(688 Chester Street, Grabbingham, Michigan. Photo Socotra.)

Thanks for suffering through the whole Detroit thing with me. I was riding on a bus yesterday, not knowing precisely what indignity I was going to suffer at the hands of the national air transportation system, but knowing, as you do, that something awful was in store under the clear skies, maybe not as bad as what Kayoed the poor old Motor City, but something unpleasant.

I stayed with friends the night before the flight down south; I felt guilty about leaving Magpie and Raven, and had booked an early afternoon flight to enable me to drive down the morning of the flight and get home in the afternoon. The luxury of already being there gave me a chance to kill some time with a trip to Grabbingham before proceeding to the airport.

I flogged the SUV toward Detroit, but veered north to what had been a comfortable bourgeoisie burg in my youth, a logical place for Detroit families to flee against the surge of block-busting realtors and developers determined to re-make the ethnic makeup of the fourth-largest city in America.

I wanted to see the two houses where we lived between 1956 and 1968. I wondered if they would be smaller or larger than I remembered.

On the placid lane off Maple Street, I watched in wonder as workmen added on to the 14,000 square foot mansion next to what I will always think of as The New Place, which essentially has been doubled in size by virtue of a massive addition to the rear facing the river and the park. It is not the only palace being augmented on Hawthorne Street; driving around, heading up town, I was surprised to see that my boyhood home was essentially untouched; everything else has been upgraded or transformed.

The Hill Building, Grabbingham’s original school, and the old High School were long gone. , as was Olsen’s Market at the corner of Bates and Chester. I remembered Merritt Olsen and his brothers would play bluegrass music there from banjoes that hung on the wall. Gone.

The little house at 688 Chester Street has lost the white fence that once surrounded it, but otherwise is unchanged. It cost $18,000 when Raven bought it, but got too small for our lifestyle.

If you contrast that with the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit images I captured of my birth city last week, it just makes everything surreal. I drove out of town again, headed for Telegraph and the airport with an air of unreality. There is plenty of money around, apparently. It just is not anyplace south of 8 Mile where the blight begins immediately, the gap-windowed buildings tumbling down. The emptiness was staggering, everything for sale or just falling apart.

It was a nice day to try to go home. The skies were blue and the temperature- well, temperate.

The last few trips in the sky had the ominous bumps and thumps of the seasonal weather change. I don’t like it, packed in the back, and view the ability to see what is happening on the instrument panel and out the canopy as being almost as necessary as an ejection seat. That is the ultimate in personal choice; making it optional to stay aboard and deal with some mechanic’s mistake, or tiny metal fractures in the structural members or bird-strike compounded by a boneheaded pilot error.

The sky was dangerously calm, which of course meant that my flight was cancelled. Naturally, they had lied throughout the process of getting the boarding pass and checking the bag that was heavy with clothing suited to the wrong climate and a bundle of frozen home-made smoked kielbasa from the Tannery Creek Market.

A tuxedo of antique and flamboyant cut was in a hanging bag, my briefcase stuffed with papers from someone else’s life, kindle, camera, charging cords, notebooks, literature from the conference.

An old man- a documentary film-maker, as it turned out, was the only other passenger on the Hertz Bus as we traveled to the North Terminal to meet our destiny.

“You don’t travel light,” he said, watching as I struggled with the ungainly aggregation of luggage with which I had become associated.

“Not my intent,” I said, with a trace of wounded indignation. “I did not have a lot of choices on this trip.” That was not nearly the level of irritation I experienced after the flight cancellation and transfer to another airline, which required a trip to baggage claim outside the security perimeter and another terminal and the necessity to stand in not one but three new lines after securing an alternate flight. The mounting anxiety level was directly coupled with the diminishing time to board the replacement flight.

Thankfully, the new inefficiency in the system permitted me sufficient time to be the very last person onto the aircraft and shoe-horn myself into a middle seat between two elderly Chinese women.

We taxied for about a half hour, touring the DTW flight campus. The pilot apologetically made an announcement that FAA controllers wanted more separation between traffic going into DCA, and hence we would be delayed at the hold-short before being permitted to proceed to the active runway.

When we started the approach to Reagan National, we were vectored all over the metro area, making wide sweeping turns calculated to open up distance between our flight and the one in front. Eventually we settled on the path of the Potomac for noise abatement and plopped down on the short runway in front of the glittering new terminal.

When we were on the ground, and the stress began to leak out of my body, I thanked the Captain for the tour of Northern Virginia and the nice landing.

Walking out of the jetway, wondering if my bag and the kielbasa had made it to Washington, I saw that the terminal was jammed with people looking covetously at the path to the sky. They were obviously stressed and delayed. Passing out through the security portal, I saw that the line of people waiting to be x-rayed stretched back from the beginning of the cattle chute nearly to the other concourse. It would take them as long to get processed as the smoked kielbasa.

“Michele Obama, and her too-close encounter with the Air Force Tanker at Andrews two weeks ago,” I said to no one in particular. “And that asshole Osama bin Laden.” I was pleasantly surprised to be re-united with my sausage, and even more surprised to be back, eventually, under those beaming skies at Big Pink only a few hours later than I had expected.

Maybe you can go home, if you don’t stay away too long.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com