A few months ago, after a work visit to U of M Dearborn, I stumbled upon Fair Lane, the estate of Henry and Clara Ford. I parked my car in an empty lot and made my way to the sprawling 17-acre estate with a 56-room mansion on the Rouge River. I’d never thought much about Henry Ford, despite his being a defining and controversial figure in Michigan and American history.
Still buzzing a bit from chasing 40 high school kids around campus, I meandered along a wooded path, around a stone patio, and down to the river. I paused and reflected, as I am inclined to do when I’m near a body of water. I climbed a small hill to an old wooden bench, strategically placed to overlook the garden adjacent to the river.
Ford employed 26 full-time gardeners, many of whom spent years of their lives tending to this garden. I thought of what it must have been like to be Henry Ford, looking over at his terraced gardens framing the river, and what a sunset or a sunrise might look like here, how it must have renewed him each day before he had to make a difficult decision as one of the architects of American industrialization. I closed my eyes and listened for the flow of the river, for birds chirping, for silence.
For a few seconds, there was nothing. It was 1910. There were real flowers in the garden.
But after a few moments, the deafening whirr of cars on the Southfield Freeway, one after the other, louder than the river, louder than the birds, louder than whatever tranquility was starting to settle in my head.
This man had created an elaborate, vast natural escape from the factory, the office, corporate culture, and the modern conveniences and vices of society. All he wanted was a quiet place to look at his garden and listen to the river. Just some silence and solitude. And now, on this hallowed ground, the grating sound of a thousand metal boxes on wheels was inescapable.
If he were sitting on that bench, how would he feel? Proud that every third or fourth car whizzing down the highway was his creation? Or horrified that the peace he worked so hard to create was now impossible to find?
I reflect on that day at Fair Lane when I’m checking my phone instead of reading to my kids. I’m back on that bench, closing my eyes, smelling the flowers.
Phone in the drawer. Back to the garden.
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