in college, and here in Detroit in a college lecture hall on Sunday morning the room smiles together, a collective conspiracy of grins.
Brown’s book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, comes out in February. I wonder if there’s a reading group.
***
I run into Tara outside the Dream Cafe as I am leaving Detroit. My story about her work in Puerto Rico is in limbo, and I apologize. Anthony Bourdain just died and the editor isn’t answering my emails, and I’m trying not to take it personally. It doesn’t seem to matter much either way. I give her a hug and a book I wrote a while ago. Maybe we can work together down the road, I say. Think about it.
I drive home, five hours, blasting down I-94 past Battle Creek, Lansing, and miles of steamy Michigan farmland. Along the way, I talk into my phone. I’ve never done this before, but I have an essay due in just days and no time to write it. So I talk, streaming half-thoughts and clauses into the rectangle and it is as close as you might get to the app every writer needs — the one that downloads your perfect sentences from your brain to the page.
I stop in Sawyer for coffee, but my friends who live there aren’t home so I don’t stay long, but neither do I get back on the interstate. Instead, I cut down to cross Indiana on the Dunes Highway. Past Redamak’s, past the cooling tower of the Michigan City nuclear plant, past the entrance to the Indian Dunes National Lakeshore where on a July day in 2013, Mount Baldy, its signature 123-foot dune, had opened a sinkhole that swallowed six-year-old Nathan Woessner.
Woesnner survived; after more than three hours buried in the sand he was rescued, unresponsive, and then, after an eternity, he gasped. It was a miracle, in a place and time when they are far between. He’s reported to be doing well — and has little memory of his time underground. The park is open again after aggressive environmental remediation to shore up the shifting base of the dune. I haven’t been back since it reopened, and I don’t stop now.
The Dunes Highway makes me happy. A rundown, overgrown shortcut along Indiana’s north coast, past dusty motels and bait shops, and the Arcelor MIttal campus outside Gary, before you hit Miller Beach, an eyeblink of brewpubs and promise. The way back to Chicago is a poorly marked on-ramp to the Skyway at the honeycombed carapace of an old motel and a strip club.
Back home I present the essay at a competitive live-lit event. I have been given the prompt of “sink;” my opponent has been assigned “swim.” To sink, I say, is to give in to the inexorable pull of gravity, to the rules of physics and the universe itself which are of a magnitude greater than our individual hopes and dreams. To sink is epic, I say. The Titanic sinks; Nemo swims. To sink is to accept the present moment in all it’s perilous and uncertain glory. To sink is voluptuous, carnal, physical, embodied. It’s what you do with your teeth into a cheeseburger, or with your body into your lover’s arms.
I do not mention Nathan Woessner but I do quote Thomas Merton: “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.”
My opponent tells a heartfelt tale of her teenaged promise as a champion swimmer being derailed by an accidental pregnancy, an inspiring and true tale of perseverance against terrible odds. It’s honest and direct and very moving. She gets $100; I get $50.
Two days later I am on a plane to Puerto Rico.
***
I have been invited to an academic conference, of sorts. I’m not an academic, but I work in a university journalism school and my colleague who was supposed to go cannot, so I go instead. As the plane taxis past the same pile of rubble that was there in May, and before that in February, I am at once grounded and dizzy. I was just here last month, and now I am back. I feel like a commuter.
I remember the dinner I had with Ora only weeks ago in a fashionable restaurant in San Juan, and how we talked about hope, which she defended with eloquence and vigor. I can’t remember why, but I remember trying to stick up, at that moment, for the situational utility of despair. It has its place, I remember I argued, badly. The conversation soon stumbled, then wandered off into appreciation of the eggplant and more wine. But it stuck with me because I remember it now and realize that what I was trying to do was not defend despair but instead create space for the right to just be, without forever trying to make things better.
My friend picks me up at the airport but he misunderstood and thought I was staying the night in San Juan, which I cannot. So a few hours later we make the drive west, battling the end of rush hour to Caguas then over the mountains to Ponce and up the southern coast. In the car, with the kids, we play alphabet games, and sing songs from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. We stop for grilled cheese and coffee at El Meson, where the French fries are excellent. We hope to get to Mayagüez in time for ice cream.
Martha, why are you smiling? says one of the kids from the back seat.
I’m happy, I say. I’m not embarrassed to be caught.
***
We do get to Mayagüez, in under three hours, just before 9. And we do get ice cream — almond and coconut and two versions of chocolate — and sit in the plaza, Plaza Colon.
