Flowing South

On the way to the Florida Keys: As Michigan fell behind yesterday, a question soon arose and then grew ever more insistent. Where is the Great Recession? The more we saw the country's bigger picture, as revealed by life's flow along I-75 South, the more we remembered another trip, that from Detroit to Seattle taken several recessions earlier. Back then we'd lifted out of Michigan's decades-deep gravity well and beheld what was then one of the peaks of Silicone Mountain. We left yesterday under gloomy skies and drizzle, but the skies grew blue and the sun rose. Ohio unfolded as the well-remembered industrial colossus still--but the very mass of trucks and cars, while threatening to those no longer used to the vast flow along such arteries, signaled economic activity on what seemed an undiminished scale.