Iowa After Dark

The trip, honestly, wasn’t that eventful—just another drive back to Iowa from Chicago, where I had spent Thanksgiving with my mom, dad, brother and brother’s wife, also known to friends as Jay and Natalie. While Thanksgiving is usually held at my parent’s place in northern Michigan, I think Chicago is a very close second place. It’s fantastic, at least in part because Jay is an avid boardgame collector. Our family definitely plays together, and thanks in part to Jay we were treated to a host of games. I brought some as well that I love and that went over semi-well with the family, but Jay clearly has the talent for seeking out general audience games that are easy to learn but still challenging, games like Thurn and Taxis, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic and Forbidden Island. There are a lot of other great things to do in Chicago, pretty much all of which I didn’t go to because of the cast on my foot, which is yet another incentive for me to heal quickly.

However, the fun eventually ended, and it was time for me to drive home. To those of you who haven’t driven from Chicago to Cresco, I want to give you a few facts that will put the journey in focus. First, the trip takes about six hours by car. It may take less time depending on your level of respect for the speed limits on the endless back roads between Cresco and Chicago. Second, there are three routes you can go, all of which take roughly the same amount of time. You can debate the efficiency of expressways versus the more direct backwoods route, but personally I prefer the route that takes me up to Madison, and then a more or less straight shot to Iowa, albeit the kind of straight shot that twists and turns along state highways and snakes through about five or six small towns that crop up randomly like whack-a-mole heads.

The third fact is that the drive to Chicago and the drive to Cresco are not the same trip. For me, the feeling I get when driving to Chicago is one of anticipation. Leaving Cresco behind and traveling down the back roads until I come across the expressway to Chicago is exciting. The small towns on the road fly by, with just a touch of activity to them. A couple friends stand around talking as their beat-up pickups guzzle gas at the Kwik Trip, and down the road a couple goes into the local Mom and Pop restaurant for some baseline American restaurant food with the occasional exotic menu item like the “Asian Chicken Wrap.” Then you get to Chicago itself. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Chicago is just as much of an insomniac. There are always other drivers on the roads in Chicago, and even after midnight there’s plenty to do. Sometimes I get the notion that living in Chicago would be great, if not for the fact that you have to accept that living in Chicago is worth paying a good 30-40% more for everything.

The towns have an entirely different feel to them when I drive back to Cresco from Chicago, though. The towns are more or less entirely closed for business, and if you need some gasoline or stop at a fast food restaurant, the odds are good that you’ll be one of two, maybe three customers while the staff, mostly teenagers,  at either place tries to keep busy while waiting for their shift to end. To go from the Other City That Never Sleeps to The Comatose Town With Occasional Signs of Life can be jarring, a kind of cognitive whiplash if you will and perhaps a sign that I may be in the wrong place.

Between the sleepy little towns, though, is darkness. Not the kind of darkness you get with a city, where it is held back by an army of streetlights and muted by the ever-present stream of honking horns, sirens and automobile engines that rise and fall in pitch as they drive past. This darkness is all-pervading, threatening to get into your car and suck out the light from your dashboard and radio. It reminds you how powerful it is when you turn off your headlights and drive for a hundred feet or so. In cities, you can drive for an hour and be entertained by a bevy of radio stations, several large-screen TV billboards and of course hundreds of other motorists. In the country, there’s very few discernable objects between one town and another. In cities and on expressways, distances at night can be interesting, or at least uneventful. In the country, though, distances are keenly felt. I can understand why some people would prefer to remain in a small town, really instead of having to drive for hours through nothingness.

This is not to say that there is absolutely nothing to see. A couple of times on the backroads I saw some farmers at work in their Green and Yellow tractors, halogen lights blazing as they hauled hay bales and wagons around the farm. It’s not a sight I get to see often, usually because I’m in bed well before that happens. In fact, most people who aren’t farmers are in bed during that time. When you’re up late, though, and wishing you were just at your apartment already, it’s eye-opening to see just what kind of effort these farmers are putting in. They don’t have regular hours, and they don’t exactly get breaks. Instead, they do whatever needs to be done, whenever it needs to be done. Farmers can’t really schedule tasks, either. They deal with whatever has to be done at the time, no matter how big it is. I could sympathize, as I raced home to be in my own bed in my apartment in Cresco.

Travel, Travel and More Travel

First, let me apologize for missing last week’s post. I hadn’t encountered anything spectacular to write about, and I tried to come up with something while trying to balance a stiff work schedule, some other hobbies and getting over a trip to Chicago while at the same time preparing for another weekend trip. The result? Tuesday came and went, then Wednesday, then Thursday. By Thursday evening I was still telling myself that there had to be something interesting I’d seen, but I really didn’t believe it any more, similar to how some middle-aged men tell themselves that a sports agent will see them shooting hoops in front of their garage and sign them up to the Detroit Pistons.

