Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey (17 page)

He had a cloth sack slung over his shoulder, and after I’d said good-bye and thanks for letting me hang with them, he took off walking.

As I was leaving, I took some exterior shots of the massive building. A black guy just walking along the road by himself saw me, and I thought he was going to ask me for a smoke, or if I had any change, but I was wrong.

“Great building, ain’t it?” he said as he passed.

“Yeah, it really is.”

O
n my walk back, I came across Detroit’s meatpacking district, which converts on the weekends into a farmer’s market, and after passing an Islamic slaughterhouse, I spotted an Ethiopian buffet. Ever since realizing you could eat Ethiopian food with your hands I’ve been a fan, and since I was a bit hungry, I walked inside. The lone girl working, who seemed about my age, told me that it was ten dollars, eat all you want, so I did. I sat down at a table in the back corner, and my camera was sitting there on the table. As I was eating, the girl came over and asked me if I’m a photographer.

I didn’t know how to answer that one. With digital cameras, everybody is a goddamn photographer now, so I told her no, I wasn’t a photographer, I was just an enthusiast who liked going inside all these abandoned buildings here in Detroit and taking photos of the beauty I found, and that gave me a reason to explore inside them. She sat down at my table, introducing herself, and told me that she enjoyed doing the very same thing. She told me of a couple other spots nearby that were good to explore, as well as an abandoned school over by where she lived, and that when they shut it down they left everything inside it—all the desks, books, everything—and she couldn’t understand why they did that. They could have sold or donated everything inside the school, but instead they just left it all there for people to take. She herself had grabbed a couple desks. The books, which were all expensive and could have been put back into circulation or donated to the library or to another school, were just left there to rot. “Sad,” she said. When I left, she invited me to a Harvest Festival in her neighborhood later that month. I thanked her and made my way back to the hotel.

A
t the hotel, Mrs. Harrington was hanging out in the lobby, talking with the guy working the front desk. I was greeted by her warm smile. She curiously asked me what I’d discovered today here in Detroit. I told her all about the guys I met inside the abandoned building, and showed her a couple of the photographs that I took inside. She put her reading glasses on, looked at them, and her smile disappeared into a look of grave concern for my personal safety.

In a motherly way, she gasped while putting her hand over her heart and warned me sternly several times to be extremely careful doing this, it was not safe for me to be exploring in and around these places, especially all by myself.

I ignored her the same way that I ignored my mother every time she put in a request for me to quit smoking. “It’s fine, Mrs. Harrington,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” That wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear, and that look of concern was still cemented on her face as I made my way to the elevator and took it up to my room.

T
he Park Ave. had wireless, which was great. A lot of these weekly or monthly hotels don’t, you have to go to a coffee shop or some fancy hotel lobby and pick up their signal to get online. Using the satellite images on Google Maps, I took a top view of the city and found myself searching for parts of Detroit that looked industrial and depressing. Like how North Korea looks on Google Maps. Sadly, there were a lot of those areas in Detroit. Using pen and paper, I marked down locations to explore, since my heart was now dead set on exploration of our greatest industrial relics. This would have been my dream when I was a kid, to do something like this someday. There, in the room with
U FUCK UP
scratched deeply on my door, inside one of the greatest hotels in the country, I felt lucky.

With a fully charged battery and two empty memory cards, my camera and I set off for the Packard auto plant. The night before, I’d read up on the place for a bit. It had first opened in 1903, closing its doors in 1957. At one time it was considered the “most modern automobile manufacturing facility in the world.” It was located on East Grand Avenue, on thirty-five acres of land, and occupied 3,500,000 square feet.

You could put a lot of condos in that space.

When I arrived, I parked the Caliente by an archway over the street, which at one time read “Motor City Industrial Park.” Each letter had been painted on a pane of glass, and since some of those windows were now shattered, it read like that one game show where you select a letter and guess the word or phrase.

I was amazed by how far it stretched, a city unto itself. This place opened just at the start of the human experiment with the automobile, and it must have seemed like a permanent monument to American primacy. A century later, the whistling wind was its only sound, and it sat next to a cemetery in the middle of a quiet residential community.

After I parked my car on a side road, I got out and walked toward an open door. I looked around: residential houses, lawns, birds chirping, a family car or two parked on the street. When I took my first step inside, it felt as if I was stepping into a whole other planet. It was like walking into a building the Allies had bombed during World War II. Some spaces were littered with trash, some were not, and some were like theme rooms. One room was nothing but old smashed-to-hell television sets from the 1970s, and another room was nothing but old tires. A couple rooms had absolutely nothing inside them, and then all of a sudden you’d come across a room with several old boats just sitting on the workroom floor, spray-painted. Bags of trash here and there. In one room, somebody had spray-painted in careful cursive, “What happened here?” The hallways and rooms were endless; they seemed to go on and on forever.

At one time, we actually made things within these walls; people made a good living and worked in teams and shipped items off our assembly lines. Now the Packard plant and the ruins of Detroit are large open coffins where artists and vagrants pay their respects, or gravediggers come in to pick a corpse of its copper bones, or people dump yesterday’s garbage, or amateur photographers practice f-stops and shutter speeds and find perfect locations for Urban Exploration.

K
erouac had his great enthusiasms, but none greater than jazz, and the improvised life, and the lovely notion of being alive—
alive
—moment to moment. Now jazz is something of a museum piece, not as alive as it once was. But these things that have been left for dead from a different America—they are
alive
, and merit exploration. At least for me they do.

The America that Kerouac escaped into was vast, anonymous, and disconnected from one part to the next. It was a place that matched his reckless, restless energy.  His rootlessness was a celebration of freedom, a throwing-off of the shackles of convention, the only limits being how much your liver could stand. In the America of his discovery, there were no more bad wars, our wealth was measured in tangible gold bars, and gleaming massive cars like my Caliente were rolling off an endless assembly line that stretched from here to heaven. This prosperity would never, ever end. Or so they thought.

