Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

Chicago, IL to Litchfield, IL

Welcome to the trip. Today it officially begins.

With that, what the fuck Chicago?!? Historic Route 66 starts downtown at Adams and Michigan across from the institute of art and you don’t have a single fucking map in a ten block radius?

Notice my own poor planning coming back to bite me. This morning I get up around 5:30AM after sleeping restlessly and getting just four hours in. I have a quick breakfast, make a to-do list, and fall back to sleep until about 8:00AM. Then I finish packing and move the car (temperature of 66* again, does that mean good luck?) with the intention to go get my handbook and a trip map and cut through traffic. But when I get to Borders…no maps of any kind to be found. So I go to Adams and Michigan to look for a store or a cart or anything. The Architecture Society, Posters Plus, hell even the city tour guide didn’t know the route started within a block (I had to show the guide the sign to make my point). It’s intensely frustrating to stand at the fountainhead of a famous landmark (literally stand on the road) in a tourist trap city like Chicago and not find a single trip planner or guide book. All this leaves me with a very unprepared taste in my mouth. Around noon I just start driving down Adams trying to recall the route from memory and hoping the brown highway signs would be faithful.

They weren’t.

I get through Chicago's west-side ghetto and hang tough through Cicero construction traffic where the electricians have shut down the right lane for a mile because clearly they need that much room for four of them to stand clustered a Genie lift scratching their asses and watching a fifth guy work. That the route cuts straight through downtown Chicago and slices at an angle down Ogden, heads down I-55 puts things close to home. So close that I’ll struggle to keep my patience as I hit the inevitable Chicago traffic snarls.

Even in traffic I love this car. It occurs to me that I should put the website on the back window so people following me can play along at home and share the love. Love, that’s kind of the point of this trip: to do something I love. I checked the life expectancy actuarial tables recently (don’t ask) and found that the average white American born in 1972 has a life expectancy of 68 years old. That puts me just past the half-way mark. Now when I was eighteen the idea of waiting to turn 21 to drink seemed like waiting for the second coming. Now I don’t expect it will be long before a decade passes. All of which is okay, because me and God have a deal: as long as I keep sucking the marrow out of life, God lets me. As soon as I stop she pulls the plug. More than a fair deal in my humble opinion.

Passing the Argonne Laboratory I’m reminded of technical research I worked on last summer with AllCell Technologies and Dr. Pinks, a couple of projects that I hoped would change the world. Dream big if you’re going to dream I guess. AllCell was developing commercial lithium ion battery assemblies for hybrid and all-electric cars and the like; I came in at the start of funding to put together some financial materials and figure out the business’ economic strategy (Q: How do you make money selling each battery at a unit loss? A: You don’t). I left knowing a ton about hybrid cars, fuel efficiency, and modular electronic design. That was at the local institute of technology where the brilliant engineers hang out and look antisocial. Near FermiLab I worked with a research scientist who spent a decade coding a genetic modeling program that makes drug research more accurate and therefore more affordable (Q: How do you cure cancer? A: Apply the limited funds available to viable drug candidates). I didn’t make a ton of cash but I felt like the work was important. The major problems we face at the local level, or the regional level, or the world level, that we have these problems doesn’t bother me; in “problem solving” mode I’m looking for ways to acknowledge those deficits and make the universe a better place. So if we figure out how to address poverty and world hunger, great; if we nuke ourselves back to the Stone Age, great. Either way the roaches and rats will keep going and maybe they’ll evolve into smarter earth stewards. And if the planet becomes uninhabitable that’s unfortunate for us. The universe is teeming with stars and planets (we found 200 so far, remember?) so far and if just a few of those planets have given rise to some form of intelligence, like one occasionally finds here on our own…well we may not like it but it could be the universe will do just fine without us, thank you very much.

Problems and issues in general are funny things in that it’s easy to lose context, lose a sense of history, and attribute permanence where none exists. We have too many gas-guzzling cars, and there’s a trajectory. We had no cars to speak of a hundred years ago, then Henry launched the Model-T with Rockefeller’s steel and Detroit emerged as the hub (cap?) to meet the latent demand not for cars per se but for economical and convenient travel (would you want to tend to a horse to pick up the kids from soccer practice? Note the synergistic layering: there would be no soccer practice or a notion of “picking up the kids” in, say, a feudal or dustbowl community). Cars got more powerful as engine technology allowed the same unit of gasoline to produce more explosive piston force, so more pistons were added, engines got bigger to power big cars and then the bodies got small (Ford Mustang anyone?) meaning now cars could go faster. Muscle had arrived and it’s hard to go back to the 98 pound weakling. Unless that previously cheap and limitless resource of dead dinosaur becomes more and more limited. Imagine ten dollars or more a gallon and you have Japan or the UK. I don’t know about you but at ten dollars a gallon I have the urge to get maybe a hundred miles to the gallon.

