Meeting the Prodigal Son on Woodward Avenue...Part I

Walking on a narrow trail, we get to see faces of the people we pass.  Walking slows us, and we have a chance to notice their gait, their posture, their way of holding and moving themselves.  When they are ahead of us for some time, don’t we wonder about them, like we wonder about a distant house, its lighted windows calling to us in the night, its inner life a mystery to us? 

My route to work, those last ten years at University of Detroit Mercy, had begun as just such a foot trail from Saginaw Bay to the nearest part of what is now called the Detroit River.  It was members of the Sauk Tribe, pushed south from the St. Lawrence River by other tribes, who walked along it, hunting and trading as they followed the trail over wooded hills, stream-flooded valleys, swampy and riverside flood plains.  In 1701 Antoine Cadillac and other French speaking found that settlement at Detroit River end of that trail a good place to disembark on their quest for settlement and commerce, and that narrow trail with its way of bringing people close to each other would begin to change, as European settlers began to widen it, and to .  By 1805 Thomas Jefferson’s appointed magistrate for the territory, decided to make it 100 feet wide, as a matter of fact, from the river to the town of Pontiac 27 miles to the north.  By the time it was accomplished, it bore his name – Woodward Avenue.  And a century later Henry Ford and leaders from General Motors conspired to pave the old Saginaw Trail with concrete to speed travel between their headquarters and factories in Detroit, Highland Park, and Pontiac. 

Now Woodward Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Downtown Pontiac remains six lanes wide, a center lane in places for left turns, and on long stretches a wide, landscaped median.  While the Saginaw trail brought members of the Sauk Tribe slowly through hill and valley and swamp, Woodward Avenue brings rich and poor of many cultures as quickly as possible

through poor and rich territories.  The poverty of now-worn out Pontiac and Highland Park and most of Detroit at the northern and southern extremes of Woodward is some of the worst in the country.  And in the middle, between the impoverished northern and southern ends of the thoroughfare, are some of the wealthiest suburbs, including Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills.

For thirty years we lived in Detroit, and I could walk the narrow trail of sidewalks a half-mile from our two-flat to my building on campus.  On warm days I could stop and greet old folks watering their lawns, and young moms with their kids.  We were neither rich nor poor.  We had enough to get by.  And we knew each other, enough to see even at a distance the subtle cues of gait, or posture, or the lines on our faces, how we were doing.  By the time we came close enough for a greeting, we had come to determine whether a cheerful tone was welcome, or a hushed tone would be more respectful.  We had time to recall whether there was a sick child, or an aging parent beginning to forget, or simpler things, like a rosebush that is finally blooming after years of effort.

But for the last ten years of my work, we were invited to move from our empty nest near campus to an apartment at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House in Bloomfield Hills, halfway between Detroit and Pontiac, the wealthy middle of the otherwise poor thoroughfare.  The opportunity to be a kind of resident woodworker there in exchange for our living quarters was too good to pass up.  It gave us a quiet place to live, and gave me a spacious workshop. The downside was that now instead of a half-mile stroll to campus, I had a twelve mile drive south, on Woodard Avenue.   

It was on that drive, halfway though our ten years there, that I met the Prodigal Son.  I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.