Cable Cars, Lake Shore Drive, and a Banker Moved to Tears

Sinatra was wrong.  Isolated in full view of thousands of neighbors, this image from my first home town blew me away, like the snow off Lake Michigan.  “I started to worry I might run out of gas and be frozen,” Ms. Theroux, 23, recalled on Wednesday in a tired, strained voice. “I’m from a small town in Minnesota, where if you get stranded, you’re basically all alone. But here I was, right here, and I felt the same way — completely isolated.”  The quote saddened me.  Chicago was not, for these unfortunates stranded in a blizzard on Lake Shore Drive, “one town that won’t let you down.” 

Meanwhile, in our little wind-blown latest home town in northern Michigan, 300 of us drive through that same storm to a warm and welcoming place to hear a report on “Poverty to Progress”  after the first few years of our Poverty Reduction Initiative.  The program began with a video of a local banker who gives us a teaser, describing how he received a call asking him to help another bank’s customer.  The PRI "Navigator" wanted to help a neighbor not lose their home, and they needed him to call his competition to encourage him to use an available federal program.  But he didn’t tell us how the story ended.  He told us that we’d see as the morning progressed.  He was right.

We heard from the champions of the program, the founders of PRI.  They showed us slides that described the mission, the strategy, the progress.  Then they introduced us to neighbors who had been served by “Navigators”, those who were not threatened by poverty who had the time and means to help neighbors connect with available resources. 

We heard Carron tell us how she had grown up so poor that as a small child she would fall asleep with a bit of food in her cheek so that she would have something for the next day…and we wept with her.  We heard Mike tell us how he had for years “used substances to
erase my day” until people in PRI helped him believe in himself…and we wept with him.  We spent some time brainstorming at our table, how we who are not threatened by poverty might help others like Carron and Mike.

And then Sid VanSlyke, the banker from the video that started the program was at the podium.  He began to tell us the way the story ended, the way he had “just made three or four calls to the other banker, thinking nothing would come of it.”  Unlike Carron and Mike, Sid’s story was not one of being helped out of a bad situation.  But as he shared the story of saving that neighbor’s mortgage, he began to weep the same tears, and we wept with him.  “These faces keep coming into my mind when I tell this story”, he said, apologizing for losing his composure. 

In San Francisco, the cable cars are able to travel up and down steep streets, not because they have huge motors or enormous brakes.  They can do it because the ones needing to climb up are connected by those cables to those going down.  Those rising are helped by slowing the descent of those on the other side of the hill – or on the other side of the distribution curve.

I went to the Chicago Tribune website  and watched a news report of cars being towed out of snowdrifts near the Wisconsin border.  “If you look closely,” the reporter said, “you can see faces in these cars, being freed from the snow after ten hours.”  

In Guns, Germs, and Steel,  Jared Diamond helps us see the factors that led to dense populations, from band to tribe to chiefdom to town.  And he helped us reflect on the loss of connection, in which there is no motor strong enough to carry one person up the hill, nor any brakes strong enough to keep another from careening down the other side.

At the PRI “Poverty to Progress” program here in Traverse City, we saw that what humanized the little girl with the food in her cheek and the young man erasing his days with substances was the same thing that helped Sid discover Banking as a profession worth serving.  It is connection; it is relationship.  Relationship is the way out of the shadows at either end of the distribution curve, rich and poor, comfort and survival.