Riders Block XII

DAY 12

Grand Forks, ND to Yankton, SD

400 miles

 

Morning in North Dakota is cold but the sky is clear of clouds so I get in my car and cross back over into Minnesota in order to take US 75 instead of interstate 29.  The road is flat and straight and every once in a while I pass a flatbed truck or a slow-moving farm vehicle that has to take the highway to get to the other side of his farm, a mile or so down the road.  Route 75 is apparently the King of Roads, or so says the signs that I pass warning me of upcoming towns with populations in the two hundreds.

I stop in Fargo, passing back over the Red River of the North into the Dakotas and have breakfast at Denny’s.  It is certainly not my first choice but I am hungry and I want to eat and get back on the road.  When I emerge from the restaurant, the blue sky has complete disappeared under a dark gray cloud and I marvel at how in thirty minutes the weather can shift so dramatically.  I drive for most of the day under a black cloud that seems to be stretched across the sky in southeasterly manner but every time I think I am going to get out from under it, the wind shifts and the cloud continues to sit over my car, dumping heavy rain on me at thirty minute intervals. 

The hills of North and South Dakota look like a poorly maintained golf course.  They are brown and craggy with old fence posts and tenuous-looking wire guarding their property or keeping cattle contained.  At one farm, a lone barn with no foundation looks as if it dates from the late nineteenth century.  It sits at an angle amongst freshly rolled bales of hay on a landscape that looks like the waves of a rough sea.  Cattle dots the hills, which roll with rockiness in some places and then are without a single rise or fall all the way to the horizon in another.

The majority of towns in North and South Dakota seem to be built along the major route through the town, whether it be 75 or 81.  As you approach the town, you see the skyscraping industrial buildings, either dealing in feed or seed or sand or gravel and then after you pass the ugly, steel gray building, you see a few businesses and houses and then the corn fields and ranches return.  This routine happened without fail the entire way south through the two states, almost like the same person was the town planner for every hamlet in the Dakotas.

In the evening, the sky becomes blue and the air warms and I stop at dusk by Silver Lake, which is so small it is not even on my map.  The lake sits off route 81 and actually looks metallic in the fading light.  I stay the night in Yankton, SD.  The town sits on the Missouri River, which creates the border of South Dakota and Nebraska.  The old woman at the desk is slow and it takes her more than twenty minutes to complete my transaction.  When I tell her about my travels, she tells me about her own and how she drove to Iowa with her niece to find her brother’s grave and couldn’t find it.  After this exhausting encounter I retire to my room and fall asleep. 

Riders Block XI

DAY 11

Land O’ Lakes, WI to Grand Forks, ND

430 miles

 

I wake up and immediately can tell that I am sick.  I use the bathroom a few times and fall back to sleep in between before my alarm clock goes off at eight thirty.  Chris and Dave and I eat a big breakfast together and I am holding it together, using the bathroom at fifteen-minute intervals at this point.  Dave lets me drive his ATV down their road and out onto the snowmobile trails and I go about twenty-five to thirty miles an hour down the gravel path.  The ride is exhilarating and I begin to understand why someone would want to drive cross-country on a motorcycle.

I say goodbye to Chris and Dave, who have a six hour drive of their own back to their place in Ingleside, and head off west on route 2.  The road brings me back up into the UP because of the sloping border between the two states and it is over an hour again before I am back in Wisconsin, this time by the far northern coast of the state.  The northern woods is nothing but wilderness with a few dipping hills and when I look in my side mirror and see no cars at all I suddenly become aware of how alone I am.  As I drive through thick forests and tiny houses I see signs for oncoming towns with names like Birch, Odana, Ino, Iron River and Maple and underneath each name, the welcoming signs say Unincorporated.  A couple of the towns are on an Indian Reservation, so this makes sense, but others are outside of it and still the towns are not officially a part of the union.  I am not sure what this means for their credibility when it comes to wanting something from the government or what it means when it comes time to pay the tax man, but I had never seen signs before explicitly telling a traveler that they were not in an officially-sanction township.

Lake Superior in Wisconsin is dark blue and this probably has something to do with the storm clouds overhead.  It rains on and off and I stop at the lake near Asheville but the water is cold and the temperature outside is colder so I give up on swimming in the world’s largest fresh water lake one last time.  Near Superior, WI and Duluth, MN, which are on the lake, separated by the St. Louis Bay and connected by the Bong Memorial Bridge, the view of the water is beautiful but the coast is covered with smoke stacks and coal chutes.  After I pass into the land of ten thousand lakes, the clouds break apart and the scorching heat returns and I have to pull over and quickly put sunscreen all over the left side of my body.

Northern Minnesota looks like what I assume Siberia looks like.  The road is flat and straight and is surrounded by dense, forests of gnarled pine trees.  In some areas where it looks as if the forest has been cleared for timber, there are small seedlings climbing their way towards the sky, interspersed with gray, dead skeletons.  In the air above the woods eagles and hawks circle the road looking for something to eat.  I stop in Grand Rapids after having stopped many other times just to use local bathrooms, coming out of each one feeling sicker and more drained than before.  I pass over the Mississippi, which is merely a tiny, marshy-looking river at this point, winding through boggy wetlands, and know that it is only a few miles from here where the headwaters of the great river have their origin.  I find a nice café called Brewed Awakenings and have espresso and a sandwich.  I feel enormously better after the caffeine and food intake and hit the road with a renewed sense of adventure.  

