Day Two: Following the Path

I woke up to a lovely morning.  Lou jumped out of the car where she’d slept and sprinted in circles.  The air was comfortable—a welcome relief from Atlanta in July—and the Ohio River was calm, smooth, and quiet.  So quiet that before breakfast, I grabbed my towel and biodegradable soap and waded in.

Eight travel hours to the Upper Peninsula.  After grits and coffee, I closed up the clamshell and Lou and I headed north.  Our route took us back through Cincinnati, then up through Dayton and Toledo and into Michigan.   We were loaded up and rolling by eight.

Many southerners, I would learn, had followed this route before me.  I started an audiobook that my buddy Matt Stoddard had recommended, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.  In the 1940s and 50s, factory owners in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region needed workers, so they sent recruiters south to the troubled coal mining country of eastern Kentucky.  They recruited whole families, promising better wages and a better life than the coal mines could offer.  Many Kentuckians answered the call, Vance’s ancestors among them.  One county in Kentucky lost 30% of its population in the migration north.

So the Vance family from Kentucky—hillbillies or hill people, as Vance refers to them—ended up in the upper Midwest, in what people now call the Rust Belt.  J.D. Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio, to a cultural tradition rooted most recently in the Appalachians, and in the Scots-Irish tradition before that.  Fierce people, with a history of some of America’s greatest feuds (like Hatfield-McCoy).  Clannish people, to whom an insult to a family member meant dishonor and a fistfight at a minimum.

They moved in droves, principally up Route 23.  Not all Midwesterners were happy to see them.  Vance tells one story of his grandparents walking into a drugstore, breaking some merchandise, throwing other items against the wall, and threatening to kick the clerk’s ass on the grounds that, before the grandparents arrived, the clerk had said something mildly rude to their son.  The clerk was scared out of his wits.  Then the Vance family casually resumed their shopping.  (It really is a great book.)  There was, Vance explains, some tension between the cultures.  Resentful Ohioans complained that the uneducated, violent hill people hadn’t learned anything in school except “readin,’ ritin,’ and Route 23.”

Then in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the factories that had employed the hill people started to close.  This was not good.  Now the hill people had no jobs.  Poverty, drug abuse, and broken families followed.  In Vance’s case, his father left his life, his mother became addicted to opioids and then heroin, and his family descended into chaos.  The families around him fared little better.  Young people like Vance had no prospects and, crucially, no role models to show what to aim for, or how to get there.  (The story revolves around Vance’s struggle to make it out—which he eventually did, and graduated from Yale Law School).

Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t pull punches.  The hill people have contributed massively to their own problems, Vance says.  He writes:

“We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy. . . . Thrift is inimical to our being.”

Vance writes candidly about the drinking, the smoking, the drugs, and the bad food.  The hill people resented Michelle Obama’s instructions to eat healthier not because they thought she was wrong, he says, but because they knew she was right.  Stubbornness can be a strength, but the decision you’re refusing to waver from needs to be a good one.  Often, it isn’t.

The book hit home for me.  That was in part because I happened to be driving on Route 23 while I was listening to it, and I can sing along to Dwight Yoakam’s country song “Readin,’ Writin,’ Route 23.”  But also because I come from the stock that Vance calls “hill people.”  Now, I was born into a healthy and comfortable family, and nobody in my family had a childhood as challenging as Vance’s.  Still, there are parallels.  My family tells our own violent stories and, like Vance, we’re damned proud of them.  My family tree has branched into opioid addiction.  My father tells some stories that sound like Vance’s—graduating law school being socially unprepared for the white-collar world he entered.  My family has its problems, but we’ll be damned if we’re going to let any outsider tell us what to do about them.

I followed Route 23 into Flint, Michigan and stopped for lunch at the White Horse Café.  I sat at the bar and ordered a burger and water, I guess to see if I could taste the lead.  The burger was good but the atmosphere exemplified too much of Hillbilly Elegy.  The young guy who had been outside smoking a cigarette when I entered came inside and slowly drank beer alone.  Overweight people eating massive calzones.  Slot machines.  I paid my tab and returned to the road.

We reached the Upper Peninsula—the “U.P.,” as I’ll call it now that I’m familiar—about 5:30, and it was beautiful from the start.  I stopped in St. Ignace, the first town across the bridge to the UP, and bought an atlas showing forest service land.  We kept heading north to Brimley, then turned left.  It wasn’t long before we were looking out of the bright blue waters of Lake Superior.

Lou was ready for some exercise and I needed it too, so we found a trail and I laced up my running shoes.  I thought about how lucky I am to be able to do something like this.  I was raised with about every advantage it was possible to have—born in the United States to a loving family with plenty of role models and plenty of investment in me.  We ran along the shore, with the trail alternating between soft sand and hard forest floor.  Lou sprinted ahead, splashed in the lake, sniffed the fir trees, and returned to the trial.  I learned at a young age what it meant to work hard, and I had people at every step of the way help me to internalize that lesson.  If you’re going to be able to pick up and drive to from Georgia to Michigan on a lark, as I had done, a lot has to go right for you.

After the run, I put Lou in the car and walked back toward a vacant spot of lakeshore with my towel and soap.  I am proud—maybe too proud, given the advantages I’ve had—but I do work my butt off and have made generally good decisions in life.  At least I took some of the good advice I got.  Lots of rich kids I grew up with got too full of themselves, then never worked or never took followed the role models they had.  I waded into the cool water and ducked my head, then applied some soap and scrubbed the sweat off.  The wind felt good against my skin.  I toweled off on the beach and wondered how many people had bathed in the Ohio River in the morning, and the Great Lakes that same evening.  Now that’s something special..