reach for the sun

Finally some goddamn sunshine.

Currently my office presents a beautiful 20th-floor vista of northeast Detroit.  Mostly the beauty comes from the sheer fact of the height; the landscape itself looks, to a girl born and raised in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, as flat and dull as the broad expanse of Ohio, with art deco skyscrapers, sprawling factories, belching smokestacks, and fields of concrete substituting for farmland.

From up here you can't tell that the city died forty years ago.  You can't tell that most of the neighborhoods visible from my window give off no light at night, that much of the once-packed residential land no longer has any neighborhood at all.  You can't see the burned out houses studding the blocks like rotten teeth, the production plants squatting hollow and cold amidst the derelict houses where the workers once lived.  You can't identify the places where the wilderness vines and creeps back over the concrete and the empty foundations, where the remnants of human habitation haunt the expanding forest.

From up here, in the shallow brightness of a winter sun, the city looks as it must always have done: sprawling, energetic, established. 

The long arm of history has not bent toward justice here.

The pioneer in me wants to help resettle this place, take the wreckage of industry and the fields and trees springing up in their ashes and turn them into something new - a strange frontier of a land wrested from the wilderness and forced into production, then abandoned back to nature.  A place where you can find the country in the middle of the city, and see the stars at night.

This romanticization overlooks, in typical white middle-class carpetbagger fashion, the many complex layers of race and class and cultural heritage that underlie all that makes up Detroit.  I can only be peripheral here, and try not to steamroll the intricate realities with my hipster starry-eyed visions of reclamation.  I am an invasive species, here.

I do confess though, that the concept of a bonfire in an urban backyard has appeal.  Living at the intersection of many different worlds.  Being a small, quiet, simple part of a much bigger ecosystem. 

With every day that passes I become increasingly excited for a new form of a self-determined life, one that I haven't dared to live yet.  The reality is still percolating, still dreamlike.  But when I consider that my next phase is arriving THIS SUMMER, I feel a warm glow to match even today's unseasonal sunshine rendering this apocalyptic city in a clear, unflinching light.