The Past as Friend

I now entered the upper Midwest. This was to be quite a different phase of my trip, and I knew it. The experiences to date had largely been selected on the basis of their newness. Novelty, like the Grand Canyon and the Rockies, won out over even proven good times from memory lane, like Vegas. But the upper Midwest encircling the Great Lakes is 'ma terre natale.' I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life in Indiana, then moved to Illinois for the next nine before giving it all up for the Pacific Northwest. The land is known to me. As are the people. The highest concentration of the many visits I am visiting on this trip is to be found here.

My first stop as I proceeded east to west was the outskirts of Cleveland and one of my best friends from high school Dave Domanski. It has been near enough to twenty years since I had seen Dave in the flesh, and we each had half a lifetime of catching up to do. Dave and his wife Halcyon, their kids Florida and Maxon, their cats, dog, turtle, and chickens live in the town of Burton, Ohio. Burton is in the country outside Cleveland, and they have a great country life. They both teach, Halcyon as a counselor at a local school, Dave teaches people how to install and maintain medical imaging equipment. But that's what they do. When it comes to what they are, Dave and Halcyon are artists. Among the many things Dave produces is fine food, so we stayed in and had home made gumbo one night.

We spent the earlier part of that day exploring the hinterlands to the southeast of Cleveland, in Geauga county. There are a fair number of Amish here, as there were in Indiana where I grew up. It's a very pretty place, and so much like where I grew up one state over. The northern Midwest isn't majestic and oceanlike, as is Kansas. It feels smaller. It has little hillocks and hollows; lakes and little streams that all wind their way ultimately to the Mississippi; oaks and maples and willows. The memory of a place seeps into your bones, like the calcium and iron you consume. It takes up residence in the matrix of your being. It is comprised of atomic particles: the sound of crickets, the smell of autumn woodsmoke, clouds reflected off ponds with lily pads, crisp air and stinging rain on your face. I'm not given to personal nostalgia, but all these things hit me in a wave of understanding where I'm from. Tom Wolfe was wrong. Not only can you go home again, it's possible that you can never leave.

I spent a good day and half or so with the Domanskis before heading west again. The width of Ohio and Indiana is less than I remembered, or maybe my sense of distance has just become distorted by living in the west and being on the road for so long. I drove across Indiana listening to the pre-game show from South Bend, where the Washington Huskies football team was in town to play Notre Dame. Despite having grown up only about a little over an hour away from South Bend, I never really became an ND fan. I did root for them in the late 80s, but that was mainly to annoy one of my roommates who was from Miami. If you are a college football fan you get this reference. In what seemed like no time I was ensconced at my second home, the house of Zoe and Stuart Baum, probably my closest friends for well over 20 years now.

I met Zoe when I was just entering college. Literally. I met her at activities sign-up night during first year student orientation week, the day before classes started. Stuart was traveling and I met him some time thereafter. Zoe is highly educated in the classics and teaches at a local college. Stuart is a marketing guy and all-purpose business man. The entanglement of my own personal history with the two of them is so complete that it would take pages to describe it. Suffice it to say, they have had significant impact on my career, where I live, my professional skills, and my outlook on life. Some people just fit together, and that's how I feel about myself and these two. In the thirteen years I've lived in Seattle, whenever I would visit my friends in Chicago or my family in Indiana, I would stay at their place on the far south side of Chicago. This would once again be my home base for my brief visit here.

I have resisted making a schedule on this trip for reasons that I explained in an earlier post. But I kind of assumed that I would spend several days here, just because there are so many acquaintances to renew in this area. But over the last few days I had begun to feel very road weary. It really started to hit me in Boston and it has grown inexorably since. So I packed a whirlwind of visits into a day and a half. I managed to catch up with college friends who still live in Chicago, like Elisa Vargas who is now a UX designer for Motorola. I didn't know I had friends who wound up in fields that were close to mine. I visited various relatives including my maternal aunt and uncle, my cousin Cindi who's about the same age as me, as well as my father and step-mother. I capped the day off with a visit to another couple of my high school friends, Dana Zurbriggen (Henderson) and Kerry Fitch (Margis) in my old home town of Crown Point, Indiana. Dana, Kerry, Dave Domanski, and I all sat together in Senior English - taught by Diane Sykes from my visit to St. Petersburg. Funny how 1986 all comes together on this trip. These days Dana teaches at the high school we went to, or more precisely to the brand spanking new high school that replaced it. In this way she is the opposite of me. I feel like my ties to my past are broken and stand to be renewed on this trip, while with Dana they couldn't be stronger. We spent the late evening reminiscing and wandering through the scenic town square. Less had changed than I thought might have, but I had to see it to remember it all.

There are more people I could have seen and wanted to see than I would give myself time for. My best friend from elementary school, Joe Walker. More of my college-age friends like John and Mamie Lilovich. My freshman roomie Dan Shmikler. I'm now more than a month into this road trip, and I admit I'm making hard choices between tarrying and heading home. For everyone I didn't get to see: You are missed! I'll be back here again, I promise.

I left Chicago bound for the north woods of Wisconsin and the cornfields of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. During my stay in Chicago I decided on the last open route question. I have decided skip the more direct route through North Dakota on I-94 in favor of the more scenic route on I-90 through South Dakota. One of the clinchers for this route was something I learned from my dad on this visit. I had always known he was born in Iowa. What I didn't know was that he's from a small town called Estherville just south of the Minnesota border, and less than two hours from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I figured a visit at least near there was the proper capper to my Midwest mission. Sadly, it was raining quite hard and evening was coming on as I reached Estherville. I saw the cornfiends around which my dad grew up, but not much more of the town. Still, somehow my own sense of profound history now reaches back even further as a result.

Next, I leave reminiscing behind in favor of new northern adventure. I'm posting this in the morning from my motel in Sioux Falls, preparing to strike out into the heart of the west and the north. My convertible is now a liability as some of my destinations are even experiencing early snow. The last days of my trip promise to be energizing and memorable!