Walking Michigan City (Indiana)

Someone has to do it: A town that makes things everyone needs, but few romanticize

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 industry¹” 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.²

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.

That normalcy isn’t just about what it makes, but how it feels, looks, and behaves, which is about as generic a Midwestern city as possible, complete with surrounding corn fields, high school football games, Mexican restaurants with religious icons, and lots and lots of serene neighborhoods of simple homes with well kept lawns.

I say all of that without the least bit of ironic “slumming it”, but with a genuine admiration and affection. The uber-normality of Michigan City has been especially appreciated this week, when keeping a balanced perspective has been harder. A kind of log off and Touch Grass thing, or more precisely, a log off and a Touch Bespoke Die Tools for Corrugated Cardboard thing.

This week I've only checked the internet in the early morning and then again before going to bed, and the contrast between what I see online and what I see and hear walking around Michigan City couldn't be more pronounced. Nobody, and I mean that literally as in not a single person, has spoken to me about what everyone online is fighting and talking about.

What I've heard from people, and I've spoken to a lot of people, has been about the drama of everyday life, which is what most “normal” people focus on the majority of the time.

Stories like the recent widow whose husband used to mow everyone on the block's lawn who can't do it themselves, because of age or infirmity, so now that is how she spends her free day, the one day a week she isn't working at the plant or caring for her grandkids, pushing the lawn mower, which does tear her up now and then because it smells of her husband, can you believe that, a mower smelling of a man dead for over a year, but it does, and if you had only met him you would know why that brings me to tears, because they don't make men like that anymore, a man who didn't have a bad word to say about anyone and only cared about helping and that is who God struck down at sixty-five, which doesn't seem fair, but he lived a good life and I only wish he would have had a few more years to go to his favorite granddaughter's wedding, which is next weekend, down at the casino. Have you been? You should go if you haven't.

Or the forty-year-old man who moved back from Atlanta to care for his mother, who has dementia, because none of the other kids could, one being in the military overseas and the other, well she married up and now she thinks she is too good for us, although she offered to help put her in a home, but us other two don't have that sort of money, and it isn't the right thing to do anyways, so I came back here and it isn't that bad, although I'm not looking forward to snow again, or running with my old crew, half who are drunks, the other half married, but it's not that bad and you do what you have to do, so now I spend my days chasing after my mother when she goes missing and my nights here working the late shift.

Or the fifty five year old woman who works morning shifts at the Casino, who moved here thirty five years ago after visiting a cousin and fell in love with it because she was from Brooklyn and people here are so much nicer and she wanted that and now she is the highest paid non dealer at the Casino and her daughter is the highest paid real estate agent in all of Indiana, and yes you hear that right, all of the state, and don’t mind the Prison or power plant, people want to move here because people here are so nice, aren’t they?

Or the guy who started the Paper Football League, which playing in, overseeing, and maintaining is his passion, not his job, which is fine because that job, don’t bother asking it’s not something you ever heard of, pays the bills, but being with his friends hunched over a table flicking paper footballs, yes just like we did in fourth grade, is really where it is at.

Or the three friends at the McDonald's who beamed with pride when I explained I was not only writing about Michigan City, but doing so because of how much I liked it. They explained that if I thought it made a lot of stuff now, I should have come here in the '70s, when you could walk from one factory to the next if you ever lost your job, and so there was always work, good, decent work that paid the bills, although it's not that bad now, no, there are jobs, but not like in the old days, and anyways, people were nicer then. Sure they are nice now, but not like they were then.

They all mentioned Jaymar-Ruby and their Sansabelt pants, whose ads used to grace the Johnny Carson show, and the Federal Mogul Corporation that shut down the windshield wiper factory, moving it to Mexico. Two of the three had also worked in the prison, which both liked because it paid so well. None talked about politics, beyond a few allusions to the problems in Chicago, since all three's parents had moved here for jobs, and less crime, in the '60s and '50s.

Politics are certainly here, as they are everywhere, but they are simmering under the surface, and barely visible, rather than being the thing that drives everyone’s every thought. In all my walks I've seen only a single political yard sign or banner, and it was for a local city council election. What I have seen is more American flags than I've ever seen before, with a density approaching one flag per person.

My fondness for Michigan City is also nostalgic, because it reminds me of the time and town I grew up in³. It has the same "we are all in this together" atmosphere, without the immense contrasts you find more and more. There are certainly variations, with poorer and richer neighborhoods, but none are that different from the other. Especially the wealthy neighborhoods, which while certainly nice, are still modest, hardly the out-of-touch fancy gated (figuratively or literally) estates that have sprung up over the last thirty years, making American cities, especially those close to the coasts, even less communal and more unequal⁴.

Michigan City isn't perfect, no place is, and the stigma attached to it primarily comes from the power plant (coal, not nuclear) and the prison, which is maximum security and where Indiana's death row inmates are housed. It really is the place they put everything most communities don't want.

The power plant is constantly visible, its cooling tower always off in the background, apparently menacing to most people, although the engineering and photo geek in me absolutely loves it, and I was especially tickled to realize you can hear it as you get closer to it, a low, rumbling, watery hissing that to me sounds like a giant mechanical snake.

