On the Road Again: Three Days Across the Heartland

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago as the guest of Robb, Deni, Layne and friends, at their annual family feast that has survived divorce with both good will and cooking expertise intact.  The board groaned with steaming autumnal beauty; a little later the diners did likewise with bloated pleasure; Robb and I waddled the ten blocks back to his place carrying leftovers, through dark North Chicago neighborhoods eerily silent, staring down moonlit perspectives of deserted streets changing trafficlights for nobody. 

Nine days or so into my course of antibiotics, my ankle infection is well on the mend, and my rash all cleared up.  And on Sunday morning it was finally time for me to pack up my backpack, squeeze it once more into my Miata’s trunk, say a fond goodbye to Robb, and hit the road.

Pulling out of Robb’s alley in Chicago

photo courtesy of Robb

Back on the road again, for the last leg of my road trip, the run from Chicago back to Seattle where it all began.  I timed my drive slowly, with a week to do it, and the plan is to arrive back home on December 2 (giving my rental manager time to clean the carpets after my tenants leave).  In the meantime I decided to make a spur-of-the-moment detour into Colorado to visit another old friend, and so for the last three days I’ve been aiming at a slightly Southern angle across the Great Plains: through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Eastern Colorado.  Tonight I’m finally at the foot of the mountains in the town of Colorado Springs.

I meant to start regular blog posts up again, being back on the road, but in typical road-trip fashion my course carried me straight out of the range of good Internet connections (even in motels).  With the mountain backdrop of Colorado Springs has come the equally welcome advent of a nice coffeehouse (Switchback Roasters) with reliable wi-fi.  But you haven’t missed much.  The last three days through the heartland were like one long, endless drive, through endless miles of flat farmland, golden-stubbled out to the November horizons under the enormous blue sky painted with territorial variations of cirrus.  The first day took me to Des Moines, IA, the second to a tiny farming town called Norton, KS, the third across the vast tableland of Eastern Colorado.  In between were the fields, the fields, the fields, ever the same color, ever the same flatness.  Getting off the Interstate for the back roads made no difference.  At a steady 65-70 mph the only clue to movement was the slow advance of the dotted white lines emerging from their pinpoint ahead to slip hypnotically under my yellow hood.

It was actually an interesting, even educational view of the country.  These fields aren’t exactly the “great plains” anymore; they aren’t exactly “grasslands.”  What they are is a million square miles of industrial agriculture: a whole quarter of the continent remade into a machine of food production.  For all that I was out in nature I felt like I was driving through a factory, the road paralleled by railroad tracks, the horizons punctuated by rocket-pad clusters of towering silos, the mathematically-regular towns each just a scraped lot of metal-sided warehouses and parked fleets of mobile farming equipment, glimpse of a bar, gone.  The land itself at this time of year was an exhausted, shorn litter of dirt, floating dust, and spiky leftover husks that blew in yellow scraps across the road in the cold wind.  The whole thing is the absolute concomitant of our mega-cities, and perhaps a more vivid measure of the scale of our appetites.

It was somehow one of the strangest places my Miata has ventured.

A Medical Downturn in Chicago

Hello again!

It’s been another long gap between blog posts.  I’ve been in Chicago the whole time, still hanging out with my friend Robb, and I wish I could report that I’ve spent the last few weeks roundly enjoying myself.  Unfortunately, that isn’t quite what happened.

To be sure, I did start out having a wonderful time.  During the days, while Robb was at work, I would shoulder my pack and walk in the wintry air through the neighborhood of old brick buildings to one of my favorite local coffehouses (shoutouts to CC Ferns and Star Lounge), where I'd open my laptop alongside my coffeecup in the hip urban crowd and get some hopefully hip urban writing done on my novel.

CC Ferns   

In the evenings I made my reacquaintances with Robb’s family after many years.  His daughter Layne, now a college graduate and drama teacher, joined us for dinner at a great pizza place called Peqoud’s, and on another night Robb and his ex-wife Deni treated me to a delicious birthday dinner at local Indian restaurant called Cumin.

    Robb strikes a successful pose with Layne and me

The pizza at Pequod's was great!

However, my real birthday present started a few days early with a strange itch on the back of my ankle.  Within a few days it developed into a full-blown case of cellulitis, in which my whole ankle steadily swelled up and turned purple, and within a few more I went into the hospital.  Which is where I spent the last three days.

