Dandelion Clock
by Angela Jones
NONFICTION
I was walking through a field of wildflowers in the rural outskirts of Michigan. I didn't know where I was exactly because I hadn't been paying much attention to the signs as we drove. I had rarely passed Detroit's city limits and I was too focused on the farms; miles of head-high corn stalks speeding by my window in a blur. There were trees all around me as I walked -- a tiny forest. And there were things that crawled through grass and scurried into holes and made clicking noises as they flew, like a busted radiator. When no one was looking I snuck away from the camp site, and from the other four members of my high school's environmental club, to take a walk. Now, lying in cramped clusters all around were a cavalry of Queen Anne's Lace, as dainty as fancy table cloth fringe. I pictured Anne, bathed in a flowing gown lined with radiant white umbels, a crown of wild violet haloing her hair. There was heart-shaped sorrel which I chewed straight from the stem just to taste that tiny pucker of lemon on my tongue. With my thumb and forefinger I traced the length of a waist-high fuzzy foxtail, pretending that it belonged to a real fox. Then there were the dandelions, as abundant as blades of grass, sun yellow and standing proud as flags. Warmth of familiarity rushed through me.
Dandelions offered themselves up to Detroit children every spring. I waited for them to arrive and mourned their departure. A teacher, still new to the arts of subtlety, once told me, with a magnanimous sneer, that these wildflowers were actually weeds. "They're not beautiful, like real flowers," she said. "Throw them away." I found them at the foot of the chain link fence that encircled the school playground and gathered them into a bouquet, then stood looking up at her from what seemed like a mile below. It may have been the first time I knew that an adult was wrong.
They were real flowers. What I held then, and what was wind-blown and spread out before me now, were inflorescence at its most magnificent. Dandelions were the lords of evolution. As a child in the city, I gained a profound respect for anything that could dig its way out of cement and claw through brick and mortar. Dandelions could make their home anywhere. Perhaps that is why I thought they were beautiful -- a flower so self-sufficient that it could self-pollinate? It didn't need anyone but itself to survive. What an appealing concept to a teenager, to a connoisseur of urban decay. I picked one dandelion clock from the ocean of wildflowers. The globe of slender white seeds was already poised to fly apart. I blew softly and half the world soared. I blew harder, determined that every last seed should have its chance at immortality. The knowledge of dandelion wine and coffee and salad would come later and only serve to strengthen my admiration for the flower. At the time I had very few words for what I was feeling. Later I would appeal to my friend, David, the kind of adolescent boy who is really a Seraph, hovering above the open mouth of Abaddon. "Why does everyone hate dandelions?" I asked him. "I love dandelions; I think they're so pretty." He smiled. He began calling me Dandelion Girl. Neither of us realized how close to the truth he was. I've been blown from the clock and I'm still flying.
It was a plummeting sensation at the pit of my stomach; a giddy freefall down a hill; an inward pulling. That is what a takeoff felt like, every time I flew in an airplane. From that moment on, I was hooked. I flew when and wherever I could.
In August I flew to San Francisco to visit my father. As we were leaving Detroit, I looked down and, for the first time, really saw how green the city was. If you are looking at Detroit from the porthole of a plane, it seems circular. Some might think "Motor City" and attribute the layout to that of a tire. They wouldn't be wrong. Like spokes shooting out from the hub, the main thoroughfares of Jefferson, Michigan, Grand River, Woodward, and Gratiot Avenues rotate around the city like a flywheel. To me, the wide avenues resemble a whorl of sepals, the curving streets in the center, a hive of pollen. I think the city looks more like a flower. Or better yet, a dandelion clock, its arms ticking away the time like the Vitruvian man. Master Gardeners have counted over forty-thousand vacant lots in Detroit, roughly ten-thousand acres. Lands once occupied by houses, high-rises, apartment buildings, or businesses, are now grown over with vegetation. Ghostly, as if nothing had been there at all. Detroit is going rural. It's a hopeful sight, seeing a vacant lot dense with flowering weeds. It allows me to believe that nature will always have the capacity to undo what's been done, to start over.
My favorite book is one that my mother used to read to us as children. It is a story by Lucille Clifton called The Boy Who Didn't Believe In Spring. It's about a little boy named King Shabazz who grows up in the city. As a child I was only aware of a world where plants and animals were a regular staple because of the songs and games in kindergarten about farmers and their farms. There was Old MacDonald, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Duck Duck Goose, and The Farmer in the Dell, during which everyone wanted to be the cheese, because it stood alone in glorious isolation. But we were city kids -- what did we know about farming? To this day I'm not sure whether my teachers felt compelled to instill in us knowledge of the agricultural economy that this country was founded on or whether they simply never bothered to alter the antiquated themes, the way school calendars still follow a harvesting timetable. In Clifton's story, King Shabazz's world looks just like mine. And he is on a quest; searching for the same thing that I have always been searching for -- urban beauty. He and his friend Anthony Polito are told that crops come up in the springtime. They're skeptical, since "crops" are beyond their understanding. They happen upon a vacant lot packed with gravel and punching its way out of a grey tomb is a tiny cluster of yellow flowers with spiky green leaves. "Man, I think you tripped on these crops." King laughs. "They're coming up," Tony shouts. "Man, the crops are coming up!"