There is roadwork all over route 2 and I am convinced that every major road (and by major I mean any state and county route you can think of) in the country is being Obama-ed as part of the stimulus package.  I spend endless amounts of time driving down one lane highway or taking ridiculous detours through the woods that I curse the ARRA and everything that it stands for (but not really).  Most of the towns I pass are built entirely on route 2 and surrounded by woods.  I pass through dense forests of white birch trees and eventually come to Cass Lake.  I walk down by the water and over a pedestrian bridge that sits over the calm waters that are filled with lily pads and long green reeds.  I watch an eagle swoop down into the lake and pluck a fish out of the water like he was grabbing a potato chip out of a bag and then fly away.  The sun moves in and out of the clouds and the breeze gusts and dies accordingly.  After Bemidji, the forests begin to disappear and if there are trees, they are in small clusters miles away or in a single file line, used to mark the edge of someone’s property.  Farms begin to dominate the landscape, growing mostly hay and soy.  A field of sunflowers is dazzling in the sunlight, looking like a field of gold nuggets, as if they can by grown by farmers instead of extracted by miners.

The long flat road finally leads me to Grand Forks just over the border in North Dakota.  I drive around downtown Grand Forks and even East Grand Forks, MN for thirty minutes and fail to find a place to stay.  Finally I come to a hotel whose lobby looks like someone’s living room because the caretakers are folding towels and watching television.  One of their children has drawn all over his face with markers.  I drive downtown and walk through the park and over the bridge and have a quick meal then return to the hotel room, exhausted from the long drive and the myriad of stomach issues I have been facing all day.  I watch soon-to-be-MLB-superstar Bryce Harper strike out in the All American High School Baseball Tournament (which ends in a tie after only ten innings!) and then go to bed. 

Riders Block X

DAY 10

Petoskey, MI to Land O’ Lakes, WI

330 miles

 

Most of my days on the road have started out the same: the day looks gray and cloudy, as if the sky will open up at any moment and unleash on me, but then the clouds leave and the sun comes out and it is brutally hot.  Today is no exception.  After the downpour last night, I am hesitant about the weather and leave at a quarter ‘til eight in order to get a good jump on my long ride, and I start to head up the coast towards the Upper Peninsula.  After about forty minutes I reach the six-mile-long Mackinac Bridge that connects the two Michigan peninsulas, which are separated by Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.  The bridge rises so far above sea level that looking down on the water can give you acrophobia.  The sky is dark and cloudy but there are a few breaks in the seemingly endless cloud cover, and the sun shines brightly through them.  On the Lake Huron side, the light breaking through the clouds shimmers in a perfect circle on the dark blue water and looks as if heaven is casting its brilliant light down on the earth.

Route 2, which starts in the UP and runs all the way to Washington state, runs mostly along the shore and at some points the water is so close it looks like the waves will crash right up on the road.  Along the road there are several places to pull over and swim, but the weather is still grey so I continue up 77 to 28 through the interior.  The roads through the center of the UP pass through national and state forests and government protected wetlands.  The road is flat and straight and pine trees seem to lean in over the pavement. Several huge skeletons of  burned-out train cars sit along the train tracks that run parallel with the road.  After Munsing, the road joins the northern shore and the clouds evaporate and the sun begins its relentless assault on my skin.  At a deserted public beach just off the road, I stop and I sit on the sand for a while, getting as hot as I can.  The waters of Lake Superior are clear blue but prove to be freezing once I jump in.  I can only swim for a minute or two before the water temperature drives me to the shore.

I stop again to swim in Harvey but the beach is rockier than I anticipate and I almost spill onto the slippery rocks while trying to get in the water.  I force myself to stay down in the chilly liquid, knowing it will help me stay cool on this hot day, and I manage to stay submerged for almost five minutes.  I stop in Marquette, which is built on the hills overlooking the lake, and have lunch at an Irish pub called the Wild Rover.  I eat a cup of cabbage soup and an entire chicken potpie while sitting outside in the sun.  I get some coffee before I skip out of town and then continue down route 28 into the Ottawa State Forest.  I spend the rest of my trip driving on long stretches of road through forest only to see the trees break for a bit as I pass through what passes for a town, a collection of a gas station and a few businesses, and then am plunged back into the wilderness.

I hit central time about an hour before I cross the border into Wisconsin and when I arrive at my cousin’s place in Land O’ Lakes, it is only two thirty.  My cousin Chris and her husband Dave have a cabin in the northern woods of Wisconsin.  As the name of the town would suggest, the area is an enormous collection of lakes, all linked by small channels, rivers and other waterways.  The area is called Sand Country because the soil there so devoid of nutrients that nothing grows except wild grasses and trees and if you want a garden or grass in your yard, you have to ship in topsoil.  The area is also the snowmobile capital of the world and the trails run through the woods for miles up into the UP and all over northern Wisconsin.  Chris and Dave’s house is a beautiful mahogany color and built entirely out of the trees that were cut down to make room for the house.  Their yard is mostly sand with weeds poking up but they have a deck and a fire pit with benches crafted out of logs and stumps.

We meet up with the gentleman who built the house and his wife and go with his kids out in a pontoon boat on Mamie Lake.  We cruise around the lake for a while, drinking and hanging out.  Bald eagles fly over the trees on the river’s edge and we see an enormous, one-thousand pound nest with a young eagle sitting on a branch below it, his head still brown, not yet bald.  I jump in at the middle of the lake and am pleasantly surprised that the water is about twenty degrees warmer than Lake Superior.  Al Weber, the homebuilder and captain, is very friendly and he and his whole family likes to drink and just hang out.  Every time we stopped at their house or at a bar they wanted us to come and have a drink and everyone in their family speaks with the delightful Minnesota accent.  After a three hour cruise we finally go back to the cabin and start dinner.  Chris has a new recipe for Beer Can chicken where you put a whole chicken on the grill and still a half-full can of beer up his ass and let the beer steam the chicken from the inside.  The chicken takes about two hours to cook but is very tender and delicious when it is done.

We stay up late, sitting around a fire and drinking.  Dave smokes cigarette after cigarette and tends to the fire.  I eventually crash around one as it has been a long day and sleep soundly until morning.   

