Detroit

I just drove out to Detroit from the east coast with my daughter, who started working for General Motors this week after graduating from Harvard Business School. (I try not to brag too much but I hope you’ll permit me that one mention.) I grew up in the Midwest and have been to Detroit many times over the years, mostly to visit the car companies or the Auto Show.

I like the town – always have. I like their sports teams, I like that there is a Coney Island hot dog joint on practically every block, I like that you can go under a tunnel into Canada and see the Windsor Ballet, a staple of Detroit media T&E for decades. I love Motown. I love how it’s a Spartie town – not a Michigan town.

But I saw it with new eyes this trip. You think about things differently when you are dropping your kid off to live in a new place. It was neither worse nor better than I remembered it, but I saw things I never saw, or never really noticed before, and they are things I think every American would benefit from seeing.

I am moved to write about this but I was only there for 24 hours (although little of that time was spent sleeping.) And I don’t have any illusions that I can offer a Brooksian insight that finds the nexus of the cultural, historical, economic and political stuff of the place and make you say “Wow!”

What I did see was how easy it is for the collapse of one industry to bring down an entire community in barely half a human lifetime; a community that was, as recently as 1970, the fifth largest in the U.S. I saw what faded prosperity looks like in the residential neighborhoods just off Woodward Avenue that are filled with spectacular mansions, alternating with boarded-up hulks.

There was so much prosperity in Detroit at one time, and like in Rome or Egypt, the signs of it are still there in the old churches, mostly abandoned and succumbing to gravity, or in other old buildings that were once grand and important, but are now forced to suffer the indignity of housing bail bondsmen, dollar stores, and under-funded municipal agencies.

Everyone should see Detroit because we take our prosperity for granted, or we assume if things don’t go so well there will be a gradual, gentile decline that we won’t even notice in our day-to-day lives. But that isn’t what happened to Detroit, and you need to see it to understand.

In the end though, it wasn’t as bleak as you might imagine. Rebirth fights through the cracks in the cement of decay everywhere you look. Many old buildings have been saved and retain their grandeur. Bold new projects dot the city. The Detroit suburbs are still as nice as any in the country, and regular people can afford to live in them.

Detroit will survive – smaller, but smarter and scrappier than before. The hubris that came with being the Kings of the automotive world is long gone, replaced with the certainty that nothing will be given to them. They will have to make it happen, and I believe they will. You should see it; both for the warning and for the hope it offers.

Buggin’

There was a stiff breeze blowing as I stepped out of the cottage Sunday afternoon on my way to the beer cooler. I’d gone barely a few steps when something small and hard slammed into the side of my head. Not the side exactly. My ear actually. And not the top of my ear, or my ear lobe, or on one of the hard ridges that lie between them either. In what must have been a navigational million to one shot, this something plunged deep into my inner ear.

My amygdala took over and twisted my head up and to the left -- my eyes turned skyward as my fingers clawed into my ear. Something seemed to fall from the far edge of my peripheral vision but I couldn’t be sure what it was. I stood and wondered: What had hit me and where was it now?

I lay down on the couch and kept very still trying to recreate from memory what had just happened. I was alone. Only the laughter of little children splashing in the nearby lake disturbed the quietude. Then I heard something: a soft rustling sound at first, it amplified steadily to a scratchy clawing until it sounded like the movie soundtrack to a cheesy horror flick -- and it was inside my head.

And then it moved. I jumped off the couch and begin pounding the left side of my head in the foolish hope it would pop the tormentor out of my right ear. It stopped moving. I lay back down, outwardly calm but inside my head Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials played “Compact Man,” raw and hyped-up, manufacturing adrenalin and preparing me to jump again. I remembered the “Twilight Zone” episode in which the earwig crawls into a man’s ear and eats it way to his brain. At least my new friend was still a couple inches from gray matter and trying to exit, not enter.

What could I do? Who could help? It was a Sunday. I was alone, and in the back woods ten miles from a small town hospital. The emergency room seemed like the only option, but I knew I’d be in line behind ten guys who’d cut off limbs with chain saws or OD’d on homemade meth. I opted for self treatment.

The next six hours were characterized by periods of relative calm alternating with full out panicked frenzies every time my new friend begin to back his way out of my ear canal. I don’t know how to describe the emotions triggered by knowing something is trying to crawl out of your body, but I can tell you that it concentrated my mind wonderfully, and brought to full bloom what little “man-as-tool-maker” DNA I possess.

The cottage is filled with the remnants of 50 years worth of kitchen and household implements and I adapted a number of them into the cause of locating and extracting the varmint. Many of these tools were sharper than my elbow and would not have received approval for my uses from even the Bush era FDA. You don’t want to know more I promise you. I also flushed my ear with some peroxide solution which I believe eventually drown the visitor. Finally, the beast stopped moving.

Several more hours passed in which I employed more tools and flushes, and finally around eight that evening the bugger emerged, dead but intact, stuck to the end of a Q-Tip that he matched in size. He was perfectly preserved in a waxy glaze that accentuated his prehistoric black and iridescent green exoskeleton. His big, dead, bug eyes focused everywhere and nowhere at once.

I don’t go in for blood sports, but no fisherman ever felt more pride in his catch than I in mine; no hunter every bagged a more satisfying buck. My prize was too small to stuff but I’m keeping him in a plastic sandwich bag -- forever -- unless the dreams don’t stop soon.