Which leads us to this blog entry, where I again try to come up with something interesting about Iowa and proceed to fail yet again, because I haven’t spent any appreciable time searching for anything. Instead, I’d like to talk about travel. Specifically, car travel.

In the past four weeks, I have drive to Chicago three times. From Iowa. If you consider that each drive is about six hours, then I have driven a whopping thirty-six hours combined. I have to admit, I now have no idea how truckers do it. Yes, occasional trips to Chicago are quite nice, and the first trip was really pleasant since I avoided the tollway completely. The Illinois Tollway system doubled its prices at the start of the year, and while I’m not blind to the realities of inflation and increased costs, jacking the prices up by 100 percent is a jerk move of the highest order. I’m confident that the lion’s share of this toll increase won’t be going to maintain the roads. So I’m starting to consider it a point of honor to take a route that doesn’t leave you at the tender mercies of the Illinois Tollway, which is a lot like being at the tender mercies of a serial rapist. Actually, that’s not quite correct—at least a serial rapist understands he’s doing a bad thing.

So I drove the expressway in Wisconsin to a highway that led into Chicago where my brother lives, and while it probably did take longer, it was more direct and it was in fact interesting to witness how a few buildings started to become loosely-connected shopping centers, then finally main drags until the buildings and shopping centers and main drags coalesced into the outlying suburbs of Chicago. My brother tells me this is known as “Chicagoland” by the people who actually live in the Chicago area, but if you don’t have an intimate knowledge of the region you could be excused for calling it all “Chicago.” Let’s be honest, by now the cities and suburbs have been grafted together with housing developments and shopping centers. To call one suburb “Des Plaines” and another “Mount Prospect” has as much meaning as figuring out just where the dividing line is between indigo and purple.

The second trip to Chicago was tollway-free as well. On the other hand, it also took me through downtown Chicago and on the Dan Ryan expressway on a Friday night. I can confidently say I never would have made it through this if it weren’t for Lori, who knew her way around the city. We drove through a lot of areas in Chicago that I have strenuously tried to avoid, most notably the downtown area, and I can safely say that my little Aveo would have ended up being scraped off some SUV’s grill if it hadn’t been for her. It’s not that the entire drive was a hellish nightmare of roads designed by MC Escher, though. Lakeshore drive was fairly pleasant, and some of the residential areas were nice, if crowded on both sides due to parking. Downtown, though...I’m trying to think how I would get around there without a state-of-the-art GPS system and years of experience. It’s like trying to navigate through a labyrinth with one-way streets. And the Dan Ryan expressway was a seething mass of taillights marked by the occasional spurts of movement wherein drivers would aggressively nose their way in to different lanes. Combine that with one or two streets that require leaps of faith to make sure they are still there when you turn onto where they are supposed to be at an intersection, and you can understand my point of view that the Blues Brothers was less of a car chase movie than giving two guys who had never been to Chicago before the keys to an old police cruiser and seeing what happens.

The third trip was, quite frankly, excruciating. I brought some of it on myself by catching the midnight showing of the Avengers movie in Decorah, and completing a six-hour drive on three hours of sleep is an experience. At some point when you’re running on very little sleep, your mind starts to realize you’ve gone beyond drowsy and begins shutting down cognitive portions of your brain in order to keep your concentration on driving. This happened to my brother Andy and me a few years ago, and by the time we had gotten to my brother Jay’s Chicago condominium the portions of our brains that could think of the past and the future had been shut down, leaving us in a Zen state of existence where there was only the present moment. In each second I would tell myself what I was going to do, as in, “Now I am going to grab the toothbrush. Now I am going to open the medicine cabinet. Now I am going to grab the toothpaste. Now I will apply the toothpaste to the toothbrush. Now I will begin to brush my teeth.” It was an interesting state of mind to be in, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone make the effort to achieve it as it could cause an accident, traffic or otherwise.

This was how I entered into Chicago for the third time—faintly buzzing on caffeine, my body shaking from the vibration of driving on the road, and feeling strung out in general. By the time I had reached my brother Jay’s new apartment I was feeling like a rag that had been wrung out repeatedly. I desperately wanted to sleep, but since it was only two in the afternoon I would have to wait for a bit. Like eight hours or so. Maybe this is why I was so unwilling to make the drive back, which took a lot more out of me that it otherwise might. Perhaps part of it was that I realized I had spent a total of thirty hours in the car. Part of it might also be that I was tired of the constant drain on my mind from having to be alert all the time. Either way, I ended up getting up to stop and stretch a LOT. Perhaps not every town,  but most of them. My legs were screaming at me to move them. My body was hinting heavily that finding a motel would be an idea on the scale of discovering the theory of relativity in terms of recognizing genius. Still, I pressed on, and eventually ended up back in northeast Iowa.