A statue of Christopher Columbus looms at its center. Atop a pillar inside a shallow pool and fountain the pediment reaches up to cup a globe. Atop the globe, arms outstretched, flag in hand, stands the explorer, astride the world.
Puerto Rico displays such confused feelings about its first colonizers.
They leave, to drive back to San Juan in the dark, and I go up to my room on the fourth floor, on the corner. Just off the lobby of the Howard Johnson, on the way to the elevator that takes me to my room, a pair of wrought iron conquistadors startle me every time I round the corner. I’ve been awake since 5 am, and flown and driven all day. I sleep, for an hour, and am woken by the power chords of a truly terrible cover band. I find out later that it is a graduation party, an annual tradition that takes over the street down the hill. But for now, for hours, I lie in bed under the polyester duvet and listen: “Don’t Stop Believin’”; “Highway to Hell”; “Rock Me Like A Hurricane.” You can’t make this up.
***
I ride a yellow school bus to the conference. I have already missed the first day. It’s at the baseball stadium, on the second floor, with an incredible view of the westward ocean. This is the Caribbean now, not the Atlantic, and the next night, when I will walk down onto the sand at sunset, the surf is gentler than what I’m used to on the northern coast, and the sky is blazing pink.
Organized by married University of Puerto Rico professors (political science; sociology) in Mayagüez, the meeting is part of an effort to harness the goodwill of the many academics and institutions who descended on Puerto Rico from the mainland in the months after the hurricane, all of them with their own schemes and plans and research projects in hand. There are so many stories: A team of engineers working in one town would have no idea that their colleagues in the architecture school were scant miles away. One squad of environmental scientists would find themselves working at cross purposes with another. Mainland community development planners would show up unaware of work being done by the locals, and do it all over again. It was, say the organizers, a bit chaotic.
So let’s get together, get on the same page, and build something — a platform, a network — that can coordinate with the work on the ground. We need to build resiliency, they say, so that the next time this happens we are better able to cope.
Because there will be a next time.
The first floor of the stadium building has been repurposed as a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center. A dozen of so volunteers and government workers in windbreakers eat pastries and drink coffee as I cross the room with the others to the elevator. There are no petitioners for aid that I can see, but it’s early. Upstairs, I’m surprised to find two FEMA reps have been invited to attend, sitting in on the discussions.
One of them will say later, of FEMA’s work on the island, that it’s important to divvy up the reconstruction between “crisis intervention” and “normal” work. I want to say, but all the work to be done here is crisis intervention, all the time. That’s the issue. And then, somehow I do say just that and I may be wrong but I think I see one of the organizers nod in approval, or relief.
Back in town that night, I go out for drinks with a man. We wander down the hill from the Howard Johnson to the intersection that may constitute the heart of the city’s nightlife district: Three bars with competing sound systems on three corners and a crumbling vacant building on the fourth. We perch on stools at a table that wobbles on the cobblestones and drink Medalla. He has worked for years in Africa, and in the higher levels of DC, but Puerto Rico is new.
Why is everything so … impossible, he asks.
I don’t have a good answer but I give him a few bad ones.
Later, in the second beer, I discover that he is from my hometown. And that we went to the same high school, though not at the same time. My grandfather taught there and he remembers him. He remembers my grandfather! In an instant I am tethered to the cobbled earth and I want to kiss him, but I do not.
***
Anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla has written of the effect of Hurricane Maria as a “temporal rupture.” Under normal circumstances, if such a qualifier can be applied to a catastrophe, there is a natural incentive to move quickly: to fix, to restore, to repair, and to move out of the current state of emergency, she says. But in Puerto Rico after Maria, this feeling of urgency was met with crushing standstill, resulting in an extended state of emergency characterized by delay, decay, and the forced act of waiting. And waiting, says Bonilla, implies the existence of a certain horizon of experience. Of the eventual arrival of help.
What happens when there’s no forward movement, and you give up on the possibility of help?
At the dinner, the dinner of hope, in May, I remember my friend talking about the days after the hurricane, when life was stripped down to the essentials of survival. He met a guy, as he tells the story, which I have heard before, who lived on the eighth floor of the condominium building across the street. He was an old man who, like everyone, had no running water, so he had to haul it in jugs up eight flights of stairs — because, of course, there was not elevator either. This man was, said my friend, the happiest he’d ever been. This is great! he recalls the man saying. I’m getting exercise, all my friends are around, I can hang out with them all day and shoot the breeze. What more could you want?
I remember another story my friend has told me, a memory from the endless blackout. They were at the school, clearing away a downed tree, and one of his kids said, a propos of I’m not sure what, “Papa, this is a utopia. Because we are all here together.”
