Was the whole world fighting to get into Detroit? Long after the French named le Détroit—at ‘the narrows’—the pinch point between two Great Lakes and so the perfect place to put a fort—after depressions in Eastern Europe and rumors of streets paved with gold brought into existence networks of steerage and a need for processing waves of humans at Ellis Island, after a boom in manufacturing to supply these new populations, after Jim Crow made blacks give up on the South, and automakers lured them north, ballooning Detroit’s population from two hundred thousand to two million; long after post-WWII highways, mortgage rates, and automobiles allowed the whites of Detroit to flee to suburbs, and construction destroyed black neighborhoods to create highways that allowed white-collar workers to cross the city to get to offices from which they began to replace workers with robots and move the factories themselves to the unionless South, setting off a series of riots, and leaving behind bakeries, uniform cleaners, schools, delivery trucks, post offices, and hundreds of other enterprises that were no longer needed after the employees themselves began to desert what had become a sinking ship, long after tax streams dried up, and the city declared bankruptcy and streetlights went dark, and pavement began to crumble, and the aging water system sprung thousands of leaks for which there was no money to repair, and over 500 deserted buildings could burn down in a single night because there was no fire department to put them out; long after rain began pouring through the roofs of what had been grand movie palaces, and trees broke through the marble floors of what had been bank lobbies, and the snow howled through skyscrapers that used to have glass in their windows, and the city began to look like a modern-day Rome after its fall, and in desperation, the city auctioned off its last giraffe, its Rembrandt, and whatever other treasures it had in order to keep a minimal staff working its skeletal hospitals, and a few police to handle at least the murders, even if anyone could just park their cars anywhere they wanted, and did, even on the steps of those museums, without anyone there to write a ticket let alone keep order, and what had been a thriving metropolis became a landscape of cavernous factories, mansions gone to ruin, block upon block of residential housing turned into charred frames, or vacant lots that from the air looked like a vast prairie of weeds bisected by a grid of crumbling streets—like the grid that had given away the location of Atlantis on photos of the Mediterranean floor—or a single house that might remain— little house on the post-apocalyptic prairie—surrounded by barbed wire to keep scavengers from tearing off its aluminum siding while the owners were at work; or pleasure palaces, neo-classical gems of green-glazed brick with stone mosaics, and Terra-cotta edging, whose roofs had collapsed and were used to store junk cars the way Roman villas became barns for sheep, and squatters moved into ruins, and property values plunged so low that it was said if you bought a parking lot, the city would throw in an abandoned skyscraper; long after a few millionaires began buying up the deserted properties for pennies; after they began renovating space and leasing it to artists for next to nothing, then start-up companies, after rising seas began inundating Miami, Venice and New Orleans, Providence, and Brooklyn—after most of Bangladesh disappeared; after islands like the Maldives and Fiji vanished under the waves, after snakes overran Florida, droughts burnt up the western states, drying up reservoirs and leaving them with the famous ‘bathtub ring’; after the Sahara spread over most of Africa, and the whole world was on the move, Detroit began to look better and better—a Great Lake full of fresh water that the city had successfully defended from companies that tried to bottle it, or pipe it out west, mild winters, long beautiful springs and autumns, the one zone in America that wasn’t either burning with drought or under water—a freak of nature created by the airstream…
Multiply this exponentially: storms drive seas up the Ganges tributaries, turning what had been the village’s fresh water supply brackish; brackish water floods fields, leaving them white with salt. Trees die. Village women search the muddy bottom of shallow seas that had been fields for roots that could be burnt as firewood; crops fail; farmers sell their youngest children to pay for seeds; after two years of near starvation, they move inland, but the slums there are even more crowded, bursting with refugees already driven there, so they decide to keep moving, to take their chances on rafts made of truck tires, or cross war zones…. They’ve heard of a mythical land, called Dee-troy, where the water is sweet, the temperature mild, the land fat…. Millions have heard this story.
In the renovated and gleaming Detroit Museum of Art, funded by billionaires who owned most of downtown, there’s a picture of Noah’s flood that shows the last humans who, along with a mother tiger trying to save her cubs, have been driven to a mountain peak. Locals can’t help but think that this picture has something to say to them, but that it would be more truthful if the picture was large enough to include all mass migrations: the red fox population and the lemming population and the golden plover and all the other animals and insects, but also populations from what had been Bangladesh and Brooklyn, joining long caravans of RVs abandoning what had been Florida and Texas, refugees from fires and floods, clamoring for the high ground, driven by heat, hurricanes, war, famine, drought, mosquitos, snakes, the animals, plants, and people pushing those at the top higher still, till they could go no higher, and so had no choice but to start kicking down at those grabbing at their ankles….
The nightly news was full of what had become a regular ritual: men in bio-suits burning thousands of infected animals, this time chickens….
Europe braces. Despite protests by wildlife preservation groups, several villages in Germany began stringing nets through the forests in an effort to keep out migrating birds, migrating birds becoming the new Big Bad Wolf. As one provincial council member put it, “We have to do something!”
From the back seat, she could hear the voice of children: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?…”