As of Nov 8

As of Nov 17

The sequence actually went like this: (1) Thinking to be proactive, I went to an Urgent Care center and got an antibiotic.  This had no effect.  (2) I went back to the Urgent Care center and got a second antibiotic.  This one caused me to break out in red spots all over my body--the eruption occurring within a matter of minutes as I sat at CC Ferns working on my book.  (3) Thoroughly polka-dotted, and with the cellulitis still spreading, I checked myself into the hospital.  I was admitted immediately, and sent Robb a text to let him know his houseguest’s new address.  He came by after work as quickly as he could.

I went to Cook County Hospital, for the dismaying reason that I’m travelling with no health insurance.  The hospital is known for taking anyone regardless, and is thus a magnet for the indigent, and I did share my room with a nice black man who was a heroin addict and moaned with withdrawal aches all night long, but it was a clean, organized facility and I was handled with smooth professionalism there.  Basically all they did was take me off the offending antibiotic (Keflex), put me on a stronger one (Doxycycline) and wait to see what would happen.  For some fortunate reason the allergy rash didn’t itch, hurt, cause fever or bother me at all, so day by day I lay in bed in a thin hospital robe feeling completely not sick, watching my body change colors.  Periodically I was visited by doctors who did the same.  It was remorselessly boring, but I’d come straight from the coffeeehouse with my pack so I had my Kindle, and the hospital had wi-fi, so I downloaded a Spenser novel and a collection of Henry James short stories and sat there trying to ignore the IV stent in my arm and the moans from the next bed.

So that’s how I’ve spent my time in Chicago.  Not how I imagined!  I was released this morning, to my relief and Robb’s, with both the ankle infection and the rash in slow remission: the ankle now looks merely like I’m recovering from having stepped in a bear trap, and the rash has gone from red to a mild brown color rather like leopard spots.  The literature sent home with me says the latter might take two weeks to go away, but it’s not on my face or hands so I’ll be able to go out in public.

No one ever discovered for sure the source of the cellulitis infection. 

The next medical blow, of course, will be the bill.  I was so hoping to get through the USA part of this road trip safely until I got home and got a job with benefits again!  So much for that.  Merely going to the Urgent Care center twice and getting their antibiotics cost me $400, and that was before being admitted to the main show.  Cook County Hospital has a financial aid office and I was told on entry that I might qualify for relief, but today being Sunday it was closed.  I’ll go back tomorrow.

I’ll stay in Chicago through Thanksgiving (which I’ll share with Robb, Deni and Layne), and then it will be time for the last leg home.  I’m starting to plot my route and keep an eye on winter weather.  Already here in Chicago we’ve had a few flings with snow, and I see that my Cascades are currently getting clobbered with a projected five-day blizzard.  Should be fun!

 Chicago in snow 

A Stroll Through Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park

It’s been a strange visit with my friend Robb, as he’s been extra busy with his classes and class prep (he warned me this would be the case), leaving me for the most part on my own during the days, other than the company of his large-eyed cat Squid, who finally seems to be letting me walk around the apartment without hissing at me.  My first several days in Chicago were grey, cold, and either threatening or pouring rain, keeping me within range of some roof and coffee cup (fortunately there are several such in the neighborhood), but at length on Monday the tenement bricks glowed yellow in the sunshine, and I set out to do something I’d never done when I lived here: walk the Frank Lloyd Wright region of Oak Park.

It was a long drive straight West in the Miata, through Chicago and more Chicago, each urban ring outward from the city center growing more impoverished, until pop! I was in Oak Park, a separate town, and immediately surrounded by quiet, tree-shaded lanes and immaculate, magnificent homes.

In addition to his home and studio—a black, forbidding structure mingling witchy peaked roofs, weathered shingles, octagon bays and cement pediments—which was the architect’s headquarters in his early career and which has been restored and opened for tours, the Oak Park neighborhood boasts over a dozen of Wright's houses, a sort of collected 3D portfolio showing his growing mastery of the “Prairie Style.”  You can pay for audio-guided tours, but I was equipped with an online guide (https://chicago.curbed.com/maps/oak-park-frank-lloyd-wright-walking-tour), which displayed a little buggily on my smartphone, and I decided to guide myself.  It was a clear, very cold October morning, the sun low, the autumn trees still full and alight like colored stained glass, the quiet streets almost deserted, and after parking my Miata for free at the curb I strolled happily around a roughly 20-square-block area, hunting out the Wright houses.  It was a pleasure just to be out in the Fall air.

 I believe that’s the Edward G. Cheney House in the background.