Riders Block IX

DAY 9

Buchanan, MI to Petoskey, MI

363 miles

 

When I get up the next morning, I honestly consider blowing off the rest of the trip to stay in Buchanan.  I know that Maureen and Joe don’t live the total life of luxury that I have been treated to over the past three days, but anything even close to that sounds appealing to me.  Maureen will take Austin to the beach and as much as I’d like to go, I have to get on the road.  After a quick breakfast of peaches, zucchini bread and espresso I hit the road.

I take US 31, which hugs the coast for most of the drive.  The landscape in western Michigan is all over the place; in some spots it looks like a typical Midwestern town with flat fields of corn and soy and lone barns, pale in color and sinking slowly into the vegetation as moss spreads over the asphalt shingles and trees and shrubs wrap their arms around the sides, reaching all the way up to the rafters.  In other spots the road dips through thick, green forests and actually heads up an incline or two and off in the distance I can see rolling hills.  A billboard touts that Healthy Michigan Families Promote Breastfeeding and I think this a rather weird slogan for a roadside sign.  In Onekama, about halfway up the coast, I stop for lunch at what is called a Chop Shop.  The food is bland and the service is slow even though I am the only customer.  The best part about lunch is the homemade potato chips, made with red potatoes.  The waiter is awkward and I contemplate stiffing him on the tip but he comes by at the end of my meal and acts friendly so I give him his due eighteen percent.

After Manistee, I take route 22 which runs up to a small peninsula on the northwestern side of the mitten.  Groves of peach trees run along the sides of hills and I begin to ascend an enormous mountain through thick forest and after I reach the summit and begin the descent, the trees clear and the first view of the lake appears.  The water is endless and is absolutely shimmering in the afternoon sun.  It is so clear and stretches on forever in a mix of blues and greens.  I stop at a scenic turnout near Arcadia and look at the endless expanse of fresh water.  The coastline is rugged and beautiful and the view looks as if they could beat anything the Mediterranean or California coasts had to offer.  I can’t even pretend I can see Wisconsin across the lake it is so massive and the view of the coast stretches on for miles.

The sparkling water becomes too much for me and when I reach a turnoff in Glen Haven I park at a public beach and jump in the water.  The beach is simple with a few rolling sand hills with long grasses poking out between the sand.  The water is feels as beautiful as it looks and up close it is a brilliant, translucent blue color and is absolutely reinvigorating after six hours in the car.  From the shore I can see South Manitou Island, home to the Sleeping Bear Dunes.  The face of a steep, sandy hill is surrounded on all sides by thick, black trees, forming a hood with a widows peak around the dune and from the shore it looks like the face of a bear with the remaining tree-covered island resembling like his massive, hibernating body.    The island is miles off shore and a popular spot for vacationers but I don’t have nearly enough time to travel there.  I get out of the water and wrap a towel around myself, remove my wet suit and drive simply with the towel around my waist.  The sun begins to beat in on me and I can feel my left arm and the side of my face getting hotter and hotter.

I skip back to US 31 and head towards the northern most tip of the state.  In Norwood I jump in the water again and put on real clothes since I plan to stop in Petoskey for dinner.  I eat at a little resort community right on the water.  Route 31 runs along the side of a hill and the little resort area is cut right into the side of that hill, the whole side of it is sheered right off, leaving a sharp drop off that looms over the area like a fortress.  All the houses and buildings have been constructed within the past twenty years and it looks as if a giant doll village has been placed along the beautiful bay.  I walk over to an overpriced restaurant and sit awkwardly at the bar between two groups of drunk couples in order to avoid the hour wait for a table.  The food turns out to be quite good; I have a Caesar salad with fresh anchovies and a ten-piece California roll.  The two couples on either side of me insist on talking to me so I tell them about my travels and they are very impressed as drunk people easily are.

When I emerge from the restaurant it is pouring and the wind is whipping the rain sideways and I am immediately soaked.  The idea of camping in the Upper Peninsula in the pouring rain suddenly seems like a bad idea so, soaking wet, I stop at a Super 8, nary a mile down the road, but still a rough drive in the brutal weather.  Luckily, they have a hot tub, as I have become accustomed to using one daily at this point, and that helps me return to my normal body temperature.  I get to bed early to try and get a jump on the next day’s journey, hoping to be in Wisconsin by tomorrow evening.

Riders Block VIII

DAY 8

Buchanan, MI

 

On Thursday, Maureen heads to Chicago to take my cousin, Austin, to the dentist to get his braces removed.  She is gone most of the day so Joe and I head off on our own.  He has found a small espresso machine in his basement and I attempt to use it, failing the first time but getting a pretty decent cup of coffee out of the second.  For breakfast I eat some of Joe’s freshly baked zucchini bread and have some sliced, Michigan peaches that he has precut and stored in the refrigerator.  Soon after we head for Warren Dunes, a place I went with my aunt nine years ago when I was sixteen.  Other then climbing the massive dunes I remember that she got attacked by greenhead horseflies on the way back to the car when a black cloud of them swarmed her and she was very upset at her brother, my dad, for showing no signs of sympathy.

Warren Dunes are just a few massive piles of sand that are blown farther and farther from the lakeshore every year by the wind.  They slowly take over the forests just beyond them, swallowing up huge swaths of woods and leaving the trees to die and rot just where they stand.  The hike up is brutal because not only is the climb straight up hill but it is also through shifting sand which makes the climb even harder.  At the top, there is some shade from trees that have not yet died or have learned to survive with their root structures buried underneath ten feet of sand.  The top of the dune is really just a massive ridge, which is only about twenty feet wide, dropping off on the other side into dense forest.  It is one of the highest points along the Lake Michigan coast and Joe tells me on a clear day you can see the Chicago skyline.  The incredible heat and haze of the afternoon make this impossible on this particular day so we settle for taking in the spectacular view of the lake and coast.  What we can see is miles of endless water, all different shades of blue, stretching off and then blending into the blue horizon.

