I play a game of "Guess what they make" when walking past a generic plant, which I’m usually pretty good at, but"Die-cutting solutions for the paper packaging industry, including corrugated cardboard" completely eluded me.
That’s what the Marbach plant I passed in Michigan City manufactures, among other things, which is a fancy way of saying they make tools that are then used to make packaging.
A few hours later I came to another long low-slung acre sized building that gave few hints of what it made, beyond the lack of windows, the vast parking lot with loading doors for semis, suggesting something industrial. Given I had spent a few days in Michigan City a month before, I suspected it probably wasn’t something obvious, high-tech, or romantic, but rather mundane, crucial, and necessary for our fast paced modern life.
So when I found they built “drainage solutions for the commercial building industry” I wasn’t surprised and the picture came together: Michigan City makes gritty essential industrial bits, the small connective parts, that keep our modern world humming. The things that someone has to make, when you bother to think about it, which almost nobody does.
This wasn’t the cinematic blue-collar town, from movies and novels, of foundries, mills, and mines, with hard hatted men shuffling from factories belching thick black smoke as sirens blast, done after a long day of building battleships or bombers, but instead a low-key hard working town, with tranquil, multi acre buildings that look more like community colleges than factories, where they manufacture non-woven fiber materials for filtration, rotary-screw air-compressors, industrial portable air-compressors, roofing shingles, hydronic heating systems, and commercial boilers, to name just a few things.
That fits with the rest of the town, which is so unassuming, modest, and reserved as to be inconspicuous to a fault. ‘You are going where? Michigan City? Which city in Michigan? Oh, Michigan City, as in that weird city in Indiana, not Michigan? The one between Chesterton and New Buffalo? That one? Why are you going there? It's got nothing but problems. First they have a nuclear power plant, and then all those guys on death row. You know it's where the state's max-security prison is. Why would you want to be there?’
I hadn’t exactly chosen Michigan City as it had chose me, or the bus system did, which dropped me off in it while I was playing a game of Greyhound roulette, where I’d planned to stay at most one day before continuing on to Chicago, but a heat wave coupled with fatigue kept me in town for four days, during which it grew and grew on me, so much so that I decided to return to it this time as a home base for walking to Chicago.
That walk hasn’t happened, thanks to another heat wave, but also to the realization that I didn't want to go to Chicago, because I was happy here, and it offered the perfect break from the madness that consumed social media after I arrived, with the news out of Utah.
I long ago learned to log off following breaking news, especially highly politicized and tragic news, where the discussion quickly devolves into an undignified spectacle that brings out my periodically cynical side. I am a believer in the inherent goodness and decency of people, and seeing death(s) used for politics tests that.
Michigan City offered the perfect antidote, because besides specializing in manufacturing the mundane, it also seems determined to win the paradoxical award for the most normal city in the US.
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