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.