After hiking along the desert-like landscape, we head down to the public beach to cool off.  The beach is absolutely trashed with plastic water bottles and empty food wrappers and every inch of it that isn’t covered with trash is covered with people.  An enormous family sets up in front of us; actually there are several families, mothers and children only, and they begin to swallow up every centimeter of sand around us.  They have two beach umbrellas, both that tout advertisements for beer.  This family moment brought to you by: Bud Lite.

The water is cold but feels great after climbing the dunes.  We hang out for a while but since neither Joe nor I are interested in tanning, we change and leave after swimming.  Joe takes me to Redamaks in New Buffalo, a popular vacation spot for citizens of Chicago, to feast on supposedly famous hamburgers.  We gorge ourselves on burgers and fried clam strips and onion rings and it is fantastic.    I have tried to avoid food like this the whole trip, knowing that devouring grease and then digesting it while sitting in a car is not optimal for my health, but this fare is nothing short of opulent comfort food.  It is not too greasy and when I leave I don’t have the feeling like my stomach is going to explode.  Instead I feel fully satisfied.  Joe is very funny and always has something interesting to say, especially about food, and treats me to everything so I have a great time.

After a few stops we return home and I shower and jump in the hot tub to complete the experience of being in a resort.  When I emerge cleaned off, Joe announces that he’s having a cocktail and I make myself one.  Joe and Maureen have a fully stocked bar set up in their kitchen and I can really make any kind of drink I want so I decide to take the opportunity to try a Cuervo Black and coke with a lime, which is quite good.  Joe and I head out for a walk on a trail that curves along the bog through the woods and he points out all the old oak trees that his neighbor plans to harvest for the lumber.  The mosquitoes are out in numbers so we head back for more drinks.  Maureen arrives home around six thirty with Austin, whom she didn’t want to drive all the way back to his house an hour and a half away after having brought him to the city and sat all day in horrendous traffic.  We have dinner together in the dining room; Joe’s latest concoction is grilled salmon and fresh vegetables and for Austin he heats up some fried chicken strips he had earlier at McDonalds and makes some homemade mashed potatoes.  Austin is ten and very entertaining.  When I ask if he wants to go in the hot tub with me he says: “No thanks, I’m straight.”  The later he says God invented football and when Maureen asks him why he thinks that he replied: “Well, how do you think he beat the Romans?”

We watch the movie Traitor after dinner and it is just good enough not to walk away from in the middle.  We hang out for a while after the movie, watching an interview with Paul McCartney on Letterman and then the subsequent performance on top of the Late Show marquee on Broadway and 53^rd.  I have the first fitful night of sleep, perhaps nervous about embarking the next day, but I eventually fall asleep.

Riders Block VI-VII

DAY 6 - 7

Chicago, IL to Buchanan, MI

Anyone who knows their geography (or if anyone actually reads this) will realize that Michigan is actually east of Chicago and therefore my grand plan of heading west has gone horribly wrong.  But there is some logic to this madness, so bare with me.  I wake up several times on Tuesday morning, due to the heat and also to Chris, Jack’s roommate, gathering his luggage and getting ready to head off to Colorado.  Jack’s other roommate, Mike, was charged with bringing Chris to O’Hare so they both left before five in the morning.  Jack was up at seven and we both left at quarter to eight.  I stay in the city for another two hours, drinking coffee, writing and eating a breakfast burrito.

My drive out of Chicago is nothing special; there is some traffic in the immediate vicinity but otherwise the highway moves smoothly.  Interstate 94 wraps its way along the southern shore of Lake Michigan through Illinois, Indiana and then shoots up into Michigan.  Through Indiana the sky turns grey and starts to rain on the flat, green landscape.  Southern Michigan is hillier than I remember it being when I drove with my parents from Detroit to Jackson to see my grandfather several times during my childhood.  But the area near the lake rolls and undulates like a Pennsylvania farm and is covered with old barns, corn, cows and soybeans.  A barn near US route 12 has completely collapsed in on itself but still remains alongside its twin, this one in perfect condition.  We drive past the same two barns a few days later and the one has collapsed even more.

The drive is a little over an hour and a half and when I arrive in Buchanan the clouds have mostly disappeared and it is hot and sunny.  My aunt Maureen and her husband Joe live in a beautiful house on four and a half acres that includes a five bedroom home woods, a bog and their own vegetable garden.  The house itself is enormous with three full bathrooms, an incredible kitchen, a finished basement with wine cellar, a deck and a sun porch, the latter with an indoor coy pond and hot tub.  In their immediate back yard they have over an acre of wetlands.  The bog is completely full of wild growth and is filled with a variety of birds, including humming birds, hawks and great blue herons, one of which flies back and forth repeatedly while we are having lunch.  There are also deer, coyotes and other smaller cats plus rodents like mice and groundhogs.  There is also an assortment of reptiles like snakes and lizards and the usual fish and amphibians as well.  At night, when I stand outside looking up at the stars, all I can hear is a deafening call from frogs and crickets and other insects that create a harmony of sounds and vibrations that drown out any other noise.  The natural and wild surroundings are very overwhelming but it is great to be so near them in such comfort.

Joe has lunch ready when I arrive and we eat flatbread sandwiches on the deck in the sun.  The road by their house is not so busy so the sounds of the bog cover all other man-made noises.  After lunch we drive out to a vineyard called the Round Barn to taste some authentic Michigan wine.  The area around the lake provides a better climate for certain crops that will not in other places in Michigan like cherries, peaches and grapes.  The Round Barn has surprisingly good wine, especially the Chianti and Sauvignon Blanc.  They also make vodka from distilled grapes and have their own brewery as well.   The seven total samples of wine, vodka and beer have me feeling a little dizzy but we head to a public garden where a designer has place a working model train that runs along a track carved out of logs and runs along bridges crafted out of tree branches.  The garden is beautiful but I have to stand in the shade the whole time, afraid that the combination of sun and alcohol will give me heat stroke.