I did try to take photos of the houses, more or less discreetly (they're private homes, but surely the occupants are used to living in a kind of photographic zoo); unfortunately I was forever pointing my iPad camera into the low sun, and really the website linked above contains better images than any I was able to get.  Still, here’s a sampling of some I encountered that came out okay:

The William E. Martin House

The Edward R. Hills House

The Nathan G. Moore House

 The Arthur B. Heurtley House

The Frank W. Thomas House

When I was last in Chicago, in my mid-20s, I was wont to roll Frank Lloyd Wright into an ideological whole with Ayn Rand, of whose fictional philosophy I was then enamored, and attach an invisible quality to his work that was something like a battle cry.  A vague sort of connection lingers in real life, mostly due to The Fountainhead, but it was interesting to revisit his architecture 27 years on and see it stripped bare, as it were, of those discredited politics, and evaluated for its own sake.  I took the $18 tour of his home and studio, in which the guide made several references to Wright’s legendary “arrogance,” and I felt the script fumbling still for the Howard Roark button in the audience’s heads, but I just smiled, for the truth I now see in his houses is a profound humility, at least alone in the privacy of his workroom, the humility of the artist before geometry, proportion, and rules of harmony and balance.  His homes still broadcast a decisive individuality that commands the eye, but the only battle I see them fighting now is the age-old battle of the artist to touch the human spirit. 

On the theme of arrogant artists who produced delicate work, I discovered to my surprise that the Oak Park neighborhood also featured the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, a simple Queen Anne cottage that has been preserved as a museum.  Unfortunately it was closed, but I was able to peek inside--for what that's worth.

Hemingway Slept Here (and woke up crying in the middle of the night)  

Return to Chicago

I lived in the city of Chicago for two vivid years after college, when I played amateurish drums in a slate of raucous rock bands, haunted bars, late-night clubs, and Wrigley Field, drank enormous amounts of beer to compensate for not doing drugs, and generally squeezed into a brief period the wild and crazy youth I’d never had.  One day in July I packed up a rental car, borrowed my bass player (to share driving and return the car), drove to Tucson to get married, and never went back.  That was 27 years ago.

One memory that’s come back to me this week is how, when I first moved to Chicago, I spent a month at my friend Robb Drinkwater’s loft while I househunted.  Today I’m crashing with that self-same Robb as I revisit my old stomping grounds, giving me the weird feeling that I’m starting it all over again.  But of course times have changed, for the city and for us: modernist condos and upscale restaurants have remade the old Wicker Park neighborhood, and Robb and I are both in our fifties, divorced, and content to spend our evenings on the couch with tortilla chips and Netflix.  In the mornings he trundles off to his teaching job at the School of the Art Institute, and I prowl the neighborhoods for good coffeehouses where I can work on editing my novel.  As always it’s great to see him (we’ve remained in close touch over the years), and as for Chicago, it’s been great to simply walk around and soberly take it all in. 

The city still has a feel all its own: the low buildings, the broad skies, the long flat avenues extending into a V of distance, the smudged brick facades with inset checkerboards of frosted-glass windows, the ethnic neighborhoods hovering between urban decay and hip creativity.  Off the main streets much is unchanged: naturally I had to walk past my old apartment building, and it looked exactly as it had on the day I drove off for Tucson.

This unprepossessing place is where I used to live...

Downtown was a different story, on the day Robb took me on a tour of his school, located in the heart of the city across from Millennium Park.  On the Magnificent Mile I could still pick out the Gothic stone turrets of the Wrigley Building, but subsumed in an aerial invasion of blue glass to all sides, including a shining 98-story M-16 barrel identified as the Trump Tower.  Returning my gaze to ground level in time to avoid bumping into office workers I took in three-story display windows for haut-couture franchises fit to rival Madison Avenue, all new.  Robb and I agreed that the constant flux was appropriate for what had always been the financial/architectural hub of Chicago; still, it was reassuring to pass in through a door and find a venerable art college still holding its expensive ground under the flag of the Muses. 

After the tour of the school I went across the street to revisit the great Art Institute museum, while he finished his day of teaching.  The museum welcomed me in just as when I was 24, undisturbed by the addition of a new wing, and it was a pleasure to greet familiar paintings for whom a quarter century is a blink of an eye.

I was actually there to see a special exhibit on early Soviet art.  It was a well-structured exhibit, with separate rooms for Home, School, Work, and other aspects of revolutionary life, but alas, despite my general Trotskyist sympathies, the art couldn’t really compete with the masterpieces of the bourgeois world, at least in my opinion.

At any rate I had to tear myself away from the museum to meet Robb, and it was a long-forgotten pleasure to take the rattling El train home past the low brick rooftops, back windows, and alleyways of Chicago.