W
alking from one room to the next room, I came across a quote printed on a piece of old card stock. “Press On,” read the card. Underneath that, it read, “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent.”

The card was just lying there on the ground, all by itself in the middle of this huge vacant cement-walled room inside an even larger abandoned factory that used to employ thousands of Americans. I wondered how long it had been sitting there, since there was a thick film of dust on it. After taking a photograph of the card in its natural setting, I folded it up and put it in my back pocket. As I was exploring the building, taking pictures, listening to the camera shutter echo against all the cement walls and long dust-covered hallways that went on for days every time I clicked a snapshot, I wondered how that quote ended up here, lost in Detroit.

I’m assuming you probably don’t see too many “the world is full of educated derelicts” quotes posted up on the commons walls of the Ivy League, where people tend to pride themselves on being overeducated—but where I can see a quote like that being posted is on an old dirty fridge at a small auto shop, or in the break room at the assembly line, places where people could once make an honest living without a college education. It takes persistence to wake up every morning and work a hard, thankless job day in and out.

W
ith one memory card full, the juice nearly drained from my camera, and only about a third, if that, of the Packard plant explored, I decided to go back to the hotel to safely download everything onto my hard drive, come back the following day, and keep on coming back till every single room here was fully explored.

On my way in, I ran into Mrs. Harrington, and she told me that it had been busy today; the phone had been ringing off the hook with people calling to ask about vacancies. The city just recently shut down three of their homeless shelters, and a lot of new people needed a place to stay. She told me that she wouldn’t rent a room to someone that didn’t have a job, that she’s tried in the past to rent out to people without employment and it was very problematic and just one big hassle, so she no longer does that.

“How was your day, Colby?” she then asked.

I told her about the Packard auto plant, and showed her a couple pictures from my camera.

In shock, “You went again all by yourself?”

“Yeah.”

She then of course told me again to be careful, it’s highly unsafe, and you never know what could happen inside those buildings.

“I know.”

When I got to my room, I stared at the “Press On” quote for a while, then set it on my desk.

L
ike owning real estate, there’s something very American about purchasing and owning an automobile. You have to pay money to have one, you have to pay money to keep it maintained, you have to pay money whenever it breaks down, you have to pay money for the insurance, you have to pay money every time you put fuel in the tank, whenever you receive a ticket, pass a toll booth, wash it, or park the fucking thing.

It all gives me a headache, the fact that everything costs money. It had been several years since I’d owned an automobile, and now that I’d been reminded of all this once again, by the time I arrived in Detroit my enthusiasm for owning a car had all but disappeared. I lost that one somewhere around the Wyoming border. Sick and tired of paying for everything, I decided not to drive unless I had to and to leave the Caliente parked up on the top floor of the parking garage a block away from the hotel. Out of sight, out of mind.

While passing through Atlantic City, Iowa, I had purchased an old-school bicycle off an old-timer who owned and operated a corner bike shop. It was one of those beach cruiser kind of bikes with only one gear, and I really didn’t need a bike, but since he was so nice and was only charging twenty bucks for it I picked it up. It’s been stashed in my trunk ever since. So today I grabbed a wrench, put it back together, and went off on a bike ride.

Since I had been unable to explore the entire Packard auto plant in one afternoon, I decided to ride my bike back over. While pedaling, I was passing one abandoned and burned-down building right after another.

I passed by the huge cement building I’d explored several days ago, when I saw one of the guys who’d been taking out pipes, the one with the decade-old Lions hat. We did the fist-bump greeting, and he asked me what I was up to. I told him that I was just riding my bike and on my way to check out another abandoned building. I asked what he was up to, and he told me that he was still pulling copper pipes out of that building. He asked how the writing’s coming along, and I told him that it was going fine, and I’d come back and chill with him in a couple days. I worry about him in his toxic water.

B
ack at the Packard auto plant I stashed my bike over in the bushes by the neighboring cemetery. There was a guy there, standing in front of a grave, talking to it. I stared at him for a while, several minutes, before I snapped out of it and went inside the building.

My goal was to explore every single room in this massive structure. Up on the third floor, hanging out in a huge room that was nearly pitch-black—some sort of part had been fabricated here—I could hardly see or make out what was around me. I was taking a couple photographs of some abandoned boats and an RV of some kind, wondering how in the hell they got those up here, when I heard footsteps.
Not again.
I wondered when my luck would run out.

I completely froze while I listened. They were coming from down the hallway, a group of them, heading toward me, and there were voices attached to the footsteps, male voices. Slowly, gently, trying to make as little noise as possible, I walked over to the door at the end of the room so that I could look down the long hallway where the footsteps were coming from, then I turned the corner, and there they were.

There were four of them. The closest one to me freaked out, and screamed. Literally, he jumped five feet back like a cartoon character. I apologized for startling them like that. I said hello and asked what they were up to, though I could tell by the way they dressed—with full backpacks, and spray-paint cans rattling—that they were graffiti artists. All were in their early twenties and turned out to be from Hamtramck, which isn’t too far from here.

When I asked if it was cool for me to tag along with them to see what they were up to, they said sure, no prob. While we were walking down the hallway, which went on for days, the one kid I’d freaked out the most looked around. He asked if I was here all by myself, in a tone as if to say, Are you fucking crazy? I told him yeah, that I was alone, and that I liked hanging out in these buildings alone. It was peaceful and, I don’t know, somewhat relaxing. Not quite sure if he believed me, or if he thought I was a liar and just saying that because I was a loser with no friends. I asked if they came across a lot of people hanging out in these buildings. While walking together they tell me they do, but usually other graffiti artists.