The country roads through Berrien County are winding and hilly and quite pretty.  The residential areas have small, modest houses on flat plots of land and most of them are surround by huge fields of golden corn stalks or dark green soy plants.  When we return from the garden we have cocktails while Joe makes dinner.  The results of his labor is roasted chicken, stuffed zucchini picked that day from his garden, baked potato and salad.   We finish two bottles of red wine at dinner and most of the food and hang out and talk while Maureen smokes cigarettes in the dining room.

The next day we get a late start as no one wants to get up before nine thirty and around noon we head for St. Joseph’s which is a small beach town just northwest of Buchanan.   The road there follows a massively winding river of the same name and we soon come upon the quintessential beach community of small antique shops and little restaurants.  We eat outside in the shade and it is actually cold as the building blocks our exposure to the sun and the breeze from the lake makes it even colder.  Afterwards we head for the beach, which is busy and crowded, but we find a thinly populated area and set up camp.  The water of the St Joseph’s river, which flows into Lake Michigan, is dark and murky, pulling down soil as it runs past farms that sit on its banks.  When it mixes with the clear blue-green fresh water of the lake, the colors stay separate and you can see a trail of silt running southeast with the current.  At first we think it is a sandbar in the middle of the water but soon discover it is just the contrasting water sources.

When we get home I hop in the hot tub to ease the pain of a stressful day of lying on the beach.  The lake water is freezing and the hot tub, although it is eighty degrees outside, feels great, especially with the jets rumbling.  After a dinner of poached haddock and vegetables and lots of wine we watch the movie Elegy with Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz.  The film is extremely intense and well acted, about a literature professor who falls for one of his students, and the atmosphere borders on tense and suspenseful although it is merely a drama.  It is sad and very poetic and I am ultimately left with an uncomfortable, but satisfied, feeling.  Afterwards we wander off to bed to try and sleep the alcohol off.

Riders Block V

DAY 5

Chicago, IL

 

The night is hotter than I can handle and at seven thirty when Jack leaves for work the sun is streaming through the window onto me.  I manage to fall back to sleep after Jack wakes me up to give me his apartment keys and explain to me which each one does, and I wake up around nine thirty, sweating and thirsty beyond belief.  I have some water and then walk to get some coffee at the cake bakery where I have been going for the past few days.  When I decide to head downtown it is almost twelve o’clock and the sun and heat are back to make it another unbearably hot day in the Midwest. 

I take the blue line El downtown to the Loop and get off near the Chicago Institute of Art.  Jack told me they had just opened a new Modern Wing and that he had yet to check it out.  I had previously been to the science museum and one other museum in Chicago and they had all been great so I was looking forward to this one as well.  The grand marble building was very crowded and expensive but walking around in the air conditioning for a few hours was worth every penny of the eighteen dollars.  At first I started to wander around aimlessly, soon realizing that if I didn’t eat something I wasn’t going to be able to appreciate the art at all, no matter what it was.

In the surprisingly low-priced museum café I buy and sandwich and roll and pasta salad and get only one bite deep into the sandwich and realize I can’t eat it.  The mustard that I instructed the sandwich maker to put on the bread, which looked like regular yellow mustard, must have been flavored with horseradish because when I bite into it the unmistakable taste of wasabi fills my mouth.  Since real wasabi is a swamp root native only to Japan, when we make it in this and ever other country in the world, we use horseradish as a substitute.  Wasabi being one of my least favorite tastes in the world, I deem the sandwich inedible, but manage to peal off the bread that has the mustard on it and it enjoy the rest as an open face sandwich.

I return to the museum and walk around some more, heading to the Modern Wing after a long trip through the labyrinthine trip to the café.  The new wing is three stories tall and the exhibits get better the higher up one goes.  The bottom floor is filled eyesores trying to pass as contemporary art and I immediately begin to doubt the validity of this new addition to the museum.  On the second floor there are more interesting works: one of the most memorable is sections of the New York Times from September 12 and 13 of 2001, right after the world trade center attacks, that have been framed and drawings of a man and woman in sexual embrace have been colored over the articles.  Another memorable exhibit is called Clown Torture and is a video loop of a screaming man in full clown costume, which, needless to say, is highly disturbing.  The third floor has even more interesting photographs and paintings so overall the new wing is certainly worth seeing.

I mill around through the main museum exhibits; one on Japanese screen paintings the other on paintings and artifacts having to do with wine over the past thousand or so years, and leave around two o’clock.  I take the red line subway to Addison and walk to Wrigley Field to see if there is a tour of the park.  The Cubs are in Colorado and since my plans to see baseball in Chicago had been thwarted, I settled for taking a walk around the second oldest ballpark in the country.  The tour started at two thirty and we sit at the beginning in the bleachers above the right field ivy, the sun beating down on us.  I watch a cloud shaped like the island of Great Britain make its way towards the sun and for a blissful three minutes we are cooled by shade, only to see the cloud finally pass and heat resume.  The stadium is impressive, not in the shrine-like sense that the tour guides would have you believe, but is still a work of art.  We travel around the inside up to the press box and the suites and then down to the team’s clubhouse and out into their dugout and onto the field.  It was the first time I had walked on the field of a major league park and it is quite a unique experience.

The Cubs play the fewest number of night games at home than any other team in the majors.  They only play twenty or so games in the evening in Chicago and the first game to start at Wrigley after three in the afternoon was in 1988.  To put this in perspective, the first major league game under the lights was played in Iowa in 1930 and now almost every game is played at seven o’clock.  The reason the Cubs play so early is because the outfield wall is so low that houses built before the stadium look into the ballpark and the occupants did not want late games being played when they had to sleep or wanted to put their children to bed.  This is also why most of these houses have built bleachers on the roofs of their buildings so they can sit and watch any game they want for free (or sell tickets for a profit, a percentage of which goes to Cubs management).

