About a year ago I undertook a sort of informal pilgrimage.
One night, starting at the Saginaw Street bridge downtown, I followed the Flint River upstream north and east, looking for the headwaters. The drive took me deep into Lapeer County, through tiny towns I’ve heard of most my life, but most of which I had never visited: Columbiaville, North Branch, Dryden, Metamora. Due to a quirk of terrain, northern Lapeer County is consistently colder than it is here, even though it’s not very far away. The Flint River doesn’t create itself dramatically. There are simply points at which the aquifer spills over into established ditches, which eventually combine into the Holloway Reservoir, which was far more vast than I had ever imagined, stretching halfway across two counties. I never was able to find a specific point at which the branches of the river established themselves; they just gradually vanished. By the time the sun was getting ready to rise, I pulled into a gas station in Grand Blanc for fuel and a donut, and I had quite a sense of accomplishment. I had crossed the extremities of the watershed and learned something new about myself and where I live.
Last night I decided to repeat the experiment in the opposite direction. I wanted to follow the Flint River past its confluence with the Saginaw River to the Saginaw Bay. Again, I started at Saginaw Street, crossed back and forth through Chevy in the Hole, then Flushing and Montrose, as the river gained steam. Southern Saginaw County is not as remote as Lapeer County, but the stars were startlingly bright out there last night; I noticed them in particular when I found myself at a demolished river crossing just south of the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge. Moving north, I was suddenly swept into Saginaw — Flint’s smaller, older sister — and then just as abruptly out and through the wetlands that sprawl under the Zilwaukee Bridge. I passed through working-class Bay City, which is less familiar to me. The river is a whole other thing up there; it’s no Mississippi, but the Flint river has combined with five others — the Cass, Shiawassee, Pine, Chippewa, and Tittabawassee — to form the Saginaw, a fast moving capital ‘R’ River that sees a fair amount of shipping traffic. I passed through surreal Essexville (imagine Flushing surrounded by factories) and up a road lined with ten-foot tall cattails to the U.S. Coast Guard post, and then I was unable to follow the river any further.
Just a few miles further on, I found the Quanicassee Wildlife Area, where I hoped to get a glimpse of the bay, which feeds Lake Huron and, from there, Lakes Erie and Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. But it was bitterly cold out and the bay was windy and dark and forbidding. I took a brief moment to look around, then hustled back into my warm car, and started the long drive home.
Last night didn’t have quite the quiet, spiritual feeling of my earlier trip upstream; on that trip, everything was dreamlike and blurred together. Last night, moments stood out from one another. Icy fields and sprawling wetlands starkly separated the rusty industrial towns that dot the river. However, some of those moments were really cool: twisting along the river in and outside of Flint, instead of following a straight-line to my destination, felt magical because it expanded the city and space and showed familiar sites from unfamiliar angles. Then there was the sense — building momentum the further north I went — that the hard ground receded in deference to water. Finally, the surprisingly quick return home; I-75 is dark and fast at night.
I came away with a slightly better understanding of where I live; how the landscapes relate to each other, and what they mean for Michigan and its history.