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Ann Arbor/Detroit, Michigan
Tuesday, 17 April 2009
This is what Detroit looks like.
Decommissioned traffic lights lean and hang at tipsy angles from the lines above the quiet intersections. This is Motor City, but many of the cars look dishevelled, their fenders hanging loose or missing, rust patterns blooming over the wheel covers.
Entire residential blocks have been reduced to green green grass, with one lonely, left-behind house remaining. Idle people recline on the porches. Some houses have been blackened and burnt, their insides show through the scorched holes. The houses are built in disappearing geometries around warehouses and factories whose windows have been boarded up or smashed or boarded up and then smashed. The signs and insignia of abandoned businesses make for curious reading as they fade from shopfronts and billboards.
There is more rubbish on the street here than in the bronx. With the nobler signs of human civilisation crumbling and disappearing, the accruing trash might soon be the only reminder of the city that was.
It is not a ghost town; the downtown streets have cars and people and open businesses. The greektown casino glitters and sparkles. Homeless men with cardboard signs maintain lonely vigils at gas stations and street corners. The enormous General Motors compound soars upwards in sheens of bluish and greenish metal. it could be seen as a slap in the face, or as the last refuge of the damned.
A brief and patchy history of the city.
Part of the midwestern industrial boom and heartland of the American auto-industry, Detroit had no need of secondary industry. It was all cars and the steel they are cut from. Endless factory jobs right across Michigan attracted unskilled and poorly paid labourers, which, when the eventual downturn in the auto industry began (not that you can tell cruising the streets of America today), were left idle and desperate and angry. Race riots, white flight, and gang violence.
There are still bad neighbourhoods and outbreaks of violence, I’m told, but the anger has more or less passed in Detroit now, and been replaced with a quiet forlorness. I’m used to taking half-built buildings as a sign of progress and development, a half-full approach. In detroit the buildings are half empty and crumbling – aided and unaided – fast. It is this phenomenon that brought me here; where else can you see a city’s consumption of itself, a ready-made Hollywood apocalypse cityscape?
One of the most impressive ruins in Detroit is the old train station, incorporating an 18-storey office block. It is fenced around with the ubiquitous razor-wire, but there are ways around that. Rummaging among the Detroit ruins is a popular pasttime, and there are ‘underground’ websites that will tell you exactly where to go and what to do. So, a short scramble under a bridge, through a rusted roller door, and we (no way i’m going in alone) are breathing frosty breaths in the train station basement.
We are by no means the first people to come here. The entire place is festooned with graffiti, and after a while narratives begin to emerge, with certain characters – like ‘catfish’ - scrawled right throughout the building. The marbling has all been stripped from the walls, and lies about, but the grandeur of the architecture is still visible in the high lofted ceilings and enormous pillars of the station foyers. Everything has been looted or smashed – even the toilets – but remnants remain of the building’s old purpose. Rows of rusty shelves. Torn and trampled carpeting. New detritus has been imported. Odd shoes and gloves lie about the building. Some have pairs on other floors. The single, abandoned shoe is, I think, wonderful image of the desolation here.
Eighteen floors, all dilapidated in their own personal ways, the decay always finding new configurations and patterns. The yawning elevator shafts become more frightening for every flight of stairs we climb. And then the roof; it is slightly surprising to find the sun is shining brilliantly, and we have one of the best views possible of the city. The shiny edifices of remaining business downtown. In another direction the Ambassador Bridge, the river, and the near-shore of Canada. It is incongruously, strikingly picturesque.
Another incongruity.
An hour’s drive from Detroit is Ann Arbor, a walkable little town dominated by the University of Michigan campus. The unavailability of couches in Detroit had brought me here, where proffered accommodation abounded. Cyan was my Ann Arbor host and tomb raider guide to detroit. Strange patterns begin to emerge; Cyan was just finalising her creative writing thesis. So once again i was staying with poets and writers.
And swing dancers. by the time i left i had been taught the lindy hop, east coast something, the big apple impossibility. i had been taught them all and forgotten them all. On my first night there was also a recital of John Cage piano pieces, at midnight and by candlelight. Fantastic, soporific music. Ann Arbor is a place of art and learning, a fun town where doors are not locked and laptops are left unattended in the myriad coffee houses. It set my travel paranoia on edge; the decay of Detroit just down the road, but the university acting, i suppose, as a bastion against the encroaching desolation and despair.