***
On Sunday we all pile into the yellow bus for a field trip to Corcovada. This is a small autonomous community in the mountains, which manages its own aqueduct, and which has recently — we are told, in a presentation the day before — gone solar and off the grid. This self-sufficient utopia, we are told, is thanks to the community, and the community leaders, and, most importantly, thanks to God.
I think the room was surprised by that last.
On the bus, I talk with a grad student wearing a yellow T-shirt that reads “Los Brigades del Oeste” — the brigades of the west. He has traveled, after the storm, with other students on this brigade, going from farm to farm and town to town as so many did in Puerto Rico, to do the work that needed to be done, clearing debris and cooking food, when the government was nowhere to be found. He shrugs; it was no big deal. Everyone was doing it, he reiterates. He has a prototype for a portable solar charger that can allegedly power a phone or a laptop, but it’s not working correctly, so he hangs it out the window of the bus in the hope of catching better light.
In Corcovada we eat pollo guisado and bacalao, and take a tour of the aqueduct and the water treatment facility. We are shown the solar array as well but it is not working. It stopped working a month or two ago says our guide, and it hasn’t been fixed. The guy who installed it? He doesn’t like him; he thinks he’s an asshole. It’s not clear whether his antipathy for the solar tech is what’s preventing it from being fixed, or if there are larger, structural issues that are invisible to us in play.
Later, in the car on the way back to San Juan, people are confounded. Why can’t the solar be repaired? How can they shrug it off? How can you present your utopian community to a group of visiting academics, and not mention in passing that the solar doesn’t work?
I’m quiet because it seems clear enough that sometimes, things just don’t work, but there may be no harm in talking about about them as though they do. It’s even possible that by so doing, you might facilitate their repair, be able to will it into being.
***
On the day I am to leave San Juan we go to the beach in the morning, just grab swimsuits and iced coffee and the dogs. It’s quiet. The water isn’t as wavy as it was the day before. Early rising kite surfers are in the water finding their sea legs and I dunk over and over in the warm Atlantic shallows. The salt water heals the bug bites on my ankles and somehow unkinks the twitching muscle in my neck. Over and over the bigger dog tries to swim out, triangulating first into the arms of my friend and then, gathering her strength, to mine, paddling without grace, but with purpose.
The smaller dog has run down the beach and after a while my friend chases after it. I stand in the surf as they disappear down the sand so far I cannot see them, and I’m alone for a time. But the dog will come back, and we will finish the swim, and later we will stop to buy mallorcas from a window set into the wall of a bakery, the least assuming storefront in a city with no shortage of holes in walls. I will eat my mallorca with powdered sugar, and drink some more coffee, and panic because I think I’ve lost my phone. But the phone is in the hammock, so I pack my bag and we drive to the airport, and I run my suitcase through agricultural inspection and get a big orange sticker to avere that I am removing no fruits or vegetables from the island. And I will go to the gate, and get on the plane, and fly to Newark, sharing a seat with a pharmaceutical rep from Rincon. And I’ll take the train to Penn Station, and a cab to the hotel, where my credit card will be declined because I forget that I don’t have any money. And on the night I arrive, a 28-year-old Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx will trounce a sitting congressperson and unleash a new wave of hope upon the land, and I’ll be following this development on my phone while on someone else’s dime an investment banker mansplains the Puerto Rican debt crisis to me at a midtown steakhouse, and I’ll try to hold my tongue and almost succeed.
And then I will go home, and I will leave my notebook with all my notes from both Detroit and Puerto Rico on the plane, and I will be left with only images and fragments.
I will not travel again until the end of summer, when I will descend from the sky into ochre smoke that blows down from British Columbia to choke my hometown. I will stay put, instead, through July and August, as the parents of friends die and the lovers of others fail them. One friend will get sick; another will move to Rome; a third will let me down for the last time. I will see my story published, to little effect. I will read about the Flint water crisis, and I will read the book recommended by Megan, about the resilience of fungal networks, and the power of assemblage, patterns of unintentional coordination. It’s called The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
The Detroit Public Schools will cut off water to its drinking fountains, declaring it toxic with lead. The conference organizers in Mayagüez will see their pensions frozen and the funding for their institute cut, under austerity at the UPR. The death count from Hurricane Maria will be revised upward, again and again, and the fires of outrage will feed on this new fuel, to drive the perpetual motion machine of a civilization that is learning, has learned, to deny its pleasure, to take what it will, and to be moved to action only by fear, cruelty, and loss.
But right there that morning at the edge of the water in the sun with a wet sandy dog, in the stillness of possibility, where hope goes to catch its breath, it is a perfect world.