Paul Simon sung in America that it took four days for him to hitchhike from Saginaw, referring to the lonely souls on the highways of a changing nation in his famous soundscape song from the 1960s.
Then, battered by the winds of foreign competition, Michigan’s once-mighty auto manufacturers had closed, signaling the start of this city’s long, steady collapse.
The loneliness and angst of Simon and Art Garfunkel’s song are amplified many times over in our times.
I discovered Rachel Oviedo, 57, gazing out her veranda at the street scene.
We spend the entire day here, she informed me. “They should demolish it and build something else since we see homeless people coming in and going out of there.”
“A supermarket,” she proposed. “Because there are no grocery stores in this area.”
When I first met her, she told me she wasn’t sure how she would vote the day before Tuesday night’s debate in Philadelphia.
She claimed that although Kamala Harris was promising but was still relatively unknown, Donald Trump felt more established and like “a man of his word.”
She stated, “I like her, but we don’t know what she’s going to do.”