That familiar morbid curiosity drew me to Michigan and Detroit and inadvertently to Ann Arbor. AA though was an insight into another USofA, one that it would be an injustice of me to neglect for the sake of sad stories about midwestern blight. The brick-by-brick disappearance of a city may be a curious phenomenon, but so is a well-funded poetry program, or the proliferation of self-made chapbooks about the campus, or an awkward aussie swing dancing among far more competent yankees. Michigan contains the best and worst of the states; the despair, anger and fear of Detroit; the smiles and ideals of Ann Arbor. Intelligent, active, discerning people. friendly people eager to engage with the world, and bring more smiles, intelligence and art into it.
The sun came out in Ann Arbor, squirrels were rasping and birds chuckling in the trees. Flowers poked through the warming earth. By the side of the immense highways ducks and geese cruised their ponds. Pickups and SUVs and trucks and Greyhound buses ground by. The skeletal winter trees began to give way to rich green pines. A man at the bus station offered me his email address and phone number just in case i needed assistance on my travels. Morbid curiosity is not the only attraction here.
I said my tearful goodbyes to my little world in Sucre, having delayed the inevitable for a full month, striking off one by one every name from my list of intended cities-to-visit, until there were only two names left, Samaipata and Santa Cruz; a cursory visit to the lush low and lower lands of Bolivia’s East before I left the country behind.
The last day in Sucre was all rushed goodbyes and slow shuddering hugs before a bus rushed me off and into the night. At 4am I was left on the dusty highway on the outskirts of Samaipata and spent the next few hours loitering about the town, the air full of rooster howls and dog cries, until a hostel opened its doors.
Samaipata is talked up on Bolivia’s gringo trail. Situated at less-than-troublesome altitude and between animal-rich national parks, milennia-old ruins and the villages where Che Guevara passed his last days, it is known as a place to relax in between partaking of the many adventures in the region. I’d long had my eyes on the Che trail, but as the time dwindled away it too had been scrubbed from the list of intended destinations.
Samaipata by daylight looked almost identical to Samaipata in the small hours of the morn. The town was empty, its lush central plaza abandoned, most of the shops and restaurants closed. Only the string of tour agencies had opened, but the price for a personal tour (there certainly wasn’t anyone around to share a tour with) per day was almost double what most Bolivian make in a month, and as usual the miser within me screamed his arid objections. There just didn’t seem to be any way to do anything in Samaipata; I was left my scratching my head and wondering whether Che Guevara had died of boredom.
On my first afternoon I wandered out to El Fuerte, the only Samaipata site more or less within walking distance. A pretty and mysterious place it is, perched, on a hilltop overlooking green valleys. ‘The Fort’ itself is a natural stone slab atop the ridge and riddled with ornamental carvings and niches for holding ancient, long-disappeared idols. The usual myths implicating extra-terrestrials, vasts hordes of gold and super-sophisticated, mysteriously-extinct cultures surround the site; more likely, though, is that generations and epochs of different groups, aided by the sculptural tendencies of nature, gradually hacked and wore away more and more of the site until what was once a curiously big rock became a bizarre bastion of half-terraces and empty nooks and crannies; a place that even today seems eerie and haunted by ghosts or fairies or deities.
The site is slowly being reconstructed and groomed back into service, and the pilgrims are coming, although mostly on half-day guided tours. I was there alone, picturing jabbering deities in every niche, and wondering why Che had picked such a tranquil and isolated spot in which to foment revolution in Bolivia.
I decided to visit some of the Che sites; no doubt there were ways of reaching them that didn’t cost 1000Bs per night. It was just that no one seemed to know what they were. Checking out of Samaipata I had to grapple with the usual dodgy maths and suddenly inflated prices, and speculated that maybe these had been responsible for the death of Che Guevara.
I was very lucky on the dusty highway outside of town. Before long an open-topped truck rolled up which was heading to Vallegrande, where the body of Che was presented to the media and then buried with minimal honour. Over the side of the truck i went; it was full of bags of rice, as well as decrepit furniture and one enormous karaoke machine. Alone in the back, I dozed in the sun, the silly truck-riding grin smeared across my face.
