If you’ve been thinking about places and roots and history and destiny like I have lately*, loading into the Ypsilanti Freight House in Depot Town is gonna stir up some ghosts. Built in 1878, the building was renovated in the 2000s and is used today for events, including a monthly indoor/outdoor flea market, where I found myself yesterday peddling records.
It's a long, narrow brick warehouse, which means if you don’t pick a spot by the door, each trip inside meanders up a ramp and then down a cavernous main hall. Rolling a dolly full of heavy record boxes is like transporting cargo on a ship under sail – the uneven floorboards pitch and yaw, protesting this small incursion so many decades after these walls stored boxcars of goods as a railroad hub.
There’s at least one Amtrak passenger line still using the tracks that run alongside the Freight House, and the train blows its whistle as it screams through town just as we’re getting the market running. You can ride from Detroit to Ann Arbor for $8, but there’s no stop in Depot Town anymore for wanderers, despite some push from the locals to get back on Amtrak’s map.
When I traveled with my band, we spend a night in San Marcos, Texas, and found it full of Austin expats who bailed out when their original home got less weird and too pricey and paved-over. Ypsilanti sort of feels like the Ann Arbor version of that, at least at flea market time. I found myself in conversation with white-haired old ladies recounting stories of being arrested at protests in the 1970s, out trans record collectors with their pronouns on buttons on the front of their shirts, and brunching couples carrying tiny dogs and gently carping about how we said we weren’t bringing half the flea market home with us this time before we left the house, Joel.
The turnout was light, or maybe most of the browsers stuck with the outdoor vendors to enjoy the almost supernaturally beautiful weather. I did pretty well, though, and once again found myself enjoying the conversations and little interactions with folks in a way that would have surprised (and possibly disgusted) the hungover record store clerk of my sordid past.
This is the kind of spot I need to bolster my schedule if I’m gonna keep doing live events – the setup fee is low, it’s less than an hour from home, and I believe I was the only one with mainly music to sell. The customers arrived in steady waves even till the very end, unlike a lot of record shows, but I was still able to hit the grocery store on the way home and be in my kitchen making dinner before 6.
One nice thing about in-person events for the chronically online person is the chance to temporarily unplug from the current state of the world. For historical context, this weekend marked some kind of undeniable health issue that befell Donald Trump, leading to his absence from TV cameras and a groundswell of speculation about whether he was incapacitated or dead. In keeping with his regime’s tradition of malicious incompetence, all their heavy-handed attempts to show proof of life have just made everything worse.
My feelings about how best to ride out this tumultuous period in America’s deathroll change depending on where I went most recently. Every time I travel to the west coast, I feel the urge to pull up stakes and leave Ohio behind before its relatively sane cities follow the rural counties’ lead in becoming the Arkansas of the north. One weekend in Chicago, and I long for a neighborhood storefront record store and a walkup apartment, snowstorms and parking spot dibs be damned. I can’t imagine how much of a conflicted pain in the ass I’ll be after a trip to Italy this December.
But then I do a record show in a revitalized neighborhood near downtown in my own city, and I’m filled with can-do spirit about making changes where I am. I see my friend building a massive new brewery in the forgotten remains of Youngstown and it reminds me that these scarred, tough places are full of people who built this country – and who can, at least in theory, be reminded that the vultures and demagogues making them punch themselves in the face at the ballot box don’t care about them.
I’d almost settled the question in my mind based solely on the fact that the hipper enclaves of our nation might well be underwater or dying of thirst by the time I’m too old to wield weapons in a street fight in Barter Town. But apparently I wasn’t the only one with my eye on the future treasure hoard that is the Great Lakes:
If the tech bros and private equity goblins can slurp Lake Erie dry, there’s no point in basing my plans for the sunset of my years on anything resembling physical safety. And wouldn’t it be great to live somewhere with walkable bodegas and light rail and a less disgusting tapas-to-Hardee’s ratio?
I’m no closer to knowing where I wanna live when I grow up. The President is no closer to admitting he’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Labor Day is dawning on a land where you can’t build anything and mail it out of the country because the guy with the nuclear codes still doesn’t know the definition of the word tariff.
But I sold enough records in a 150-year-old building today to square up my bank account and fill the fridge. For now, at least, the beer is cold, the water is running clean from my tap, and I’m always a four hour train ride from broader horizons and better Persian food. Maybe the cost of living at a physical crossroads is a constant curiosity about what life would be like down any of those paved-over horse trails leading to bigger and more prestigious ports of call.
* possibly the most pretentious, ten-paragraphs-of-exposition-before-the-casserole-recipe way of looking at deciding where to put a 1200-foot record store anyone has ever devised