Return to Arrowwood

It’s hard for me to grasp that I’ve now lived with my wife, Mary, at Arrowwood Hills Cooperative for five years. It’s been a circuitous and fortuitous journey.

When I was growing up in Oakland County in the 1960s, mentions of Ann Arbor conjured images of longhairs running through clouds of tear gas and fighting cops. It was just “common sense” that tolerance for social diversity did not include anti-war hippies. Not even the horrific killing of four students in a protest at Kent State got much sympathy from the adults of my dirt-roads-and-lunch-bucket Avon Township community.

We moved to Waterford, where I graduated from high school in 1977. At the time, you could get a low-skilled job on the way home from losing or quitting the last one.

I built boats at the Sea Ray plant in Oxford for a few months. I washed screws at a Ferndale factory until my buddy and I were fired for pretending we were robots. I got fashion tips while doing deliveries for a wholesale florist: “Lose the Farrah Fawcett hair, the wallet chain, and the flared jeans,” a shop owner advised me. I switched to a New Wave look, but it was another dead-end job.

In 1979, I learned that college students could get a federal Guaranteed Student Loan of $5,000 and wouldn’t have to start paying it back until a year after they left school. To a twenty-year-old, that sounded like free money.

“Go to NMU; they take anyone,” advised an uncle. “Big party school—you’ll have a blast.”

After a couple of years in Marquette I dropped out to become a full-time punk-rock nightcrawler. A few years later, I decided I’d had enough of the frosty winters. With the single purpose of rocking a band, I headed for Ann Arbor. I tapped Barry Schorfhaar and Matt Winkelpleck (RIP), who had moved south a year or so earlier. We became the Groove Biscuits.

We wanted to be cute and funny and do our own music from our own influences: Captain Beefheart, early Zappa, Butthole Surfers, mixed with a little XTC. We had props, which once included a hundred or so White Castle hamburgers and ears of corn tossed from the stage and smeared across the Blind Pig dance floor. 

Were we good players? Perhaps not. Did we entertain? Absolutely.

My life here included more bands and addresses than I had shirts. Sometimes it also included cocaine, and Arrowwood was one of the spots I got it.

The place to score was in one of the northernmost lots. I saw discarded appliances and furniture here and there, some units appeared unoccupied or run-down, and the monthly crime maps in the Observer showed a smattering of thefts or robberies. But it was hardly the death-defying experience suggested by the nickname “Little Lebanon” (a nod to Beirut’s turmoil at that time). I heard no gunshots, saw no cops.

Our supplier was a woman I’ll call Alice. A bit older than most of us but always up for a good time. More than once, we left her place to brightening skies and chirping birds.

Recognizing my mortality, I took the partying down a notch in 1987. The following year I met Mary while canvassing for Greenpeace.

By then, Ann Arbor was getting too small for me: my efforts to have a more “grown-up” personal life were overshadowed by my past. Mary and I were both happy to learn that the Seattle Greenpeace office was recruiting.

A coworker connected us with her mom, who would let us crash in her guest room until we found our own digs. With jobs waiting, we and our two cats set sail in Mary’s ’79 Ford Granada toward a new life.

We couldn’t have hoped for better timing. We were shocked to find a two-bedroom apartment for less than we’d paid for a room in a house on Ann St. Our modest canvasser salaries kept us financially afloat, and I could restart my music and stage ambitions in a “real” city.

I played in a few locally popular bands and performed and directed music for the 14/48 Festival. Mary got a series of solid editorial jobs at companies big and small.

But our sweet Pacific Northwest life was rocked by the Great Recession of 2008. Like millions of other Americans, we found ourselves underwater on our mortgage. We refinanced, but the sad truth was that nothing could ward off the skyrocketing cost of living.

By then, Seattle’s once-provincial charm had vanished. It happened gradually and then accelerated, as entire blocks of early-twentieth-century architecture were replaced with towering condos in an endless plaza-scape. Seattle had become L.A. Jr. There was perpetual turtle-parade traffic, and exiting a parking lot or getting coffee required thick skin and a lust for competition. Many of those who were pushed out of housing were now more desperate and aggressive, and more tents lined the sidewalks and highways each year.

Our wonderful friends and the endless choices for day hikes near stunning mountains and waterways kept us there for probably too many years. I tried switching gears for better income, completing my B.A. and adding a master’s, but the competition was brutal. Occasional administrative gigs with UW or community colleges left me just half in the game. Mary was well settled into freelance editing, but affordability from one-and-a-half income streams had vanished.

In 2017, we made the agonizing decision to sell our beloved Beulah the Big Yellow House just north of the city. In 2018, we moved to Marquette, where quite a few of my old NMU friends still live. We bought a tiny house right next door to where I’d once been a student renter.

It took just two years of brutal U.P. winters to make it clear that we just weren’t cut out for it. We had the snowblower, the roof shovels, and the Arctic Carhartt wraps, but we lacked the Yooper spirit. With aging family in the Detroit area, we started to look below the Bridge.

Related: Making Room for Everyone

So where to next? Grand Rapids had some affordable homes and the feel of our early Seattle days. We also looked at Ypsilanti, where in 2019 a three-bedroom home could still be had for around $125,000. Airing these thoughts on social media caught the eye of Oni Werth, a longtime friend and Arrowwood Hills resident who asked, “Why don’t you just buy my co-op?”

We’d written off Ann Arbor as out of reach. But Arrowwood? A cooperative? What did this mean? Seattle co-ops were mostly shared living spaces. Who would share our kitchen?

“You have your own kitchen,” replied Oni after a laugh emoji. “Your own everything.”

“But isn’t Arrowwood … kinda iffy?”

By then my brief nighttime experiences there were more than a generation old. The thought of landing in Ann Arbor in 2020, never mind Arrowwood, seemed like a weird fever dream.

But we were listening.

Oni sent me photos of the two-bedroom unit highlighting his years of updates and remodeling—and the shockingly attractive cost. Visiting some forty years later in the light of day, it was clear that Arrowwood had experienced renewal and a long-revived pride of ownership. The process was relatively seamless and in May 2020, we became Arrowwood Hills members.

Nowhere is perfect, but we like it here. Our front yard has perfume-sweet lilac trees and red tulips. There are cardinals, squirrels, and groundhogs. The little pond out back that Oni and Kim put in teems with frogs croaking at night. And this is just a small part of the landscape of a 350-unit community.

Lovely neighbors include Lucy, who has been at Arrowwood since it was established as Pontiac Heights in 1968. It’s quiet. Everything works.

From 2017 to 2020 we and three aging cats moved three times, once across the country. If I have my way, my next move will be out my Arrowwood front door in a black zippered bag.

While we were still in Seattle, some old Ann Arborites warned, “You won’t recognize the place. Traffic is murder. Parking, forget about it.”

Clearly, U-M has made some big moves on properties. But compared to Seattle, much of the early twentieth-century architecture I remember remains, and the infrastructure has kept pace with the population. Traffic woes are all about perspective. Mine is: go live in Seattle for a while and get back to me!

When I lived here in the eighties, to imagine the year 2000 was impossible, never mind 2025. And to one day return to a town I left in 1988 with my finger in the air? Unthinkable.

And as for one of my favorite features in the Observer, the monthly crime map? In our five years here, I’ve seen few, if any, squares or circles over Arrowwood.