Reading Neruda en route to Detroit

It’s cold and blustery, but thankfully not snowing, and we are zipping past the steaming steel mills of Gary, Indiana on route to Detroit—and ultimately, tonight, to Niagara Falls. The madness of steam and wires, tracks and trucks that envelopes the south end of Lake Michigan, is somehow very cheery: we’re still manufacturing steel here! This place is still a working, industrial zone! The mess of a Calumet River slides beneath us, turgid with the greasy output of this manufacturing, and still I cheer it on. A recession is coming, the radio has been warning as we struggle east and homeward, and as the gas burns beneath our tires we feel the weight of this pronouncement begin to bear down on us. Thus the steaming factories and mills of Gary are a cheerful sight . . .

Reading Neruda on route to Detroit—thanks to the sweet roadtrip-gift of his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair from our friend Jennifer—is amusing in its ironies. “Let your deep eyes close,” Judith reads as I struggle to stay awake, mile after monotonous mile of American fast food culture blurring by us. “There the night flutters./Ah your body, a frightened statue, naked.” Michigan appears to have a greater saturation of Adult Video / XXX Superstores / Exotic (insert Asian-sounding name here) Health-Massage Clubs than any state through which we have yet traveled.

Dearborn. Flint. Motor City! How did this quintessentially American industry—the birth of the assembly line, the manufacture of the automobile—end up just across the border from Canada? Was Henry Ford from Dearborn?? The vaguely rolling terrain is dotted with a crust of snow that seems to have endured since last year; the strawberry and cherry orchards almost invisible against the leaden gray sky and this brownish-white crust. Why is Michigan known for fruit and cars, and not corn and cattle, the way Iowa is? It’s too simple to say “geography” since it is hardly ever the only lever of American economics. Why fruit, why Ford; and is Kellogg Michigan’s Neruda? Inquiring minds on the road--especially when the highway is closed down due to another snow storm!--want to know. We are making our way slowly, slowly back to New England.