The End of the Line

Today was the final leg of our train trip. We took the Wolverine from Chicago to Ann Arbor, a trip that took five hours and fifteen minutes when it should've taken about four hours. We were a bit delayed in Chicago switching out engines, and never made up the time. Oh well. It's a very pretty trip, after you get away from the industrial areas of south Chicago and Gary, IN. It's just that coach is a bit more confined, and we arrived in Ann Arbor stiff and tired.

The high point of the trip was a statue of Tony the Tiger on the lawn of a factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, home of a gazillion cereals. Cereal factories are very clean-looking, particularly in juxtaposition with the steel mills in Gary. I guess no one wants to think their cereal comes from a grubby place.

I should also mention that as we came through Chelsea, we were confronted with a fifty foot high painting of a Jiffy Corn Meal box, because Chelsea is "The Home of Jiffy Corn Meal Mix." We all have to have things to be proud of. Don't judge.

How We Started a Fire in Chicago

But first, to build the suspense, here's a lovely photo of the sunrise from our room. We didn't get up this early; we just woke up, took some pictures, and went back to sleep.

Now, on to how we started a fire, and no, this has nothing to do with euphemisms about how to celebrate 25 years of marriage. This is the other kind.

Our room, you notice, faces east. It's a very cool room, very art nouveau, lots of little extra decorations, including a shelf of books. On the marble desktop, they had seen fit to place a slightly out-of-period art deco lamp with a clear globe base, full of water. This watery globe sits exactly in front of one of the eastward facing windows, through which the morning sun streams like, well, blazes.

Hank and I were doing our morning get-ready-to-check out chores when I asked him, "Are you on fire?" Turns out, he wasn't, but his sweater was. We had tossed it on the desk near the lamp, and (I swear I am not making a word of this up) the sunlight through the globe of the lamp had ignited it. Smoke was spiraling upward, and the edges of the sleeve were laced with tiny, festive flames.

I put the sleeve in the sink to extinguish it, and moved some magazines that were under it. Then I called downstairs to let them know that their lamp positioning didn't take basic physics into account. I understand that much interior decoration doesn't. They were very apologetic, but did not apparently feel that our trauma warranted, say, a free stay at some other time. They did, however, promise to move the lamp.

The Chicago River: A Modern Fable

Once upon a time, there was a river. As rivers go, it was short and fat, and it didn't move very fast, because it had the misfortune to lie along Lake Michigan, where the slope gradient is less than a tenth of one percent. The total fall of the short, fat, river was less than five feet.

This did not matter, insofar as the river just oozed along, sloshing water back and forth with Lake Michigan in a very unorganized way. Sometimes the river flowed into the lake, and sometimes, when things were dry, the lake flowed into the river. It was one of those "open arrangements" that seem weird to more conventional minds, but it worked.

The people along the lake were nomadic sorts who didn't have very much use for rivers, so they left the short, fat river alone. Unfortunately, these were sent packing by some people who used rivers a lot, and those folks were busier than a hive of bees. They built houses and shops and granaries, and then they built abattoirs to chop up the animals that ate the grain. They noticed the short, fat river, and said, "Instant drainage." They dumped everything into it -- sewage, offal from the slaughterhouses, chemicals from the tanneries and soap makers whose businesses always happen alongside slaughterhouses. Because the people got their drinking water from the lake, through big intake cribs offshore, the short, fat river seemed unimportant.

The short, fat river could not do anything with this mess other than what it already did, which was to slosh back and forth with the lake. Sometimes the foulness from the river reached all the way out to the intake cribs. When that happened, people in the new city got sick. At one point, a sixth of the city's population died of cholera. Besides, it stank. No, it reeked. It produced so much gas from rotting goo that the south branch was called "Bubbly Creek."

Something had to be done, not to clean up the short, fat river, but to carry away all the filth that people wanted to dump into it. Because these people were rather typical of people everywhere, they decided to turn the short, fat river into a long, deep river going the other way. They dug a deep channel, hooked up the short, fat river to the Des Plains river, and watched with joy as Lake Michigan water flowed into the short, fat river and washed the stench and filth toward the Mississippi.

Oh, how the people downstream howled! How they complained about the smell and the disease! But there was nothing they could do, because it's not illegal to divert a river in Illinois, something that good children will be advised to remember. The people in the city rejoiced that the short, fat river was acting like a real river and actually flowing. They forgot that the gradient was so slight, and they forgot that silt and other goo will clog channels. It wasn't long before the short, fat river was just as horrid as before, only now it could foul water in two directions.

Then, one evil night, the city caught fire. The citizens on the north looked at the onrushing flames with dispassion. "The short, fat river will stop the fire before it gets to us," they said. They apparently believed that the short, fat river contained water. What it actually contained was a toxic, flammable stew that caught fire almost immediately. Now it was the northern side of the city's turn to howl, as soon as they rebuilt.

Moral: Don't mess with short, fat rivers.

Addendum: The Chicago river still flows west into the Des Plains, still carries a lot of waste that makes it unfit for animals or people, but the Friends of the Chicago River have gone a long way toward seeing in cleaned up, restricting development along its watercourse, and containing floodwater in huge reservoirs.

Travel with Kamel

When we headed out to meet Christopher and Kris for dinner, our bellman at the Blackstone handed us into the cab of Kamel Kahiri, and thirty seconds later I wondered if we'd forgotten to tip him or something. It is about a mile and a half to Navy Pier from our hotel, and in that distance Kamel cut off three cars, flipped off two drivers and one pedestrian, and slammed on his brakes so many times, we felt like bobblehead dolls. New Orleans cabdrivers do not do this, but I digress.