The prison is more complicated, but equally photogenic, although I don't have any photos of it for obvious reasons⁵. A heavy, imposing building, with an austere design, that according to internet represents "Typical American penitentiary architecture from the Civil War era," its vastness, over thirty acres, comes out of nowhere, exuding a serious authority coupled with a tinge of the menacing. The menacing part dominates as you walk on the road to its south, where you have a perfect bird's-eye view into the recreation yard, where a scene straight out of the movies (heavily muscled and tattooed shirtless men milling about, lifting weights, walking in circles, smoking, whispering furtively in each other's ears), plays out below for everyone to watch.

I can appreciate why someone doesn't want to live next to a prison, although it's not necessarily rational, given safety issues are the opposite of what people might think. It is much more a “I’d rather not see that or be around that” issue, as well as a class issue, because working in prisons is one of those well-paying, non-college jobs that is associated with the "wrong type" of person, the louche, vulgar, and rough types.

The prison, like the power plant, like the drainage equipment factories, all fit with the rest of Michigan City, a city of those thankless things that someone, somewhere, has to take care of.

I’m typing this on the train, the South Shore Line⁶, into Chicago, on my way to the airport, after a full week in Michigan City, and I would happily return. It isn’t unique, there are thousands of Michigan Cities scattered across the US, each an illustration of how much stuff is still made in the US, things necessary to keeping it going, that you never think about, including making bespoke tools for then making cardboard packaging.

More importantly they are also reminders (certainly to me this week) that whatever happens online and in politics can be muted, at least temporarily. That doesn't mean those battles over politics don’t matter or don’t ultimately impact life in a place like Michigan City, because they do, eventually, in very fundamental ways. Rather getting our politics right is essential because of that profound impact, and getting that correct requires a healthy, balanced perspective about what we are fighting over, which isn’t only about scoring temporary points against (insert your online nemesis here), but building a healthy society, and a week walking in a place like Michigan City is the perfect way to get that human centered perspective.

A healthy society is where communities such as Michigan Cities exist in droves, where "normal people" can still live fulfilling, rewarding, and tranquil lives, without constantly having to be on guard, and where they can tune out the online noise, to focus on the business of living, which is already hard enough, without another layer of nastiness weighing on it.

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I will be home for remainder of month, going to various doctors (normal upkeep), before leaving on October 1st, for Seoul, then Kunming, then Yangon, and then Taitung (Taiwan).

1. From their website: “Josam offers drainage solutions for the commercial building industry. Products include Specification Plumbing Drainage Products, Stainless Steel Drainage Products, PRO-PLUS® Trench Drains, and Stainless Steel Push-Fit Pipe and Fittings.”

2. Here is a list I pulled together of some of the manufacturing in Michigan City:

• Hitachi Global Air Power/Sullair - Manufactures industrial compressed air systems, portable air compressors, and air treatment equipment.

• Hearthside Food Solutions - Contract manufacturer producing packaged foods and snacks for major brand names.

• Josam Company - Manufactures high-quality plumbing and drainage products including floor drains, roof drains, and stainless steel piping systems.

• Marbach America - Manufactures die-cutting tools and equipment for the paper packaging industry including corrugated cardboard processing.

• Dwyer Instruments - Manufactures precision instruments and control equipment for pressure, temperature, flow, and air quality measurement.

• Filter Specialists Inc. - Manufactures liquid filtration products including filter vessels, filter bags, and cartridges for industrial applications.

• Weil-McLain - Manufactures hydronic heating systems and commercial boilers.

• Hitachi Global Air Power US, LLC — Manufactures industrial and portable air compressors.

• Vanair Manufacturing, Inc. — Builds mobile power equipment like vehicle-mounted compressors, generators, and welders.

• Josam Company — Produces plumbing and drainage products for commercial and industrial systems.

• Sullivan-Palatek, Inc. — Makes rotary screw air compressors and related equipment.

• Dekker Vacuum Technologies, Inc. — Manufactures vacuum systems and technology equipment.

• Michigan City Paper Box Company — Produces paper boxes and custom packaging.

• Fiber Bond Operating LLC — Makes nonwoven fiber materials for filtration and insulation.

• Canvas MW, LLC — Manufactures industrial textile and canvas-based products.

• Vacuum Technique LLC — Produces vacuum equipment and components.

• Sanlo, Inc. — Manufactures custom wire rope assemblies and cable products.

• Frech USA, Inc. — Builds and services die casting machinery.

• GAF Materials Corporation — Produces roofing shingles and related materials.

• Marbach America, Inc. — Makes tooling for packaging, including folding box and thermoforming tools.

• Shell Catalysts & Technologies, LP — Develops refining and petrochemical catalysts and technologies.

• Sandin Manufacturing — Specializes in wire ropes, cable assemblies, and related hardware.

3. 1970s Dade City, Florida.

4. My home town also was based around manufacturing, but in my case it was orange juice concentrate, which while pretty obscure, is relatable. Everyone gets orange juice, and thinks it’s cool, but drainage solutions for warehouses.

5. Once you have had a camera impounded by police, if only for a day, you tend to shy away from it happening again.

6. A fast, efficient, and civilized commuter rail. It, like much of Michigan City, feels anachronistic, from a gentler (perhaps imagined) time.