September 9

We didn’t make it through Indianapolis to check our mail because they offered us a good run from Cicero, Illinois to Erie, Pennsylvania. Cicero is a suburb of Chicago, or at least must have been at some point. Today, it’s almost downtown. You can see the Sears Tower from there, so it can’t be more than a few miles from the center of the city on Lake Michigan. We got there around midnight for a load that was scheduled for pickup around 2am, so we went on over to the shipper, which turned out to be in a very seedy part of town. Now I understand why they pay teachers so much and also forgive parts of your student loans if you’re willing to teach for a couple of years in the inner city. I hardly think it would be worth it. The tenements were really bad, with people out walking the streets in the middle of the night. There were prostitutes standing on street corners and police cars with people pulled over– one even shot across the street in front of us and barely missed our front bumper while apparently trying to get across the street for some urgent reason. Needless to say, we locked the doors and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible (hard to do when you’re sitting 10 feet higher off the ground than everyone else. When we got to the dock – another scary looking place – they weren’t ready for us, so we decided to drive back out of the area rather than waiting to see what fun things might develop there. (Note: I told Jim I wasn’t going to mention all of this stuff because I knew that Mom would worry, but I already told her about it over the phone, so I might as well go ahead). Most of the docks where we load and unload are in professional looking industrial parks, with Laredo and Chicago being the two exceptions thus far. When I started looking at the map of where we were and trying to get us back over to the interstate going into Chicago, I noticed that we were just a few blocks from Oak Park, another suburb of Chicago. Oak Park is the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. Our Microsoft Streets and Trips software has a feature that searches for landmarks in a 10 mile radius of your present location, so I ran a search, and sure enough, we were just a few blocks away from the house where Hemingway was born and lived until he left home after high school. I’ve actually been working more on my LIFELONG dissertation on Hemingway while we’ve been on the road, so it would just be too hard to get that close and not try to see his birthplace. The problem is finding a way to get down narrow streets lined with brownstones in a big truck! I told Jim it wasn’t worth trying. I’d seen pictures of the house in Hemingway biographies and knew that it would be a restricted access street because the house and those surrounding it were built before the turn of the century when roads didn’t need to accommodate 18-wheelers. Much to his credit, Jim was determined to get me as close as possible and wouldn’t leave the area without trying. We went down a street or two that I thought we might not be able to turn around on to get back out, and the streets seemed to be getting narrower and narrower. We finally gave up after getting within about 3 blocks of the house. During the daytime, we might have attempted to walk the remainder of the way, but this did not look like the kind of neighborhood you’d want to take a stroll around at one o’clock in the morning. It’s pretty sad, because the way Hemingway’s biographers describe it, Oak Park was a very exclusive upper middle class suburb when his grandfather, Anson Tyler Hemingway built the house shortly after the Civil War. The Hemingways were contemporaries of the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived just across the street from them and designed many of the buildings in the area. Some of the homes still look like they belong to well-to-do families, but the surrounding area has certainly suffered from over a century of growth as Chicago proper overtook the satellite communities. Downtown Chicago is much prettier at night, though, with an impressive skyline and the Sear’s building towering over the tallest of skyscrapers. We finally got back over to the dock and got loaded before heading out of Chicago toward Erie, PA. Now there’s a study in contrasts. What a beautiful place! The GE plant where we unloaded around 1:30 in the afternoon was only about 6 blocks from the shores of Lake Erie. I searched for nearby places on the mapping software and found a little place a couple of miles up the road called the Lighthouse Inn and Restaurant. Next to it was a road that led to the edge of the lake, so we thought we might be able to park there, grab some lunch, and walk the ½ mile down to the water to take some pictures. We parked and asked the owners of the inn if we could leave the truck there for a little while. They said they were closing the restaurant for the day, but that we were welcome to park there and they would even give us a glass of tea to take with us on the walk. Then, one of the waitresses was really nice and gave us directions to one of the lighthouses in the area. Since we had some free time, we drove over and walked out onto a long pier that separated a small island from the shore, with a deep channel cut through it to allow local sailboats and other small boats access to Lake Erie. Presque Island is really more of a small peninsula that houses a US Coast Guard station and has a state park on it. As we walked out to the end of the pier, a Coast Guard cruiser (about 50 ft long) came down the channel, which also had several other boats and two young guys on large jet skis coming down it. There were people fishing from the pier, and we asked a few men standing there if one of them would take our picture with Lake Erie and the lighthouse in the background. They said only if we told them where we were from, so we said Texas, which of course they already knew by our accent. They were from a nearby town in Pennsylvania, and one was from Syracuse, NY. One of them had his son with him. He was about 8 or 9 years old and pointed out into Lake Erie and told us that they took their boat out there the day before and almost got to Canada. His dad laughed and said, “No, son, we weren’t anywhere near Canada.” The international boundary runs through the center of each of the Great Lakes, but they are so large that they look more like oceans. His dad told him that if they had reached Canadian waters, there would have been Coast Guard boats out there asking them what they thought they were doing and maybe even helicopters swooping down on them. They all laughed, and the guy from Syracuse (I think they were all brothers) said, “Kind of like Grandma, huh?” and they all laughed again. Then, the boy’s dad told us about how their 98-year-old grandmother had a corn field that someone had managed to plant a small patch of marijuana out in the middle of, and everyone gave her a hard time about it after the authorities found it. He told the other guy, “You shouldn’t be picking on your 98-year-old grandmother that way.” But they said she thought it was pretty funny, too, and they all had a hearty laugh. It was a beautiful day, and the lake was really pretty. We walked back up the pier and saw a ship sailing in the harbor. It was in full sail, and we later learned that it was a historic ship called “The Brig Niagara.” We drove down the shoreline through town and stopped to eat at Smokey Bones BBQ – mmm good! Then, I walked into the mall and got my hair cut by a girl who gave me the whole history of the town. It was neat, because we ran into more than one person who said, “I just love it here in Erie, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” It’s good to hear people say that about a place where they’ve lived their entire lives. After a good night’s sleep, we got an offer for a load from Shadyside, OH (about 150 miles south of Erie) to Windsor, Ontario, so we had breakfast at Cracker Barrel and are headed down to Ohio to pick it up. We’ll pass through a part of West Virginia in about an hour. The country is beautiful, so I’m going to take a few more pictures while Jim’s driving. It’s raining pretty steady right now, but maybe it will let up long enough to snap some good shots. We won’t get close enough to Cincinnati to see Delana again just yet, but she sends text messages regularly since we saw her and says to tell everyone hi. I know she misses her family a lot and I can sympathize because I’m missing mine a lot too right now. More later. Please take care . . . we love you all. Pics:General Electric plant in Erie, PA, Presque Island, Coast Guard Station, Lighthouse, and Lake Erie Roadside Park in West Virginia on Blue Star Memorial Highway