Reflections on the Road

Tomorrow ends our three-week vacation. We'll catch a flight out of O'Hare at 8:10 A.M. and return to Fresno. Tonight being the last night, I thought I'd set down some of my impressions from our path across a region stretching from the Mississippi to the Three Rivers and from the Ohio River Valley to Motown.

The first and lasting impression is, my gosh, the land is so flat. There's virtually no visible elevation until you get to Wheeling and Western Pennsylvania. For a guy who has spent most of his life in California, a state where it's almost impossible to find a place where you don't see mountains, at least on the horizon, it's eerie at first.

Even so, it's easy to imagine the ancient forest stretching an unbroken thousand miles from the Atlantic to the Great Plains. There's still a lot of it left. Along the roads and wherever the land isn't being farmed stand dense deciduous woodlands.

There is way too much corn being grown here. Other than hay, you rarely see anything else being farmed at all. I was wondering if that was because of subsidies meant to encourage ethanol production. If so, it's not a good idea. The stuff is not a net energy or pollution saver, and it's reducing the production of other grains and raising their prices. I'm still amazed. Across 2,000 road miles through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Southern Michigan I saw one fruit orchard, no dairies, no vegetable fields and just a bare handful of wheat farms. It's largely a corn monoculture.

American commercial culture is ubiquitous. The familiar national gas, department store, burger and semi-trendy restaurant places are all over. There are some regional chains. Steak and Shake Restaurant and Meijer Supermarket are two that stand out, and the blot of southern Waffle House joints is beginning to make its way into the north.

Despite this, local pride remains strong. People are always quick to mention the prominent locals who are nationally known in sports, business, politics or what have you. Small towns go to great pains to set up well-equipped and staffed local historical and cultural facilities, even in places where the economy is distressed and the population shrinking and aging. It's poignant and heartening to see little towns building a waterpark for their kids, or a pioneer or railroad museum, or restoring and refurnishing Victorian mansions built by the magnates of a bygone age. These folks are not giving up.

There is still a lot of manufacturing, especially in the Toledo-Chicago corridor and in Southern Michigan. But much of it looks antique. And an awful lot of it, particularly in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, has closed its doors, likely forever. It's hard to see what is going to replace it, and they worry about it.

The great cities are still vibrant. They are more concentrated than Western cities, rather than sprawling out quite so far. They stand like islands of skyscrapers surrounded by oceans of corn and forest. Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Gary,
St. Louis, Columbus and Indianapolis are for the most part clean and bustling. Road construction and urban refurbishment are busily underway in all of them, though it looks like Gary, St. Louis, and Cleveland are the three that seem the most worn around the edges. Chicago clearly outshines them all as the colossus of mid-America. It's a truly great city and should be on anyone's list of places to see in the USA.