Quest of the Phoenix 2017 (11)

Since I’d fallen asleep so late last night, I did not get up this morning until 7:45, the latest of the entire trip. I showered and then found it to be raining outside. Heading to the office, they had no breakfast, but at least they had coffee (which was a relief since there was no coffee-maker in the room). I thus finished off the last of the dry food I’d brought for Firstmeal and opted to leave a bit earlier than planned, since I only had about a five-hour drive today and I wanted to consume more fattening, horrible shite from purveyors yet untested. I seemed to have missed my chance to try Chick-Fil-A, White Castle, Church’s Chicken, or Whattaburger, but another burger franchise still awaited. In Michigan City, Indiana, to be precise.

It was still drizzling and I had to put my hood up as I loaded my stuff into the car for the last time and checked out of the hotel; I didn’t feel the greatest, partially due to the Assholes of America (AoA) conference last night and partially due to the dramatic shift in climate over the last couple days. As usual, my plan consisted of getting back on the freeway, focusing on getting out of the city traffic zone (in this case, Chicagoland, again), and then worrying about stopping for stuff.

Going through the expressway emporium south of Chicago seemed worse this time than when I’d gone through it on the first day, but nevertheless I passed it without incident. It’s curious how, when on the freeway for a long time, you start to see semi trucks and columns of cars as “obstacles”, and to feel as if you should get “points” for passing them, like defeating enemies in a videogame and gaining XP or something. Of course, the trick is to pass everyone at just the right time so that you don’t have to actually “speed” any more than necessary, since, you know, cops.

After awhile, I crossed the Indiana state line and then just had to get free of the congestion near the city of Gary and then it should be fairly smooth sailing. I did, and it was. Soon Michigan City (which, again, is not in Michigan) approached and I exited there, looking for the restaurant I’d looked up.

It took a little while to find one and I was disappointed to see that they did not have a drive-through, and thus were yet another of the “fast casual” chains that business magazines like to blather about. I arrived at almost the exact same time as two other dudes, who managed to get in line ahead of me (which gave me time to look at the menu anyway). It was about 11:15 in the morning and they’d just opened.

The place’s prices were horrifying. They don’t do “meals” so you have to order burger, fries, and shake separately, all of which are marked up substantially from what I’m used to. But they’ve been much-praised for the quality of their food, so we would see if it was worth it. I used the bathroom while waiting, got my food, and discovered that yes, it was worth it. Good fries, too.

It took me a bit to get back the hell out of Michigan City (an okay, fairly generic mid-sized city whose decent attempt at being charming was somewhat afflicted by the musty, dreary, chilly weather), but I did, and very quickly I engaged in my final state-line-crossing of the trip, returning home at last to Michigan.

Truly, one cannot appreciate just how slow and clogged our freeways are until one has been on an empty highway out west with a speed limit of 75 or 80. Semi trucks are officially supposed to drive only 60 here, which many of them did (though my roommate later said they were raising it soon) and the other motorists (of which there were many, even in rural areas) consisted of 90% old people who wanted to drive 60, maybe 65 at most and 10% malignant narcissists who wanted to drive 107.

State police were everywhere. Even in Oklahoma I don’t believe I’d seen as many cops blanketing the road as I did today in southwestern Michigan. A generalized sense of frustration and unpleasantness was setting in. Partly this was because I was impatient to finally just get home, and the roads seemed to be trying to delay me. And partly this was because the weather of said home was now giving me a headache. I never get headaches. Over the course of the last 36 hours, the temperature had dropped by at least 20 degrees F to around 47, the humidity had probably doubled, and the gradually decreasing elevation meant the air was growing thicker. As I told my brother, it seemed, by contrast with the Southwest, a bit like driving into a large grey jello mold that someone has had in their fridge for two weeks, or like coming via horse-and-carriage to the sort of damp, funereal landscape featured in an old gothic horror movie where the decaying mansion in the swamp awaited.

I stopped at a Meijer near Battle Creek for gas and restrooms. Meijer is a Michigan department-store chain equivalent to Super Wal-Mart, CostCo, or something like that, and is quite popular around here due to their decent prices, unionized workforce, and high-quality produce, ALTHOUGH, for some strange reason, they never bothered to standardize the layout of their stores. I know exactly where everything is at the two Saginaw locations (which are pretty much identical), but stepping into one in another town, it might as well be a different company. Since I couldn’t find anything, I just peed and left. I would buy groceries at home a bit later.

Once again, my path went up Freeway 69, past Kalamazoo, and branched off onto Highway 52 (which went from way down by the Ohio state line all the way up to the Saginaw area), where going was even slower since I got stuck behind some old person for at least 30 miles. The whole drive was taking longer than planned, plus I was now back in the Eastern Time Zone and thus had lost another hour. I passed again through the slightly interesting town of Owosso, just north of which I took one of my very last photographs, of a slightly creepy-looking cemetery, which summed up my current mood and physical condition rather well.

And then I was pretty much back in the general area of home. I stopped for coffee at the St. Charles McDonald’s, where I’d stopped right at the very beginning over ten days ago, and the girl at the first window gave me my coffee there so that I could pull out ahead of the guy in front of me waiting for food. Suddenly I wasn’t quite so depressed to be back in Michigan. Outside of our world-famous, post-apocalyptic ghettos, midwestern friendliness is in full effect here.

Thus the trip ended with the usual phenomenon whereby my house and my room and everything looked strange and different to me. As it so happened, we would be moving out in a couple weeks anyway, so I would not have much time to say goodbye to it. Not that it was exactly the greatest of places, but I’d been there five years now. It was my home. Still, I’d driven a good 5,000 miles and survived a bunch of strange and interesting crap, much of which was entirely new to me, so on some level I no longer felt entirely like the same person anymore.

And I did want to go back to the desert. Permanently. It would be awhile before I could afford it (not least due to the amount of money I spent on this very trip), but at least I had a purpose, a notion that finding the way to the Promised Land or whatever was something actually worthy of effort, austerity, motivation, and so forth. Whether or not I would be successful at that is a story not yet written.

Epilogue

On a final note, I just wanted to say that Michigan has been my home for my entire life (I recently turned 33) and it does possess its natural charms, especially noticeable in late spring and early summer and at the height of autumn. However it’s a particular type of beauty that I’ve simply seen (almost) enough of and a change of scenery (not to mention humidity and temperature) would, I think, suit me well. Still, when I renewed my driver’s license tabs, I paid the extra $11 for the “recreation pass” that gets me into any state park in Michigan for the rest of the year. It seems a fine farewell.