mark_asphodel | That Hole of a Port Huron

Port Huron is the perfect place to spend a day that claims to be April but feels more like November, what with the gray skies, barren trees, and stiff winds blowing swirls of dead leaves down the street. The hotel I'm staying at is the revived corpse of the once-hallowed Thomas Edison Inn, now with 100% less nostalgia for Port Huron's most famous son. Down the road a ways is the more glorious shell of the Marysville Power Plant, and an excursion there was the highlight of my trip yesterday. I stood on the highway in front of a skate park taking pictures of the massive building with its crown of slender smokestacks, and three young boys in the skate park behind me started talking to me through the fence about the plant and how they loved it and how much it meant to their town. I had to break the news to them that it could never, ever start making power again, as they believed the old story it was still on "standby," ready for some emergency. I explained to the boys that I'd been there when it was cut off the grid and that even if its silent turbines started spinning again, the power had no place to go. I showed them pictures of my trip through the plant back in '08, and then the eldest boy mentioned that if the plant really had to come down, could the people of Marysville at least get to have the bricks? He said when the old high school was torn down, people had the chance to obtain bricks. Well, I told the boy that I really did know a guy who knows a guy and that I'd see what I could do for him. So I went back to the hotel and told my guy who knows the other guy, and we'll see...