There is a lot to process this morning. The basic stats? Easy: 536.4 miles in 8 hours and fifteen minutes, with a net Speed of Advance (SOA) of 64 mph, including two gas-and-comfort stops. Ohio is still flat and Pennsylvania isn’t.

There were a lot of miles in a short time, but I escaped just ahead of the first snow and spotty ice. As someone said up there, “the winter can’t go on forever, right?”

God, it hasn’t even started.

I will never quite get it out of my system, I guess. The kids were humoring me. We did the Franklin Cider Mill for the tastiest damned hot cider I ever sipped, watching the ducks frolic in the rushing cold water of the narrowly-channeled tributary of the Rouge River. And those doughnuts. Dark brown and chewy and rich. Gawd.

I do not think I have been to the cider mill in nearly a half century. I remember the fall-time trips there to the dark wood building, and watching the wheel being turned by the insistent water that drove a shaft that in turn crushed the apples and produced the marvelous elixir. Hot or cold, it was either refreshing or sustaining against the coming snows.

The place was smaller, though, or I was larger.

We looked at the places we lived, long ago, after the Socotra’s were chased. Out of the city by unscrupulous real estate operators, eager to flip neighborhoods from white to black. They flipped us right out of the house on Kentucky Street off McNichols and Six Mile roads.

I didn’t slip into a reverie, exactly, but close enough for Government Work. We wound up driving past where Baldwin Elementary School once stood-and those memories flooded back: the massive brick structure that had once been Grabbingham High School and the curious relics of other times. The plaque commemorating the students who served in the Great War, and the way too cool banked wooden track that circled the gym, suspended high above it.

Gone now, completely, like the even more ancient Hill Building next door. When they tore that old hulk down, we fond the carved initials of students from the century before on the beams of the rafters. The Hill School went all the way back to the days when the town had been known as “Piety Hill,” and the volunteers for the War Between the States drilled on what became the playground.

Not too much left that shouted anything like pious now in the terminally hip suburb, and passing through the old and new buildings, flush with irony, toward fabled Woodward Avenue the impetus of change and fashion was clear enough.

“I could tell you what all these things were,” I said, thinking of the Rexall drugstore, and Cunningham’s and Peabody’s Market. “But who cares?” The kids were nice enough not to tell me.

Driving down the Avenue that slashes out of the downtown to the northwest from the River, we talked about where the street-racers once tromped on the go-pedal of the Chargers and GTOs, and the things that have transformed and the things that have not.

The Car that protrudes from the second floor of the alignment shop is now a ’64 Plymouth Valiant, rather than the 1948 Ford I remember, but car it is and still poking out proudly toward the Avenue.

We stopped for a bite at Anita’s Kitchen, south of Nine Mile Road. It was an ice-cream shop back in the day, but got a face-lift with a strategically located on Woodward south of Nine Mile Road got a witty redesign from Ron Rae of the Grabbingham architectural firm on and Roman, and now Anita’s offers some of the best Lebanese fare in town. We had the big Greek salads and with gyros strips. Awesome.

From lunch we ventured down south of Eight Mile, into the City proper, and drove around the Palmer Woods neighborhood where I rented the maid’s quarters to one of the posh old mansions. We drove past the place, still in good shape, and marveled at the places that were for sale, and were stunned by the former Archbishop’s place, a 62-room pile of Tudor revival commissioned by the Fisher Brothers (of Fisher Body) and donated to the Catholic Church as the seat of Archbishop Gallagher.

Archbishop Deardon was living there when I was a couple blocks away, and after this death in the 1980s, the place passed from Church through an elaborate deconsecrating ceremony to the hands of Mr. John Thomas Salley of the Detroit Pistons basketball concern.

A curious thing- the streets which once exited the neighborhood onto the eerily quiet Woodward Avenue to the northeast and Seven Mile to the south have been sealed to through traffic. I guess it is the better secure the area, which is an oasis of calm in an area that had been in free fall.

I felt myself getting the fever, looking at the Bishop’s house- what it might be like to rattle around the oak-wainscoted walls, carved plaster ceilings and heavy leaded glass, conservatories, libraries and strange staff kitchens.

It is sort of the spirit of Detroit, in a way, the temptation to throw a tiny amount of money at one of these places and live like a king. We saw one that a quick browser search suggested could provide baronial luxury for about what a new condo in Arlington would cost.

But of course it was quickly pointed out that since no one lived in the city anymore who actually paid taxes, regardless of how cheap the property was, the taxes reflected a confiscatory grab by a couple generations of corrupt city councils, and the cost of providing their own security (and snow removal) made the homeowner’s fees in Palmer Woods likewise atmospheric.

But still….the dream stirred. To imagine yourself as one of the Fisher or Dodge Brothers, whose homes were in this neighborhood. To be a Baron of the auto industry, the 1920s auto industry. I could see why the spirit moves people to come to this place, this amazing, sad, impressive, astonishing place.

We got back to watch the Lions eke out a victory, just as they did when Bobby Lane was the quarterback, and later we watched as Anthony Bourdain featured the Motor City on his global food show “Parts Unknown.” He is very good, both as a judge of food and of people and places. I wanted to know if he was going to stop by the Lafayette Coney Island.

Instead, we got something that was half Motor City comfort food and half social commentary on a great place on the skids. Here is what he said about ten minutes into the show:

“Is Detroit going to turn things around? I could lie and tell you ‘Yes.’ But you know what? This city is screwed. The only place I’ve ever been that looks anything like Detroit does now is Chernobyl. I’m not being funny. That’s the truth. But you have to admire the bold, proud, ferociously enterprising survivors who have decided to hang on, hang in and figure out a way to not only survive, but do something extraordinary.”

I know some people who are doing extraordinary things. I am going to have to tell you about them tomorrow, though. The real Spirits of Detroit.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303