Niagara to Chicago - A Fond Flyby of Ann Arbor

After spending a good chunk of the morning at Niagara Falls, I decided to drive around Lake Erie on the Canadian side, so I fished out my passport, made an abrupt U-Turn to find an ATM for cash to pay the toll, and drove over the Rainbow Bridge, thus completing my North American trifecta of countries. 

I wasn’t particularly impressed with my day in Canada.  The first thing I did was look up a place for a late breakfast; the IHOP I found proved to be in a huge touristy amusement park called the Clifton Hill Fun Centre, a vast sterile place almost deserted on the cold day, where I had to pay to park and walk back past dinosaur mini-golf installations and giant Haunted House buildings blaring amplified scary voices into the empty street, to find my IHOP breakfast on the third floor of a casino.  After a month of back-road rural life in Cornwall it was a rude, and surreal, reawakening to the modern world.

Well-fed at least, I then spent a long day’s drive on Canada’s Rt. 403 and 401 through the almost featureless farmlands of Ontario.  The shorn brown fields were planted here and there with hundreds of gigantic wind-farm turbines, turning slowly under the grey sky.  I never saw the lake, and at the far end I waited on an hour-long line to re-cross into the USA, while rain and sleet surged over the lanes of stationary cars.  I showed my passport again, answered rather more questions, crossed another bridge, and was in Detroit.  Apologies to Canada: I’m sure it has more to offer!  If it was summer I would go home to Seattle via Banff.

As it was I had one more night en route to Chicago, and no desire to spend it in Detroit, so I booked a room ahead in the town of Ann Arbor Michigan, knowing nothing whatsoever about it.  The little road there (Rt. 12) took me through the bowels of Detroit, confirming my decision with every glimpse of its abandoned, boarded-up brick tenements and sad, shuffling inhabitants.  It was a long inner-city trek, repeatedly held up by traffic lights, but a valuable glimpse of the reality, better than taking the highway. 

Finally out the other side into the suburbs and I was now hungry for dinner, and for some reason conceived a strong desire to go to an Olive Garden restaurant, a franchise I hadn’t visited in perhaps 20 years.  I found my Motel 6, on the southern edge of Ann Arbor, checked in—and found that an Olive Garden was literally across the street from it.  The dinner with its signature salad and breadsticks was as satisfying as I remembered.

My little stay in Ann Arbor was almost miraculously accomodating in that way.  In the morning I went to a nice coffeehouse called Biggby’s, again just down the road from the motel, to make my Niagara Falls blog post, after which I searched Google Maps for a place to get a much-needed haircut, and found one right next door to the coffeehouse.  After that I drove past the University to explore the center of town, and found it a charming cluster of city blocks, two-story Midwestern buildings alternating with handsome brick towers, everything clean and funky with interesting shops and restaurants at every turn.  I had a great burger at an attractive warm-toned restaurant called Avalon, browsed a nice bookstore called Literati Books, and had to tear myself away to begin the drive to Chicago.  In two city block turns I was on the highway, and Ann Arbor was gone behind me.

Avalon restaurant in Ann Arbor
(Note waitress in costume on Halloween)

I was deliberately delaying my arrival in Chicago, because Robb, my host, wouldn’t be home to receive me until 6:00 pm.  So after crossing the wrist of Michigan on the highway and hitting the East coast of Lake Michigan, I pulled off at the Warren Dunes State Park, with a desire to see SOMETHING of a Great Lake.  There it was, teal-blue out to the horizon on a vast beachy stretch of windswept grassy hills.  At the end of October I had the whole place to myself, and on a cold day with the sun coming in rifts through the grey clouds I had a great time wandering the wind-scultped dunes of sand and grass for an hour or so.

Finally it was time to get back in my Miata and fight the evening highways into urban Chicago at rush hour.  How many years had it been since I made this drive?  The familiar silhouette of the Sears Tower emerged against that same backdrop of empty lake sky—but the building is now called something else, and there were strange skyscrapers competing with it.  Robb had promised that the city I once knew would be very changed; I was eager to see.  But having found his address and parked on a side street, and then realized that I had neglected a time crossing and was an hour early, and so had to stand in the cold at the street corner waiting for him, hands jammed in my jacket pockets, I had time to review the wide avenue of three-story brick buildings in palettes of dark orange and brown with bay windows and brick porches, and think to myself that after all Chicago looked just the same.  And finally a figure on the darkening street waved to me, and Robb arrived to let me in.