The Shiawassee River

Claire Galford 

About an hour or two after we go to bed, a loud thump on the wall outside our room wakes me up. Another thud follows, then swearing and the sound of punches. Rose sits up. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a fight in the hall.” I slip out of bed and prop the back of a chair under the doorknob to make it harder for someone to break down the door, accidentally or not. More grunts, punches, and wall crashes.

I call the front desk, but no one picks up the phone. “I’m going out there to tell them to shut the fuck up,” I say as I slide back under the covers, nesting against Rose’s back to shield her. 

“That’s not funny.”

There’s a reenactment of the fight scene around 3 ᴬᴹ. Still no answer at the front desk; I wonder if the night clerk is one of the combatants or too loaded to wake up.

In the morning, there’s blood on the hallway carpet and wall, probably the byproduct of a broken nose or two. “Want me to see if we can stay here another night?” I ask Rose. Proud of her self-proclaimed lack of a sense of humor, she scowls at me. In the sober light of day, it hits me that the drunken brawls our hotel features could’ve ended in gunfire. I should have rolled us on to the floor behind the bed or retreated to the bathroom once the fighting started to protect her.

The hotel, the Saginaw Sheraton, was full of my former high school classmates, now late middle agers, attending our reunion. Guess my old contemporaries haven’t changed or slowed down.

I wanted to go to the reunion to connect with my high school buddies and girlfriends. Few people had left Michigan in all those years so turnout was high. I’m surprised at how many are still alive and not currently incarcerated. Although years could pass between seeing my high school friends, we always took up where we’d left off after graduation. (“Remember our Thanksgiving football games?” referring to the annual tackle games played on a concrete-hard strip of frozen grass between the train tracks and the long wooden Furstenberg warehouse weather-faded to grey). Growing up together, and, in my case, without going through the adult experiences that tend to push people apart and ruin friendships, we knew each other at a deep, no-bullshit level. Except for me. In that era, no queer person was out, and even the psychiatric profession deemed what we now call “trans” a mental illness and a perversion. I kept my growing desire to be the other gender locked away from everyone, even myself.

I never understood why someone would want to go to their partner’s high school or college reunions, spending an evening or more in a large room full of strangers who have tons of shared memories but won’t remember your name two minutes after your partner has introduced you. And who in their right mind, would want to go to a reunion in a cultural and social backwater—no, cesspool—like the decaying factory town of Saginaw, Michigan? It makes Detroit look good!

But Rose wanted to see where I grew up and who my boyhood friends were. That’s how we found ourselves in the Saginaw Sheraton after the reunion dinner. I warned her about what to expect—street fightin’ men and factory girls—but was she prepared for such a contrast to her childhood neighborhood in the Chestnut Hill area of Boston? But she does fine. I’m proud to be with her; she’s smart, energetic, unconventional, and still fly.

We pass up the stale pastry brunch at the Sheraton (“I’d rather get a corn dog at that gas station across the street,” I say) and instead have a “negative calorie breakfast” by running a few miles in the brisk fall air. As we shower and hurry to pack our things to get out of the hotel before we die of cigarette smoke inhalation, Rose announces she has found something interesting to do. “That’s amazing, honey! I grew up in this hellhole and can’t think of a single thing I’d want to do here. How do you do that?”

She’s come across a boat trip with champagne on the Shiawassee River, one of the three placid streams that come together to form the Saginaw River and the perfect spot to float hardwood trees to sawmills in the nineteenth century. Saginaw was born as a booming lumber mill town for the fifty or so years it took to cut down all the chestnuts, maples, elms and hickories in southern Michigan. The giant spreading street elms that survived the destruction of the great forest formed dense canopies over the city’s streets of my youth, patches of blue sky peeking through here and there, before Dutch elm disease killed every single one of them. I wish Rose could see them.

Seven years later, Rose tells me, “I hate you! I’ve hated you for years!” and I’m desperate to put a number to “for years.”

“Did you hate me when we retook our wedding vows in the meadow?”

“Yes!”

“Did you hate me that day on the Shiawassee River?”

“YES! YES! I hated you then!”

We meet up with our river guide at a boat launch where the Shiawassee and Tittabawassee Rivers merge to form the Saginaw. Our guide has a ne’er-do-well air about him that suggests he probably supports himself by stringing together various gig jobs between drug sales. I suspect he gets few customers to pole and float a river no one knows about. Between ourselves, we think of him as The River Rat. But RR turns out to be a nice guy underneath his exterior, and his love for the Shiawassee River and the surrounding migratory bird sanctuary is contagious. 

We putter upstream past the old Grey Iron Foundry, whose giant furnaces used to smear the night with a hellish dirty red glow. After the lumber barons deserted the town and their ornate Victorian homes, decay set in for a few decades before the auto industry turned Saginaw into a factory town and its assembly line workers into automatons. We pass the junction of the Shiawassee and Tittabawassee Rivers, the latter now a Superfund site along with the empty houses that sit on its banks. 

“We won’t be going up there,” our guide says. “They can’t clean up the shit that’s been in there forever, and Dow keeps dumping new stuff in it. It’s cheaper for them to pay the fines than to figure out what to do with their chemical waste.” I wonder about the medical histories of the children who grew up on the Tittabawassee’s banks and shudder. 

But when we pass the Tittabawassee and get on the Shiawassee, the world changes. The Shiawassee is hardly pristine, being downstream from Flint and its auto factories and foundries. But it also doesn’t have the malevolent aura of its sister river. It’s shallow, rarely getting deeper than a man’s height, and slow as it makes its way along slightly less than flat land to connect with Lake Huron, via the Saginaw River, which facilitated the shipping that once brought iron ore from Minnesota and delivered finished cars and trucks to the cities of the Midwest and Northeast. 

Now, this part of the Shiawassee is a tranquil backwater, quiet and full of red-winged blackbirds that rise from the riparian zone along the river to fly into thickets and gangly hardwoods struggling to live. Posts from long gone piers mark the sites of log ponds that held timber until it could be moved to the wood mills in Saginaw. The stresses and pressures of my daily life and the ugliness of my childhood slip away. No one can reach us. I squeeze Rose’s hand in silent communication. How does she find something serene and beautiful in such a blighted space? We pop open the champagne, which turns out to be surprisingly drinkable, and share it with our boatman. 

I tell Rose, “I was so lucky to meet you. You make life fun.” Worth living, I mean. She’s enabled me to do the two things every queer person must do: accept who I am and decide what to do about it. Rose kisses me on the lips. I’d never thought it possible for my life to turn out this way. She’s made my lifelong loneliness fade.

Rose whispers in my ear, “Do you know how much I love you?”