By Amanda Knox

By the end of our four-day trip to Detroit, Chris, Gavin and I were silly giddy. It was that state of exhaustion when you really should go to bed but instead linger a little longer. It was not enough sleep, sensory overload. It was getting a sense of Motor City by incessantly weaving our way through, around, and back again. We were there to scout locations for their next novel, and it was the joy of having made a point to take in as much as we could, details both striking and subtle, until our notes blurred before our eyes and we finally melted into the deflated cushions of row 31 on the 737 bearing us home again.

At first glance, the difference between Detroit and Seattle was more stark than you’d expect between one U.S. metropolis and another. The largely grey, flat landscape was dominated by reiterations of Baptist Missionary Churches, Coney Island fast food joints, Lotto + Check Cashing storefronts, burned-out houses, ambulance chaser billboards, car washes, and vacant and crumbling monoliths. We drove through neighborhoods where house after house—big houses, four-story houses, the kind with parlors, porches, and cellars—was abandoned, siding warped and unfurling like cedar bark, littered with black rubble, scorched wood, windows reduced to fractured fangs of glass, awnings toppled or askew in defiance of gravity, rooftops cratered and caved in like Mt. St. Helens. We drove around vacant and crumbling warehouses and parking lots like from the zombie apocalypse, or else occupied business strips like from a noir film, strip clubs and liquor stores set against neon-lit Warriors for Jesus storefronts and makeshift recreation centers, the streets noticeably lacking in human traffic.

The first glance was both stunning and oddly repetitive. It was also humbling. After all, Detroit had once been the hub of American progress, where the ideas of the most highly educated engineers and businessmen from across the country were fathered-forth, found physical form, and were distributed to the masses. Would Seattle be any different were Amazon and Microsoft to implode?

That was the other difference I noticed, past the stainless steel mirrors, bankruptcy advertisements, and the homeless man meandering blindly across an empty, five-lane thoroughfare. The lone walls left standing of otherwise collapsed houses hinted at it. The graffitied “Detroit Vs. Everyone” and “We Keeps It 300 percent” slogans were another clue. The statue of a giant fist, poised like a battering ram in Detroit’s Hart Plaza, seemed to punctuate it. It was how in Detroit there can coexist the extremes of both mortality and vitality.

It was like delving into an alternative reality, Seattle Amanda meeting Detroit Amanda. At the LGBT-friendly bar where she, Gavin, Chris and I first met up for a drink, Detroit Amanda pounded the table with her fist as we discussed free trade politics and the Flint water disaster. Wide-eyed Seattle Amanda was quietly ignorant. Only a few years older than me, Detroit Amanda was the owner of her own coffeeshop, Always Brewing Detroit, where she hosted local art and poetry events and breathed her own life force back into her city’s culture and economy. Detroit Amanda was like the Wild West version of Seattle Amanda, a survivor and entrepreneur, passionate and protective of the heart of her city in the face of adversity. It would have been easy to overlook her, and others like her, in the face of so many beautiful and sensational ruins, but that would have meant missing out on the truth of Detroit, its beating heart.