The trip took nine hours, which was not a big deal. I have no problem with long drives, and my co-worker and I took the path of least resistance, sticking to the three-digit routes that often circumnavigate major urban areas, which on this trip meant Chicago. I also don't mind driving in heavy city traffic, but living in Wisconsin, I'm not used to tolls, and whenever I drive in Illinois, it's a reminder of how lucky I am not to have to deal with them on a daily basis. Although I was pleased to learn that you can now blow past most without stopping and pay later on-line if you wish. I cringe thinking of how miserable a Chicagoland commute must have been in the days when EVERY single vehicle had to queue its way up to a toll booth, one at a time. Every once in a while there is talk of starting a toll system on a few select Wisconsin roadways, and I no more want that than I want an end to daylight savings time.
But that's another post.
After getting through Chicago, and a short stint in Indiana (an area informally called "Michiana", whose largest city is, strangely enough, Michigan City, Indiana...), we swung around the lower end of Lake Michigan and entered the Wolverine State on I-94, hugging the shoreline north for about 30 miles before breaking east and making our way through a lovely area that left me regretting not being able to do things right - that is, stop and look around, talk to someone, take some pictures, breathe in the lake-fed air. This snow belt growing region is not unlike the snow belt growing region I grew up in (different lake, and notably grapes and cherries, rather than apples), but lamentably, it slid past unexplored. And I do mean lamentably. I've always thought of Michigan as a kind of enchanted land for its strong relationship to the bodies of water that surround it.
It seems whenever I have a good long drive ahead of me, there's some kind of itinerary forcing me to forge on like Clark Griswold dragging his family cross-country to Walley World, blowing past the splendor found in every little town along the way, just to make time. Man, I can't wait for 1/48/50, when, for a few glorious months, there will be nowhere I have to be except where I am.
I mean, come on, I had to drive past a town called Paw Paw without stopping to check it out. That really hurt.
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NEVER ENOUGH TIME - At 9 hours/600 miles, my recent drive to Detroit, Michigan took me through the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, and left me wishing I could spend more time in a state that has always seemed to me like an enchanted land, for its relationship to the three major bodies of water that surround it.
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My association with Detroit actually goes back to my youth, growing up in northern Wisconsin (on the leeward side of the greatest of Great Lakes, Superior), and watching a lot of television. WKBD-Detroit was a "super station" on our cable system, along with WGN-Chicago and WTBS-Atlanta.
Outside of WTBS (which aired Braves games all summer long back then), WKBD was the station I watched most often. It aired all the right cartoons and sit-coms at just the right times, either right after school, or more or less all day long on the weekends and in the summer. I watched so routinely, its daily broadcast became as familiar to me as our local network stations, which broadcast out of Duluth, Minnesota, barely an hour away. Thanks to the miracle of basic cable, I remember things about Detroit I have no geographically legitimate reason to remember: Bill Kennedy hosting classic movie night, Amyre Makupson anchoring the news, The Three Stooges on Comedy Classics (which got a mention in the largely forgotten novelty song, "The Curly Shuffle" by the Jump 'n the Saddle Band). More significantly, I remember certain advertisers in heavy flight on "TV 50" back in the day, businesses only Detroiters would have any reason to recall: King's Island (the Cincinnati amusement park), Boblo Island (an amusement park somewhere in Detroit), Fretter Appliance ("You're entering the Fretter Zone...!"), Highland Appliance, Kaufman Furniture, and most vividly the Ontario Division of Tourism "Yours to Discover!" campaign that aired every summer in the States. Like all advertising, these spots played over and over, day and night (repetition was the key then, and remains so today), and so colored my young life, even though it was all happening 10 or more hours away from where I was, in another state.
This was in the early 1980s, roughly 1981 to 1986. Before '81, I was too young to really be paying attention to what I was watching, and after '86, I was not watching nearly as much. Detroit was just a distant city. I had no idea (and it certainly wasn't WKBD's job to make this known) that even then, it was in its economic death throes: job layoffs, plant closings, population loss, the implosion of the industry that made the Motor City, would plague it for the next two decades, contributing to a severe (and worsening) urban decay that really had to be seen to be believed, leading to nicknames like the "arson capital of the world" (I DO vaguely remember this being talked about on the WKBD 10 o'clock news once actually, long ago...), until by 2006, The Onion's headline, "Detroit Sold For Scrap", was too close to being true to be funny. Further distressed by political scandal, Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013, the largest American community ever to do so.
Detroit wasn't the only community to struggle. Its decline was part of a larger economic collapse in the latter half of the 20th century that created what's known as the rust belt. Sprinkled throughout the Great Lakes region are the remnants of past industrial glory, numerous towns and cities who overnight found themselves contributing mightily to the nation at large in some way, and then, seemingly the very next night, had nothing (left) to contribute. Truth be told, the outer reaches of this rust belt include my small hometown as well...so I guess it could be said I had a direct connection with Detroit growing up.
But my town was too small to completely fail the way Detroit did.