Approaching Vallegrande I asked the driver if he would be continuing on, and he rattled off a vague list of villages further along the road, including La Higuera, where Che was captured and executed. It was only later on, after an immense woman heaved up among the rice bags beside me had begun asking for money, that the driver explained that he wouldn’t actually be going to La Higuera, but that it was a quick walk to the village from where he would drop me off. I wondered if I had missed that point earlier, his clenched country drawl near impossible to decipher, or whether he had just felt no need to mention such details. And I wondered if accent problems and cultural barriers had killed Che Guevara (and apparently they had played their part, Che’s faction learning the Guaraní of the lowlands and not the Quechua of the mountains we were winding among).
The sun set over the endless folds of ridge and valley, and I was left at the roadside with another clench-jawed campesino who was very very uncomfortable in my presence. He kept his distance, head bowed, wolfing down bruised bananas, but with the aid of the cookies stashed in my pack I prised sentences out of him. The driver had said (this I am sure of), that this guy would take me into town, and that it would take less than an hour. After an hour the guy stopped abruptly, said that this was his home, and disappeared over a gate of sticks. Perhaps Che had died by the stoic mistrust and suspicion of the locals (and this too must have played a part, because the revolution certainly didn’t ignite out here).
Alone in the dark with a pack on my back, I decided that this was exactly how Che would have spent his time here. I followed my shadow cast by the moon, and tried to keep my imagination away from the things moving in the trees and bushes.
An hour later I caught a glimpse of La Higuera, a few lights glimmering among the trees. When I came to the town it was deserted, save for the grumble of the generator and the drawn-out creak of the guesthouse gate. The guesthouse was also deserted. Did Che Guevera perhaps die of a spooked and lonely heart? For one of the rare times in this whole jaunt, I craved gringo company.
The town was not completely deserted though; on the main plaza – consisting of three Che monuments and a few sleeping dogs – a gas lantern shone light through the open door of a tiny shop. Into that puddle of light stepped an old lady with a nervous tic and an oozing eye. She offered me stern hospitality, and a headful of reminiscences about the last days of Che.
La Higuera turned out to be beautiful and tiny and well worth the trek. As my host told me over dinner and then breakfast and then lucnh, before ‘the war’ the village had numbered 80 families. Now it numbers about 20. Those that remain are sustained by the slowly increasing trickle of Che tourists. Che may be revered all over the world, but nowhere more so than here, where he is probably alone responsible for the ongoing existence of the village, and certainly for the constant supply of Cuban doctors and investment (the newish school I stayed in was built with Cuban support). The town, being of Santa Cruz province but also of the Quechua-speaking impoverished mountains, is divided between admiration and distrust of Evo Morales, but for Che, a man of more extreme socialistic tendencies, they have nothing but adoration.
And finally, this is how Che died, according my hostess, told over stale bread and gritty coffee and piles of potato and corn, and quite different to how I had previously read, written and imagined the story to go.
Che had stayed in the village, sleeping outside the schoolhouse in which he would later be incarcerated, with his tiny band of revolutionaries. Three hundred soldiers had descended on the village in pursuit, and Che’s group had been forced to flee, jettisoning their scant supplies as they headed down into the dry quebradas below. The soldiers had been unable to find the group, though they had combed the area. They offered anyone in the town $100US for information about the guerillas, but no one would have betrayed them for any money. The guerillas had holed up in a natural cave, inside as big as a house but virtually impossible to find from the outside. Eventually a cattle farmer passing through the quebradas stumbled upon their position and informed the soldiers, who set out en masse. The final shootout took place on the banks of a stream, shaded by old trees. Thirty soldiers were killed, as were four guerillas; Che and his companions ‘Willy’ and ‘Chino’ were captured and taken to La Higuera. Che was a shadow of his former romantic self, his beard long, his face blackened, sick and skinny, his boots in tatters. In the evening he was given his last meal, peanut soup (sopa de mani) and chicken – such ingredients as can’t be found in La Higuera any more – which he devoured with hunger. At 3am he was taken outside and placed against a wall. He said ‘you are only going to kill a man, not the revolution’, and then was shot several times. A helicopter came, scattering the terrified locals. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande where it was cleaned and exhibited. His hands were cut off and made their way to his widow in Cuba, his body was buried in Vallegrande.
I reached the ugly border town and crossed into Peru exactly ninety days after arriving in Bolivia. As I did so I became a backpacker again, skimming over the surface, choosing only the most worthwhile pursuits, knowing almost nothing about the place I was in. The nightly processions through the streets, the graffiti on the walls, the names of the streets and restaurants and plazas all meant next to nothing to me.
