A Rough Road for the Guardian of Spirits

Sept. 20, 2006

Life hasn’t been easy for Sue Ellen Austin Gilmore.
Chronic illness, poverty, the dashing of a family business, and now there‘s literally a road of trouble looming on her horizon.
She and her husband John have been living on just $8,000 per year for the past three years while he struggled to finish nursing school.
Now, they face an assessment of up to $3,000 per year for a road project in Whitewater Township outside Williamsburg that would pave Deal Road where they live. Unless they catch a break from the Grand Traverse County Road Commission, they stand to lose their home of 27 years due to an assessment they’ll be unable to pay.
But that’s just the frosting on the cake for the Gilmores.
For 15 years they owned the Spring Hollow flower shop on Union Street in Traverse City until they were forced to close their business in 1996 to address Sue’s chronic kidney disease. It was the devastating end of a dream.
“I was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease at the age of 20,” says the soft-spoken but forthright Gilmore. “It’s a disease where your kidneys get really big; you get cysts on top of cysts on top of cysts. When I was 20, they removed over 200 cysts, some as much as two inches in diameter.”
Kidney disease runs in her family. Her father died of it at age 54; her nephew at age 46; her sister had two kidney transplants before dying at age 57.
Sue at 53, dresses in the aging hippie style and is adorned with the wire-wrapped jewelry she creates for extra income. She has a childlike quality, underscored by her habit of passing out colorful, hand-drawnmessages. But her arm is cruelly swollen from the kidney dialysis she endures three times a week to stay alive. A large scar of eight inches or so dissects her left side which is swollen by her troubled kidney.
Three times a week, two 12-gauge needles are placed in her arm to completely drain and cleanse her blood through dialysis. It’s a painful process -- she compares the needles to those of the little coffee-stirring straws you get at a fast-food restaurant. Imagine needles of that size, plunged into two vessels of your arm -- three times a week -- forever.
None of that, however, can suppress the warmth of her smile and a transcendent beauty. And despite her New-Agey way of speaking and a touch of naivete about taxes and public finance, a few words with Gilmore reveal that her passion for saving her home is matched by an articulate intelligence.
Some of that passion must come from sheer suffering and the will to survive.
“I had pancreatititis twice, which is an inflammation of the pancreas,” she says. “I was three months in Munson both times and got to know the nurses on the Southwest II unit very well.”
She says that during an operation, she lost most of the blood in her body, and that her heart stopped. “It was probably just a few minutes, but it felt like half a day,” she says of an out-of-body experience she had on the operating table. “I went to the other side to see the Great Spirit in the Garden.”
She also suffers from fibromyalgia which sends painful sensations radiating from her toes to her abdomen. “It’s so painful it makes me want to scream.”
And now, Sue and her husband John are caught up in a $2.5 million road paving project -- the biggest in the history of the county road commission.
Things are brightening for the Gilmores. John has earned his R.N. and has secured a job at Munson Medical Center. But Sue has been on disability for years, spending most of the $483 per month she receives on co-pays for doctor visits and approximately 10 prescriptions. She‘s pleased to be driving a $1,200 used van -- for years they had only one car. She makes a little money from her art and plant sales, but the looming road assessment casts a shadow over the Gilmores‘ lives.
I was skeptical that the Gilmores could possibly be assessed $3,000 per year for the next 10 years, but a report in the Record-Eagle confirms that the average property owner will pay $600 or more per year for a single-home lot. The Gilmores own more than 22 acres.
Gilmore doesn’t want to lose her property which abounds with wildlife, including bears and even once a cougar sighting. There are over 20 springs on the property and she considers herself the “Guardian of the Springs.”
A neighbor used his springs to create a lake as bait for the development of expensive homes. Yet as a grower of unusual plants who still has roots as a florist, Gilmore said that developing her property is not an option. “I don’t think that’s an ethical thing to do,” she says. “It’s a way to hurt Mother Earth.”
She appealed to the Michigan Tax Tribunal and to the Grand Traverse County Road Commission. Unfortunately, she didn’t spell out the nature or depth of her problems; the commission has asked her to send another letter citing any special considerations.
It’s all been too much to bear. “We’ve struggled for a lot of years and feel our civil liberties are being trampled on,” she says, her eyes brimming with tears. “When we had our flower shop we were in charge of the Old Town Bazaar for 10 years and we did a lot for this community. Now, I feel kind of abandoned in my time of need.”
Personally, I don’t know many homeowners who don’t pay an assessment of some sort; we have a street lighting assessment to pay in my own neighborhood. And it’s commendable that many of the Gilmores’ neighbors have willingly sought the assessments in order to pave their roads. They haven’t passed the buck; they‘re taking on the responsibility of improving their roads. That‘s how communities move forward.
But when you hear a story like that of Sue Ellen Austin Gilmore, you wonder, how much can one person take? Is it right that the collective good of the many should crush the dreams of the few? Is it right that she should lose her home or property?