The chaser approaches cautiously, raising his large frame from the stoop on which he sits, and ambles over. "Hi, I'm Mike." I extend a hand outward. "Sorry I smell," he says. "There was a house fire down the street this morning that I had to go check out." He doesn't offer his name. His billowy frame is draped in billowy clothes - tattered jeans, dirty sweatshirt, worn-out shoes. His beard is unkempt and his glasses are foggy, and his photos of the city are beautiful - hundreds of snaps of an abandoned Detroit that outsiders don't dare to see, and locals don't want to see. I found his site, Detroit Urbex, when researching my trip, and when I inquired about a tour of the town, he cautiously agreed to take me around.

I ask about the house fire. His phone is equipped with a police scanner, and whenever disaster strikes, he scrambles out to take photos. But all the fires have been the same, he laments. "I'm waiting for a certain type of fire." He's writing a book. The details are vague. From his familiarity with Detroit, I would've assumed him a long time local - turns out he commutes every weekend from Ohio to pick amidst the rubble. Apparently Detroit's not his only stop. "Dearborn is my Disneyland," he says.

We pile into my rental, a miniature Fiat. It takes some finagling before the chaser can fit. Here in the heart of american muscle and I'm stuck with the J-Lo mobile. You'd expect some more chunk in the trunk.

I'd been milking him for a little more direction - a list of his favorite spots. An itinerary of some sort. When none was forthcoming, I asked him which was the hardest to get into. He took me to Fisher.

The old plant sits on Piquette, neighbored by a few large scrap yards and factories. Windows are broken, fences rent apart. It may have been difficult to enter at one point, but today, as we scout the southern side, we see a large breach in its decaying hull. It looks like someone's driven a truck through. "That's new," the chaser says. Apparently he visits these sites often - taking notes on their progression or regression, like some sort of foster father. He can tell you when they became abandoned, when they caught fire, at what point things started disappearing from inside, and when the building was finally demolished.

Inside Fisher is a glimpse of the past. The framework of old machinery still stands - paint sheds, assembly conveyors, lifts, hoists, joists. "This was a Kahn building." Taggers have painted over what windows remain, and the light that shines bathes the scene an eery blue. From the ceiling hang thousands of snot-like stalactites. The chaser reads my gaze. "Calcium carbonate. Water seeps through cracks, combines with chemicals in the air and concrete, and these things form."

On the roof we stand and survey the scene. "That's Russell Street." He's pointing a fat finger toward a large warehouse district. "It's been converted into an arts studio." It is a rare example, I will soon learn, of salvaged space. The finger swings toward downtown - "there was a skyscraper there, a skyscraper there, Majestic there, Ford auditorium there. That one, that one, and that one are abandoned. You can walk right in and up to the top of that one. Forty stories." He spots a guard in the nearby yard who looks back up at us. I move back a pace but the chaser remains. "They only care about protecting the scrap."

We see an abandoned police station, an abandoned fire station, an abandoned luxury housing complex stripped bare. "This was standing six weeks ago." At Brewster Projects we're chased away. On Robinwood we see the signs of folks that were chased out long ago - classic homes collapsing in on themselves, their corpses litter the street - modern day mastodons extinct or headed that way. Maybe one in twenty is occupied. Residents wander here and there, zombies amidst the wreckage. The chaser waves out his window to one such zombie. "That's Lucy. She's cool." Atop the Packard plant I see a sign of what the apocalypse might look like - three million square feet of shattered industry.

"I don't understand why there are so many fires. Surely the insurance companies aren't paying out on widespread arson?"

"Not insurance, usually."

"Squatters?"

"Sometimes. They start a fire to keep warm, they leave it going, the building burns. But mostly it's scrappers."

"Scrappers?"

"When a building burns to the ground, all of the heavy stuff from all of the floors collapses to the ground, so it's easier to haul out." He points to a truck in the distance. There's some scrappers there."

