I grew up just 80 miles from Detroit but rarely travelled there as a child. Much later in my work life I spent many weeks right downtown. By then Detroit was on the decline, a ghost city but one filled with many remnants of its amazing roots.

When we flew over earlier this week, skies were clear and the plane tipped a wing toward the downtown just at the right time. Odd to see all of it laid out below, the same places I worked in and walked around so often in the past.

And then to think beyond that to the remarkable history of the area. What often seems so fixed in a single lifetime is, over the course of even a short period of time, so transient, so changing. The millions of lives. The stories of real people. The print of humankind on the land. I see all of that from the safe distance of the airplane.

24 Mar This entry was published on March 24, 2012 at 8:32 pm. It’s filed under Uncategorized and tagged aerial, Detroit. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.