It’s not good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral. It’s change because some people are interested coupled with resistance because other people are opposed. Framed not so much as good or bad but as cheap and expensive (when all costs are considered) an interesting question for something like some Trixie’s H2 is: what is the true cost and who really bares it? Hint: That Chad pays for Trixie’s gas doesn’t mean the price of gas covers the national defense cost of protecting American oil interests abroad. In a real sense we all pay. It’s not the goodness or the badness that troubles me, it’s not seeing the bill.

Around Joliet, IL just south of Romeoville (I’ve been in and out of the greater Chicago area going on eight years and I just got that) I get so disoriented I pick up my adventure handbook and flipped to the Illinois section hoping for a phone number, a contact, anything. Fuck me but there’s nada, so I call Terrie to ask for the information for “Henry’s Rabbit Ranch” in Staunton (southern Illinois) which bragged tourist information and memorabilia. I figure if I race out there I could buy a map (I mean they have to exist somewhere, right?).

Terrie is a good sport and lets me interrupt her workday as I try four or five dead-end numbers struggling to find out which actually rang Henry's and was not simply Google's crossed wires. Eventually I reach a guy named Rich, the world’s nicest and most patient man, who tells me not to rush to Henry’s because Illinois has plenty to offer and I’ll miss a ton on such a beautiful day. Instead he suggests I pick up the route in Elwood. I take his advice, driving through the semi rig traffic delays and detours around the Joliet BP Amoco refinery. After a series of traffic snarls, dead ends, and back tracks I start to give up hope.

I remember the advice I got from Jens, Terrie’s ex-husband and a retired firefighter who knew every nook and cranny in Southeast Minneapolis because his ladder went wherever the fire was and fast—selective street memory would leave someone dead. Jens advised me that when I’m in an unfamiliar area if I find a firehouse get directions there. They don’t usually mind the interruption if it’s not rude. It keeps them occupied and is part of that “protect and serve” thing. I notice a local firehouse and stop in, telling the crew what I'm up to; in a minute the junior brigade parades out the fire chief who directs me on I-53 where I can find the characteristic brown “Historic 66” signs I lost outside Joliet. If this Rick character knows his Route 66 stuff, once I pick up the scent of the road again I shouldn’t have too much trouble from here on in.

Driving another half an hour and my pleasant feeling of sleep-deprived giddy induced from the rush of finally getting started with the trip gives way to a sharp reminder of my mere mortality as a shot of nerve-end pain fires down my back. I have to remember to stretch in the morning or I pay for the privilege of treating my body like shit all day. If you let your body down it'll let you down I’ve been told. While I’m thinking about pampering myself it makes sense that I buy a seat cushion, there’s no point in keeping the original seat upholstery on permanent display if I’m sitting on it with no one looking for five hundred miles a day. It’s nothing I haven't seen a million times before. I like keeping her interior crisp and clean for daily driving but I’m going to need to make Cherry a little more comfortable for the next few weeks. As I make all kinds of grand plans and pull out my todo notebook I run across my first real attention grabber, the “Gemini Giant,” a spaceage colossus gingerly holding a rocket and alerting passing motorists to the Maxwell Street hotdogs to be found in the adjacent restaurant. The adrenaline jolt at the discovery makes my whole body stiff and it tastes like I have pennies in my mouth. The Gemini Giant in Wilmington, IL is a muffler man, one of the twenty-odd foot tall fiberglass giants that dot the landscape coast to coast. They were classic advertising props in the age of attention grabbing roadside attractions. Curiosity prompts investigation which in turn prompts consumption. It prompts it in me at any rate, and before mass advertising campaigns and market consolidation.