"Should we go talk to them?"

He shakes his head. "Best not to. Some of them can be territorial. If I was on my own I might."

Another figure enters our field of view - a lone photographer with a large camera and tripod in tow. It brings to mind a story I read. An author for Vice, in an article entitled "Something something something Detroit," once lamented - "If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house." Photographers being sent on assignment to sum up the essence of Detroit in a six hour stay - shoot some ruin porn, crop the shot to shave off the city's functional side, head back to New York, Chicago, LA. I suppose my own mission, though recreationally motivated, hasn't been much different.

What I want from the chaser is some sort of value judgment - on Detroit, on its residents, its leadership, the scrappers, anything. But he stays aloof. I can't tell if he knows about the city, cares for the city, or if he's just another pornographer. So I do my best to form my own value judgment.

The stories are old but the scene hasn't changed. Detroit is wounded, and its hard fought battle to return to former glory has failed time and time again. A city once the richest in the nation, one point seven million residents strong, now stands at seven hundred thousand. White flight, they say, but it seems to me that everyone is fleeing - black white or otherwise. Hundreds have even gone so far as to disinter their dead and bury them somewhere safer, like the suburbs. What logical conclusion then but for these vampire scrappers to crawl out of their coffins and salvage what is left? The king of the vampires might be Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit's former mayor - sentenced to five years probation for perjury and obstruction of justice amidst widespread accusations of corruption. Banished, the former Mayor claimed financial hardship in response to his inability to pay a hundred and sixty dollars a month in restitution. Yesterday he bought a house in Houston for three million.

And while thousands focus on calling out the causes of decline - industrial collapse, drug wars, race wars, arson, bankruptcy, etcetera, no one seems to come to agreement on a solution. The city pours money into repopulating its core, trying to raise this tumbled tower of babel. But the money's not enough without some self sustaining industry to stand on. And the thing that scares me is that Detroit seems like a blueprint. As economies falter and markets fail, this scene before us seems a very likely scenario for other U.S. cities.

So what's to be done? The best solution I've heard comes from local Detroiter John Gallagher, in a book called Reimagining Detroit. "Many politicos tout fantasy versions of the city's comeback. Repopulating vast empty spaces, returning downtown to the shopping mecca it once was. That ship sailed a long time ago. The more time and money we waste on such fantastic visions, the worse Detroit will become. A better future is possible if those of us who call the city home make the right choices. And where does that possibility lie? In an unqualified acceptance of Detroit as a smaller but better city. Detroit will continue to lose population for a time, and too many ciritcs will see that loss as a death sentence. They believe that a shrinking city is a shameful place."

Gallagher goes on to suggest that the vacant lots once slated for development could be turned into community gardens. Ten lane trafficways could be turned into bike lanes, transit lines. Streams and wetlands buried to provide sewers for a growing city could be unearthed to create a greener environment. Shattered government kleptocracies could make room for strong local leadership. It's a nice picture of Detroit's future. It seems a plausible one to me.

The sky is darkening, rain is falling, my time with the chaser is dwindling. We make one last stop on Heidelberg, where the street has become a canvas. The six remaining homes on this two block span are bedecked in color and shape. The detritus of a declining Detroit has been repurposed as art, tacked to the sides of houses, painted on sidewalks, and scattered about the yards, a surreal escape from an otherwise muted reality. The artist, Tyree Guyton, grew up on this block. Realizing that his chosen audience would not go to some upscale art gallery, he brought the gallery to his block, and welcomed the audience in on the action. The work of city officials, local artists, and school children is on display, come what criticism may. Huddled under my rain jacket and peering at the rain soaked scene, it's hard to tell what's winning, the color or the gloom. I look to the chaser for answers and he simply nods, a signal that our time is done.

At his doorstep we shake hands, and I ask him what his plans are for the rest of the night. "Probably sit by the scanner," he says. "Wait for another fire."