This weekend, I don’t plan on travelling anywhere. No big trips, nothing involving crossing any state line. This weekend is all about resting, relaxing, and finally getting the chance to clean my bathroom, which is impossible to do if you’re in a different state than it. There’s definitely no place like home.

Unless you can rest there for a couple days, that is.

Trains, Trains, and…Well, More Trains

Well, there is a definitely not a shortage of things to talk about. On Sunday, a tornado or two passed through the next town up, wreaking their fair share of havoc. So I was going to talk about that, but then I remembered I did promise to write about the train ride to Chicago, and it would be unfair if the only impression I left of the train was that it was TWO AND A HALF FREAKING HOURS LATE.

When the train actually arrived in La Crosse and I was able to board it, it turned out to be one of the nicest rides I’ve ever experienced. The seats were all comparable to those you see in the first-class sections of airplanes, provided they’re the larger airplane that takes you on a flight that lasts for at least an hour and a half. Two seats on either side of the aisle, with plenty of leg room. This is a must if you’re trying to get comfortable for a long trip, and I was more comfortable on the train than I usually am taking a plane. Five minutes later, we were moving.

Compared to airline travel, getting on a train is a very brief, even rushed. The typical station stop is about five minutes, and then the train leaves. Fortunately, I didn’t know how long I had, so when I was jogging toward one of the cars near the back it was not because I was worried the train would leave without me—I just wanted a good seat.

Actually, five minutes was plenty. Say what you will about the trains being late, but once they arrived they were the model of efficiency. It seemed incongruous to me that they could be so efficient, like a water buffalo sashaying into Carnegie Hall and performing Swan Lake, followed by some light tap dance.

After I’d gotten seated, the train began to move, and I was treated to a view of America most people don’t get to experience. Most of the rails have been designed to interfere with the highways and city traffic as little as possible, so most of the time you’re looking at the backs:  backs of businesses, backs of houses, backs of property lines and backs of the country side. Most of the time it’s a fascinating experience. Just outside of La Crosse I saw acres and acres of scrapped cars. Some were in good enough shape I originally thought it might be a storage lot for used cars, until I saw a light blue sedan with the front quarter of it crushed and twisted into a jagged nightmare of modern sculpture. Then I noticed the rust, the open hoods and the lack of doors and tires on models. There were so many cars that calling the area a car graveyard is much too vague. A necropolis is more accurate. Thousands of cars were arranged in a rough sort of order, and they stretched for acres. I could not imagine visiting the auto necropolis and being unable to find a usable part for any car made since the 1950s. I don’t know who owns the necropolis, but I’d like to imagine he loves cars and spends his nights walking down the rows, inspecting each chassis and refreshing his mental records of the models he has.

Another building that stood out was an old brick factory in Milwaukee that had several bright red wooden doors on its back that led out to small cement docks. I don’t know what the factory was, but I assumed they must have shipped a lot of product by rail. I wondered how much product the factory workers could load in five minutes and if it depended whether or not the employees were Teamsters.

Other interests included the back lots of gas stations, which all seemed to have the same emergency equipment in back: orange traffic cones, sandbags under a tarp, an emergency speed limit sign and a snow shovel. Now, the orange traffic cones I can understand. The emergency speed limit sign makes sense if a gas station owner is very concerned about someone not crashing into the store in bad weather. But the sandbags mystify me. So you can have two sandbags holding up the emergency speed limit signs, and if you’re paranoid I’ll give you four, but then what? Why would anyone need that many sandbags?

Anyway, there was also the lounge car. This car has much larger windows for observation, and seats that face the side. Some of them swivel for better conversation, not to mention better leg room, and there are small tables between them with metal rings where you can set your overpriced drinks, such as a $2 can of soda that does not, unfortunately, have gold flakes mixed in to justify its cost. It also serves beer, and on the way to Chicago I saw a young man in a camouflage t-shirt go into the lounge car empty handed and come out with a bottle of beer about seven times, looking happier and happier each time. Quite possibly the only person on the train whose smile was bigger was the person manning the drink counter.

I try not to be too political on this blog, but I really think that if the government were to pour in some money to train travel, they would have a gold mine on their hands. It’s cheaper than air fare, arguably more relaxing, and the scenery is mostly nicer. True, you don’t get the complimentary juice or soda, nor do you get the complimentary airline peanut, but you can take a snack aboard. If you ever get the chance to go Amtrak and you have a few hours to spare waiting, try it.