Peru is full of thieves, I had been warned by many Bolivians. I don’t know that this is true; I wasn’t robbed, but I did find my cash disappearing much faster across the border. Peru a country far more accustomed to tourist hordes, and to finding ways both legitimate and illegitimate to make tourists part with their cash.
I spent three nights in Peru, in the town of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca. It was a time of oscillation between loneliness and boredom within the town, and wonder and contentment out by the lake.
I had written about Puno, and more specifically about a town further along the fringe of the lake, Chucuito, in Lord of Miracles (which I swear will be on every book shelf one of these days), and so felt I should go pay my respects. A bus crammed full of people and one llama took me out of the grit of Puno and into the beautiful crystalline light of lakeside Peru. The great expanse of the lake lay pale and blue beyond the floodplains, which were being reclaimed by agriculture, stranded boats lying crooked among the crops and flocks.
Chucuito has been put on the tourist radar by the Templo de la Fertilidad, an Inca ruin perched on a hill overlooking the lake. Within the perfectly fitted stone walls of the tiny temple are arranged row upon on row of stone phalluses, which Inca maidens would visit, pouring out offerings of coca and booze, and squatting over the monolithic cocks in hope of conceiving an emperor or a warrior or a boy or a girl or whatever. That, as best I can tell, is the official line, explained to me by two kids who had learned the history word for word and recited it in singsong voices.
There is something suspicious about the temple, thought. It is in part the lack of any government or university investment or official anthropo-archaeological interest in the site; it is in part that the stone phalluses look exactly like the carved stones used by the Incas to fix the thatched roofs to their buildings, it is also in part that the temple and its phalluses lie across the road from a colonial church, which was erected (ha ha ha) during the age of the Inquisition, at a time when the church took great delight in smashing and burning anything or anyone deemed offensive or heretical. Rows of pagan penises would surely qualify for destruction for multiple reasons.
Even if the temple isn’t authentic, even if the phalluses were added later to draw curious tourists, the temple remains a fascinating place to visit. It is a testament to the added value that the word ‘inca’ adds to any tourist site. Other cultures – Tiahuanaco, Moche, Chavin, Mapuche – excite next to no interest in the tourist world, but Inca trails, Inca temples, Inca ruins are all goldmines. It is hardly surprising that Chucuito should want in on the lucrative business. And given how funny the temple is, and how pretty the town is, why shouldn’t they make use of the heritage of the region to make a few dollars?
On my other full day in Peru I headed out onto the lake on a tour of the islands. The day started lugubrious and overcast, and I soon found myself excessively unhappy to be stuck on a tour boat.
Our first stop was the floating islands of the Uros people. It is said that hundreds of years ago these peaceful people took to man-made islands of reeds to escape the predations of their warlike neighbours. The lives of the people have been woven into the lives of the great beds of reeds that grow thick in Peruvian Titicaca. The reeds are eaten, they are made into islands and houses and boats. The many-layers of reeds that float upon the lake are constantly replenished to keep the islands high and dry. It is a funny, funny feeling, walking on these folded beds of reeds.
Naturally, these floating islands are a major curiosity for tourists. The locals have long moved on to wooden boats, some with motors, and away from the many tourist islands larger houses are made of wood and metal, though they still float upon the lake. The traditional life of the Uros is preserved today only in parody, for the sake of luring tourists and their dollars to the handicraft stalls and boat rides of the islanders. Spending a few hours visiting various islands, eating with the locals, spending time with them might be fun, but as it is every tourist boat (and they are legion) visits one islands, receives a brief explanation of how the reeds float, and then is given thirty minutes to take photos and buy souvenirs. It is not particularly fun or interesting.
Beyond the reed beds and the floating islands sits another island, out in the greater, deeper expanse of the lake. Isla Taquile receives far few visitors, and is far less well know than the floating islands, but it is infinitely more enchanting. Here, too, the people make a living out of the tourists that rumble through, some times staying the night, sometimes just for lunch. The difference is that here life has not been bent entirely to work the tourist industry. The people still keep sheep and make most of their clothing from homespun wool. They farm and they work, and the rest of the time they congregate in the plaza looking out onto the lake, the men in their floppy red caps and puffy shorts looking either like clowns or a religious order.