Muffler men and their oversized oddity brethren used to prompt millions of Americans to check out what all the commotion was about in little shops and stores across the country. Television, radio, and the internet do that job a lot more cost-effectively now on the whole, but neon signs and attention grabbing colors and crazy promotional tricks are alive and well, as your trip to any major city (or anywhere at all, if you're attentive) will tell you. Attention disrupting stunts to sell a cause or idea or product of some kind have been with us throughout history. Mass advertising and market consolidation are not at all bad things, although you're welcome to resent them if you choose to; rather they serve as the mechanical byproduct of economies of scale. Not all that different from Standard Oil standardizing the gas station experience in the 1950s or Stuckey’s standardizing roadside restaurants across the south and Midwest in the 1960s. We could always go back to an era before economies of scale, we would just need to decimate the planet’s population. I hope you don’t start your headcount reduction project with my block. Increasing size causing increasing evil is feeling I relate to but a claim I've never found evidence for. People and companies do inappropriate things all the time; size makes it more visible but not more likely. Increasing size causing increasing “icky yucky” I've seen over and over. Sometimes it's a shame that the world keeps on keepin’ on.

As I continue my afternoon drive in diligent pursuit of road signs that will take me close to Staunton and Henry’s first thing in the morning, since Rick would seem to be the man I need to talk to in order to get across the rest of the country, I find I'm in no hurry at all. The Illinois landscape along the byway is calm and languid. The Old Route seems well preserved here and the farther south I travel the more frequent the historic relics: a beautifully restored gas station and tourist center; a dilapidated garage with a collection of highway signs from all along the route and a rusting Model-T in the grass; a dream car museum that has one car of my dreams after another (I love Cherry but this isn’t necessarily a monogamous relationship). The road veers back and for in a manner I don’t expect, too. Instead of running a straight shot parallel to the I-55 expressway it diverts north, runs for a stretch, maybe passes through a little town, then merges with the I-55 service road, darts south and meanders among the cornfields. This crossing to and fro seems to be the result of existing roads being commissioned in a patchwork manner into under the bigger umbrella route. Because if it were designed this way, that designer would have had to be crazy or drunk or crunkered. Resource-constrained growth regularly occurs this way; we as intuitive tool makers adapt and kludge and build ad-hoc Rube Goldberg contraptions that in retrospect look like Frankenstein failures but somehow manage (barely) to get the job done. “Well what did you expect to get for a few million bucks? The Eisenhower Interstate? Try $25 billion over a decade, buddy. If we stay on budget, that is.” Most project managers and product designers I know understand this deeply and do all they can to make the neck bolts less prominent.

And much of the time we pay no attention to the design they put all that time and money and emotional energy into. Nope, not until it inconveniences us. Then that design gets anthropomorphized into a vile adversary that is intentionally out to get me. Or the sheer complexity of the design leaves us awestruck that it can even function at all. But some designs despite their sophisticated engineering are a little damn bizarre. I mean what kind of sick individual kludges a reproductive organ into a drain for waste fluid? Must have been resource constrained down below the waist.

Just before sunset I arrive in Springfield and poke into the Lincoln Library and tourist center to see if I can pick locate myself a map. The librarian is a complete darling and digs up copies of different maps that covered Illinois that give me enough confidence to get to Henry's. The library is open and modern like several other downtown Springfield buildings. I take a few minutes to like Cherry up for a sunset photograph and draw the attention of at least three old derelict looking passers by shouting variously as I drove by or walked up to the car. "What year!?!" followed by "I used to have a ('64/'65/'67/'68)." I'd ask them about the specs and they all knew their stuff so my guess is they were legit. And I felt a twinge of satisfaction as if I were somehow reminding them of the good old days.

After dark I decide not to push too hard and cruise leisurely through the cool Illinois countryside. Since the route follows I-55 closely but offers its own twists and swerves, I let the car go to the north and south as the road sees fit. I'm impressed by how much of the preserved alignments are paved (I expected to encounter dirt roads and be forced onto the highway) and function as low-traffic service roads, main streets, and two-lane highway stretches. At this point I'm settling into the car, reestablishing my driving rhythm and getting a feel for Cherry's quirks. Two years isn't all that long but muscle memory involves a little delicate touch before it resurfaces. It's about tuning and mutual adjustments and reacquainting to reignite the intimacy. Dinner and drinks with witty conversation before going back to my place.

Around 9:00PM I pull into Litchfield, a micro-town with a Comfort Inn showcasing wireless connectivity and a cheap remodeling rate. I carried all my road gear out of the car and reorganized it to make room for groceries and whatnot. My first motel room on the road is clean and pretty sterile, so maybe my case of Busch Light will liven up the evening. (I don’t know how I got it into my head that a few cans of Busch Light would even produce a buzz much less get this party started but forty five cents a can sounded excellent at the time.) If nothing else I’ll get a little rest and make up for last night’s insomnia. At this point I feel I can probably pull between six and ten hours of drive time depending on whether I see captivating sights or feel I should blow past nostalgic ghost towns.

Next stop: Rabbits and Ponies