You never know when something long forgotten might crop up on the landscape and bring with it a flood of memories. Such was the case while driving on I-94 in Michigan with my buddy Alan recently. Just outside of Detroit, we passed the world’s largest tire. It’s an 80 foot tall, 12 ton giant that I vaguely remembered from my childhood as a Ferris wheel spinning at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. Long ago stripped of its gondolas, it was moved to Allen Park, Michigan in 1966, a fitting location near the Motor City.
Determined to admire an object out of my past, we found the dirt road leading to the rubber behemoth at the back end of a college parking lot. Unfortunately, the area was fenced and gated, the way blocked with construction materials and heavy equipment. I went to the construction trailer which was as cold as a meat locker on this hot, humid day, but found no one. I hailed a hard-hatted surveyor on the other side of the lot, but she shook her head, saying the bridge over the creek was out.
Just as we were about to leave disappointed, a big white pickup arrived in a cloud of dust from the direction of the tire. Behind the wheel was Jason Y., a muscular fellow with a tan and sunglasses who bore a slight resemblance to Brad Pitt. The inspector on this sewer project which called for 5,100 feet of 13 foot diameter tunnel, he confirmed that the bridge was out. He was deeply apologetic, noting that locals like him enjoyed showing off the big wheel because it was an icon, a marker of home. As a kid he remembered seeing it when returning from long car trips with his parents, a reassuring sign that soon he’d be in his own room.
As we walked back to the car in defeat, Jason shouted that he’d radioed the construction crew and to his surprise they’d just opened the bridge. Piling into his truck, we took the rough, rutted, and muddy track to the huge monument to America on wheels where it sat behind a chain link fence topped with concertina wire, like an animal in a zoo.
To Alan and me it might just have been really big kitsch, something to say we’d seen and bagged with a photo on our safari through Michigan. But to some locals, at least, this relic of an era when America’s auto industry was unrivaled had meaning and was embedded with a deep sense of place.
