Detroit is Sci Fi...
What you see isn't necessarily what you see
Issue #290 Keith’s SciFi Musings April 2, 2023
When I first moved to Detroit from South Florida just a few months over 30 years ago in January of 1993, I think it was 7 degrees. Thanks to a good friend of mine, I got a line on a nice and quite spacious apartment just several blocks walking distance from the Detroit River, which I could actually see from my fifth-floor kitchen window.
Which didn’t change the fact that it was 7 degrees. But at least it was 7 degrees, clear skies, and with a view of how 7 degrees could actually be kind of pretty.
One of the first sounds of Detroit that I recall more than any other is the sound of an ice-breaker that woke me up one morning in a near-panic. It was an echoing, explosive CRACK that sounded like the sky was splitting open. I had no idea what I was hearing, and I was new to the city, new to the building, and it was way-too-damned-early o’clock to find anyone available to ask for advice on whether I should be making a mad dash for the basement to seek shelter or just pray that whatever angry critter had just broken through from another dimension wouldn’t find me.
Or maybe the cold weather would send it shrieking back to wherever it had come from.
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As I said at the outset, I moved here from South Florida. I had been a reporter there for close to four years at the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel, which was the name of the paper at the time.
It was about 77 degrees on the day of my departure.
Friends, family, and various associates all thought I had lost my damned mind abandoning a nice warm clime like South Florida to make my life in Detroit. I think they figured anyone who had been born and raised in a city like Denver, where it seems like everybody now wants to live (and the insane home prices bear witness to that insatiable desire and demand), would have better sense than to swap out a tropical vacation spot paradise (for some) for a beaten-down, majority Black, and poverty-stricken wreck of a city like Detroit.
Which goes to show it pays to know what you’re talking about before you start talking.
Later in the day, hours after the sky had cracked open, an amused neighbor explained to this New Detroiter what it was that he had actually heard that morning.
“Wait…you’re telling me you have to have special boats to crack open the river?”
For some reason, I thought that was one of the coolest things I had ever heard. From then on I kept watch from my kitchen window for those broad-shouldered ships built with what I soon learned was part of “Detroit Attitude.”
Look. You can either make way for me to pass, or I’m gonna make my way through you. Your choice.
Nothing else could devour the ice like the ice breakers, specifically built for kicking the shit out of adversity and the harshest of conditions. Which is why I imagined them not as ships but as massive beasts made of iron and steel that rose from the river’s deep to create paths and directions where none had existed before.
Today, three decades later, I have seen more than enough evidence that Detroit is SciFi. Which is why I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Detroit has its own magic and its own miracles, but can’t everybody see them because they are not on public display. Detroit is like an invitation-only kind of affair; either you see us or you don’t.
We’re not on the map.
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