En route to covering a visit by president Obama to an auto plant in Toledo, Ohio, I stopped overnight in Detroit. Admission: I’d never seen the city, and I wouldn’t see it this time, either, opting instead for a night in exurbia and an early start in the morning. The images I had in my mind before getting there were no different from the usual coverage of Detroit and its fellow sad cities: grey colors, postindustrial decay, the iron tumbleweeds of a formerly bustling steeltown in America. I wasn’t prepared for the silent void I got instead.

Yet, at first, a glance out of the window while on descent revealed a classic American scene.  

“New York it’s not,” the guy in the seat in front told me as I snapped away. Still it looked clean and normal from the air, its highway junctions and tall buildings and stadium doubtlessly serving as indicators of home to the natives: here is a city like all its sisters in this land, here is a baseball diamond, here is a sign that things are all right. But the traffic looked pretty scarce on those wide roads. Minutes later at the airport, a ridiculously oversized but very efficient behemoth built in late-20th century International Airworld style, I was struck by the low ratio of people to available space. Luminous and airy all right, but where’s everybody? O’Hare or Atlanta would have been thronged at five o’clock on a working Thursday. It seemed to be the right building in the wrong place. It looked like the airports in Shanghai, Paris, Frankfurt – but it didn’t feel like them. The big 777 parked behind the fountain would be going to one of them, most likely.

That wasn’t where I was going. I was going to a Holiday Inn in a Hertz car, past a landscape far cleaner and emptier than I thought, following the voice from my Android’s satnav app through what felt like the twilight zone, with no sounds except the occasional truck or plane. Then I walked around, looking for more emptiness, finding it. A backward sign with a hole in it, job placement notices, blue skies shining on not much at all. And an empty Red Roof Inn whose walls got buffeted every time a truck sped by.

The eerie quiet of a sports bar / restaurant in the exurbs, interrupted by baseball scores and the scream of jets, evoked a midwestern Lost in Translation. Sarah the waitress called me “Sir”, but patted me on the thigh when she brought me the check. Midwestern friendliness? Midwestern bizarro on a strange summery night with a cold breeze? And what would Edward Hopper have done with the shot I tried to take thinking like him?

I never felt so much like I was in America.  

(Technical note. Good photos: Nikon D700 and 24-120 VR lens, old version. Crap photos: phone.)