Author: Anne L'Ecuyer

Detroit has a central core with broad avenues that radiate out. The concentric boundary streets are marked in a way that only a city planner could love. The road eight miles out from the center is called ‘8 Mile Road.’ Five miles later it’s ‘13 Mile Road.’ It goes on like that to the edge of town.

There is a difference between municipal boundaries and cultural geographies, though, especially in Detroit. Teenagers blend the borders of the city with their bikes every day. Muscle cars stream Latin polka through Black neighborhoods and down crumbling freeways. Poverty creates a density in one place and a vacuum in another. The region really is a collection of places mapped out by the cultures that inhabit and transgress its linear design.

Read the full essay at Arts in a Changing America.

The waterways of Pittsburgh give the sense of being at the confluence of something larger than one’s self.  Beautiful bridges recall an era of grand public works and the steel barons’ pursuit of an epic city. Immigrant stories are layered into the hillside neighborhoods.  Pittsburgh’s past is still present.

My visit reminded me that culture transpires moment-by-moment and over centuries. Through each boom and bust, the city is made and remade. That cycle of growth and decline has an odd effect of the city’s playwrights, photographers, and urban designers. It helps them develop a finer intuitive sense for how we prosper as a people and a place.

Read the full essay at Arts in a Changing America.

The opportunity to drive across country came through Joe Boles, my professor and boss from college years, who was headed back to Flagstaff with Aly Jordan after her year-long sabbatical in Philadelphia. Over dinner they lamented having to drive two cars across the country.

“I’ll drive one for you,” I said.

A moment of silence made its way around the table as each of us discovered that it would work. I was yearning for an extended road trip and they didn’t need the car for three weeks. They could take the other car with the dogs and follow their own circuitous route across country. Joe and I would stay in touch through my travelogues and the occasional phone call. As we talked it became clear. For them, it would be a convenience. For me, an unexpected opportunity.

In the days before I left, the trip grew into a professional project with both a plan and a central question. I called colleagues whose work I admired and asked them to be my cultural guides. I chose a route through the middle of the country, veering north to Detroit, Minneapolis, and Omaha to see people I love. In between each city, I planned a day to hike, rest, and write.

It’s an odd thing, driving someone else’s car out of their driveway only to meet them in their new driveway 3000 miles later. It’s not exactly goodbye, more like good luck. I snapped a picture of my benefactors with their dogs, and caught Joe’s eye just briefly.  Among all the teachers in my life, he holds a special place. In college, he introduced me to the post-modern notion that the world is as we see it—a fractured mirror of multiplicities and duplicities that favors the brave and the curious. I pulled the seat belt across and gingerly made my way down their tree-lined street. Brave and curious, it was a relief to feel that way again.