We had a wonderful dinner at Riva, a terrific seafood restaurant with equally terrific views of the sailboat basin and the city. The best thing, though, was just being with Christopher and Kris. I really can't believe we've waited so long to do this. Kris is so much fun, and the two of them have traveled a lot themselves and have great stories. The time flew. They insisted on taking US to dinner, to celebrate our anniversary, which was so kind. We tried to make an end run around them and pick up the check, but Kris sweet-talked the waiter, who seemed oddly immune to Hank trying to sweet talk him.

Now we're back in our room, watching the Lakers and wishing we could stay in Chicago longer. Tomorrow morning we catch the Wolverine for Ann Arbor, if we can navigate Union Station and actually find our train . . .

Chicago with Dr. Wolcott

I knew we were in trouble when Christopher called to see where we were. I burbled something cheerful about being almost to Union Station. Christopher was less than sanguine. "You're going to come out in a lot of tunnels down there. Just head for the daylight and then call me and tell me where you are."

Right. How hard can this be? I'll tell you how hard. We decided pretty quickly that if New Orleans is the Big Easy, then Chicago, 926 miles north, is the Big Hard. First of all, tunnels DO go everywhere down there, and we are not familiar with the layout. Second, we have arrived during rush hour, along with ten thousand Chicagoans heading to work from the double-decker commuter trains. We are squashed on escalators, bumped on concourses, and bumfoozled when we finally get to the light.

I call Christopher, but I don't know where we are, and there aren't any street signs. Finally I walk a block west to an intersection and figure it out. It's another fifteen minutes, thanks to the magic of rush hour traffic, before the welcome (and oddly familiar) sight of Christopher's silver Ford Explorer with a Yakima rack, pulls up in front of a line of cabs.

After that, Chicago got a LOT easier. Christopher drove us all over, from Hyde Park to Lincoln Park and beyond, while we looked at architecture and got caught up. We took a walk along Lake Michigan, and back around by one of many yacht basins, enjoying the blue sky and the company. We went to his and Kris's house, a truly beautiful garden condominium in the north Chicago neighborhood near Wrigley Field. We also looked at his office, which he designed himself.

After a yummy 100% organic lunch at a restaurant called Uncommon Ground (where Christopher knew everybody, waiter and patrons), he dropped us off at the Blackstone Renaissance downtown. From the window of our 17th floor room, we have a fabulous view of Grant Park, the Buckingham Fountain, and Lake Michigan beyond. This is so interesting, and so different, that I really wish we had a lot more time here. As it is, we'll be taking a cab in a few minutes to Navy Pier to meet Christopher and Kris for dinner.

The biggest thrill in seeing Chicago is seeing Christopher and how well he's doing here. It's also cool that he's Dr. Wolcott, and that his chiropractic practice has really taken off. He teaches two days a week at two different Chicago schools, too. He's going to Nepal in June to see David (his brother), who's been there for five months, living with a Nepalese family and teaching. I feel mostly caught up with him, but also really impressed with how much he has done and continues to do, and yet he's the same comfortable Christopher. With the same dry sense of humor, and no, Chip, he has not once mentioned that you wrecked his truck.

Some random Chicago thoughts: This is the third largest city in the U.S., after New York and Los Angeles. It does not lend itself as well to walking as some more compact cities we've visited; it could spread in every direction, so it did. On the other hand, I would hate to try and drive here. This is the sort of city for which cabs were made. I must remember on return visits to budget for cabfare.

Chicago gets its drinking water from Lake Michigan. You can just see the little artificial islands where the intakes are. On the plus side, there's a lot of water in Lake Michigan (whose vastness really has to be seen to be believed), but on the downside, a lot of that water is pretty dirty with things like PCB's and mercury. Thanks to the zebra mussel, the water is crystal clear, which makes looking into the depths off the jetties somewhat alarming, particularly if you're me, and you don't have great balance at the best of times, much less when you've been walking on a train for a while. Nobody had to fish me out, but I didn't walk too close to the edge, either.

And P.S., the photo above was taken out of our hotel room window. This is just amazing.

Miracle Ear

Somebody, and I think it was Pam Clark, said"We'll see if you still love trains after you've been on them a while." I've been on trains for a lot of hours -- almost forty at this point -- and yes, I still love them. We've had several Arlo Guthrie moments on the City of New Orleans. It's a newer train, bigger room (except for the upper berth, where Hank struggled all night with cramped quarters), and cooler dining car. I like it.

I also, strangely enough, slept like a real person, all night long, thanks to the miracle of earplugs, which shut out all the distracting noises. We stayed awake until Memphis, because we wanted to see it, and it did not disappoint. The Mississippi River runs right to the left of the train tracks, and even in the dark, it's spectacular. Crossing the Ohio at Cairo was pretty cool, too, insofar as I just woke up as we were pulling onto the bridge. I watched the train cross, then went back to sleep. We're an hour and a half from Chicago. Yay!

Cool and Blue

New Orleans had record cold last night -- 61 degrees. O-kay.

We had beignets and Cajun hash browns in a sunny courtyard this morning. I fed the sparrows bits of beignet from my hand, to Hank's amused exasperation. He said he was sorry that something as small as a sparrow could do a mind meld on me. We walked slowly down to the river, took pictures, and now we're packing up for the train station. On to Part II of the adventure.

As the average train whistle says: Woohoo.