Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge Page A

child could be next.” 22

CHAPTER 5
    TYLER DUNN (11)
    Marlette, Michigan

    8:19 P . M . EST
    A S CLOUDS GLOWERED OVER RURAL M ICHIGAN , THREE LONG , sharp, discordant beeps sounded in slow, even succession over my car radio, followed by a dispassionate voice on every available station warning of extreme weather. In measured, urgent, intrusive tones, it promised conditions that were not just extreme—thunderstorms, lightning, flash flooding—but almost Biblical in their impact. Hail was coming, the voice said, that might ruin your roof, lightning that could kill, weather so ferocious one should stay away from windows. These calamities, I was warned, would be moving through counties I had never heard of, which meant I had no idea whether I was heading toward the storm or away from it.
    But there was little reason to worry. Unlike in the city, where weather creeps up on your built environment and then mugs you unawares, hereit made its presence and intentions clear long before it approached. The horizon is so broad, the landscape so sparse, and the sky so huge that the weather declares itself with great ceremony. Long streaks of lightning cracked at the early-morning sky to the west like a huge cosmic whip. The clouds brooding in the distance were drifting south and west and clearing on their journey. Despite the dire warnings from my car radio as I headed northeast, toward Michigan’s thumb, I could see that the storm was skirting around me.
    Sanilac County, where I was heading, has a lower population density than Finland 1 and is slightly less racially diverse than Norway (it is over 95 percent white). 2 According to Michigan’s Department of Agriculture, Sanilac leads the state in its acreage devoted to soy, corn, wheat, dairy farms, and general cattle operations and is third in its acreage dedicated to sugar beets. 3 Straight roads lead past silos, Dutch barns, rows of corn, grazing livestock, and fallow fields interspersed with the occasional township and homestead as you head toward Lake Huron (one of the Greats), which serves as its eastern border.
    Marlette, population 1,879, lies on Sanilac’s southwest flank, the third-biggest town and a twenty-five-minute drive to the county seat of Sandusky. The shiny blue water tower bearing the town’s name announces itself from afar to the left while McDonald’s golden arches peer over the trees to the right. From the south, the first sign welcoming you into town bears the motto “Marlette, The Heart of the Thumb.” Underneath the second sign, which simply states “Marlette City Limit,” is a footnote of sorts boasting, “Home of the Boys’ Cross Country Div 3 State Champion Runner Up.” The nearest cinema is in Sandusky; you’re about half an hour drive from the nearest Starbucks and non-Christian bookshop.
    Long ago, writes Kate McGill, one of the town’s early settlers, in The Beginnings of Marlette, this “had been the home of the Sauk Indians, later of the Chippewas. But the settlements at Detroit had driven them back until in 1854 only a few scattering bands remained. Through the primeval forests, guided only by the blazed trail of the woodsman surveyor, came the hardy pioneer, to hew out for himself a home and fortune in the new land.” 4
    The Irish and Scots in Ontario, Canada, “loaded their guns, sharpened their axes and came to investigate,” floating over the Huron. Rumors had swirled of “tall timber and fertile soil that was almost free for the asking,” 5 and gradually the immigrants made the area their own. A century and a half later it feels like the town that ate Gilbert Grape by day; driving through by night, particularly during the winter, you feel like an extra in the movie Fargo.
    Brittany Dunn, age twenty, wouldn’t be anywhere else. “I’d rather live here than in the city,” she says. “It’s more laid back,” says her grandmother, Janet Allen, who moved the seventy miles from White Lake for the “peace and quiet.”