It took some time to reach Taquile, and in that time the sky clear and Titicaca began to shine. On the island we were free to wander, and poke our noses in wherever we pleased. I made my way up the ridge that runs down the island, offering massive vistas of the lake, and the mountains that surround it. It was a perfectly tranquil spot, looking down on the fields and houses covering the slopes, the tall eucalyptus trees, and the stone paths that meandered in every direction. From up there, seeing the lake properly for the first time, I was struck by what a strange thing it was; too calm and pale to be a sea, but having its own ports and shipping roots and islands and bottomless depths full of myths about Atlantean cities. The insularity of this island completely different to the insularity of say, Australia; we are isolated and surrounded by sea, but Isla Taquile is isolated and surrounded by other countries. There is certainly no sense of distrust or discomfort shown by them towards the mainlanders that daily come coursing across the water to explore their homes. Rather, the sense that they give is of a simple, content life, a hybrid of ancient farming and contemporary tourism. They are managing the strange disparity very well.
I had one free hour on the island but it more than made up for the rest of the day, herded along, on and off the boat, my head nodding asleep against the window.
And then back to Puno, and the following day another border crossing back to Bolivia, and I as I received my entry stamp I couldn’t suppress a big, silly grin from spreading across my face. I was very happy to be back.
My well-connected host in La Paz had emphatically described Tiahuanaco, the mysterious name of a lost civilisation, and of their grand ceremonial centre, now a ruin on the route from La Paz to Titicaca. He was even good enough to check the operating hours of the nearby Peruvian border for me, by phoning his friend the mayor of Tiahuanaco. Off I went.
The day was glorious, the mini-van hummed along, out of the city and into the rich green farmland, all tethered cows and adobe houses. When the driver called for Tiahuanaco I leapt from the van and into the sunny emptiness of the Bolivian countryside.
I wandered along the disused train tracks, past the half finished hotels, and ducked into a café for the usual sandwich and fries – the unimaginative staples of the vegetarian in Bolivia. By the time I finished eating and re-emerged dark clouds had blown over the town, and quavering columns of rain could be seen drifting in from the mountains.
There was nothing else to be done; I was at Tiahuanaco, but I had to be in Peru before 7pm (6pm Peruvian time). I passed through the gate and into the ruin complex as the first fists of rain thudded into the clay.
The Tiahuanaco culture flourished for millennia, rising in power and importance until about 900 A.D. By the year 1200 the civilisation had basically disappeared. The lake that had reached to the fringes of the ceremonial complex receded away, and mud and weeds accumulated over the carefully sculpted stone; later the Spanish came marauding through, exorcising the demons in stone monoliths, and appropriating stone and sacred objects for their own ceremonial centres in the old and new worlds.
Today Tiahuanaco is something of a rallying point for indigenous Bolivian culture. When he was elected, Evo staged a ‘traditional’ inauguration ceremony at the site. The ceremony was an Aymara ceremony, but the ancient Aymara were enemies of Tiahuanaco and may have contributed to their downfall. These details are less important than the emerging pride Bolivia feels in its premier pre-Colombian site.
The Tiahuanaco I visited resembled a quarry; the ancient capital being once again constructed out of the same materials, the same old stone being dug out of the mud and re-fitted to the same old walls. It is an incredible slow process, and most of the grand pyramid presiding over the site is still buried under mud. Other sites bear names like the Palace of the Sarcophaguses, but are essentially piles of exhumed stone, and the vague outline of an ancient wall.
Still, the place is impressive, and as the storm groaned overhead the place felt profoundly forlorn and once again abandoned. The gutters and irrigation still work, funnelling muddy water out of the main temple and into troughs below. A few lonely monolithic figures, one bearing the etched mark of Spanish exorcism stood tall against the deluge, their carved details still distinct. In the semi-subterranean temple distressed and worn faces leered out of the moistening stone, expressing ancient concern at the speed with which a storm can be formed in these lands. The storm that overtook the civilisation must have come on scarcely less fast.
By the time I left, heading for the border, the sun was back out and the impressive stone gates of Tiahuanaco were standing grand and regal against a blue background. As more of the civilisation is uncovered and its treasures restored the site will regain its old grandeur. But the layers of history have settled thick over Tiahuanaco, and much will remain lost and mysterious and forlorn forever.
