Morning in a French Orbit

Dark coffee in the rough clay rooster mug, my dad's old paisley bathrobe, a whole pink grapefruit in an orange bowl, strawberry cream yogurt, sun. 

The light here is gentle and direct.

It's my first morning alone in Detroit. (Or was, when I began this entry.) Morning alone is a test of a place, of the homeness of it, I think. Detroit, oddly, seems to be getting an A. I feel peace here I never felt in the mountains, comfort looking out on rooftops that I never felt gazing at Appalachian treetops. A feel for the city that makes me want to wander, find people, know who they are. 

Two psychics - vastly different people living in vastly different places with vastly different approaches to their work -- have remarked, unprompted, that Detroit feels like home to me.  They can't explain it. I can't either, exactly, but I agree. I feel guilty for it, almost, or even embarrassed - but I feel it.

I feel at home in France, too, and in French Canada, and speaking French. Maybe that explains it. Those who familiar with the history of New France can skip the next couple of paragraphs, but for those of us who are unversed, here's a quick glimpse of the motor city origins, grace à nos amis at wikipedia:

Detroit was named by French officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a controversial adventurer, trader, and “visionary” who (secretly) shipped off from Paris to escape punishment for unknown crimes, arriving in Canada in 1683 at age 25. After changing his name from Antoine Laumet to sieur Antoine de Lamothe-Cadillac to claim nobility and protect his identity, he founded and named Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit in 1701. Détroit, literally translated as "strait," is short for “le détroit du lac Érie,”  the narrow passage that links Lake Erie and Huron, now known as the Detroit River. 

Then man credited for noticing the "ideal spot for a settlement" on the North bank of the strait is Father Hennepin, a member of the Franciscan Recollect order (Les Récollets, credited with brewing the first beer in New France in 1620). One of the four missionaries sent by the Récollets to New France in 1675 at the request of Louis XIV, Hennepin sailed with La Salle on the great lakes and later described the vast territories of the new continent in three books that were largely debunked by later historians. Hennepin has been immortalized in place names all over North America, and in "The Hennepin Avenue Bridge," the final track on the 2006 album 13 by Brian Setzer. (Did I mention I was using wikipedia?)

Back to Detroit, where the British lopped off the accent aigu after gaining control during the French and Indian War (1760). Ottowa leader Chief Pontiac laid siege to the Fort of Detroit in Pontiac's Rebellion three years later, but was as unsuccessful as his namesake, the auto line that gave birth to such classics as the Star Chief, the Bonneville, and the GTO, but was recently deleted from GM's repertoire like an outdated accent mark.

The British kept control of the city until it passed to the US in 1796 as part of the Jay Treaty. This treaty, which also laid the groundwork for a decade of largely peaceful trade between the US and British-controlled Canada, was motivated, like so many diplomatic agreements, by fear of a political rival. In 1791, the first coalition of the French Revolutionary Wars had thrown France into chaos while the rest of Europe watched, unnerved and unsure of how best to exploit the situation – or at the very least how to protect their interests from its potentially destructive reach. Britain found one solution in the Jay Treaty, which, as wikipedia describes it, was formed to “improve relations with the US to keep the US from falling into the French orbit”.

Centuries later, I, an  American of somewhat British descent, seem to have yielded to the very danger the Jay Treaty was designed to prevent. Ever since tasting the delight of the word “hippopotame” in my mouth in fourth grade, I have been falling into a French orbit, and that orbit has, oddly, led me to Detroit. Where I feel at home. It could be, as they say on the West Coast, a "past life thing"...maybe I landed to New France 3 centuries ago and followed the ballsy Cadillac to that auspicious spot on the North shore of the strait. Previous incarnations aside, there is a trace, however faint, of Frenchness in the air...and maybe that's enough for me.

On a less personal (and quite possibly more interesting) note: it seems fitting that, for more than a century, the success and failure of this city - a place "discovered" by an ambitious missionary who wrote fake descriptions of the glorious new continent, and settled by a law-dodging adventurer who invented a fictional identity for himself (only to serve 5 years in the Bastille when he returned to France decades later and reverted to his birth name in order to claim his inheritance) - has been inextricably bound with the success and failure of an industry built on the American art of self-reinvention. 

But that's the subject of another blog, n'est-ce pas?

Till then...