I take the bus back to Jack’s place around four thirty and get off at the wrong stop and end up having to walk over a mile to his apartment.  When he gets home, his roommates and I and one of their sisters go out to eat a block away from their place.  It is Jack’s roommate Chris’s last night in town so his sister and the three of us have wings to celebrate.  My streak of hot waitresses continues that evening and so the legend grows even more.  After dinner we hang out with Chris for a while but then we all go to bed pretty early.  This night has the same unmistakably hot qualities as the previous evenings but I am so tired from walking in the sun all day that I fall asleep quickly. 

Riders Block IV

DAY 4

Chicago, IL

 

I wake early, around seven thirty, to get a move on and try and beat the traffic headed southbound for the city.  I am slightly hung over but not enough to effect my motivation to get back to Chicago as quickly as possible.  I say goodbye to my cousins and walk out into the continuing brutality of heat and humidity.  It is already seventy degrees at eight o’clock and obviously is only going to get hotter.

I make it to Chicago in one hour, missing the traffic entirely, so obviously my plan that I had fretted over the whole day before has worked out.  It is only nine thirty and I am sure that Jack and the rest of his house are still asleep so I have coffee and make a few phone calls to my parents.  When Jack lets me up, the house is bustling because his roommate Chris is moving to Colorado on Tuesday and his parents have come to load up their van with his stuff.  Chris dismantles a futon that Danny had slept on the night before and takes the television and several other items.  Jack is obviously disturbed by the amount of furniture and décor being removed so abruptly, but says nothing.

Soon Jack’s girlfriend Nicole comes bringing with her another Dan, this one her brother, bringing the total of Dan’s to three out of six total people.  We head out around noon to eat brunch, the second time in as many days, and have to wait in a bar while they clear a space for our big party.  It is an odd experience being in a grungy, dive bar during the day.  Everything inside is black and concrete and cold and the only illumination is the sunlight streaming through the dirty windows.  It is an unsettling experience.

After brunch we decide to go to Montrose Beach instead of going to the White Sox game like we had planned.  I was a little pissed off at first, seeing as this was one of the things I had wanted to do when coming to Chicago, but the beach sounded nice on a day when I am sweating bullets in the air conditioning.  We drive in Nicole’s car to the beach and end up sitting in an endless line of traffic and once we arrive, the beach’s parking lot is completely full.  The place Jack described as “low-key” and “not crowded” is a mad house.  We leave before we get stuck in the line of cars just trying to escape the full parking lot and head to a local pool to cool off.  The idea of swimming in a communal pool in a city sounds disgusting to me but when we arrive it is actually quite nice and clean.

The water is amazingly refreshing but we aren’t in it long before a grey cloud rolls overhead and we begin to hear thunder crashing.  The lifeguards empty the pool and clear the deck in a frenzy only to see the clouds pass and the sun come back out.  Jack’s girlfriend leaves us in our wet bathing suits and takes her car home because she needs to get ready for a trip so we have to take the bus home in our wet suits.  This also manages to rub me the wrong way (pun intended) but the bus ride is short and I soon get home and shower.

For dinner we head to a pizza place where our friend Lindsey used to work when she lived in town.  The restaurant is also a brewery and it is absolutely packed.  Jack apologizes for bringing me to obviously the busiest places in the city and assures me it is not usually like this and that he has underestimated the spillover from the crowds at Lollapalooza.  The wait is about thirty minutes so we drink free beer because Jack knows the bartender and watch the Yankees finish sweeping the Red Sox into oblivion, six and a half games out of first place (I won’t even bother going into my frustration over this).  We order a deluxe pizza with jalapenos, feta, onions, sausage and spinach and between us we are able to murder the whole thing.  The jalapenos are spicier than I give them credit for but after the initial uncomfortable sensation, they do manage to cool me down.

Jack’s friend Allison, who is also taking a cross-country trip, turns up in Chicago for only one night and she and her siblings are in the Signature Room on the 95^th floor of the John Hancock building.  We hop a bus and take the elevator up and find Allison and her brother and sister and their friend at a table drinking overpriced cocktails.  The view is obviously spectacular and I feel out of place in the swanky atmosphere but it is nice to feel like a big shot so high above the city.  Allison is driving to California with her siblings and they have not slept in a proper bed since leaving Andover, MA the night before.  I had met Allison last Thanksgiving at a party in Boston and as one of Jack’s friends described her, she looks like a hot alien. 

We hang out until around twelve thirty until it becomes obvious that the waitress either wants us to order lots more drinks or leave.  The one consistent thing about my trip to Chicago is that in every restaurant I have been in, all our waitresses have been exceptionally beautiful.  It has become an expectation now, after five consecutive times that I should be served by hot women every time I come to the windy city, and if I cannot count on this than all will be lost.  We part with Allison and family as they head north to do more drinking and Jack and I go back to Division Street as Jack has work the next morning.

Riders Block III

DAY 3

Chicago and Ingleside, IL

I wake up on Jack’s couch and the apartment is pleasantly cool despite the humidity outside.  After dressing, the five of us go to brunch at a breakfast place with a Latin twist.  I have eggs scrambled with tomatoes and scallions and jalapenos with a side of beans and potatoes and some soft corn tortillas.  It was one of the best breakfasts I have had in a while and I surprised I have room for it after all the macaroni and cheese I ate the night before.

We arrive back at Jack’s place, escaping the sweltering heat of outside, and I decide to make the hour or so journey north west to visit my cousin Chris is Ingleside.  On Division Street in Chicago I miss the turn for the interstate entrance and end up driving around the city in circles.  Finally I get on 90-94 and cruise north of the city, watching the southbound traffic piling up.  I begin to get nervous thinking about my return trip to the city the next morning and how I will most likely be stuck in the road work/Lollapalooza/every day nightmare traffic that Chicago has to offer.

Interstate 94, which branches off 90 and heads towards Milwaukee is being Obama-ed: that is, it is being ripped to shit by construction crews eager to spend the billions of dollars the government had allotted to them.  The traffic is horrid and the northbound road is split into two different sections, express and local.  I cruise up the express lane, which is only one lane wide and the traffic crawls until I get to Grand Avenue outside of Ingleside.  The heat inside my slowly moving car is unbearable and I am sweating profusely.  I have put sunscreen on to keep myself from frying like an egg in my car because the sun beats in perfectly through the driver’s side window, so I become sweaty and greasy and it is unbearable.