I've always imagined that the flowers King Shabazz and his pal, Tony Polito, found were none other than dandelions -- a child's chain grass, a lion's tooth, the urban rose. And by calling the flowers crops, they alluded not only to the Great Migration of African Americans from the farms of the south to the factories of the north, but to the history of immigrant farmers who brought their knowledge and crops, to the United States. As an urban child like King Shabazz, I always assumed that little yellow flowers with spiky green leaves were the closest I'd ever get to arcadia. I was wrong.
One could argue that the population of Detroit right now consists largely of an invasive species, not unlike American settlers before us, or the British before them, or the French before them. We are post-colonial, post WWI descendents of the migrant sharecroppers who traveled north to claim their right to an elusive American Dream. As if blown by the wind, war and the age of industry brought droves of dreamers to Detroit to fill the demand for workers. But who would have guessed that a city christened "The Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II would, in the span of a generation, become the Rust Belt capital of the country. Certainly corporate quislings and urban sprawlers played their part. Some even attribute Detroit's economic erosion to the human weeds now inhabiting the city, but undesirables like dandelions are underestimated. They spread their seeds beneath the soil as well above, growing sequoia-like root systems so intricately connected that it's nearly impossible to destroy them. A city that is half its former size could learn a lot from weeds. Those who remain in Detroit are folks who could not afford to leave, or whose taproots were too deeply embedded in the soil, or who understand, finally, that Detroit is the future of every American city -- so what's the point in running.
***
My plane touched down on the tarmac of Oakland International Airport. My father, gone gray with time, met me in the smoking section of the lobby. He had lived in California nearly all my life and we had communicated mostly by telephone and through letters, but he had recently been diagnosed with liver cancer and I had heard that liver cancer doesn't waste any time. So I decided to finally meet him in what was now his home. He lived on the Presidio, in a veteran's retirement community. The surroundings were magnificent. The palm trees were reflected off of the sparkling bay, the air was fresh and full of that sea smell. I set foot inside his apartment and immediately realized how desperately I wanted to leave. To run, screaming back down the pristine, palm tree-lined walkway and into a taxi, back to the airport. But I stayed, knowing that if I didn't confront what I came there to confront, then it would be waiting for me wherever I went.
He lived in a studio apartment. Just inside and to the right were a mirror and a sink; to the left, a mini fridge and a microwave. Through an archway just ahead was a bed, a desk, and a couch. As I stepped inside, I was suffocated by the smell of cigarette smoke. It was familiar, like the Old Miami Bar on Cass Ave or the Greyhound bus depot downtown, or the Alexandrine Motel, past Anthony Wayne Drive. I stayed there once, when I needed to get away. The sheets were stained and the carpets had burns in them. I pictured old men in sagging slacks and wife beaters, sitting at the edge of the bed, dragging on bummed cigarettes until lines of hot ash tumbled down between their feet. That smell always reminds me of sadness, of men whittled away into nothing; hollow, like muffled voices and creaking bones. In my father's apartment, I felt infected by that smell. As if, simply by association, my skin would go translucent and I'd begin to disappear.
"So I was kind of wandering around, staying with my friend Sonny. Sonny had a couple of extra bedrooms. No furniture in ‘em. Your mom and I hadn't gotten along. We loved each other but we couldn't live together. I was a wanderer. I guess that's how I've been most of my life. That's where you got it from. I was just everywhere," he said.
I asked him to tell me when it was that he decided to leave Detroit.
"I don't know. It was just one summer. I was restless. I couldn't do anything right. Everything I touched turned to shit. I just had a fear of imminent danger. And I knew I had to get out of there. I went and applied for welfare. I took my welfare check, got on a Greyhound bus and just took off. I went to Houston; from Houston to L.A.; and L.A. to Monterey. On welfare; pocket full of food stamps."
I asked for something positive about the city, anything. But he came from another era, another mindset, and his memories of Detroit had corroded. So he didn't believe me when I told him that the first farm I ever visited was on the corner of Poplar and Lawton, a few blocks from where the 1967 rebellion began. It was on Detroit's west side, not far from where he grew up. Two acres, the size of a regular middle school playground, holds beehives, an apple orchard, a duck pond, a field of alfalfa, two horses, and a barn built by girls. It's all managed by the students of Catherine Ferguson Academy, a public school for young mothers located just off of Interstate 96. "You're dreaming," he said.
