I’ve been to over half the American states, but it wasn’t until Detroit when I finally understood America. It’s industriousness. I was driving leisurely along the I-94 in a construction zone when I was passed by two trucks each carrying three columns of ladder frame chassis piled on top of each other. I teared up.
I was on my way to the Ford Rouge Factory for a tour of where they make road machines and imagined that the chassis I saw were headed for the factory. Not long after, I passed an articulated truck carrying about a dozen brand new Ford F-150 pickup trucks. I imagined that these began as skeletons and came out as complete cars.
Factories are not palaces to wealth, royalty, or class, they are bastions of productivity, industry, and ingenuity. While the castles in Europe are a reminder of its feudal past, factories are the palaces of body and mind. The average man that contributes his small part to American export, the business baron that arranges every small part to come together as a manufacturing line, the diplomat that negotiates a trade deal, and the consumer that votes with his dollars. America is more collectivist than it knows and more socialist than it would like to be.
Still, I saw many run down parts of Detroit. Abandoned factories with broken windows, half torn-down brick homes with exposed bedrooms, and the pothole-ridden roads that criss cross these bad parts of town. What it means is that Americans are keen to move on, to leave behind the old and inefficient and welcome the new and improved. Just a short drive from the dilapidated neighborhoods via gargantuan freeway flyovers is the vibrant, shiny downtown as seen from Windsor, Ontario.
I’ve waited a whole year to come to Detroit. I first laid eyes on its skyline while the border was still closed, dreaming of seeing cars old and new. There’s the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant where the Model T was first produced, a special exhibition on automotive design in the Detroit Institute of Arts, but no visit would be complete without a history lesson from the Detroit Historical Museum.