When I arrive I shower before speaking to anyone to wipe the filth off me and I immediately feel better.  My two cousins and their kids are all there and we spend most of the day drinking beer and sangria, which helps me get drunk fast.  My cousin’s husband Dave cooks three different kinds of meat and I eat all of it greedily to help soak up the alcohol.  Inside their house, the AC is blasting at 74 degrees and it is pleasant every time I go to use the bathroom.  Upon reemerging outside, the heat hits me like a wall and I am instantly wet with humidity.  A nice breeze comes through their back yard making the day bearable, but even at one o’clock in the morning it is still 80 degrees out.

My cousin has a seven-month-old British bulldog named Keira who is so ugly that she is adorable.  Three times in the evening someone spills a drink on my bare feet and I use the house to wash them off and hose down the deck so it isn’t sticky.  When I start to spray the deck, Keira run over and sticks her face right in the way of the hose and begins to violently lap up the water as quickly as she possibly can.  This escalates to me spraying her right in the face at close range while she tries to drink the water.  She gives up, after not being able to breathe, walks away to catch her breath, then comes back for more.  Their other dog Guinness is pound for pound the largest black lab ever.  His neck and head are twice the size of mine but he is so lumbering and friendly that he poses no threat to anyone.

My cousin Mike, who is plastered by nine thirty, wants me to come to the bar with him, but I decline because he is already so drunk, and try to convince him to stay at the house.  About an hour later his dad makes fun of him for texting his girlfriend and he storms out of the house and drives to a bar to meet his friends.  I still haven’t heard from him but I’m sure he is okay.

I go to bed around one in my cousin Nikki’s room.  She had arrived late, chugged a few glasses of sangria and then thrown up and spent most of the evening lying down in the grass outside, before moving to her room.  By one o’clock she was totally rehabilitated and when she left and I went to sleep in her room, I found twigs and grass in her bed from when she was lying in the yard.  It was the best example of boot and rally I have ever seen.

Riders Block II

DAY 2

Lancaster, OH to Chicago, IL

386 miles

I woke up early and took a shower, choosing to forgo breakfast just to get on the road.  I drove quickly towards Columbus, the capital and largest city in Ohio, and then passed through it, unimpressed.  I stopped for breakfast at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, wanting to try and avoid the eating fast food and settled with quick, chain-food instead.  The breakfast was delicious; sausage, eggs, biscuits and gravy and old fashion grits with orange juice.  It hit the spot and kept my full for the whole ride to Chicago.

North central Ohio and Indiana are like a crumpled napkin that’s been flattened out again.  For the most part the land is smooth and even, dotted with enormous power lines and a few awkward trees, most marking property lines, and every once and a while a summit will rise a few feet off the ground and people will be convinced to call it a hill.  But other than this, it is mostly pressed flat to fit the original design, like a hand sweeping over it, knocking everything remotely shapely out of the way.  Even the Great Plains has more dimension than the Midwest.  However, there is a simple beauty to Indiana (Ohio much less so) with its rolling cornfields and lone barns with silos leaking kernels.  Everything is green and yellow, against a blue sky, and the farms are all plainly colored, nothing too extravagant.  It’s a pleasure to roll down a back road or a traffic-less highway in Indiana and just take it the simplicity and tell yourself: people choose to live here!  And then laugh.

But there is no short, breezy day trip through Indiana unless you already live there, and in that case you would not gain as much pleasure as an outsider would.  It takes forever to get out of the state, even on the major highways and from Indianapolis (dead center) to Chicago (North-western most corner) the drive is three hours.  Near Lafayette I pass Battleground, IN, home to the famous Tippecanoe battlefield, where the fearsome Shawnee warrior Tecumseh led his army of Ohio Valley Indians against the American army.  And won?  I can’t remember, and I am ashamed to admit this, since I was a history major.  But I do know that Tecumseh died shortly after that battle in another fight in Ontario and since there are no Shawnee faces to be seen in Indiana and Ohio, I’m guessing the outcome of the victory is meaningless.  I want to stop and see it but I don’t have the time.  Also, I realize that a historic battlefield is just a field, maybe there’s a plaque, but it’s otherwise deserted and uninteresting unless you are watching a reenactment.  As I pass by Battleground, IN I think: people actually fought for Indiana?  I guess it was a matter of principal more than anything else.

I get lost, or at least think I am lost, in East Chicago when I come to a sign that says the road is closed.  I had skipped off the main highway on a gut decision to take back roads instead of getting stuck in roadwork traffic on the interstate.  The move pays off until I get to the closed road, but I follow a detour that seems to be leading me to the wrong place, only to find eventually I am right where I want to be.  The towns of Whiting and East Chicago, near Wolf Lake, are horrifying.  For as far as the eye can see in rows along the lake are white caps, probably containing petroleum, spread out across a huge swath of land.  Every so often there is a blackened factory spewing acrid smoke into the air, but for the most park I cruise on a bridge over what looks like a scene from The Matrix.  The industrial sprawl is nightmarish, like a futuristic wasteland of endless factories, and I begin to get chills at the lifeless, inorganic land before me.

I try my best to reach Chicago before five o’clock, and do, forgetting that when my clock says five it’s really only four, but the traffic is deathly.  I inch along for almost an hour on I-90 before finding my exit and maneuvering to my friend’s place with surprising ease.  Since he isn’t out of work until 6:30, I go to a café/bakery to get some coffee, only to wait for ten minutes while workers help customers pick out wedding cakes.  They have pictures of cakes they have made on the walls and they are spectacular.  Their designer obviously forgot the main purpose of a cake was to be eaten, but I suppose their fleeting beauty is what makes them so amazing.