I told him that I wasn't dreaming. That Detroit, because it has understood the inevitable failures of industry and capital long before anyone else, is trying to start over. Master Gardeners in Detroit, who have never forgotten their agricultural ancestry, their ties to the land and to one another, understand the value of weeds. Dandelions, besides being a remedy for liver problems, are rich in vitamins and minerals. Dandelions, as well as other species, break up hardpan, helping crops grow deeper root systems. Weeds are nutritional, medicinal, aesthetic. When word spread to Detroit gardeners about the mass deaths of pollinating bees, they wondered at the vibrant health of their own honeybee population. Some theories point to the lack of pesticides used in Detroit gardens, the practice of companion planting and crop rotation, and the use of beneficial weeds. Detroit's problems with education, unemployment, health care, and food production are only a microcosm of the problems facing the entire country. A people with fewer resources will become resourceful. And it is only a matter of time before Detroit teaches the masses that, like biodiversity, the elements of urban and rural must become interconnected. He said it again. "You're dreaming."
I had to get out of there for a while. My father's nurse, Cynthia, took me bird-watching, something I'd never done before. The closest I'd ever come to bird-watching was waiting at the bus stop while sparrows hopped around overflowing garbage cans in cheerful revelry to waste. But Cynthia, calling out the names of birds I'd never heard of, showed me a vibrant ecosystem camouflaged against an oblivious backdrop. Pointing to a Monterey Cypress resting on an island in the middle of a pond, she said, "I see five Black-crowned Herons in that tree. Can you see them?" It took me fifteen minutes to find them all, but I was determined. I wanted to see what I was missing. We saw a Great Egret tip-toeing through the shadows of overhanging branches, its long neck rippling forward and backward like gentle waves. We saw a flock of Brown Pelicans flying in formation inches above the bay, close enough to tap the water with the tips of their arching wings. I could understand the appeal of running away to a place like this, where it was easy to believe in spring, where all the problems without solutions were swept away, past Pacific Avenue and into other neighborhoods.
Cynthia left me to my own devices for a while and I walked a mile or two along the water, occasionally getting a whiff of something sweet. I discovered that it was a field of Silvery Lupine bushes; once thought to be stealing nutrients away from soil, they actually improve the soil for neighboring plants. I snapped off a few flowering sprigs. I put them in my hair, stuffed some in my pockets, and kept one in my hand, waving it in the air to smell that sweetness. I wanted to take the whole field home with me, to add that fragrant species to the list of other misunderstood species in Detroit. I took them back to my father's room and presented a sprig to him with a flourish and a smile. He put it aside without looking at it. He said that he had questions for me, too.
On the last day of my visit, my father asked me where I would like to live when I finished school, asking me without words if I would be willing to move to San Francisco, to be with him. I thought about what that would mean, being the caretaker of someone who never knew what it meant to take care of someone else. I thought about all the men who had been like fathers to me, brown-skinned, broad-shouldered, and playful, like bears. They lived and loved Detroit and wore the scars of that love on their dry and callused hands. I thought of the kids who I grew up with, bony and falsetto-voiced, who were now elegant men and regal women, and all the times we leaned shoulder to shoulder on railings, staring out at the calm surface of the Detroit River with its powerful undercurrents. They were Detroit dandelions and when I thought of them I felt grounded in the sovereign demesne that made me. Sitting there with my father, in his studio apartment, I did not feel grounded. I felt what I have often felt in my drearier moments of flight; aimless and alone, nearly nonexistent. Without meaning to hurt him, I said, "I'll go back to Detroit. I'll always want to go back to Detroit. I want to breathe my last breath in Detroit."
The wind blew me back into Detroit from the west. From the plane, I could see downtown flanked by two distinguishing landmarks. Belle Isle, shaped like a penguin floating on its back, and the River Rouge Plant. While Belle Isle is no longer the only place in the city where children can see crops coming up, it still serves as Detroit's very own Central Park. Canadian geese cross quiet roads with their chicks trailing behind them, weeping willows give shade to wobbling pheasants searching for scraps, and in the spring one can watch plates of thawing ice break off from the shore and float downstream, crashing into one another along the way. Further down the river I could see the River Rouge Auto Plant, billowing soot and spewing flames through smoke stacks from its boiling belly. I could have been staring at charred acres of the Amazon, the same temporary solutions coughing up the last of their determination. Detroit rested cozily between these two opposing forces. As my plane touched down on the tarmac, I could see other planes in the sky, their headlights gleaming like low-hanging stars. I wondered what the people sitting in the bellies of those giant birds saw as they flew over the clock, over the portentous ticking. Did they see only a post-industrial Babylon from the porthole of an airplane? Or did they see it for what it was, a flowering Mecca.