In the interest of "having to be seen to be believed", one YouTube user has done an impressive (as in impactful) job of illustrating the extent of Detroit's plight, and resulting blight. With a camera and microphone mounted on the dashboard of his vehicle, he methodically drives up and down the streets of rough Detroit neighborhoods, capturing street scenes as they are happening and painting a stark and haunting portrait of a city in utter distress. He rarely says anything, meaning he doesn't distract by commenting, just lets the video do the talking, and so the viewer comes to understand - with nothing lost in translation - what has gone on there, and is still going on.
It's completely shocking, as well as compelling, to watch, and rendered more potent (in my opinion) for his lack of commentary. But every American should watch. Every American should be aware that this is going on...not just in Detroit, but other cities, in and out of the "rust belt". The individual's YouTube username is CharlieBo313; over the last couple years, he has shot similar video in other cities as well. I don't claim to know why he does it, nor do I pretend to have a connection to him in any way. I don't. I simply like the way he goes about it. I believe that, for better or worse, he's created some "historic archive"-caliber scenes.
While I was there, I stayed in a resort casino that is close to some of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods, and while it was a nice stay, the feeling I had for the duration was similar to what I experienced on the Vegas strip a few years back: there's something unnatural and weird about being cradled in the arms of so much opulence, so much contrived glitz and glitter, when there is equal or greater amounts of deprivation and struggle under my feet (in this case literally...). From my hotel window, I could see some of the city's worst neighborhoods in the distance, rows of homes lining streets, every few either boarded up or burnt out, and at night, large swatches of pitch black gouged out of the glitter of urban sprawl that otherwise stretched to the horizon - areas where I knew there were homes with people living in them, just apparently no working streetlights.
Bear in mind as you watch the video above: this is not some abandoned town in the middle of nowhere that hasn't had more than 25 residents since 1971...these are active streets, where people still live, in a city of nearly 700,000, a metro area of 4.3 million.
But all is not lost. The city came out of bankruptcy in 2014, fairly quickly, and its current mayor, Mike Duggan, laid out some specific plans for turning things around in his State of the City address this week: tearing down abandoned buildings, finding new use for vacant lots, linking job training directly TO available jobs, a program called "Detroit at Work". It was the type of stuff that sounds good in a political speech; hopefully it spurs real action, not just more talk.
There's also a restoration/renovation movement going on downtown, thankfully, as there is some gorgeous art deco architecture trimming the Motor City skyline that city leaders are working hard to preserve. These kinds of buildings stand as vestiges of not just Detroit's past, but our country's past - a time, now given to the ages (talk about lamentably...), when a certain aesthetic mattered even in something so basic as brick and mortar, when all those uniquely shaped windows and sweet, supple lines said something about not just the people building the structure or the people who would inhabit it, but everyone in that community.
Nowadays of course, it's all just featureless fiberglass forming shapeless right angles...
As we walked to lunch through these ornately detailed concrete canyons (in beautiful 60 degree weather), I was sheepish about snapping too many pictures. I didn't want to look like an annoying tourist tripping over the curb in his feverish attempt to capture it all. But by the time we walked back from lunch, I had decided there was too much to see not to try to capture some of it, at least.
Of course, that was the very moment when my phone died on me.
I did manage to snap two illustrative shots, however. The first is of the Broderick Tower, built of limestone in 1928, its neo-Classical design caught my eye almost immediately, before I was even aware of other buildings downtown.
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AIN'T SHE PURDY...? - Even from a distance, the aesthetic value of the 369-foot Broderick Tower's architecture is apparent, and striking. Built in 1928, it's one of several impressive skyscrapers in downtown Detroit having been (or currently being) preserved.
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The other picture I snapped was at the famous Lafayette Coney Island, where we went for lunch. The location, along with its long-time next door rival American Coney Island, has been featured on shows like The Travel Channel's Food Wars and Man V. Food, and while I can't say this kind of urban setting - sitting on uncomfortable 50s-era vinyl stools in a cramped space with harsh lighting and even harsher acoustics - is my ideal place for lunch, I can say the dogs (chili and mustard, no onions...please and thank you...;-) were fantastic. I also had a Vernor's ginger ale - a Detroit/State of Michigan institution for over 150 years now - for the first time since I was a kid. It's weird how some tastes take you back to old times as reliably and strongly as some songs do. For instance, Sunkist orange soda to this day tastes like 1979 to me, to being seven years old and drinking it out of a glass bottle...and Vernor's, well, that taste hasn't changed either...and will always remind me of vacationing with my parents - strolling down a Michigan beach with my can of Vernor's and my fish belly both glinting brightly in the summer sun, blinding the other tourists.
While I was waiting for my food, something caught my eye on the cash register directly across from where I was seated, prompting me to do something I don't normally do: take a photo in a public place. I'm glad I indulged the impulse this one time. Of the two pictures I managed to take before my janky phone decided it had had enough, this is the one, the image, I've taken with me. I think the (top) sticker pretty much says everything that needs to be said about the Motor City. It's both an acknowledgement of the past (good, bad and ugly), and a rallying cry for the future.
And a life lesson for us all.