When my old roommate Jack finally comes home, we go up to his apartment on Division Street in Wicker Park where his brother Dan, Dan’s friend Dan, and Jack’s current roommate Chris are hanging out.  Jack’s paramour Nicole comes by shortly after and we stuff ourselves into a cab (minus Chris) and head to a restaurant/bar/club.  The taxi driver is playing a mix CD that ranges from Buckcherry to Kelly Rowland and we spend most of our time singing along or laughing at the play list.  I order a plate of mac and cheese and what comes to me is a serving dish, the size of which would feed most families, and I eat the whole thing because I am starving and I don’t want to carry leftovers around for the whole night.  A band comes on at ten thirty, but they are only the opener and they are not memorable enough to even remember.  The second opener, Other Lives, is a five piece with a female cello player and a lead singer who looks like the son of Jethro Tull’s front man Ian Anderson.  Their music is dark and creepy and original, but not very melodic and in the end it just becomes grating. 

Delta Spirit, the band we have come to see, is an eclectic bunch of white guys and a Latino lead singer who has a mustache and a straw hat and looks like Fez from That ‘70s Show.  Their music is okay but they have such energy that it is easy to enjoy it.  The most impressive sound coming from the stage is the percussion; there is only one drummer but often during a song the keyboardist or second guitarist will leave his post and play a snare or tom that has been set up separate from the drum kit.  One guy in the audience, almost ape-like, jumps up and down and claps his hands for every song or pats his friends’ backs enthusiastically.  He and a friend almost get in a fight with another guy who tells him to cool it.

We find another cab around one thirty and head back to Jack’s place where I choose one of three couches to sleep on, after watching some of Jack’s latest obsession: Shark Week on Discovery.

Riders Block

DAY 1

Binghamton, NY to Lancaster, OH

589 miles

The road beat me today.

I had seen signs in construction areas touting that the working men and women were part of the American Recovery and Reconstruction project, or something equally obtuse.  But it became utterly clear that the money from the Stimulus Bill is being used to repair interstate 81 between Binghamton and Harrisburg and driving on that road is an absolute nightmare.  I spent more time than I’d like to admit sitting or crawling through traffic, traffic caused by closed lanes and narrow bridges.  Pennsylvania in particular seems to have greedily taken the government funds and used them recklessly, repairing about every ten miles or so of highway, causing bumper-to-bumper headaches for every driver on I-81.  A yellow caution sign posted through the construction areas tells me that I should Watch For Stopped Cars.  I marveled at the suggestion but decide to play along but quickly get bored since every car in the vicinity is stopped.

The Blue Mountains along the Pennsylvania Turnpike are like an earthen wall built by prehistoric man to keep dinosaurs out.  They follow the highway, showing no summits or even slight deviation in height, but their east-west reach is endless.  The road is flanked on all sides by these giant floodwalls and a few times the road pierces the base of the mountains and drivers are plunged into the darkness of the mile long tunnels.  Before the first, I scratched my head at a sign that said Remove Sunglasses, but I quickly understood what it meant.

I was greeted in West Virginia with stand-still traffic that wove through two separate sections of road work, covering only about five miles or so.  But because of the massive amount of tractor trailers on the road, the drive took more than an hour.  I remembered thinking it was a good thing when our new president called for improving the infrastructure of out roads and bridges and thereby creating jobs for people out of work, but I never imagined it would mean I would have to sit in such appalling traffic for so long.  Its selfish of me to say but if giving a handful of guys the responsibility of repairing a bridge means that everyone on the road is going to be two hours late to their destination really doesn’t seem worth it.

My Ipod has run low on batteries, so I turn on the radio and find a number of stations actually worth listening to.  I even hear a Frank Zappa song on one and know I must have found a college radio station or a really unique DJ.  After listening to a few tracks on a hip-hop station, a white disc jockey comes on and says:

DJ: If a guy walked up to you on the street and complimented your chest, would you be insulted or take it as a compliment?  (tells us the radio call numbers and then the phone number)  We want to hear what you think.  Hello?

Anonymous woman caller: Hell yeah it’s a compliment, I wouldn’t be insulted at all.

DJ: Right?  A guy can come up and compliment you on your chest!  That’s not bad!

AWC: That’s right, I love mine, I take great pride in them.

DJ: What size are you?

AWC: 32DD.

DJ: Holy God!

AWC: Yeah, I know.

DJ: I wouldn’t compliment you, I’d get you the number of a chiropractor.

AWC: Haha.  I wear them with pride.

DJ: What do you got: roman columns under them?

I quickly changed the station, only to go back to it later and hear a grown man ask to hear a Miley Cyrus song, which turned out to be the worst song I’ve ever heard.

The mountains along the Ohio River look like the top of a fedora, with the banks of the river like its rim, and roll awkwardly on both the Ohio and West Virginia side.  Wheeling, WV is an old industrial town with ancient brick buildings, some still blackened with soot, and look as if immigrant children should be standing outside of them with dirty faces and golf hats.  Not modern-day immigrants but Eastern European ones from the days of the Depression with blonde hair and freckles and blue eyes.  Besides the deep red color of fading bricks there are huge factories and other industrial eye-soars perched along the river.  I drive on route 7 underneath the shell of rotting, steel bridges that tower over me and disappear into a hole in a mountain on the other side of the river.  Smoke stacks stick up from the banks of the river like phalluses, exploding in orgasmic into the sky, their ejaculate thick clouds of grey smoke.  The brick and concrete towers almost look organic there amongst the sloping hills and thick trees.

Route 550 West to Columbus bobs through hills and past farms and is very pretty in the sunset.  As I head inland from the Ohio River, the land begins to smooth out and becomes more residential and less agricultural.  I have only eaten two nectarines and a peach that day, not wanting to stop for food, and finally reached Lancaster, Ohio, just outside of Columbus, around ten thirty at night.  The only hotel I can find had two queen beds and was a smoker, so I settle down in one of the beds and watch television until I fall asleep.